THE SHAME DECEPTION

Why good people cover up bad things 

Chapter ‘X’ (Prologue)

Breaking the silence

London 2024

It’s always too late when one is innocent

Franz Kafka, The Trial

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk

I pretend I don't see it

I fall in again

Portia Nelson, There's a Hole in My Sidewalk,

But I’m not guilty said K, there’s been a mistake..

We’re all human beings here, one like the other

That is true said the priest, but that is how the guilty speak                 

Franz Kafka, The Trial 

Therapists have no monopoly on wisdom, and different therapy schools offer competing formulations of our struggles and ailments, some of which are helpful, and others less so. It’s not just people who fall down potholes – therapists of all stripes fall down them too. I’m one of them. I get things wrong. I’m unable to help people who seek it, and shamefully, clients inform me of my failings. Perhaps in sympathy, they sometimes tell me about the shortcomings of other therapy interventions too, so I can at least take some comfort in my own.

Take one episode from ‘Ben’s’ life. Ben experienced crippling anxiety, so much so it almost derailed his career. Ben turned to positive psychology for help, which worked exceptionally well at the start, but later his anxiety returned, rebounding more powerfully than ever. What if nothing worked? He turned once again to his therapist who helped him refocus attention and shift awareness, restoring the persuasive arguments for kicking anxiety to the curb. The grounds were overwhelming: Ben was bright, intelligent, not quite 27, popular in his organisation, innovative in his field and passionate about his work. His anxiety-emotions were obviously ‘failing to read the room’, as his therapist humorously put it, and the best part? – Ben agreed with every single point. Which led him to attack his worry with renewed vigour.

Ben and his therapist weren’t wrong to seek a positive solution, it’s just that Ben’s emotions grew increasingly immune to the notion of a positive outcome for a mental health situation that was clearly getting worse. And every time Ben attacked himself for his anxiety, the anxiety got bigger. Some part of him was pushing back against upbeat predictions when all he felt was dread.

The idea we can talk our minds down from adverse situations, or out of ‘thinking errors’ when we encounter setbacks in life is a powerful strategy for some (it was nearly a good fit for Ben), but leaves others feeling reproached they must be the problem. To be told you only feel bad because your thinking is too negative might give you a reason to feel worse. And there’s a wider issue here, because aren’t we all positive psychologists to some degree  – telling ourselves our responses simply aren’t justified by ‘the facts’?

That Ben had little to be ashamed of ‘objectively speaking’ made little difference, and that’s true for many of those we see in mental health clinics. They often suffered a bad experience, but they flipped it and made themselves bad instead; and then they hid it all away, like a guilty secret.

These individuals were not without conscience – it was quite the opposite, but many had gone so far down their own paths they could no longer hear your voice. All they heard was a ‘morality policeman’ (a sort of inner critic) lodged somewhere inside their mind telling them they’d done something bad – yet it also strangely protected them, as if it were guarding a crime scene. What was the crime – where was it?

And isn’t this guilt rather than shame? Hiding innocence was most apparent in those who’d encountered early-life adversity. Children survive difficult environments by adjusting their shape to fit their surroundings – and shame does all the contortion work, moulding the child into ‘something they’re not’. The child’s ‘form’ becomes detached from their ‘spirit’, and the break is patched-over, carried often undetected into adulthood.

Shame’s reputation is a big part of the problem. The dominant narrative says we’re shamed because we’ve done something wrong – but there’s a hidden narrative, because shame is long known to be linked with coercive and controlling relationships, sexual abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depressive episodes.

Three hundred and fifty million people suffer depression – an even greater number are affected by anxiety, these figures surely underreported, yet they can’t all be deserving of their ‘punishment’, lacking in resilience, dignity, goodness, honour or moral fibre. Statistics suggest most of us will experience anxiety or depression at some point in our lives, but when everyone covers up mental health, we feel like we’re the only person struggling. Could we all be hiding the same thing, while judging ourselves for being different?

All this was particularly true of ‘Ben’, ‘Maryam’ and ‘Maddy’. Ben’s story was buried so far beneath his ‘official biography’ he could no longer reach it. Maddy didn’t much care what anyone thought about her so long as they didn’t see her as ‘broken’; while Maryam’s self-loathing masked her hurt, but she was just desperate not to be ‘bad’. Shame is not, however, just a problem created by the outside world – shame attacks us from the inside as well.

Shame, science research tells us, is a brand of strong medicine, potent and unpleasant enough to prevent wrongdoing – but there’s got to be a hitch somewhere, since it’s the ‘good guys’, the victims of wrongdoing who often walk away with the shame and guilt. Every day the internal ‘shame police’ arrest the wrong people. This book is an attempt to understand why, expose the injustice, and tell how some confronted and survived their shame. But it also asks: how exactly are we getting duped?

Chapter One

The trouble with shame

Guard the secret like your life depends upon it

John Hathaway – to Steven Spielberg, when the shark didn’t work while filming Jaws

One hundred and fifty years before the birth of Charles Dickens, somewhere among the back streets and market places of northern England, sometime during the 1670s, a new word: ‘sham’ made its first appearance, meaning something that’s not what it seems – that ‘tries to deceive’; such as one who ‘pretends to be something they’re not’. ‘Sham’ is a very close relative of the word ‘shame’ – whose original meaning was to ‘hide’ or to ‘cover something up.’ Shame appears in the Book of Genesis, when Adam and Eve discover they’re naked. They were responsible for neither their anatomy nor their nakedness – but they still tried to cover it up. Like many of us they covered up something they hadn’t done.

I see it a lot in my work, plus I understand. If I returned home to discover a phone message saying: ‘I know what you did’, I’d assume I’d been found out, even though I’ve no idea what I had done. To be accused is enough. This is because guilt and shame often team-up; but shame is one of those ‘fit-to-fill’ emotions that expands in infinite space – yet it infiltrates inner space, where our mental health is attacked.

