I have decided that September is going to be a month of getting curious about shame.
Not in the let’s all sit around and decide everything we hate about ourselves kind of way. In good ROR fashion. We are still exploring rewiring out of resentment and I don’t know about any of ya’ll but I believe shame plays a role in the cycles, habits, and patterns we find ourself stuck in. I’m interested in shame because the more I study human behavior, sit with people, examine my own reactions, and pay attention to what happens inside relationships, the more I wonder how often shame is present even if lurking in the background of the under currents.
We tend to recognize shame when someone says, I hate myself, or I’m embarrassed. I’m becoming more interested in what happens five seconds later. Getting our Goonies on and exploring the treacherous waters of what shame can activate in behavior. Donald Nathanson’s work describes shame responses that can move toward withdrawal, avoidance, attacking ourselves, or attacking somebody else (Nathanson, 1992). Clinical literature expands on this further: shame-related avoidance can show up through numbing, efforts to undo or escape reality, dissociation, and aggression toward oneself or others (Dearing & Tangney, 2011).
Which has me wondering: How many things we call personality, stubbornness, defensiveness, control, arrogance, avoidance, or “that’s just how they are” are actually strategies somebody learned because shame was an emotion they never learned how to metabolize?
Shame is relational before it becomes personal
Patricia DeYoung’s work conceptualizes chronic shame relationally. Her work brings together attachment, relational psychotherapy, and neurobiology to examine how shame becomes organized within personality through relational experience (DeYoung, 2015, 2021). Janina Fisher approaches trauma from another direction but arrives somewhere complementary: traumatized people can become alienated from parts of themselves, carrying shame, self-loathing, and assumptions of guilt that eventually feel like identity rather than adaptations (Fisher, 2017).
This is where family systems get really fascinating—in a fun exploratory way— to me because none of us came into the world knowing what was “acceptable” inside the family we landed in. So we had to learn it, and well? How do you think we all learned it? Maybe you cried and somebody became irritated, or you told the truth about something happening in the house and suddenly the whole room got cold or silent—possibly even hostile. Experiencing anger? Well it will cost you connection while being helpful earned you warmth, affection, or acknowledgement. Achievement got everybody excited about you, buuuuut questioning an adult quickly got you labeled disrespectful, problematic, or difficult.
I’m not saying every one of these moments automatically creates shame, but I do wonder what happens after years of collecting them and storing them somewhere within the body. Nobody has to sit you down and hand you the family rulebook because your nervous system has been taking notes and listing names the entire time. Storing the data you collect under:
Surviving
This is why I love learning theory because it gives us something interesting to play with. Classical conditioning helps us understand how our brains start connecting things that repeatedly happen together, while operant conditioning gets us looking at what happens after we behave a certain way.
What gets rewarded?
What makes the discomfort stop?
What gets us connection again?
What gets everybody off our back?
Negative reinforcement is especially interesting because if I do something and an uncomfortable feeling goes away, my brain has a pretty good reason to try that strategy again.
Let’s play with an example:
🍬 THE CANDY AISLE
Imagine a child asks Mom for candy at the grocery store. Mom says no. The child becomes upset and starts crying, yelling, maybe throwing themselves on the floor. Mom is tired, people are looking, she can feel herself getting overwhelmed, and she just wants the whole thing to stop.
So she gives him the candy.
The tantrum stops almost immediately, and Mom feels relief.
This is where it gets full of blindspots, and remember we all have them. Mom didn’t necessarily give him the candy because she suddenly changed her mind about candy. She gave it to him because giving it to him removed something uncomfortable: the screaming, the embarrassment, the pressure, her own activation. That immediate relief can negatively reinforce her behavior, making giving in more likely the next time she finds herself in the same situation.
Meanwhile, the child is learning something here too and we often overlook the power of witnessing. When I hear no and become uncomfortable, escalating sometimes changes the outcome. The candy itself can positively reinforce the tantrum behavior because something desirable was added after the escalation.
