What is shame?

What is shame? What is its purpose? How do we overcome it?

Shame is an internally-directed sense of inadequacy, unworthiness, dishonour, regret, or disconnection. It causes us to perceive ourselves as defective, ugly, incompetent, or stupid. We feel ashamed not because of what we do, but because of who we are. For these reasons, we hide. In social contexts, we avoid the emergence of shame in order not to feel valueless, inadequate, or deficient.

We all have shame. Its psychological purpose is to stop us upsetting the norms of our social groups so we can stay connected and inside the group - maintaining a sense of belonging - by pushing us towards “accepted” behaviours. But shame is a pernicious feeling, keeps us small, invisible, not-brave, and it festers in the darkness and the silence.

Brene Brown is perhaps the best known researcher of shame, because of her hugely successful 2011 TED talk. I periodically re-watch that talk because the messages are so powerful and so empowering. Embrace your vulnerabilities, they are what make you human and lovable and powerful, and being those things makes you successful and, perhaps most importantly, happy and fulfilled. They are also what enable other people to connect to you on a very human level.

In another of her TED talks, Brene also says: Empathy is the antidote to shame. That’s empathy towards ourselves and our experience and our feelings about ourselves. Once we allow ourselves to feel empathy, we begin to treat ourselves with compassion, understanding, kindness. We realise that we are not defective, merely human, and that our experience, all of it, is what makes us the people we are today.

That realisation enables us to let go of shame, and to recognise that we can choose how we move through life. We may not be able to stop the feelings of shame entirely, but we can decide how to behave in the face of them. We can step forward and have that conversation. We can connect with others. We can take risks. We can push ourselves. We can, to use that well-known expression, feel the fear and do it anyway.

And by doing, even in the face of shame, our confidence and self-belief grow. We learn to stand tall, to open our arms and embrace the world around us, to trust our experience and move forward towards the life we want to be living.