Understanding Shame

Shame is another one of those scary universal human experiences that everyone has but no one really wants to talk about. Since my masters in psychotherapy and the following years as a practicing therapist I have learned some things about shame.

I remember one professor asking the class to demonstrate with our bodies what shame looks like. Together, we hunched our shoulders, bowed our heads, and looked to the ground. This was a powerful lesson, it taught me in a visceral way not just how uncomfortable and painful shame is, but the way it forces us away from one another. The way shame keeps us isolated, and takes away opportunities for connection. Without eye contact I cannot see or be seen. Without an open posture I am unapproachable. Shame body posture says ‘do not connect with me, I do not want it and I am not worth it.’ Shame is very good at building on itself, the more shame we feel, the more isolated we become, and the more reasons we find to be ashamed. In shame, our nervous system stops moving through its usual rhythms. Emotional states that would usually be temporary tend to hang around (Lyon, 2023).

“Shame is a debilitating feeling that takes over the mind and body. It can make you feel small and incomplete while building walls around you to keep out compassion. Despite wanting to be seen and known, shame causes people to hide behind masks instead.” - Aslanian, 2025

I remember Brene Brown’s talks on shame too. She said that shame is the fear of disconnection, of not being worthy of connection (Brown, 2011). That no change, no courage, no innovation can be had without shame being acknowledged and attended to. Shame is ours, it uses our voices and our memories and our insecurities but it pretends it belongs to everyone else. Shame says we’re never good enough and we should stop pretending to be. Shame lives deep in our identities (Brown, 2012).

As a therapist I have seen again and again how often shame wields its power over us, mostly without us noticing it. Because shame is naturally an emotion we want to avoid, we rarely remain aware of it long enough to put a name to it. Instead, shame attaches itself to other emotions like fear, anger, or grief making them more intense, and allowing them to last longer (Brown, 2011; Lyon, 2023). “No one wants to talk about it and the less you talk about it the more you have it” (Brown, 2011).

Shame, at its core, is a healthy and necessary human function. It allows us to collaborate in large groups, one of the abilities that sets us apart from other animals, by restricting our behaviours to those that are helpful to the rest of the community. But more and more shame is being used to restrict behaviours that are helpful to us as individuals. When used against us shame is felt intensely in the body, it lingers, it changes the way we see ourselves. Left to fester, shame can lead to dysregulated behaviours like violence, aggression, depression, addiction, eating disorders, and bullying (Aslanian, 2025).

Autistic Shame

I am realizing now, as an autistic, and as I continue to learn about neuro-diversirty, the way shame latches on to the parts of us that are ‘different’. The parts of us that society doesn’t necessarily make space for. The parts of us we learn to cover up with better-liked personas. There's still a lot of societal stigma about autism, which unfortunately means there’s a lot more to dislike in someone neuro-diverse than in someone neuro-typical. When exposed to all these big and little ways people react badly to us, it’s easy to internalize. Shame and rejection are deeply interwoven and are often experienced in tandem. Even innocent confusion can feel a lot like criticism because it means we have to explain ourselves and point out our differences… again. Shaming can feel constant for anyone that is too different (Oswald, 2022).

Internalized stigma transforms into shame pretty easily, and in turn motivates us to mask and hide (Turnock, Langley, Jones, 2022). We begin making decisions according to what is going to protect us the most from shame. Shame might therefore keep us from partaking in hobbies we enjoy or communicating openly with others. It might lead us to develop people-pleasing tendencies (Oswald, 2022). Shame often keeps us from asking for what we need, explaining accommodations, or placing boundaries. A lot of the time attempts to do these things lead to semi-passive denials of our needs and experiences. 

“The pressure to “fit in” doesn’t exactly go away when you become an adult. For some, it may even feel worse. You might be expected to have a job, find a partner, and live independently. And if you don’t meet those milestones, you may feel like something is wrong with you.” -Oswald, 2022

Treatment

Like anyone, I have shame. I have memories that pop into my head vividly and at inconvenient times to remind me why I’ll never be good enough, why I am fundamentally unlikeable. I have doubts and insecurities and hesitancies. I have questions about what I’m really capable of accomplishing with my time here on earth. Recently, I’ve found myself feeling at a loss with what to do with all these thoughts and feelings and memories. Do I write them down? Do I talk about them? Do I push them away? Can I ever hope to be rid of them? So I did some research, and here are the results of my deep dive into the question: ‘What do I do about shame?’ The answer is - we build resilience. Resilience often means exposure and practice, in this case, practicing the skills listed below.

“Empathy is the antidote to shame” (Brown, 2012). Which is great in theory but can be hard to find in real actual people, a lot of whom have a limited capacity for empathy. So what do we do when we can’t get the empathy we need, when it seems no one wants to have the conversation that would release us from feeling haunted or stuck? How are we meant to show up for anyone else when no one is showing up for us? We focus on the empathy we can provide to ourselves and others:

Compassion and worthiness, first towards ourselves and later towards others (Brown, 2011). Compassion helps us prevent burnout, empathy fatigue, and low self-esteem. When these needs are met we move closer to believing we are worthy of love and belonging (Brown, 2011). This allows us to step out and away from defensiveness and a constant need for validation, and it opens us up to providing compassion and validation to those around us. We can work on compassion by lowering our expectations, allowing ourselves to make mistakes, and giving more space where we are free to show up exactly as we are. As well as acknowledging that shame is most often associated with situations we had little or no control over (Sutton, 2017). By working on an internal sense of safety, usually built out of self-compassion and compassion from others, we can find and use that inner strength to help us face and tolerate the risk of external rejection and criticism (Aslanian, 2025).

