The shame deception

How shame hacked our mental health

Chapter X (Prologue)

Shame’s ‘deep state’

London 2024

Everything seemed upside down. Why did the anxious, the hurt and the depressed blame themseIves? Many people in the clinics and waiting rooms acted as if they deserved their plight, but they also managed to hide it away, as if it were a guilty secret.

The shamed weren’t without conscience – completely the opposite but they’d gone so far down their own paths some could no longer hear you. All they heard was a ‘morality policeman’ lodged somewhere in their own mind telling them they’d done something bad – yet it also protected them, as if it were guarding a crime scene with the perpetrator still inside. What was the crime? Where was it?

And isn’t this guilt rather than shame? And why wouldn’t clients let us reach in and turn off their ‘guilt switch’ long enough so we could check what they’d been accused of and see if the punishment ‘fit’. They thought they were hiding guilt. They were mostly concealing their innocence.  

Most of us will struggle with anxiety or depression at some point in our lives, which we fear means there’s something wrong with us so we conceal it, which can leave us with the distinctly odd impression we’re the only one with a problem. Could we all be hiding the same thing while judging ourselves for being different?

Three hundred and fifty million people suffer depression around the world – a greater number are affected by anxiety, these figures surely underreported, yet they can’t all be ‘bad’, deserving of their ‘punishment’, lacking in resilience. Many of those we see in clinics suffered a bad experience, but they flipped it and made themselves bad. Some even got worse when you disagreed, when you suggested there might be other factors here. Their internal security police didn’t like that notion one bit. Sometimes, they made the client pay for it later.

Shame, the 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. I wanted to question the injustice, tell some of the stories and ask: how have we been tricked?

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 in the back streets and market places of northern England, sometime during the 1670s, the 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.’

If you tap in the word ‘shame’ on the net today, you’ll discover it’s a ‘moral emotion’ that tells us we’ve caused hurt or offence to others, or we’ve done something generally bad or reprehensible; only the biggest sufferers of shame may not be those who cause harm – they may not be wrongdoers at all. Psychology-focused websites recognise shame as a problem-emotion, one that attacks self-esteem, self-worth and sense-of-self. Some encourage humor in the face of shame, some suggest self-compassion and quite a few recommend talking to a therapist; but how are you are you supposed to talk about or use humor or compassion on something so bad you have to cover it up?  

It’s not clear how our low mood harms other people, but many of us experience shame in connection with our mental health. So we hide it too. Shame can end up hiding whole people – which doesn’t solve many problems since what’s hidden doesn’t get much opportunity to mend. Shame is a poor judge of character – but it’s not good at owning up to its mistakes, which it simply covers up.

I’m a psychotherapist originally from Northern Ireland, a place where survivors’ guilt and shame was apparent among victims of the ‘Troubles’. People’s emotional wounds seemed to worsen over time – and I recalled many who criticized and punished themselves for their suffering. And later I found in the therapy room, shame mostly 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.

Shame is a serious adversary that thinks it’s an ally – and it will make you believe it’s an ally too. Within the mental health arena, it’s an intimidating opponent. Shame may seem irrational, but we needn’t put all our faith in logic. ‘Trust me’, it says to its ‘clients’, many of whom have known shame longer than they have known their therapists.

Shame doesn’t like exposure – and it hates whistle-blowers. Shame loses some of its power when things are more out in the open, and it fights to keep them in darkness. 

Shame’s whole notion of morality is ‘fishy’ – and it doesn’t want you to know this, but it’s not 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?

Other people’s opinions and how we want others to see us governs our actions more than we’d care to admit. Shame is actually more a social enforcer than a moral one; but perhaps it’s also an antisocial one, since it ruins social lives. Shame ‘worries’ about other people more than it worries about us – but it doesn’t seem to like other people very much either. Firstly, it tells us others think badly of us – then it persuades us to think badly of ourselves, so the cards often fall badly for our relationships. We might discover what people really thought if we gave them half a chance, but shame keeps ‘telling’ us what they think – putting us right off.

The characters in these stories experienced and survived shame, and they are actually composites, each based on more than one person – and usually from diverse cultures and backgrounds. Further measures have been taken to protect confidentiality – yet all the story dilemmas and internal battles are real. All carried negative assumptions about themselves, as many of us do. The shamed are often the deceived.