If you tap in the word ‘shame’ on the net today, you’ll discover it’s a ‘moral emotion’ that tells us when we’ve caused offence to others, or when we’ve offended against our personal moral code, or done something else generally considered bad or reprehensible, but the biggest sufferers of shame may not be those who cause harm – they may not be wrongdoers at all.

Psychology-focused websites explicitly warn shame attacks self-esteem, self-worth, identity. Some of the websites encourage humor in the face of shame, others suggest self-compassion and quite a few recommend talking to a therapist; but how are you supposed to talk about or be humorous or compassionate about something so bad you have to cover it up?  

People feel shame when they struggle with social phobias, anxiety and depression – so they hide the fact. Shame can end up hiding whole people, which doesn’t solve many problems since what’s concealed doesn’t get much opportunity to mend. And shame, surprisingly blind to moral character, fails to distinguish deserving recipients from undeserving ones. Does shame at least own up to its mistakes? Quite the reverse – it covers those up too.

I’m a psychotherapist originally from Northern Ireland, where survivors’ guilt and shame was apparent among victims of the ‘Troubles’. Emotional wounds seemed to deepen over time – and I knew many badly hurt people who criticized and punished themselves for their suffering. And later I found in the therapy room, shame often seemed the result of other people’s wrongdoing.

Sometimes people assumed they caused others’ wrongful acts – and sometimes they blamed themselves for their hurt reaction.

Some people I work with despise the word ‘sensitive’, partly because it makes them the culprit – where harm is only caused due to the excessive proneness of the recipient; so they end up denying their sensitivity. ‘Maddy’ found the word so toxic I couldn’t say it in her presence. She had been taunted a great deal as a child, and while she later exercised her freedom to be unflappable, the truth was Maddy cared deeply about other people’s hurts – but had grown ashamed of this quality. 

In the mental health arena, shame is an intimidating opponent. It’s a serious adversary that thinks it’s an ally – and it will make you believe it’s an ally too. This may not sound terribly rational, but we needn’t put all our faith in logic. ‘Trust me’, shame says to its ‘clients’ – many of whom have known shame longer than they have known their therapists. The ‘deception’ relates to the harm shame does when it loses traction with ‘reality’. Shame doesn’t like exposure, and it loses some of its power when things are more out in the open, which is the intention of this book.

Shame’s whole notion of morality is suspect – and it would rather you didn’t know this but it’s not always even that bothered about fairness or justice. If you remember the last time you did something ‘wrong’ – was shame really more worried about what actually happened, or what other people might think? Shame frequently transmits unhelpful and misleading information – and it causes serious confusion when it carries inaccurate messages from the wrong people to the wrong target.

The characters in these stories experienced the ‘wrong type’ of shame, and all are ‘composites’ – each born of a variety of people and situations, cultures and backgrounds. Further measures have been taken to protect confidentiality – yet all the dilemmas and internal battles are ‘real’. All carried negative assumptions about themselves, like a great many of us do. The shamed are often the deceived.

If you happened to meet ‘Maryam’ in real life, or someone very much like her, you’d come away with the unshakeable conviction you were in the presence of a good person and you would little suspect how she felt about herself. You’d know she couldn’t be bad in under ten minutes, but Maryam genuinely had no idea. Maryam was disbelieved and so she stopped believing herself, and she no longer saw herself as ‘good’. How do you work with a good person who knows they’re a bad person? It sounds like it should be straightforward, but I couldn’t offer up a straightforward answer. All I can do is tell how Maryam and I grappled with it.

If ‘Maddy’ happened to be a boxer during the platinum era of US heavyweights, and she took a head shot in the ring from Sonny Liston, Mohammed Ali or Joe Frazier, she would have got up every time. Maddy would not only have beaten the ten-count, she’d have been up before you knew she was down. Maddy would not display hurt no matter what – not under any circumstances. Even if George Foreman had caught her with a haymaker full-heft off the ropes and knocked her down dead, she’d still have got back up again.

A further metaphor comes to mind when I think of Maddy. If she’d been among Allied forces in world war two dropped in to pass on vital information behind enemy lines and was captured by the Axis powers; even under torture she’d have given nothing away. With my low pain tolerance and questionable courage, I would give up most of what I knew before Maddy would so much as relinquish her name, rank or serial number. Maddy learned these skills early in life.

‘Ben’ was outwardly confident – but this was mostly a front. In fact, he was extremely anxious, but he didn’t want to dwell on that, blaming it on work pressures. He was certainly driven, but the anxiety made no sense – he loved his work. Ben was similar to Maddy in one respect: he was a terrific masker. Masking shows up throughout the book, but the masker themselves is often the most confused person out of everyone as to why they feel or behave as they do.           

Unfairness is stitched into the whole shame problem – and people are often blindsided. The concealment is clever and the deceit endlessly ‘adaptive’. Someone who ‘pretends to be something they are not’ is not always the perpetrator of a deception, but is quite often the carrier of one. The ‘cover-up’ is one of the most challenging aspects of the whole story, and brings us back to the 17th Century word sham: ‘A trick put upon one, a hoax, a fraud’. Many of us have been misinformed by shame, falling under the sensory spell of its bogus ‘moral’ signaling. Shame prioritizes survival over our wellbeing – it’s just not so bothered about the cost to our psychological health. Piercing any part of the cover-up’s veil is an act of resistance. Doing so might even assist in arresting the slide in our mental health.

Chapter Two

There must be some way out of here

The puzzle that many struggled with over the decades is,

what happens to the information that an object contains

when it falls into a black hole. Is it simply lost?

