Issue 12. Shame

Some emotions are difficult to talk about even as we feel them. Shame is one such emotion. It often comes up in moments where our belonging, recognition or status feel at risk, and can quickly become entangled with our entire sense of self. We spoke with Carlo Garofalo, associate professor of psychology at the University of Perugia, in Italy, about what makes shame such a powerful emotion, how we interpret and deal with it, and what it reveals about our need for social connection.

So, if you were to articulate these different components for someone who’s not an expert, what would help us figure out that what we’re experiencing is indeed shame? 

Some images come to mind that are quite typical of shame: when we want to hide, for example. When we just want to disappear, when we don’t want to be seen. Cognitively, it is when we think we are unworthy, ridiculous, ugly, that no one would want to be with us. Not because others are hostile or because of an injustice, but because we feel we don’t deserve anything. 

Is that where you would draw the line between shame and something like guilt?

Guilt and shame are quite clearly distinguished. Guilt is about something we do: “I feel guilty about an action. I feel responsible for it.” Shame is: “I feel bad for something I am.”

They can, of course, go hand in hand. People who are prone to guilt are often also prone to shame and vice versa. If I offend someone and then realize I've offended them, I would feel guilty if I said, “I feel bad about having done that.” And I can apologize. It becomes shame if I feel like I’m a bad person, someone who offends people. That cannot be remedied. I can apologize, but that doesn’t change who I am.

What plays into how we narrate these experiences for ourselves? In your example of offending someone: what makes some people more likely to see this as proof that they are a bad human being, while others see it as simply a mistake they made?

In psychology, it's really difficult to draw conclusions about the directionality of what caused what, but in terms of associations – what other characteristics does the person who is prone to shame have? – there is definitely a connection with our upbringing. Some research says that our early interactions with our caregivers build what are called “internal working models,” the lenses through which we read relationships throughout our lifespan. Not, of course, in too rigid a way. Those lenses can be revised. But they provide the structure through which we look at relationships.

If, in our upbringing, we build an attachment with our caregivers where we feel that what we do, the mistakes we make, are connected to who we are – for example, if our parents tend to say “you're a bad boy” rather than “you did something bad,” – this can lead us to internalize the attribution of worth and value.

There are also other factors, like personality. It is then difficult to tell apart what causes what, because the tendency to feel shame is probably a personality trait or at least an aspect of personality. It goes hand in hand with other things, like the tendency to experience negative emotions in general. What is interesting to me is that we have connected shame to what we call “internalizing symptoms”, such as anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, insecurity in relationships and so on. Shame is also linked to aggressive behavior, violent behavior, antisocial behavior.

But it’s difficult to define “the” shame-prone person. Shame can take very different forms.

People also feel shame about things that aren’t their fault or within their control – they can feel shame for living in poverty, for having a condition or disability, for being abused by someone. What makes shame “attach” itself to vulnerability, and why is that dynamic so hard to break?

What makes those experiences laden with shame is that the person, to some extent, feels they are responsible for, or deserve, what happened to them. Alternatively, they can feel that the experience defines them and their identity. Either way, the fact that the situation happened to them “because of them”, or “is everything they are”, triggers a negative evaluation of the self. On the contrary, if someone experienced poverty or abuse as an injustice, anger would be the more immediate reaction.

Some psychologists argue that there are positive sides to shame, because it can act as a moral compass that stops us from doing things which could be detrimental to the community. Others argue that shame is intrinsically bad because it’s punitive and, as you were saying, connected to a lot of suffering. I was wondering where your research puts you on that axis.

I’m reluctant to label emotions as intrinsically negative or positive. Anger, for example, is considered a negative emotion. Most of the time, we don’t want to feel angry, but in some circumstances, feeling angry may be energizing or useful, for example, in sports and competition. So, I don’t think a given emotion is always negative or always positive. Emotions exist for two reasons: to evaluate what we do and to guide what we will do. In that sense, shame can have positive outcomes because it can help correct our behavior.

What makes a difference is that it needs to be proportional to what we do. If we offend someone without meaning to, guilt would be a more appropriate response. If we do something really bad because we think others aren’t worth our care, or our concern for their safety, and we later realize that was wrong, then feeling shame can be the trigger to want to change as a person.

But I agree with those who say it’s detrimental, because the experience of shame can be so intense that it prevents us from changing, it just keeps us stuck in being “bad.” Shame can have positive outcomes if it is brought to a level of reflection. It needs to be something we can work with, not just something we feel.