If you happened to meet Lissa in real life, or someone very much like her, you’d come away with the unshakeable knowledge you were in the presence of a good person yet you would little suspect how she actually felt about herself. You’d know she couldn’t be bad in under three minutes; but Lissa genuinely had no idea. How do you work with a good person who knows they’re a bad person? I still don’t have a simple answer, but I will tell how Lissa and I grappled with it.

If Maddy happened to be a boxer during the golden era of US heavyweights, and she took a head shot in the ring from Sonny Liston, Mohammed Ali or Smokin Joe Frazier, she would have got up every time. She would not only have beaten the ten count, she’d have been up before you knew she was down. If George Foreman had caught her full heft off the ropes with a haymaker and knocked her down dead, she’d still have got up.

Another metaphor comes to mind when I think about Maddy. If she’d been among Allied forces in world war two dropped in to do surveillance behind enemy lines, and she was captured by the Axis powers; even under torture she’d have given nothing away. With a low pain threshold and less courage than she has, I might give up most of what I knew before Maddy would so much as relinquish her name, rank and serial number. Maddy learned these lessons 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 and ambitious, but it made no sense since he loved his work. Ben was similar to Maddy in one respect: he was a terrific masker. Masking shows up throughout the book’s narrative, 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 ‘cover-up’ is clever and the deceit is ‘adaptive’. Someone who ‘pretends to be something they are not’ is not always the perpetrator of a deception, but is quite often the victim of one. The ‘cover-up’ is one of the most challenging aspects of the whole story – and concealing things brings us back to the 17th Century word sham: ‘A trick put upon one, a hoax, a fraud’. The shamed might be the scammed – how many of us have been deceived? For three hundred and fifty years though, one part of ‘shame’ at least played it straight, doing only what it ‘said on the tin’.

Chapter Two

Do we need this much shame?

Well I screwed it up real good, didn’t I!

Richard Nixon

Shame is a bit like a great whispering audience full of invisible people lodged 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, they start shifting around in their seats, muttering, making disgruntled noises. Shame is so powerful that no matter how much we might hide ourselves away, the noise finds its way into our secret hiding places. Shame makes us want to disappear but then strips away the benefits since our portable audience follows us around regardless.

Shame may be noisy in the inner world, but it creates a silent ‘lockdown’ in the outer one. The clients in this book reluctantly, yet with great patience, helped me understand more about their solitary plight. Shame’s cover-ups are rarely communicated directly even in therapy, 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 have a powerful human need to be ‘seen’ – and to be present in someone else’s mind, which isn’t really possible if all the disliked and shamed bits of us are banished and exiled. We need people as much as we need food and shelter, but shame has a tendency to believe we’ll be scorned or rejected if others discover this about us, as if we all didn’t suffer from the same condition. Shame assumes it’s protecting us, with little notion how it harms.

Shame’s protection and ‘policing’, as one or two of the stories suggest, can result in regimes worse than those it rescues us from. Sometimes we’re better off living our lives and taking our chances, because micro-ambushes lie in wait for us from every quarter. Appraisals with managers at work, your mind going blank in the middle of a job interview, your partner ignoring you when out for drinks with friends later – 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.

We’re an instinctive, needy, threat-activated animal that likes to tell ourselves we are a logical one – which doesn’t sound very rational. Emotions carry signals from our very oldest neural networks, yet offer us bang up-to-date data – which we dismiss as unreasonable. We design our lives around avoiding emotions, yet we can’t seem to rid ourselves of our own nature.

Shame’s ‘everyday’ variety seems happy just to show up and leave again, and it’s situation-dependent. A colleague’s client making a complaint I was rude to them in the reception area; being spotted at a football game after telling the boss I couldn’t come in because I was ill – or the pub-quiz team dropping me when I was ‘99 per cent certain’ I was right, making them swap their right answer for my wrong one.

But ‘chronic’ shame shows up and forgets to leave, and it doesn’t care about the situation.

Once shame clings to us, we become the situation. Our mind ends up retrieving everything even vaguely shaming, scouring memory banks for any negative data. We get trapped between past shame and fear of what’s coming. It becomes a forcefield that pulls in every unhelpful thought or impression, fear or experience. It starts to build its case against us. While guilt indicates remorse for what we’ve done, shame, according to psychologists, becomes regret for who we are, hacking deep into our wellbeing.