So now we potentially have two people reinforcing a loop together without either one consciously deciding to create it.
Child: “When I make the discomfort bigger, sometimes I get what I want.”
Mom: “When I give in, the discomfort finally stops.”
THIS is the part I want us to carry into our conversation about shame while we explore it this month as part of the rewiring out of resentment series (ROR.)
Consider this:
What happens when the “tantrum” isn’t happening in aisle seven at Albertsons anymore? What happens when we’re adults and the strategy becomes explaining, blaming, withdrawing, controlling, people-pleasing, attacking, or immediately finding somebody else’s behavior to focus on? “Well last week you did___ and I was hurt.”
We are often told that this behavior is malicious, intentional. What if they’re strategies when a nervous system feels under threat?
If so what would it change? Does that change impact you directly?
This excuses nothing, but what happens if we sit with the understanding that so much of what happens around us isn’t actually about us? Sometimes it has far more to do with the nervous system of the person in front of us and their capacity—or lack of capacity—to sit inside their own internal chaos long enough to find their way back to regulation. If explaining, blaming, withdrawing, controlling, or some other strategy makes shame disappear, even temporarily, relief may have just taught the brain to reach for that strategy again and again.
The algorithm might quickly tell us, That’s manipulation. Maybe sometimes it is. My issue with immediately reaching for the most extreme explanation is that we lose all the nuance in between. Do ya’ll know what lives within the in between??
US.
HUMANS.
Think about the grace we would probably want extended to us during a season when we were caught in our own egocentric loops and weren’t showing up like ourselves. Grief, divorce, loss, moves, children, sickness, job loss, stress, family. You name it, we are going through it. We would want someone to understand that there was more happening inside of us than what they could see from the outside. Yet when someone else does something that hurts us, the mind can become incredibly certain: They knew exactly what they were doing. They meant it. They did it on purpose.
Sometimes that may be true, and sometimes we may be watching a person reach for a go-to strategy their nervous system has learned gets those pesky uncomfortable feelings away. The nuanced understanding is, that doesn’t automatically make the behavior okay, nor does it automatically mean they are consciously trying to manipulate us or avoid accountability. Sometimes people are repeating something that worked for them—often times because you conditioned them that it worked. Sigh, that is a hard one to face.
Which leaves me with a much more difficult question to sit with:
What has my nervous system learned to do when I desperately want an uncomfortable feeling to stop?
Research on experiential avoidance explores a similar loop: escaping an uncomfortable internal experience can bring immediate relief, and that relief can keep reinforcing the escape even when the strategy creates problems for us later.
So let’s put shame inside that loop for a second. Someone tells me something about my behavior that I really don’t want to hear or maybe even admit to myself. I feel that tightening in my body, that little exposure of oh shit, what if they’re right? Maybe I immediately explain myself, remind them of what they did first, minimize what happened, or start collecting evidence for why they’re actually the problem. Somewhere in the middle of doing all of that, I don’t have to sit as closely with the shame anymore.
And there it is: relief.
See the pesky little loop hole it found?
When those well-worn neural pathways find a way to sneak us out of the pressure cooker, even for a moment, the brain gets this tiny sliver of relief that can feel like evidence that whatever we just did must have worked. The problem is that we haven’t actually gotten out of the pressure cooker we’ve just found a little escape valve that releases enough pressure to make staying inside of it tolerable.
*sniff
*sniff
Smells like a trap to me, because the brain remembers that relief and starts reaching for the same escape hatch the next time the pressure builds, giving us just enough of a break to keep us looping through something that never actually resolves what created the pressure in the first place. Sometimes we can live there for years, surviving off these tiny slices of relief without realizing we’ve become incredibly practiced at escaping the feeling while never actually leaving the cycle.
