The Hidden Burden of Chronic Shame

A Personal Reflection

[Photo by Rebecca Rinaldi for Scopio}

Admitting the Weight We Carry

During a recent deep conversation with a friend, we both admitted to struggling mightily with shame. As it turns out, both of us would appear put-together and successful. We both care about making a positive impact. Yet secretly we shlep around an amount of shame that is, in many ways, crippling and painful. According to some social scientists, shame can be deeply ingrained and hard to off-load—no matter how desperately we want to be rid of it. It usually has roots in our younger lives. While shame is a universal human experience, it can be quite burdensome for some. I write this article for those who know the burden well, either personally or through someone they love.

Understanding Shame Through Research

We are fortunate to live at a time when shame is more widely understood, thanks largely to the work of Brene Brown, whose research sheds light on shame in important ways. While in the past, it seemed people commonly equated shame with guilt, nowadays more people understand the difference. Brown elucidates it this way:

“… guilt is adaptive and helpful—it’s holding something we’ve done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort. I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.”

I’ve also heard the difference between guilt and shame summarized simply: we feel guilt about something we’ve done; we feel shame about who we are. Though some people can point to specific early traumas as ground zero for their struggles with shame, many of us cannot pinpoint where our shame comes from. Regarding the source(s) of my own extreme shame, I am in the dark. I expect a thousand ultrafine threads form the knot of my shame.

How Shame Shapes Our Behavior

Shame often causes people to withdraw from connection and can cause feelings of loneliness around other people. We feel so flawed that deep down, in an often unarticulated way, we believe no one will love or like us. Therefore, we want to hide to protect ourselves from the rejection we believe will be inevitable. Or conversely, we spend our time contorting ourselves, trying to drum up whatever scant love we think we can get. We might do this through pleasing or ambition or artistic pursuits or sexual exploit. But it’s seemingly futile since the efforts are not adequate to fill the hole shame creates. In my experience, the people who struggle with shame are often putting themselves out there anyway, partly in a quest to fill that hole. In this, they can appear confident and self-assured. Yet the self-assuredness is an illusion.

{Photo by Marie Dashkova for Scopio}

Metaphors for Shame

Two anecdotes from my childhood illustrate for me these impulses. At one of my preschool-age birthday parties, I crawled under the dining table and hid as everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday’. And as a small child I frequently went around shouting—trying to be heard by the group of kids in my neighborhood. ‘Hiding under the table’ while alternately ‘shouting at the top of my lungs’ are perfect metaphors for my whole life and can be metaphors for the shame experience in general.

The Physiology of Chronic Shame

Those of us with extreme shame (clinically called ‘chronic shame’) often feel shame flooding our bodies long before we recognize it is present. In some cases, it may take years or decades to decipher what is happening to us physiologically on a somewhat regular basis. The physiological effects of shame can include blushing, change in heart rate, “flooding” and a feeling of distraction, shaking, changes in body temperature, instant sense of fatigue, and sometimes pain (headache, etc.). Body language is also affected:

“Shame is connected to processes that occur within the limbic system, the emotion center of the brain. When something shameful happens, your brain reacts to this stimulus by sending signals to the rest of your body that lead you to feel frozen in place. This process then produces behaviors and body language that act as nonverbal signs of shame.”

These body cues can include flushing, a dropping of the eyes and shoulders (slumping posture) and a falling of the face.

When Shame Becomes Chronic

Again, guilt is a normal response when a wrong has been committed. And when we realize our personal failings caused us to commit the wrong, shame is appropriate—the awareness of personal failure. But chronic shame causes a sense of perpetual unlovability and badness that does not go away. It stays dormant and can be triggered at inappropriate times when one has done nothing wrong.

A Call to Encourage One Another

I believe my experience with chronic shame makes me keenly aware of such feelings in others. I can see the subtle body signals and read the signs. In light of this, I want to encourage others when I can. Encouragement doesn’t cure chronic shame, but it can sometimes halt a shame spiral in another—as if encouragement is the antithesis of shaming. Blessed are the encouragers!

If you liked this article, please leave me a comment below; I am interested in your perspective. To support my writing, please subscribe and share with a friend!

---

Wren, winner of a 2022 Independent Publishers Award Bronze Medal

Winner of the 2022 Independent Publisher Awards Bronze Medal for Regional Fiction; Finalist for the 2022 National Indie Excellence Awards. (2021) Paperback publication of Wren , a novel. “Insightful novel tackles questions of parenthood, marriage, and friendship with finesse and empathy … with striking descriptions of Oregon topography.” —Kirkus Reviews (2018) Audiobook publication of Wren.