Yet there is less stigma today around anxiety and depression, and many people experience setbacks and traumas in their lives without blaming it on their character. However, when someone experiences a setback in life plus a mental health difficulty, they are more likely to criticise their weakness, blame their lack of resilience – judge themselves unjustly, blame themselves for situations they didn’t choose. Shame, the most troubling human emotion punishes the victim. Shame tells people they’re responsible for things they didn’t do, with heavy implications for their mental health.

Shame is a big ‘brand’ – and yet I encountered few people who suffered shame because they deliberately harmed someone else; though this is surely the brand’s best known ‘product’.   

Unjustified shame shows up in those who suffer mental health difficulties, in those who don’t warrant it – but this simple fact offers surprisingly little comfort for sufferers. The tendency to self-blame owes less to the facts of any given situation, and more to the shame-based thinking and emotions that show up when bad things happen to us. This process can start early, and before we look at how that happens and consider shame’s ‘purpose’, we need to know there are some prospects for recovery.

Chapter Three

Shameless – is healing out there?

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk

I pretend I don’t see it

I fall in again

There's a Hole in My Sidewalk, Portia Nelson

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour

Viktor Frankl

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk

I walk around it

I walk down another street

There's a Hole in My Sidewalk, Portia Nelson

Shame has already been introduced as an unreliable ally, a trickster, an untrustworthy character-witness and a downward pressure on mood, state and wellbeing, so how do we get to healing? Since shame will tell you seeking help isn’t safe and others will misuse information you’re in trouble, shame is most unhelpful when we most need intervention. Can’t people just recover by themselves? A relational problem usually requires a relational solution, yet therapy is not the only response – all it sometimes needs is the right character witness. But there’s a witness problem.

The witness issue

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 a court of law, but in the courtroom of our own minds; but people who assume they’re guilty don’t reach out for help.

Without ‘positive’ witnesses, the ‘internal trial’ gets away from us and we get railroaded by uncontested testimony. Our self-image is propped up by people who validate and hold us in good-esteem. Kick these props away, and morale collapses. From this prone position, we’re less likely to reach out to potential allies.  

When there are things we can’t say about ourselves, it sometimes affects how much we can know about ourselves. We need people to reflect back reliable and safe information about who we are and how we’re perceived: ‘positive mirroring’ occurs through living beings. Once we give up on this, the other side sniffs victory.

People may have served as the wrong sort of witness in the past, but in survival mode – we stop seeking compassion. When shame is high, compassion tends to be absent, and self-compassion is one of the hardest, yet most powerful counterweights to shame.  

The compassion-switch

When shame cuts us off from the world, we’re left staring into a one-way mirror. If the person in the mirror happened to be anyone other than ourselves, we might do almost anything to try and help, but we downgrade our own suffering relative to others – and discount the urgency of our predicament.

Stories can be a means of cutting through time and distance to convey another’s inner experiences, despair, defeat, hopes or dreams. Should we recognise a sense of our own neglected stories reflected back, it can carry hope. It might even allow some updating of our own self-image.

We tend to drop our guard when we make ourselves the observer. If we can witness someone else’s shame, we’re more likely to see the injustice. When more compassion is available in the system, there might be a little more available for ourselves. This is what your inner critic-policeman doesn’t want you to know: that others may have little wish to shame or attack us for our anguish. That human beings are mostly compassionate to other people’s suffering.  

As a version of ‘narrative therapy’, stories can encourage a perspective-shift – maybe a glimmer of self-recognition. In that recognition lies the potential for self-compassion, which is one of the hopes, even goals of what follows.

Potholes

Therapies of any stripe involve potholes. For instance, take the ‘quick-fix’ pitfall. The idea we can just talk our minds out of, or down from adverse situations is undoubtedly effective for some people, but leaves others feeling hopeless and reproached they must be the problem. To be told you feel bad because your thinking is too negative gives you a reason to feel worse. Better understanding of why we’re in a hole in the first place is a preferable first step – plus we usually need to be in a few holes before we even realise there’s a problem. Identifying the potholes we’ve already fallen into is a big part of the process – and this goes hand in hand with avoiding potholes still to come.

Once our potholes start to look familiar (linked to something called ‘repetition compulsion’) we’re in much better shape to understand how we keep ending up inside them. You can start working on this goal pretty quickly – since you might be approaching another hole in the sidewalk (if you’re not already in one) around now.  