That’s the part I want us to get curious about, I often feel that if we looked at our behavior as a game and that we are stuck on a level because we didn’t gather all the “crayons”— skills needed to beat the big boss at the end. Now we must go back and check the steps, see if we missed some spots. We have the external portion of the assignment down, the hard part is the internal role we play and exploring what we can see in our own behavior. If defending, explaining, blaming, withdrawing, or avoiding gives us relief from shame, what has our brain just learned? How many times do we have to repeat that cycle before we stop experiencing it as a strategy at all and start saying, This is just how I am?
What if “this is how I am” is enough for people?
Now what?
What happens if we are faced with people who are completely content where they are in their life what ever the circumstance. The mind wants to make it feel as if we are not enough but it has nothing to do with us and everything to do with how much the other party had in the tank to meet you where you wanted or needed. That data on another person tells us what we are willing to face in courage, not what we are willing to face trying to get them to change.
Many people out there know exactly the position they put themselves in and still can’t seem to get themselves to move to a forward direction that ultimately benefits themselves, but will cause some grief or even the double whammy— guilt. Attachment grief is a pain many want to avoid at all costs, but relief is one hell of a teacher, It is one hell of a reinforcer of behavior, even maladaptive behavior. Research by Stuewig, Tangney, and colleagues found that shame-proneness was indirectly associated with aggression through externalization of blame; guilt-proneness, in contrast, was negatively related to aggression and externalization (Stuewig et al., 2010). That distinction has been sitting with me because it suggests there may be very different psychological consequences between I did something I don’t like and what I did means something terrible about who I am.
CASE STUDY: “YOU NEVER LISTEN TO ME EITHER.”
Imagine a partner says:
“When you made that joke about me in front of everyone last night, it embarrassed me. I really didn’t like it.”
The person hearing this immediately feels exposed in some way. Maybe there’s a drop in their stomach or heat in their chest, flush feeling in their face. For a split second, the information available is simply: Something I did hurt someone I love.
Now, sitting with that would require tolerating some discomfort. What psychology calls Distress tolerance skills
So instead, the conversation shifts:
“Okay, but you embarrass me all the time. What about what you said to me last week? You never think about how you talk to me.”
Now, look at what just happened.
The focus has moved from my behavior to your behavior. Now I can start collecting evidence against you, defending my character, explaining myself, or getting angry about everything you’ve done. The original discomfort begins to loosen because I’m no longer sitting with I hurt you. Now we’re discussing how you hurt me too.
That relief can become reinforcing, so reinforcing that some couples and families see themselves stuck in the cycle of chronically doing this to each other. Yet, do not consider the silent erosion to the union it causes.
Two possible pathways
Guilt:
“I don’t like that I did that. I can understand why it embarrassed you. I need to repair it.”
The behavior is the problem, which leaves room for me to remain a whole person while taking responsibility for something I did.
Shame + externalization:
“You’re making me out to be a terrible person. What about everything YOU do?”
Now the threat feels larger because it isn’t only my behavior being questioned; my sense of who I am feels under attack. Shifting the blame outward can give me temporary relief from having to sit with that painful self-evaluation. Now I want us to get curious rather than start diagnosing ourselves. The question isn’t “Am I a shameful person because I’ve done this?” That would almost hilariously recreate the exact cycle we’re exploring.
A better question might be:
What happens inside me during those few seconds between someone showing me something about my behavior and my need to show them something about theirs?
In order to access those few seconds, a pause will need to be implemented. There might be a whole lot of information living inside that pause too.
Men: What happens when shame collides with manhood?
I especially want to get more curious about shame in men because I think we sometimes interpret male defenses without examining the emotional rules that preceded them. Research on masculine gender-role strain describes discrepancy stress: distress that can occur when a man experiences himself as falling short of internalized standards of masculinity (Levant, 2011). Other studies have linked masculine discrepancy stress with depression, violence, and other negative outcomes, although obviously this does not mean masculinity or shame inevitably produces aggression (Reidy et al., 2015; Reidy et al., 2018). There is a mob of women reading that last part and disagreeing but then I want to immediately ask, What does that mean for your sons if you have one?