Brian Greene

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk

I see it is there

I still fall in

Portia Nelson, There's a Hole in My Sidewalk,

Shame is like a great whispering audience full of invisible people lodged somewhere inside our skull. The audience sits in an imaginary courtroom of public opinion, and when we fall from grace, or at least when we think we do, the audience starts squirming around in its seats, making disapproving noises. No matter how much we want to disappear, the noise still follows us into all our most secret hiding places. Things get noisy in the inner world, but shame creates a silent ‘lockdown’ in the outer one. Even in therapy, shame’s cover-ups are rarely communicated directly, and must be ‘tapped out’ in a sort of ‘prison code’. Shame forbids ‘open’ communication, and its silence looms large in the wider mental health world, spreading confusion and misery.

We are told there is less stigma around mental health today, but is that really the case? When someone experiences a setback in life and becomes anxious or depressed as a result, it’s frequently accompanied by blame, self-judgment and criticism. We respond to our own misery with an attack on our ‘lack of resilience’, ‘agency’, ‘backbone’ or some other imagined failing. Our recovery prospects aren’t improved by silence, yet shame places us in an information black hole. It needs an open conversation; but we already know what shame’s attitude to that is.

Right out of the blocks shame tells you seeking help isn’t safe – that others will abuse any sense you’re in any trouble. It tells you to keep your problems to yourself. Shame is at its most unhelpful when we most need intervention – because it’s misleading. Shame is not just a ‘moral’ emotion, as we’ll see, it’s supposed to be a ‘pro-social’ one too, and yet it keeps the most important things about us from the people most important to us. OK – so can’t people just recover by themselves? It depends. A relational problem usually requires a relational solution – and yet therapy is not the only answer; all it sometimes needs is the right character witness. But there’s a witness problem.

The witness problem

We have a powerful human need to be ‘seen’ – to be present in the mind of another human being. We need people as much as we need food and shelter, but shame fears humiliation if others discover how needy we are; even though we all have pretty much the same ‘secret’ needs. Shame tries to protect us from hurt and abandonment; but what if it’s shame itself we need protected from?

We don’t just need witnesses to help put the guilty in jail, we need them to testify in defence of the innocent – not in an actual courtroom, but in the courtroom of our own mind; yet people who assume they’re guilty don’t reach out for help, since they fear every witness will secretly end up siding with the prosecution. With shame, even the accused secretly ends up working with the prosecution.

Chronic shame resembles an internal ‘trial’. Without supportive witnesses, the trial is lopsided and beset by false testimony that’s allowed to go uncontested. In everyday life, our self-image is propped up by people who validate us, hold us in good esteem, support, ground and ‘contain’ us. Kick all those props away, and morale collapses. From this prone position, we’re less likely or too demotivated and dejected to reach out to allies for help.   

When there are things we can’t say to others about ourselves, it affects how much we can know about ourselves. An information loop is the opposite of a black hole – the more information you send into a live system, the better the quality of information you get back. Other people’s words, opinions and actions go a long way to shaping and holding up our self-image, and we need them to reflect ‘real’, trustworthy, generally supportive (sometimes constructively critical) information about who we are and how we’re perceived.

This is ‘positive mirroring’. When we lose our positive mirrors, a disfigured, distorted self-image remains. Cut off from the real world, we’re left staring not into a positive mirror, but a one-way looking glass. If the person reflected back happened to be anyone other than ourselves, we might do almost anything to try and help; but we hold ourselves in contempt, downgrade our suffering relative to others, and discount the urgency of our own predicament.

Someone may have served as the wrong sort of character witness in the past – hurting us, scorning us, shutting us down; so we start rejecting our own need for help and reassurance. When shame levels are high, compassion tends to be absent, and self-compassion is one of the most challenging, powerful counterweights to shame. Compassion is a light-emitting energy.

Compassion tales

Stories can cut through time and distance to break down isolation. Stories reflect others’ experiences of despair, hope, defeats, dreams and even repair, and should we recognise something of ourselves mirrored back, it might enable a re-evaluation of our own disparaged self-image.

When we witness someone else’s shame, we’re sometimes more able to see the injustice – even feel some empathy; and with increased compassion in the ‘system’, there might be a bit more available for ourselves. I’ve learned to be more compassionate to my own younger self through working with other people and their younger selves; which continues to have a psychological effect on my wellbeing. This is what your inner critic/policeman/prosecutor is desperate for you not to know: that others have little wish to shame or attack us for our suffering. That human beings are mostly compassionate to other people’s suffering. 

Chapter Three

Shameless – is healing out there?

Receiving kindness, gentleness, warmth and compassion tells the brain that the world is safe                                                                                                                                                                             Paul Gilbert, The Compassionate Mind

The most beautiful words in the English language are 'not guilty' 

Maxim Gorky

Following traumas or setbacks in life, crucial recovery data such as: ‘You’ve been hurt – you’ve suffered injustice – you’ve done nothing wrong’ gets buried. Instead, our cognitive mind, a ‘reason-seeking’ system gets its logic backwards: ‘I’ve been punished – there must be a reason – I must be bad’.

We are an instinctive, needy and threat-activated species that likes to tell ourselves we’re a logical one – which doesn’t sound very rational. We’re an emotion-based ‘hominid’ that somewhere along the line got ashamed of our emotions. We’ve designed our lives around avoiding emotion, yet try as we might, we can’t seem to rid ourselves of our own nature. The more chronic or acute our particular brand of shame, the more emotion-phobic we become – some of us end up virtually allergic to ourselves.

But it doesn’t seem to matter how avoidant we become, mini-ambushes await us on every corner, from every vector. Appraisals with managers at work, our mind going blank in the middle of a job interview, partners ignoring us when out for drinks with friends – or the cashier inexplicably deciding to do the same thing at the local supermarket. Shame is inevitable, few escape – we just think we avoid further shame by not talking to each other about it.

I’m careful who I choose to disclose to; and I encourage clients likewise to practice care; but when they do break the silence, it doesn’t need to be to me they break it to. We’re widely  encouraged to ‘share our feelings’ and told to be more open about them, but there’s so much technology to promote contentment in the 21st Century, or at least, to distract us from our discontentment, that emotion almost seems a bit of an old fashioned, obsolete technology. Do people go on social media to share emotions? Not really. Their ‘avatar’ lives: shame snorts at emotion.