Here the notion of emotional regulation becomes important. There’s an emotion we experience, and then there’s what we do with it: we can pay attention to it or not, name it or not, experience it in our minds, or try to change it.

In fact, people often try to avoid shame. When it starts to creep in, they distract themselves or avoid the situation altogether. When shame is kept out of awareness, many of the negative consequences begin. Another pathway to negative outcomes is when we add a secondary emotion on top of shame. For example, if feeling shame makes us angry at others or at ourselves, that’s when shame becomes linked to more negative outcomes.

Speaking of what we do when we experience shame – whether avoiding it, withdrawing from it or reacting with anger and aggression – I was struck by a paradox here. Shame is, according to psychology, very much about not wanting to be excluded or perceived negatively by others. But reacting aggressively and attacking can also lead to exclusion. How do you make sense of that paradox?

I think the same goes for avoidance. Those kinds of reactions give us an impression of being in control. They lead to the same social disconnection, but by our choice. Of course, when we think about such maladaptive reactions – functional in the short term, as they protect us from a painful feeling, but negative in the long run – it’s always a trade-off. It’s not really about looking for the best scenario, but about avoiding the worst-case scenario. So when the worst-case scenario is that we want to belong and others say we don’t belong or can’t belong, then attacking or avoiding feels like the lesser evil in the moment.

But there is a paradox, and bringing awareness to it is one of the ways through which people can cope with shame: connecting the dots and realizing that what we want is to avoid being disconnected, but our actions will lead to disconnection anyway. So there needs to be a third way. It’s just that we’re not always logical. Our behaviors often don’t make sense.

You mentioned that when we feel shame, we often want to hide. But we now live in a world where, because of the internet and social media, we’re constantly out there, so to speak. We’re constantly visible or exposed to others, in a space that isn’t exactly non-aggressive. I was wondering if being online so much might have rewritten our relationship with shame.

I'm not familiar with research about this, but conceptually that also feels like a bit of a paradox, because we put ourselves in a position of being constantly approved or disapproved. Shame has a lot to do with comparison, so we can also feel shame not because of something we have done or something we show, but because we feel we miss something others have or show. In this sense, the internet and social media can function as an amplifier.

What may have changed is that shame has become more of a daily experience for more people. We are 24 hours a day in a social context, and so shame can be triggered any moment. In that sense, it has probably lowered the threshold for experiencing shame.

Something I also found interesting in your work is your position on shamelessness. We sometimes look at people who do harmful things – in our immediate environment, but also more broadly, for example some politicians – and we say: “they have no shame. They are shamelessly lying, shamelessly passing legislation that harms us, shamelessly doing this or that.” You seem to question whether shamelessness is a useful way of describing what’s going on. Could you explain that a bit, and what it changes in how we respond to such situations?

If we take the perspective that emotions serve a function, the only thing that is always negative is not having emotions. If we never felt fear, sadness or anger, we’d be in trouble. Shame is no exception, because otherwise we could become predators who go around dominating others and acting ruthlessly.

What I mean when I say that there aren’t really “shameless” people is that when we see someone doing horrible things and think they don't feel shame, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re unable to feel shame. It may mean that something happened throughout their life that made them very skilled at keeping that feeling out of awareness. In fact, I would bet that if we could go back in their lives, we would find that they did experience shame when they were very young, and that it was so painful that they had to protect themselves from it.

Based on your experience, what would a healthy relationship with shame look like?

I think it has a lot to do with what we do with that emotion – not necessarily right away, but also how we think about it and relate to it in a more abstract sense. For example, not fearing the experience of shame is healthy. Shame gives us a signal that we care so much about social connection that we are afraid to lose it. So a healthy response is to provide ourselves with reassurance that we do have social connections.

Children can teach us a lot here. When children feel ashamed in kindergarten, they tend to look for their parents, the safest people to go to. So as an adult, you should have relationships like that, which can help you sit with your shame and reflect on whether you’re feeling shame when maybe you should just feel guilt. Or that you’ve done something wrong, but that doesn’t make you evil; or maybe you did nothing wrong and others are blaming you; or maybe you are misbehaving, and a person who cares about you will make you aware of your impact on others, but not in a punishing way.

My research with incarcerated populations, for example, shows that a justice system that sends out the message that a person needs to be incarcerated because they’re bad, not because they’ve done something bad, probably doesn’t do much to help that person change. So I think relationships can help us contextualize shame and remind us that we do have control. We can change things. It’s not about fate.

If shame exists, it has a good reason: it gives us information about ourselves, our social context, and what we value. We should look at it as we look at all other emotions.