Think about what that might mean inside an ordinary relationship. A woman says, I need you to communicate more. I need you to go to therapy. I need you to be more emotionally available. She may be describing completely legitimate needs. Yet if the man receiving them has organized his worth around competence, strength, providing, emotional control, or never appearing weak, he may hear something underneath her words that she never actually said:
You are failing at being a man.
Again, explanation is not exoneration. Understanding why somebody becomes defensive does not require us to tolerate what they do with that defensiveness. I’m interested in what becomes possible when we understand the emotional architecture underneath behavior instead of immediately reducing the person to the behavior.
Women: When care quietly becomes control
Women, I want us in this conversation too.
Brené Brown’s work has helped bring shame, vulnerability, worthiness, and imperfection into ordinary language, particularly around the expectations people internalize about who they believe they’re supposed to be (Brown, 2010/2020). Even the enormous popularity of books such as Rachel Hollis’s Girl, Stop Apologizing tells us something culturally interesting: women clearly recognize the experience of organizing themselves around expectation, approval, apology, and permission. Those books are not equivalent scientifically, but they occupy the same larger cultural conversation about who women learn they are allowed to be. The uncomfortable place I want to explore is what happens when our own shame and anxiety become hidden inside care.
Sometimes I want you to heal quietly becomes I need you to change so I can finally feel okay. Sometimes we can see a man’s family dynamics, avoidance, wounds, or relational patterns before he can see them himself, and being correct about what we see can make us feel entitled to his timeline for discovering it. Boy oh Boy was this a hard lesson I had to face within my own marriage. It doesn’t make sense sometimes for us women when we are told the very behaviors of care and nurturing are causing the very suffocation in our partner. That does not mean we take all the blame, it means we examine the parts our dysregulation plays and how we use care as a loophole to discharge what we refuse to examine. If the behavior is around love, kindness, affection, we can argue that our behavior is supportive. Rather than listen to someone telling us they are not receiving it that way. We always want to get someone else to see their blind spots but let them try to point ours out—defensive.
That is where I have questions.
Can I know something without forcing someone else to know it? Can I identify behavior that doesn’t work for me without orchestrating another adult’s development? Can I recognize another person’s blind spot while remaining curious about my own?
Greenberg’s work on shame and anger is helpful here because he treats them as closely related emotions whose sequence matters; one can sometimes mask or interact with the other, and both can take adaptive and maladaptive forms (Greenberg, 2024). Shame researchers have similarly found that blame and hostility can become pathways connecting shame-proneness with aggression.
Maybe sometimes righteousness feels better than shame.
The generation that “doesn’t believe in therapy”
Then there are our parents and grandparents.
I’m becoming careful about saying the older generations simply “didn’t do the work.” Every generation inherits an emotional vocabulary from the world that raised it. For some families, strength meant silence, privacy meant loyalty, talking about family problems was a form of betrayal. So survival in these systems meant getting up tomorrow and going to work regardless of what happened yesterday. Do that and you are strong, resilient, tough.
Those rules can absolutely preserve dysfunction, but if we zoom in close enough—it can also make historical sense.
That distinction matters.
Living in a system where disclosure once resulted in humiliation, punishment, exclusion, or loss of belonging, silence may have been reinforced long before anybody used words like trauma response. If emotional suppression reliably allowed someone to continue functioning, well we are looking at a form of suppression that had a payoff even if the bill for it arrived decades later, in the generations after. So when we reflect on some of this, instead of beginning with Why won’t this generation talk about anything?, I find myself wanting to ask:
What happened in the world they came from when somebody did?