Ben struggled with any sort of disclosure. Ben was so ashamed of his anxiety, nobody was really allowed anywhere near it, me included; so when we started working together his anxiety continued to grow, alongside his disappointment.

Hiding wasn’t the answer to Ben’s problems – it was the solution to a symptom. It maintained the problem. What helped in the end was some sort of renegotiation with his inner critic or inner policeman, which required breaking his own silence – but I’m getting ahead of the story. Despite greater mental health awareness, we don’t always appreciate the threat we face from inside. Shame cheats us into thinking we’re bad or weak – and it’s pretty good at ensuring the innocent don’t discover their blamelessness.

Shame itself is a patchwork of contradictions. Sometimes it is protective. When you’re at risk of arousing others censure, early-warning signals can anticipate and avert a crisis before it materializes. Shame can reunite us with our personal values when we transgress against them – and when we hurt others, feeling ashamed can encourage reflectiveness, remorse and even repair.

Shame’s protection comes at a cost however, and it fails to make crucial distinctions between those who deserve shame, and those that don’t. Shame prioritizes our survival at the cost of our mental health, and while there is clinical evidence that suggests shame is least effective against wrongdoers, it seems most effective against those who need and deserve it least.

While guilt indicates remorse for what we’ve done, shame turns into regret for who we are. Shame is the ‘trump card’ in our emotions deck, since most of us mask our painful feelings; but in a world of everyone’s hidden hurt, we’re fooled into thinking we’re the weak-link: we’re the only impaired, disfigured, ‘broken’ individual. Once we discover we’re struggling just the same as everyone else, only judging ourselves by a different standard, some of the veil is lifted.

Healing is ‘out there’ when we confront the silence; and these stories are relayed in order to expose the shame-concealment link, and are offered with the (admittedly ambitious) purpose of helping spring people from their ‘traps’. There are no simple dragon-slaying bullets, but there are other, better options. Disclosure is a risk, but risks are survivable. Compassion helps. Expect potholes – and even problems conceal opportunities.

Chapter Four

Ben’s anxious brain

I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range

Bob Dylan, Things have changed

For around the first 18 months of life, we have intense emotions but can’t speak – then we learn to talk, and spend the rest of our lives not saying anything about them. Which of us is good at speaking about emotions? Emotions are our closest companions, yet we seem to fall out and lose touch with each other. We become increasingly distant and suspicious. Shame is the one emotion that doesn’t like emotions – and we already know it conceals things.

We all have the distinct feature of slight distance/separation in brain architecture – in its split-structure, with some interesting neurological consequences. For instance: our left-brain hemisphere (language brain) seems to find opportunities to silence its right-brain twin: the ‘emotional brain’; and it does this by blocking the signal pathways between them.

Ben’s emotions

Ben’s left brain almost gave the impression it would prefer a much greater left/right separation – and we are all not so different. Many of us, after all, prefer to avoid our feelings. Isn’t this one of the things we’re secretly taught when we’re told to grow up or stop being so emotional when we’re distressed?

Ben arrived with a history that seemed short on information, and it turned out he had a hidden biography. I got his ‘official’ one – but there was a truer one buried beneath, and I wasn’t allowed too close to that one. A biography is really a story, and today, we don’t seem to need stories so much; yet at one time, they were embedded into our lives, maybe even into our survival.  

Emotions generally made no sense to Ben. He often disagreed with them. He found he felt numb when he should be happy, depressed when he was really angry, and anxious when he was under zero threat. Ben was told he was in charge of his emotions when he was growing up – but his emotions seemed to have little interest in what he was taught. Ben’s attempts to swerve his feelings were an understandable, if unrealistic objective.

Ben suffered a severe form of anxiety for which he’d tried various therapies and interventions and had visited a number of clinics and specialists over the years. On each occasion, he emerged with excellent skills to allow him to continue in his job as joint head of sustainability at a wind turbine energy start-up, but after a while, deflatingly, anxiety seemed to return.

The shaking would start on a Sunday night and by Monday morning his face felt like a furnace. He would struggle to communicate or form words for the first few hours at work, and if he had to present something at a meeting, it brought him to the verge of panic even though he had excellent relationships with everyone on his team.

Brief coda on left and right brain

Imagine someone asking: Would you prefer power or feelings? Feelings are great, but they’re a bit risky, unreliable, and sometimes make us miserable, anxious, exhausted. Ben’s left brain (same as most of us) got the ‘language-package’: our most prized personal technology. Mastery over what we communicate to other people helps control what they know about us – only many of us get stuck in a left-brain version of our personal histories, which then become our ‘official biographies’. We start to believe them ourselves, since we get used to hearing ourselves talking about them. Soon, the stories get installed as part of our identity. This is exactly what happened to Ben.

It started in childhood, and got imprinted by the time he reached adolescence. Ben took it for granted that since he was fed, had a roof over his head and would get access to a smart phone, social media and the internet, his happiness was guaranteed. It would be embarrassing to admit anything less. Only emotions don’t work that way. We don’t actually know how they work. Science doesn’t know how they work, and even today science is no closer to a consensus.

Ben didn’t like emotions – so as we know, he found a way to suppress them. In any case, there was no change in his anxiety during our early sessions, and each of us quietly blamed ourselves – therapists are just as ‘socialised’ as anyone else towards self-blame.

Chapter Five

Fixing people

A warrior seeks no solace for his sorrow

The teachings of Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda

My personal need to ‘help people’ is maybe a bit of a cliché, also a bit of an ‘Achilles heel’, as is my tendency to self-accusation when I’m ‘not up to the job’ – a tack not necessarily encouraged by psychotherapy schools. The profession seeks to offer a stable-platform upon which clients themselves can effect change, and I do try to avoid projecting my own needs or ‘narcissistic wounds’ onto therapeutic relationships. Plus there is, at minimum, a ‘do no harm’ ethical obligation – but even here there are complications.

