26 Nov Let’s Talk About Shame
Let’s Talk About Shame
No one has ever contacted me saying, “I think I need therapy because I feel a lot of shame.” And honestly, that’s kind of wild—because shame shows up in the therapy room all the time. I think that’s because shame is the master of disguises. It hides underneath other emotions and unprocessed experiences. Shame is that deep feeling that you’re flawed, broken, or simply not good enough. It’s heavy, disconnecting, and incredibly painful. It can show up physically too: blushing, stammering, slumping, avoiding eye contact. Shame doesn’t just hurt—it isolates.
Where Shame Begins
People often tell me about “a shameful act” or “a humiliating moment,” and while those things absolutely bring up guilt or embarrassment, the shame underneath usually has much earlier roots—often going right back to infancy. Psychotherapist Philip Mollon (2002) suggests that shame can start when a baby doesn’t get consistent emotional responses from their mother. In healthy-enough parenting, the mother picks up on the baby’s cues: baby smiles; she smiles back. Baby cries; she responds. These tiny back-and-forth moments help the child feel secure, connected, and valued. But when a parent repeatedly doesn’t respond—like in Edward Tronick’s famous “Still Face” experiment—the baby quickly becomes distressed, looks away, or shuts down. If this lack of emotional engagement happens over time, the child can start to feel something is wrong with them. That early emotional blueprint often continues into adulthood.
Ego-Destructive Shame
Shame is a deeply destructive emotion. As Peter Fonagy (2016) puts it, it often starts with sudden self-consciousness, turns into painful self-scrutiny, and ends in an inner sense of torment. Shame almost always involves the feeling of being seen—or sometimes, not being seen at all. Freud talked about this in relation to how children develop: the idea that being looked at, or imagining others looking at you, can create intense feelings of exposure. More recently, psychoanalysts agree that shame comes from being seen as “fundamentally bad” (Kaufman, 1974). It’s that fear of someone noticing the parts of yourself you believe are defective. It creates a loneliness that’s hard to describe.
When shame begins in early relationships—especially with a parent—many people grow up with a defensive strategy of “not being seen.” The inner story becomes, “Something is wrong with me.” And when that message repeats silently for years, it forms powerful defence mechanisms that keep people stuck.
Therapy helps because you can’t change what you can’t see, and you can’t heal what you’ve had to push away. Talking about it—bringing it into the open—is the first step toward loosening shame’s grip.
If any of this resonates with you, please reach out. You don’t have to work through shame alone.
No Comments