I don’t know about you but when I ask it that way, I feel a sense of relief and curiosity. The relief for me comes from the reduced pressure that leaves my body feeling as if I must please a generation of people who won’t understand why I perceive it this way and they perceive it that way. That relief you get from the chokehold of pleasing, allows you to be completely ok with what ever discomfort will show up when faced with what ever protest behavior or cognitive dissonance you receive for initiating your first exposure training protocol. Facing discomfort head-on. Especially when we disappoint others by doing what is in our best interest. I don’t mean this in an entitled way. I mean it in a self-sovereign way.
Shame also lives in the audience
There is another reason I can’t explore shame without talking about the internet.
Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed traces the resurgence of public humiliation in digital culture and places it alongside the longer history of public shaming as social punishment (Ronson, 2015). What fascinates me now is how ordinary participation in public shame has become. Someone makes a mistake, a marriage falls apart, an old video surfaces, somebody says something ignorant, and thousands of strangers gather to decide what kind of human being this proves the person has always been.
I wonder what that teaches all of us watching.
We tell people to be vulnerable while maintaining enormous digital archives of their worst moments. We tell them to take accountability and sometimes leave very little psychological pathway back into belonging once they do. We even demand that people grow while occasionally treating evidence that they needed to grow as permanent proof of their character. Yet, here we are—collectively wondering why everyone is terrified of being wrong. Is it that we truly believe we are above being wrong? Or that we are in a society so obsessed with catching you in something to shame you that we are all afraid to mess up. So we don’t move at all.
Maybe the work is learning to survive seeing ourselves
This is where I’m landing for now, although I expect September to complicate it considerably.
I don’t think the goal is eliminating shame. I’m much more interested in increasing our capacity to remain present when something about ourselves hurts to see. Benau’s work on shame, pride, and relational trauma emphasizes differentiating forms of shame and developing what he calls pro-being pride a capacity to delight in one’s own and others’ unique aliveness rather than organizing the self entirely around maladaptive shame (Benau, 2022). Fisher similarly describes trauma healing as changing our relationship with disowned parts of ourselves, replacing self-alienation and assumptions of guilt with compassionate acceptance (Fisher, 2017).
Maybe that’s part of what allows accountability to become possible.
I was controlling there.
I lied because I was afraid.
I told that story in a way that protected my image.
I hurt somebody.
I didn’t know what I know now.
Maybe shame isn’t the villain we think it is or need it to be? What if shame is actually the portal we have to be willing to walk through to get to the other side of whatever the f*ck so many of us seem to be looping and drifting around in? Like some weird Narnia portal into conscious awareness of self. 😂 Except instead of walking through a wardrobe, we have to walk through the deeply uncomfortable experience of seeing something about ourselves that we would really rather explain away or prove was useful.
There are things we do that we genuinely believe are positive behaviors. I give everything to the people I love. I would do this for you. I always show up. I anticipate what people need. I take care of everybody. Those things may be beautiful qualities, but I think the portal opens when we become willing to ask what else might be hiding inside them. Is there an expectation attached? If I would do this for you, shouldn’t you do this for me? If I sacrifice this much, shouldn’t you recognize it? If this is how I love you, shouldn’t you want to receive it?
Except there is only one of us.
I can be willing to move mountains for someone and still have to accept that another person may not want mountains moved for them—that hurts. I think about how painful it is to pour everything into somebody, do all of these things in the name of loving them, and eventually hear some version of, “I never asked you to do any of that.”
Oooof, because now I have to confront the possibility that something I experienced as love may have also contained an unspoken contract the other person never agreed to. We can give what was never asked for and then punish someone for not receiving it the way we imagined they should.
THAT is the portal I’m talking about. Portal of mirrored truth. Now we get a taste of our own medicine because the sting of shame has us move differently as a means to avoid it. Doesn’t the view from the anger of being stung hit differently? It’s a lot easier to point out the sting in others and still not understand their defensiveness to your comments about it. Because they are already being attacked by shame, they don’t need an added reminder from an external source. Experiencing the feeling of shame in the body feel different for everyone. For me—it makes me feel like I want to through up.