Shame’s insistence on silence and concealment can pose a bit of a challenge for therapists. It often means working ‘blind’ in the therapy room. It can make psychotherapy seem like a bit of a weird dance where the therapist doesn’t know any of the dance steps and ends up standing on everyone’s toes. The client gets upset with the therapist for the additional unasked-for pain, and the therapist gets upset with the therapist because we’re supposed to know about this stuff.

We are all selves who know only a fraction of who we really are, treating other selves who know only a fraction of what they are going through and what they’ve hidden, and so the required information (and expertise) can appear unexpectedly absent. We sometimes say ‘incomplete’ – but that’s just being kind.   

The ‘help!’ imperative is almost never pressure from clients, nor our teaching institutions, yet I do feel responsible. Maybe it’s something to do with training late in life and feeling I had to ‘catch up’; but I never really felt I did catch up, at any stage. Therapists operate in a world of growing anxiety. We also increasingly exist in a wider world of targets, goals, outcome measures, performance indicators and general oversight and scrutiny, which means we’re not immune to external pressures or the existence of a social consensus. And nobody wants to be an outcast.

Chapter Six

The social influencer

A humiliation acknowledged is a double humiliation

Milan Kundera, Immortality

The purpose of shame is to ‘prevent us damaging our social relationships’ according to evolutionary psychology – and our ability to ‘fit in’ with other people was once a matter of life and death. Not hurting or offending the people around us was vital – exile from our communities in primitive times was a virtual death sentence. Before the advent of charitable institutions, welfare schemes and food banks, our chances of holding out, once abandoned by our tribe, was poor – especially as we were ourselves a sort of food bank for other species, tribes and predators.

Shame upheld order. It was the ‘security’ emotion in our evolutionary toolkit, stopping us doing bad or ‘shameful’ things that got us in trouble and thrown out of our communities. It seems a basic calculation: suffering shame is better than experiencing death.

The consequences may not be quite so drastic today, but shame continues to play an important role in our development and learning. Shame helps us discover what other people find acceptable and unacceptable; their likes and dislikes. We generally don’t enjoy being excluded, disowned, rejected or ignored by others, so we pick up fascinating shame-lessons from the consequences of ‘pissing other people off’. Shame ‘socialises’ us into our schools and friendship groups – teaching us how to live among people. Instances of shame can link us to the world, a life-supporting connection.

But too much shame disconnects us. There’s a tipping point: a point beyond which shame becomes destructive, where new learning is placed out of reach and where we stop knowing who we can trust.

Shame takes instruction from both positive and negative role models – and the wrong lessons can be picked up from the wrong teachers. But there’s a deeper problem. Shame shows a distinct preference for negative teaching models over positive ones.

Something called ‘negativity bias’ helps explain why we’re so receptive to the wrong kind of shame. Negativity bias is the powerful idea in cognitive psychology that negative experiences exert a greater influence over us than positive ones, a notion that recurs in Ben’s story.

A flexible response to criticism can help us steer a safer and more effective course through life, especially when the lesson is internalized, rather than the shame. ‘Situational’ shame is the means by which we learn things: by losing a game of squash or a bout of judo because we had insufficient knowledge of the rules, failing an exam by turning up too late to be admitted or flunking a job interview because we were too embarrassed to say we’d misheard the question. Learning from failure (‘margin errors’) can increase our understanding of systems and tightens up the connection between our experiences and other people’s thinking – and between other people’s experiences and our assumptions. Yet these encounters need not change how we essentially see ourselves; since they remain external to our self-perception.

Inward-facing shame however lives on quietly inside us regardless of other people’s thinking. Once installed, ‘chronic’ or ‘internalized’ shame creates a breakaway effect, severing our connection with the outside world, with a strong effect on how we see ourselves.

In this state, we are receptive only to our own ‘shame policeman’, a more toxic version of the ‘inner-critic’, one more likely to assume – and to convince you, your shame is merited, and based on real-world consensus. It eats away at self-worth. Trapped inside a ‘self-shaming system’, it’s much easier to believe shame is an actual message from the outside world, rather than an admittedly powerful sensation from our inside world. We start seeing the world not as it is, but ‘as we are’.

Ben’s story lay beyond the external version – closer to the chronic, ‘internal’ variety of shame; yet somehow he still managed to stay connected to the world through his work. He only managed to do so, however, by shutting down his emotions. But Ben was starting to lose this battle. He reminded me of many people I knew who displayed an allergic reaction to their feelings, myself often included. I was helped through this issue in my own therapy, and what have I done since then but find new ways of escaping myself? Perhaps working with other people and their stories is itself a form of self-evasion.

Chapter Seven

A short history of Ben’s face

Shame may be one of the only emotions for which no facial expression has evolved 

Paul Ekman

To keep a secret, you first must hide it from yourself

George Orwell

People like Ben are termed ‘functional’ since they can operate at high levels through crippling anxiety, but by this point even Ben now hit his limit, and had taken leave from work. Colleagues insisted he see his GP, who referred him for NHS intervention, which is how twenty six-year-old Ben and I first met. He was approachable, personable and didn’t seem at all nervous at this point. Ben had a ‘sunny’ disposition – a trait that clearly made him popular at work, but behind which he hid his anxiety. During our initial assessment, he mentioned his family life and childhood were ‘all good’. Just for conversation’s sake, what in particular was good, I asked him. He was smiling in family photographs – in every single one, and there were a lot of them. His family confirmed he was a carefree, happy child, so he was certain his anxiety was a disorder without cause, merit or justification.

Regarding Ben’s ‘happy childhood’, we now had face-proof confirmed by memory backed-up by photographs – an unbreakable evidence chain. Only his childhood was more like a jigsaw puzzle with more than one picture-solution. A hidden design was buried inside; eventually, it would rearrange itself.

