Shame: the emotion that whispers "There is something wrong with me"

Someone in a meeting mentions a mistake you made. Everyone looks at you. In an instant you feel the heat in your face, your gaze slides to the floor, your body would like nothing better than to shrink into something as small as possible. Later the scene replays in your head again and again — not as the memory of a mistake, but as evidence about you. Not “I did something wrong”, but “there is something wrong with me”.

This is shame. Of all the emotions it is the quietest and at the same time the most all-encompassing: guilt attaches to an action, fear to a danger, but shame sticks to you yourself. Which is exactly why we almost never talk about it — and that, as you will see, is precisely the environment in which it thrives.

In this piece I will explain where shame comes from in the first place and what it once served, how it differs from guilt, how it turns from an emotion into part of your self-image, the four ways we defend ourselves against it — and why, unlike most difficulties, it cannot be healed alone, only in relationship.

What use is an emotion nobody wants to feel

Shame has a special status among emotion researchers. The American psychologist Silvan Tomkins, who developed an influential theory of affects in the 1960s, described it as one of nine innate affects — biological programmes we are born with. On his account, shame is triggered when interest or joy is suddenly interrupted: a child turns to a parent with excitement, and the parent does not respond, or responds coldly. The head drops, the gaze slides away, the body collapses. At its core, then, shame is the emotion of interrupted connection.

And like every innate emotion, shame too has its purpose. Healthy shame alerts us to boundaries — our own and other people’s. Because of it we do not bare everything to everyone, we can sense when we have gone too far, and we retain what might be called dignity. A person entirely without shame would not be free — they would be dangerous to themselves and to others, because they would have no internal signal for “this is the boundary”. Healthy shame is brief, tied to a situation, and passes once the situation is resolved or once we share it with someone.

The problem, then, is not shame in itself. The problem arises when this brief, situational signal turns into a permanent background — into a belief that says not “here you crossed a line” but “you are a mistake”. That difference is so important that it deserves a chapter of its own.

Shame is not guilt — and the difference is not hair-splitting

In everyday speech we often use the two as synonyms, but psychology has kept them clearly apart for decades. In 1971 the psychoanalyst Helen Block Lewis set out a distinction that later research has consistently confirmed: guilt says “I did something bad”, shame says “I am bad”. Guilt refers to behaviour, shame to the whole self.

This apparently tiny difference has large consequences. June Tangney, one of the leading researchers in the field, has shown with her colleagues that guilt and shame lead to entirely different behaviours: guilt as a rule motivates repair — an apology, restitution, a change of behaviour. Shame motivates hiding — withdrawal, avoiding eye contact, lying, sometimes attack as well. Which is logical: if my action is wrong, I can put it right. But if I am wrong, there is nothing to put right — I can only hide, so that nobody sees.

That is why research consistently links proneness to shame (unlike proneness to guilt) with depression, anxiety, addictions and low self-esteem — a large meta-analysis by Kim, Thibodeau and Jorgensen from 2011 confirmed this across more than twenty thousand participants. I have written in more detail about guilt, its healthy and toxic versions, and why it sometimes gives us a false sense of control in my piece on guilt — but this time let us stay with its darker relative.

When shame is no longer an emotion but an identity

Now to what I see in my work with people as the most painful form of shame: shame that no longer appears in response to particular events, but has become part of who a person is. Psychology calls this toxic or internalised shame.

How does this happen? A child is completely dependent on adults for survival — and when adults respond to their feelings, needs or mistakes with humiliation, mockery, withdrawal of love or long silences, the child does not conclude “my parents are behaving badly”. That would be far too dangerous for them. They conclude the opposite: “There must be something wrong with me for them to react like that.” Each such experience on its own is a small moment of shame; but thousands of such moments settle, layer upon layer, into the very structure of the personality. Shame is no longer something a person occasionally feels — it becomes the lens through which they look at themselves. Every mistake, rejection or criticism in adulthood then produces not a new conclusion but a confirmation of the old one: “There you are, I knew it.”

Shame that settles in this way is no longer only psychological — it becomes bodily too. People with internalised shame often describe chronic tension in the shoulders and chest, shallow breathing, difficulty holding eye contact, a sense of being “too much” in company or of taking up too much space. The body has, after all, rehearsed the posture of shame — bowed head, averted gaze, caved-in chest — a thousand times, until it became the default. That is why working with shame is not only a matter of talking about the past; it also matters that the body slowly gets the experience of a different posture: upright, present, one that allows itself to be seen.

People with deeply rooted shame are often very successful on the outside — perfectionism, excessive accommodation and constant proving are among the most effective disguises shame has. The price is unremitting inner tension: the feeling of playing a role, and the quiet fear that one day someone will look behind the scenery and see “what you are really like”. This voice from within is also well known to the inner critic — shame is often the fuel from which that voice draws its sharpness.