It’s being able to look at something I genuinely like about myself—my generosity, care, loyalty, willingness to help, bubbly personality —and still ask whether there are moments when those same qualities become suffocating for another human. Maybe some of the ways we unconsciously suffocate other people are extensions of the ways we have suffocated ourselves, but adapted to that suffering. If I don’t allow myself to disappoint people, how well do I tolerate someone disappointing me? If I believe love means anticipating everyone else’s needs, what happens when someone loves me without anticipating mine? If I constantly override myself in the name of love, maybe I eventually expect other people to override themselves for me too.
None of this requires us to walk through the portal and beat the hell out of ourselves once we get there. That’s just shame finding another means of discharge as emotional self-harm.
The point is radical acceptance:
I am a human being with blind spots. I can have beautiful intentions and still create an impact I didn’t intend. I can love somebody and still behave in ways that make it difficult for them to breathe. I can be incredibly self-aware in one area and completely full of shit in another.
That last part let me repeat it. “I can be incredibly self-aware in one area and completely full of shit in another.”
I felt that.
Those realities don’t cancel each other out. Maybe there is some humility in remembering that other people probably see things about us that they haven’t told us yet. Think about how many times you’ve noticed something about someone you love and thought, I’m not saying that because I don’t want to hurt their feelings. Well...why would we assume nobody has ever done the same with us?
There may be people who love us enough to see our blind spots and are still trying to figure out how or whether to tell us. Could it be possible that conscious self-awareness isn’t reaching some magical point where we no longer have blind spots?
What if it’s all in the exploration of becoming a person who can survive discovering one.
As we continue Rewiring Out of Resentment, maybe shame gives us another place to look:
What does resentment allow me to keep focusing on in someone else that I may be avoiding in myself?
When someone shows me something about my behavior, what happens inside me before I respond?
Where have I confused “this is how I love” with “this is how you should love me back”?
What have I given, sacrificed, or done without being asked and later resented someone for not appreciating or reciprocating?
If I could experience the discomfort of shame without defending, collapsing, or blaming, what might it be trying to show me?
What is one blind spot I might be willing to walk through the portal and look at?
Till next time Data Collectors.
References
Benau, K. (2022). Shame, pride, and relational trauma: Concepts and psychotherapy. Routledge.
Brown, B. (2020). The gifts of imperfection: 10th anniversary edition. Random House. (Original work published 2010).
Dearing, R. L., & Tangney, J. P. (Eds.). (2011). Shame in the therapy hour. American Psychological Association.
DeYoung, P. A. (2021). Understanding and treating chronic shame: Healing right brain relational trauma (2nd ed.). Routledge.
Engel, B. (2015). It wasn’t your fault: Freeing yourself from the shame of childhood abuse with the power of self-compassion. New Harbinger Publications.
Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. Routledge.
Greenberg, L. S. (2024). Shame and anger in psychotherapy. American Psychological Association.
Hollis, R. (2019). Girl, stop apologizing: A shame-free plan for embracing and achieving your goals. HarperCollins.
Levant, R. F. (2011). Research in the psychology of men and masculinity using the gender role strain paradigm as a framework. American Psychologist, 66(8), 765–776.
Nathanson, D. L. (1992). Shame and pride: Affect, sex, and the birth of the self. W. W. Norton.
Reidy, D. E., et al. (2015). Masculine discrepancy stress, teen dating violence, and sexual violence perpetration among adolescent boys. Journal of Adolescent Health, 56(6), 619–624.
Ronson, J. (2015). So you’ve been publicly shamed. Riverhead Books.
Stuewig, J., Tangney, J. P., Heigel, C., Harty, L., & McCloskey, L. (2010). Shaming, blaming, and maiming: Functional links among the moral emotions, externalization of blame, and aggression. Journal of Research in Personality, 44(1), 91–102.