Courage to be authentic and vulnerable. To show up imperfectly. To let go of who we think we should be and instead be as we are. To know that vulnerability is necessary. (Brown, 2011). This is not an easy task. I don’t know about you, but I often don’t trust the people around me to receive my vulnerability with respect, let alone validation. Which means that the consequence of vulnerability is often the pain of rejection which can be difficult to tolerate. But the alternative is perhaps worse:

We give power to shame by refusing to speak about it. We don’t understand shame and so we don't like talking about it, we don’t talk about it and so we don’t understand it. Whenever shame is mentioned it brings with it the feeling of shame and a lot of fear. But persevering, conversations about shame can also help us feel in control and give us an internal sense of empowerment or efficacy. Secrecy can feel safe in the short term, but over time it gives way to shame and all its consequences (Sutton, 2017). By hiding, we are affirming to ourselves that we should hide, that we deserve to hide, that if we showed up honestly we’ll be punished for it.

Connection as a result of that authentic, vulnerable, and imperfect self-expression. Doing things like reaching out, maintaining stronger and more meaningful relationships. To allow others to see, respond to, and connect with the most real version of ourselves. Which is, of course, a very different and much more rewarding connection than the kind we get when we are pretending or covering up (Brown, 2011; Sutton, 2017). When the only version of me available to everyone else is the version that I’ve tried to make perfect. Which not only leaves me feeling lonely anyway, but also reaffirms that connection only exists when I provide a doctored or filtered version of myself. We feel shame when we are worried about our ability to connect. And we can only experience empathy by asking for it (Sutton, 2017).

Guilt, which is easily mistaken for shame or often conflated with shame but actually works counter to shame. Shame is about who we are, guilt is about what we did. Shame tells us there’s nothing to be done, no solution for the problem. Guilt tells us there’s a path forward, albeit an uncomfortable one. People who cope well with guilt, who can acknowledge it and work with it experience less shame. People who learn to separate guilt and shame also experience less shame (Brown, 2011; Brown 2012). 

Avoiding numbness (Brown, 2011). Shame and vulnerability are so scary to most of us, so traumatic, if that language suits you, that we dissociate from it with or without conscious effort. We dissociate from other people too: the things we see other people feel. Which means, in order to get to the shame and unravel the roots, we need to get back into our bodies and back into our feelings and all the pain and discomfort that lives there. Back into our relationship, into empathy, into connection, into the impact we have on others. Back to the joy and inspiration and courage and compassion and guilt that also sits under the surface. (I have known for ages that we cannot selectively numb our emotions (ie. the bad and not the good) and have said so to so many people. But it wasn’t until writing this blog that I realized, originally, I learned this from Brene Brown).

Uncertainty. We have a tendency to treat everything as black and white, true or not. We are slowly losing our ability to sit in the inbetween. To tolerate not knowing. To live with the messiness. It has taken from us that ability to talk calmly and vulnerably with people who disagree with us (Brown, 2011). And the skill to explore, within ourselves, the parts of us that aren’t logical or simple. Contradiction is a key component of human nature and culture, but we work endlessly trying to erase it. If we are to forge healthy relationships with shame, if we are to be compassionate, it is necessary to live for a while in the imperfect, uncertain reality of human experience. To know that most things aren’t ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, they aren’t ‘bad’ or ‘good’, they aren’t ‘perfect’ or ‘ruined’. they just are. Which brings me to:

Acceptance and the absence of blame. Mostly: acceptance that it’s no one's fault terrible things happen or that we feel terribly. And if it is someone's fault, it’s always a little bit our own. And that fault is a lot less important than what we’re going to do about it next. Working with shame requires acceptance of the pain and struggle inherent in all the things I have touched on here: rejection, imperfection, uncertainty, emotional overwhelm, fear, or insecurity. These things are real and unavoidable. Learning to move through them will serve us much better in our goals to manage shame then finding a way around them will. When practicing acceptance, we learn we are capable of sitting with much more discomfort then we might assume. This is called distress tolerance, building up the skill to be distressed without feeling out of control. And it is crucial to healing our shame (Aslanian, 2025).

Critical awareness - Know your shame. Grow your knowledge and understanding of shame, know it within yourself - that it’s there, how it works, and what it does. What are your triggers, what are the things about you that feel criticised or rejected? Being able to recognize shame, how it feels, and our safe spaces gives us a road map to growing our tolerance carefully. Understand that shame and empathy exist on a spectrum and we are always somewhere in the middle (Sutton, 2017). 

“Shame is an epidemic in our culture. And to get out from underneath it, to find our way back to each other, we have to understand how it affects us and how it affects the way we’re parenting, the way we’re working, the way we’re looking at each other.” - Brown, 2012

Sources

Aslanian, A., 2025. How to Deal with Shame: What story from your life makes you go into hiding? Gottman. https://www.gottman.com/blog/how-to-deal-with-shame/

Brene Brown, 2011, The power of vulnerability, TED, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o

Brene Brown, 2012, Listening to Shame, TED, YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psN1DORYYV0

Lyon and Rubin, 2023. Three Steps to Healing Shame (and Trauma)

Separating shame from other emotions. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/unlocking-shame/202310/three-steps-to-healing-shame-and-trauma

Oswald, 2022. Shame and Autism: How Neurodiverse People Struggle With Feelings of Shame and How to Overcome It. OpenDoorsTherapy. https://opendoorstherapy.com/shame-and-autism-how-neurodiverse-people-struggle-with-feelings-of-shame-and-how-to-overcome-it/

Sutton, 2017. Shame Resilience Theory: Advice From Brené Brown. https://positivepsychology.com/shame-resilience-theory/

Turnock A, Langley K, Jones CRG., 2022. Understanding Stigma in Autism: A Narrative Review and Theoretical Model. Autism Adulthood. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8992913/