Ben’s charming exterior masked a story (of course it did), one that eventually snapped into place. Ben’s elder brother, Jacob, was not an especially happy child. Jake was given a diagnosis on the autism spectrum when Ben was around two or three, and when Ben was ten and Jake 20, he was further diagnosed with a form of schizophrenia. For some years Jake was in and out of institutions, and was held occasionally in hospitals under Section 3 of the Mental Health Act. Ben’s family were often swamped in Jake’s crises, and these overshadowed Ben’s early life.

Because Jake’s predicament was a source of real and constant worry for his parents, and for Ben too, he became the opposite of Jake: a ‘problem-free’ child whose emotional needs never intruded. Ben protected his family from further worry, and his smile was a form of misdirection, except eventually, Ben himself was miscued by the misdirection – he started to believe his own face messages.

Ben’s ‘inside’ experiences completely vanished from view – and he, alongside everyone else, lost sight of how he really felt. Only disowned feelings cannot simply disappear.

Ben became a self-contained child. He could even be described as an isolated one. Young children are designed to attach and seek comfort and reassurance, but Ben had learned to ignore these needs, and then forgot he had forgotten them. Remembering would only cause suffering to his overwhelmed parents (and misery for him, since what he needed was out of reach).

Conflict between Ben’s isolation misery and his ‘official history’ fuelled anxiety, because misery was trapped inside a false story, and nothing that exists likes to be trapped. It fought to get out, and the escape bid formed a big part of Ben’s dread: the truth released would be accompanied by a torrent of unexpressed emotion and a great dam-burst of needs would follow – needs Ben must ignore to maintain his identity, his integrity – his dignity. Shame rose sharply at any prospect of release – deepening his anxiety.

Ben’s official biography was designed to keep the ‘shaming’ truth of his needs as far away as possible, because somewhere inside, he believed that needs in an overburdened family must be proof of an inadequate, frail or self-absorbed nature. He was very invested in his ‘persona’ – someone for whom others’ needs were more important than his own; someone solid and dependable in a crisis, and this was reflected in his professional identity: an admired and non-replaceable member of the clean energy start-up team. Only a slightly ‘unfortunate’ anxiety flaw spoiled this perfect front.

During our early assessment sessions, Ben didn’t really say very much about himself at all except he wanted the problem ‘gone’ so he could get back to work. He wanted the very best techniques for dealing with anxiety (he in fact already had them from various clinics), and since talking about his life only made him more anxious, he became increasingly frustrated with me during our follow-up sessions. After two months of working together he left a voice message saying thank-you, but he wasn’t coming back. He added the observation his anxiety had become worse since starting therapy.

Ben’s real biography was still a mystery at this stage. The fact it was hidden wasn’t unusual, but it was an important clue I was really working with shame – and anxiety was more of a symptom than primary ailment. An ability to work with shame, according to a cascade of clinical evidence, is a key predictor of therapy outcomes. There were no excuses – I’d ‘botched it’, as the voice inside my head kept reminding me.

Shame has a distinctive acoustic ‘signature’ quality – an intensely loud rushing noise followed by a resounding, deathly silence. That’s just my own experience. I have little direct knowledge of others’ perceptions of shame since even among my closest colleagues, its private qualities remain mostly private. Ben’s face had become accomplished at keeping his own shame private – a useful survival tool, generally discovered in early life. But it’s a skill that hurts our need to attach.

Chapter Eight

Attaching and distancing

There is no pain, you are receding

Comfortably Numb, Roger Waters, Pink Floyd

I think I may have forgotten this before

Stephen Wright

A child won’t survive without being attached to something or someone bigger than itself. Children come into the world without words, posing a challenge for attachment figures, sometimes called caregivers – also known as parents. They’re the ones tasked with trying to figure out a child’s needs based on little more than instinct and best-guess technology. A child’s relationship with caregivers is not only critical to every area of its development, but will determine the quality of the child’s relationship with itself; which doesn’t mean caregivers must get everything right, but does require some ‘tuning-in’.

After generations of relative incomprehension, ‘attachment theory’ captured what children couldn’t express – meeting survival needs (food, warmth and shelter) isn’t enough. It’s important to feed a child who can’t tell you it’s hungry – but it’s also important not to confuse the survival drive (food) with attachment needs (care). Why can’t children just be left to their own devices when they’re not hungry? Bonding needs are complex, and when these go mostly unmet, a child survives only to come face to face eventually with its own misery.

When attachment needs are neglected, children become anxious, tense, even depressed – and judge themselves for these ‘shortcomings’. The child bears the developmental cost of any deficit, which often shows up in low self-confidence.

Positive self-esteem relies on consistency of physical contact, eye contact and verbal reassurance from caregivers, and children with mostly met needs are spared a sense of shame or guilt for a seemingly unlimited cycle of needs. There is something unacceptable, even abhorrent for a child that catches sight of its own neediness. Can a young child really judge itself for its helplessness? Yes, an unloved child will turn against its own dependency needs.

A child quickly learns its feelings are unacceptable – its neediness the ‘wrong kind’. Children might try to downplay or veil needs; but eventually they end up even more entangled, while never quite knowing what their underlying feelings are. When feelings pose a threat to existence, we have an extra motive to try to rid ourselves of them. Is all this really possible in a child?

From around nine months, children will register shock if faced with sudden indifference. If neglect is consistent, children soon learn not to register anything at all. If a child learns to mask distress, perhaps it won’t completely lose its lifeline. We think of child distress in terms of tears and protest, but this isn’t always the best signifier – silence may be the far greater risk.

Over time, masking actually helps disconnect us from emotion, and this pattern of self-evasion is followed in later life by a legacy of confusion, dissociation and self-blame.

‘I must simply be too much for other people’ becomes the instinctive assumption. A child will try to cancel its ‘burdensome’ nature; and delete its healthy attachment needs. A child can’t fight a war with the outside world – it’s much too small and defenceless; it can battle only with itself. A child’s attachment drive, in other words, eventually succumbs to its survival needs.