For good reasons already mentioned, you might prefer not to break through your one-way looking glass back into the world of other people. Other people are usually responsible for your negative self-image, but soon you don’t need them – you become perfectly proficient at perpetuating it yourself. Shame gives you the sense something’s not right, but then reminds you not to worry, it’s just you.

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’. Despite greater mental health awareness, we don’t always appreciate the threat we face from inside. Shame cheats people into thinking they’re bad, they’re weak – and it hides their innocence, not their guilt. Something concealed is harder to reverse. The stories that follow are told in order to expose the shame-concealment link, and are offered in the (admittedly ambitious) service of helping spring people from their traps.         

Maddy’s story hid the wrong evidence, but she just wanted not to be weak. Ben’s face concealed his biography, and he just needed to know his needs didn’t make him selfish, while Lissa’s torment hid the truth, and she just desperately needed not to be bad. In each case, their mental health took the hit.

Shame is the ‘trump card’ in our emotions deck – almost everybody masks hurt, but in a world of everyone else’s hidden pain, we’re fooled into thinking we’re the ‘weak link’, we’re faulty, defective. 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.

Psychological acceptance is a ‘counter-intuitive’ part of change. It doesn’t mean we must accept everything that happens, but it does mean accepting there’s a problem, and though we may not have caused it, we need to take some responsibility for fixing it. Are the cards stacked for us or against? It depends on whether we’re playing, or folding. If we pick up our ‘unlucky’ hand, the cards we end up with will almost certainly not be the ones we started out with.

Hiding isn’t the answer to the problem – it’s the solution to a symptom. It maintains the problem. What’s needed is a renegotiation with the inner critic/policeman. Shame is averse to risk, we already know that, and though there’s no simple dragon-slaying golden bullet (sorry Ben, whose story is coming up), there are still solutions.  

Repair is not beyond reach. The risks are manageable. Expect potholes. And even the problem has a purpose.

Chapter Four

The social influencer

A humiliation acknowledged is a double humiliation

Immortality, Milan Kundera

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. We simply couldn’t survive out on our own. Before the arrival of social welfare, universal credit or food banks, our chances of holding out, once abandoned, were poor – especially as we were ourselves a sort of food bank for other species, tribes and predators.

Shame upheld order. And 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 families, groups or tribes. It seems a basic calculation: suffering shame is better than experiencing death.

The consequences may not be quite so drastic today, but shame plays other roles in our learning and development. Shame helps us discover what other people find acceptable and unacceptable; their likes and dislikes. We generally don’t enjoy being ignored or excluded by others, so we pick up hugely valuable 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. Shame links us to the world, a life-supporting connection.

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

Shame takes instruction from negative as well as positive role models – the wrong lessons can be picked up from the wrong teachers. And there’s a deeper issue. Shame shows a distinct preference for negative teaching models over positive ones.

‘Negativity bias’ helps explain why we’re receptive to the wrong kind of shame. Negativity bias is the powerful idea in cognitive psychology that suggests negative experiences exert a greater influence over us than positive ones, more on which appears in Ben’s story.

Responsiveness to criticism can help us steer a safer, smoother course through life where the lesson is internalized rather than the shame. Situational shame can be instructive where you lose a game of baseball, blackjack or Minecraft that you were supposed to win – fail an exam where you were predicted top grade, or failing to get a promotion at work against someone more junior and less experienced. Learning from failure can increase our understanding of systems and tightens up the connection between our experience and other people’s thinking.

The problem is inward-facing shame, which lives on quietly inside us regardless of others thinking. Once ‘installed’, this ‘chronic’ variety creates a breakaway effect, severing our connections with the world.

In this state, we are receptive only to our ‘shame policeman’, a more aggressive version of the inner-critic. If you have a ‘loud’ critic, you already know its shame-active. Trapped inside a ‘self-shaming system’, it’s easy to assume the outside world is just our own self-view reflected back. We start seeing the world not as it is, but ‘’as we are’’.

Twenty six-year-old Ben’s story lay somewhere in the midpoint between situational and chronic shame. Ben managed to stay connected to the world through his work, but he could only do so by shutting down his emotions. He reminded me of many people I knew who displayed an allergic reaction to their feelings, myself often included.

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 anywhere near it. 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.  

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