The compass of shame: four ways we avoid it

Because shame is so unbearable, we humans have developed reliable ways of not feeling it. In 1992 the American psychiatrist Donald Nathanson, a student of Tomkins, arranged them into a model he called the compass of shame. The four points of the compass are four defences:

• Withdrawal: I disappear. I break off contact, close up, cancel the meeting, fall silent. Relief in the short term, ever more solitude in the long term — and shame grows in solitude.
• Attack self: I get in ahead of others and humiliate myself first. Self-criticism, dark humour at my own expense, excessive apologising. “If I strike first, your blow will not take me by surprise.”
• Attack others: I turn shame into anger and hurl it outwards. Belittling, sarcasm, hunting for someone to blame, outbursts. Many a conflict between partners is in fact a duel between two shamed people attacking so that they do not have to feel.
• Avoidance: I redirect attention, mine and other people’s. Alcohol, workaholism, shopping, a perfect physique, jokes — anything that blurs the inner feeling or creates a glare loud enough to drown out shame.

None of these directions is a sign of bad character — all of them are attempts to survive an unbearable feeling. But all four share the same flaw: they leave shame untouched. The infographic below may help you recognise which direction is your most frequent — most of us have one or two favourites.

Why shame grows in hiding

The American researcher Brené Brown, who studied shame and vulnerability through several hundred interviews, condensed her findings into an image I often use in my work: shame is like a fungus — it thrives best in darkness, damp and silence. To grow it needs three things: secrecy, silence and judgement. Take one of those three away and it starts to lose its power.

It is worth distinguishing shame here from its milder cousin, embarrassment. Embarrassment is brief, social and often even endearing — you trip in the street, blush, smile, and five minutes later it is forgotten. Shame goes deeper: it does not say “that was awkward” but “that revealed who I really am”. Embarrassment can be told as an anecdote over dinner; shame, as a rule, is told to nobody. And that is the easiest way to tell them apart — by whether you can share the story.

The mechanism is logical. As long as I hide my “shameful” truth, I never get the experience that could disprove it. Nobody can show me that they accept me as I am — because nobody knows what I am like. Hiding thus preserves exactly the belief that makes me hide. The circle is complete: shame commands silence, and silence feeds shame.

In her research Brown looked for what breaks this circle, and among people who had developed resilience to shame the answer was surprisingly uniform: empathy. The moment you tell your story to someone who receives it without judgement — and the catastrophe shame predicted does not happen. Shame is in fact the only emotion whose healing necessarily requires another person: it arose in a relationship, when connection was interrupted, and only in a relationship where connection holds can it also be dismantled.

What happens with shame in therapy

This is precisely why psychotherapy has a special role with shame — and a special trap. The trap first: therapy is a situation in which a person is supposed to speak about the most hidden things, while shame is the emotion that commands hiding. So it is nothing unusual for people to say the most important things only after months, or to cancel the next session after one in which they truly opened up. This is not resistance out of stubbornness — it is the compass of shame at work. Withdrawal after closeness is almost the rule with shame, not the exception.

And the role: the therapeutic relationship can be the first space where the corrective experience Brown writes about takes place. You say the thing you were certain made you impossible to love — and the person opposite goes on looking at you just the same. Not once; many times, until the nervous system begins to believe it. The British psychologist Paul Gilbert, who developed compassion-focused therapy for work with deep shame and self-criticism, emphasises that this is not a matter of persuasion by argument: shame did not move in through reason and it does not move out through reason either. It moves in through experience — and it heals through a new, different experience. Why and how a safe relationship literally reshapes the nervous system I described in more detail in my piece on why the therapeutic relationship heals.

From my own experience — including on the stage, where as an actress I stood for years in front of other people’s gaze — I know how thoroughly one can train oneself so that shame never surfaces. And how little that helps when you are left alone with yourself in the evening. The difference between hiding and healing is not how well you wear the disguise, but whether there is at least one space where you do not need it.

Where you can start today

Deep shame heals slowly and, as a rule, in relationship — but there are a few steps you can take on your own:

• Learn to recognise it in the body. Heat in the face, eyes to the floor, a shrinking posture, the wish to disappear. When you name shame (“ah, this is shame”), you move it out of identity and back among the emotions — into something you have, not something you are.
• Separate the voice of shame from the truth. Shame always speaks in absolutes: “always”, “never”, “all of me”. Ask yourself: what would someone who loves me say about this event?
• Watch your compass. Which of the four directions is yours — withdrawal, attack self, attack others, avoidance? Simply observing, without judgement, already loosens the automatism.
• Choose one person. You do not need a public confession. You need one safe person you tell one true thing to. Shame is not dismantled on a big stage, but in small, safe moments.

And if you do not have such a person at the moment — or if your shame is so old and so deep that everything inside you contracts at the very thought of disclosure — that can be the first reason for a conversation with me. Not because there is something wrong with you. But precisely because there is not.

I recently spoke about shame on Instagram too — about how it turns from an emotion into a belief about yourself:

Sram ne pravi »naredil si napako«. Sram pravi »ti si napaka«.