The child is in effect dealing with the separation drive before it’s securely attached. It can’t survive out on its own, so it exists in a sort of ‘no-mans-land’ somewhere between insecurely attached – and unready to separate.

Attachment theory was developed during the 1950s and 1960s, and it proved one of the great revolutions in developmental psychology. Childhood, considered a sort of roadblock on the fast-track to adulthood in previous eras, was not a state to be over-indulged for fear of hobbling the child in the ‘slow lane’ of infancy. Attachment theory took almost the opposite view: children need heavily protected from the real world and from adult responsibility, requiring a long period of safe, insulated ‘gestation’.

A child in crisis, targets itself as the problem to solve. Assigning ‘weakness’ or ‘badness’ to itself is one half of the solution: the other half is eliminating any outward sign of weakness. You’re not wrong, this sounds like the onset of shame. Shame is both the consequence of exposure to some unacceptable ‘thing’ within ourselves – and it’s the contraption for hiding the unacceptable thing. None of the characters in these stories were physically harmed by caregivers, and all came from well-meaning families. Each one regarded themselves as the problem.

A ‘securely attached’ child will cry, get angry, distressed, scream and remonstrate, but some insecurely attached children go silent and just ‘disappear’. As adults, we deal with a variety of attachment ruptures, for instance when a romantic relationship comes to an end; but for a child, the end of an attachment is the ‘end of the world.’

Separation fuel

Secure attachment starts to mature into energy for ‘separation’ sometime during late adolescence, but if a child has had to suppress its attachment urges and its needs remain unmet, the child’s separation fuel stocks will remain low. They may well be cognitively mature enough to separate at the appointed time, but experience a deficit in emotional self-sufficiency. To successfully hide needs from others, you have to work out a system for hiding them from yourself. Soon, we’ve got a child with no known needs – and little idea of what its emotions are. 

Chapter Nine

The reckoning

When the levee breaks, got no place to stay

When the levee breaks, Memphis Minnie

Almost a year passed before I heard anything further about Ben, when out of the blue I received an email from him to say he had been thinking he wanted to give it ‘one more go’ – a courageous message, and a brave step. We did give it another go – and this time, while working back through his actual history (which he still found deeply unpleasant), Ben was inclined to withdraw the facts of his official biography. He discovered it was mostly a false story – that he and his face had somehow acquired separate biographies.

But updating Ben’s history meant confronting personal dread. Discarded emotions and his true dependency needs leaked out of their ‘holding centre’ during the therapy, and were now on display – the very last place he wanted them. This turned into Ben’s biggest crisis yet. At one point, he was certain he’d end up in the same hospital as Jake.  

A painful self-reckoning followed, with a more agonising encounter with his family still to come. Every phobic instinct fought against his involvement in an expanded, and for Ben, acutely embarrassing family therapy process. Somehow, he bravely pushed against his instincts, and found himself swamped, as a result, by a great flowing sludge of feelings – feelings of hurt, bewilderment and anger.

This outpouring of emotion was enough to convince Ben that rejection was now actually going to follow – at some level he believed he’d only survived because he’d hidden his emotions, his needs.

Ben needed to know that his disgust wasn’t going to be shared by either his therapist or (hopefully) his family. The first part I could guarantee, the second part would have to be treated more carefully. It might still backfire.

Even in our individual work, the emotional breakthrough was like a catastrophe for Ben, and we had to plough through that first. Doing so brought up true rage in the therapy room for the first time – a healthy sign. Later still, feelings of grief bubbled up from somewhere he didn’t even know existed; a great void of loss for a vanished childhood.

Overwhelmed, he took time out from work. I got word from his parents he was home depressed. There was another hiatus in the therapy, but he returned six weeks later. That’s when the family work began. It was fortunate for Ben – and certainly for me, Ben had a receptive, open and courageous family. The process included his parents, and his brother, Jake. They all quietly heard what had been uncovered by Ben and I during the ‘narrative’ part of our work, where we’d exhumed his history. In fact, they added to it, helping us complete the narrative. Once they realised the full consequences of his early life, they indicated they really understood. In a session with just his parents, they demonstrated remorse.  

When the work eventually finished, Ben continued to struggle to express his feelings, and it still felt like a ‘betrayal’ every time he did so; but he came to accept that others (me included) thought his feelings perfectly relatable, normal and acceptable. His family now also understood him better, having expressed sadness and contrition in a way Ben could understand. He still broke into a sweat before going into work most days, but anxiety attacks had a shorter duration, and panic receded into milder episodes.

While I don’t think Ben ever found it easy to talk about emotions, he learned at least to spot when he needed to do so. His close friends and family learned to read the code: when Ben got anxious, he was usually experiencing emotions he still found too painful to express. The feeling of anxiety itself remained the one and only exception: a fairly ‘generic’ state that even Ben could admit to. But why was anxiety more acceptable, and why is it so commonplace?  

To achieve any task, we need to narrow attention and block out other tasks. If I want to read my book, I might have to ask Alexa to silence the music. To switch something on, we need to switch something else off: our brains work a bit like that, our minds too.

If I need to escape my car in a crisis and reach safety while stuck in a snow blizzard, my mind has to switch attention from my frostbite, my hypothermia and my hopelessness and focus on my family and friends instead. But some of us learn, early in life, to survive in a world of others, the danger that needs blocked is ourselves.

A child in crisis has limited options other than escape (difficult) or rescue (not always forthcoming). The only remaining tactic is self-erasure – to simply disappear; which of course isn’t so simple. To achieve it, emotions must be switched off, but feelings, needs can’t in fact be cancelled – the best we can do is try to ignore them, pretend they are not there; block them. This solves one difficulty, but creates another.

Little or no knowledge of this process will remain, but what does remain is the shame that made us wish to vanish – and the anxiety some needy part might one day return from its vanishing point and shame us all over again.

Chapter Ten

Rejection dysphoria

Something is going on behind the scenes

that is not allowed to appear on the scenes

The ghost in the atom, John S Bell

Those who live in your place, do they have faces?

No. Faces exist nowhere else but here

Immortality, Milan Kundera

Ben’s struggle with emotions makes him a lot like the rest of us. Our needs give others power over us, and we don’t like that. Survival imperatives contort people into some strange shapes – do we seek help when we’re in trouble, or do we avoid this at all costs? Attachment says: ask! – survival says: admit nothing!  

Our attachment drive has been located in the ‘mammal’ part of our mid-brain, while our older threat instincts lie within the brain stem, centimeters away. It’s hard for them to avoid each other; yet these major ‘security drives’ contradict each other. Our 200 million-year-old attachment system seeks out other people for protection – while our reptilian threat-brain (300 million-years-old) prefers to avoid other people.  

In the presence of shame, we swing helplessly between opposing security overrides. We need people; we can’t seem to shake our dependency on them; but shame makes us cautious, and human dependency makes our ‘reptilian’ brains nervous.

The earlier question was why was Ben’s anxiety more acceptable than his other emotions – and why is anxiety so commonplace? It has something to do with a needs-based risk assessment and an overriding survival imperative.

The human attachment system’s need for acceptance and belonging is counterbalanced by our fear of rejection. One hundred and fifty years ago, somewhere now in the south of England, Charles Darwin identified this dual drive as: our love of approbation and our dread of infamy – only the latter (dread) holds more power than the former (approval), since we are motivated less by reward than by fear. Our primitive threat system fears annihilation; while our more modern threat system is terrified of rejection (for some of us, these outcomes are not so different).

Other people’s disapproval or disappointment has a greater impact on us than their validation or approval, and figures more heavily in our decision-making. The ability of dreaded or unwanted outcomes to shape our thinking and behaviours is also known as negativity bias. It was certainly a heavy influence on Ben, since his was installed early.

Ben only escaped the whole snarl-up when he managed to block his own care-needs. The inner banishing of needs led to his family’s approval and acceptance, while outright displays of emotion and frustration did not bring about either of these desired outcomes. Ben’s own emotions had started to pose a survival threat, activating rejection-fears. He wouldn’t have been conscious of any of this at the time, but Ben must have picked up on his parents’ helpless disappointment – their exhaustion whenever his emotions or needs were on display. Yet you cannot repress emotion without some residue of anxiety. Anxiety was just his needs pushing back against oblivion.

Our social brain is engaged in a constantly updating risk-assessment of others’ behaviours relative to our own. We scan for adverse consequences that antagonise others and assimilate the ‘danger’ into our: ‘‘no – avoid – reverse’’ relapse-prevention solutions next time.

Kindness and care are vital commodities for us humans – but abandonment and exclusion (multiply your shame-phobia by your negativity bias!) are accorded priority status. We will, in other words, forego our desperate need for reassurance and compassion if it will only prevent the horror of exclusion and desertion.

Shame traps our emotional needs and wraps security tape around them; severing and concealing them from the outside world. Anxiety, which we sometimes consider more a nervous system ‘glitch’, is a slightly ‘lesser’ problem by comparison. In Ben’s case – shame gave anxiety a ‘free pass’.

Anxiety is not of course a minor problem, but it’s a trade-off. Compared with dependency needs, anxiety lies further down the shame hierarchy, and carries a less severe inner critic penalty.

Disclosing anxiety caused Ben only minor anxiety! – and aroused surprisingly little curiosity or even suspicion. Anxiety was something Ben found you could seek help for without upsetting anyone so long as you trained your face not to reveal too much. In fact, Ben saw a school counsellor for anxiety when he was nine – but he and his parents had ‘forgotten’ this fact within the ‘Ben has no needs’ version of his official biography.

Ben’s eventual recovery from the worst of his anxiety attacks didn’t come down to learning new ways of managing anxiety – more in becoming reconciled with the feelings that lay beneath. Once Ben was able to acknowledge how much he feared rejection and disapproval, hated his own bonding needs, and could admit at least to some desire for reassurance (alongside his disgust at having any of these needs); his fear, grown monstrous in a laboratory jar of denial and anxiety, started to lose some of its power.

Ben’s family didn’t reject him when his official biography unravelled, but Ben had to wrestle with the rejection inside his own head before he could tackle it out in the world – and every phobic sinew strained against the risk. Ben would almost rather have put up with panic and anxiety for the rest of his life than face being ‘disgraced’ by his needs released from their prison.    

Fear of rejection will trump just about everything else. Whenever a social consensus turns its back on us, whether in the classroom, the playground, the gym or the office, our self will reject its own emotions to fit in with other selves. Shame is part of our legacy ‘survival pack’ – only perhaps it’s one that’s working a little overtime. Evolutionary psychologists argue shame and guilt are protective emotions, getting us to modify our behaviours to conform to others’ expectations and needs, preventing hurt, or worse: rejection and abandonment by family, community and tribe – so ensuring our survival.

They may be right – up to a point. Breaking point.

• Update #4 - Update title Aug. 21, 2024

  Dear all, I really wanted to thank you very much again for your support - I can't tell you how much I appreciate it. I've …

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• Update #3 - Coffee with authors Aug. 1, 2024

  Bethany Marshall (Publishizer CEO) has come up with the idea of curating a series of 'coffee with authors' events - and it includes a chat between Emily Goodson, …

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• Update #2 - Summer Theme here: https://publishizer.com/themes/golden-questions/ June 7, 2024

  Thanks so much for your patience.. and I'm still writing - honest! Just wanted to mention 'The Shame Deception' is included in a Summer Themes …

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• Update #1 - First chapters May 29, 2024

  You can now read the prologue, the opening chapters of 'The Shame Deception', and  'Ben's' story, under the 'Samples' heading. 

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