The Psychology of Shame

Why shame makes us want to hide, fix ourselves & sometimes do exactly what we don’t want to do

What shame is and how it differs from guilt, why it makes us want to hide, why it can push us to fix ourselves and when that goes too far, why it sometimes leads us to do exactly what we don’t want to do, what it has to do with our mental health, where we learn it, and what actually helps

23 minute read  ·  5,085 words

You send a message in the group chat and nobody answers. You notice a typo in an email you’ve already sent to your boss (ughhhh). Someone at dinner asks a simple question, you realize you have no idea, and your face goes hot. For a second it doesn’t feel like a small slip. It feels like everyone can suddenly see something about you that you’d rather they didn’t.

That feeling is shame. It’s one of the most common emotions there is and one of the least talked about, partly because talking about it can feel shameful too. It can also sit behind a lot of things that don’t look like shame from the outside: going quiet, overworking, snapping at someone you love, or putting off the one thing you most need to do.

If you recognize yourself anywhere in what follows, nothing is wrong with you! Every culture researchers have tested so far has this feeling, and it seems to exist for a reason.

I did something bad, or I am bad

Say you forget a close friend’s birthday. There are two very different thoughts you might have when you realize. One is “I forgot her birthday.” The other is “I’m a terrible friend.”

The first thought is about something you did. That’s guilt. The second is about who you are. That’s shame. Researchers have been studying this difference for more than fifty years, and it’s one of the most studied ideas in the field: guilt is about what you did, shame is about who you are.

It matters because the two feelings send you in different directions. Guilt tends to point you toward putting things right: you call her, you say sorry, you send the card late. Shame tends to point you toward hiding, defending yourself or tearing yourself down. Same forgotten birthday, very different next step.

Most real moments have a bit of both, and neither one makes you a bad person.

Shame doesn’t need an audience

A lot of people think of shame as guilt in public, the feeling of being caught. But when researchers asked people to describe real moments of shame, those moments were no more likely than moments of guilt to happen in front of others, and plenty of them happened when people were completely alone.

Think of reading an old message you sent, remembering something you said years ago out of nowhere, or catching yourself in the mirror after a bad day. In the same research, people rated themselves more harshly than they thought anyone else would.

So you can feel deeply ashamed in an empty room. The audience is still there. It just lives in your head.

Embarrassment and humiliation

Shame has two close neighbors, and it helps to tell them apart.

Embarrassment is lighter and more social. You trip on the sidewalk, you wave at someone who was waving at the person behind you, you laugh, and it passes. The blush and the awkward smile that come with it seem to work as a small signal to others, something like “oops, I know”, and people tend to respond by going easier on you.

Humiliation is shame plus a sense of unfairness. Someone brought you down, usually in front of others, and you feel small and powerless, and often angry too, because it feels like something that was done to you.

In short, embarrassment says “that was awkward”, shame says “something is wrong with me”, and humiliation says “you did this to me”.

The alarm that goes off

You’ve been meaning to reply to a friend’s message for weeks. At first you were just busy. Now it’s been so long that replying feels awful, so you leave it a bit longer, which makes it feel worse still. If that’s happened to you, it’s one of the most ordinary things shame does.

Researchers have found that shame is closely tied to one thing in particular: how much other people would think less of us. Across very different countries, and in small communities around the world, how ashamed people expected to feel about something matched, very closely, how much others said they’d look down on someone for it.

That’s why many researchers think of shame as a kind of social alarm. It goes off when you might be seen as less by the people around you. The thinking is that for most of human history, being pushed out of your group was genuinely dangerous, so an alarm that says “hide, make yourself small, don’t make this any worse” made a lot of sense.

You don’t have to have done anything wrong

In experiments, people felt shame about things that weren’t wrong at all, as long as others might judge them for it. People who were left out of a group felt ashamed even when they’d done more than their share.

That’s why you can feel shame about things you never chose: your body, your accent, money, an illness, your family, a diagnosis, being single, being left out. The alarm responds to the chance of being judged, not to whether you actually did anything wrong.

So if you’ve carried shame about something that was never your fault, that shame isn’t evidence against you. It’s evidence that the alarm went off.

What it does to your body

Shame is a whole-body feeling. Your face gets hot, you want to look away, and your body tries to take up less room. Athletes who lose a match tend to slump their shoulders and narrow their chest, and they do it all over the world.

In the lab, being judged is also one of the most reliable ways to set off the body’s stress response. Across more than two hundred lab studies, the stress hormone cortisol rose the most when people were being judged on something they couldn’t control, and it took longest to settle afterward. In small lab studies, feeling ashamed also went with short-term rises in markers of inflammation.

None of this means shame will make you ill. But it does mean the urge to curl up and disappear isn’t you being dramatic. It’s a body reacting to feeling judged.

The 2am replay

It’s late, you’re trying to sleep, and your brain decides this is the moment to replay the thing you said at a party, word for word, three times.

In one study, people who gave a short speech in front of a judging audience kept going over it for days afterward, much more than people who gave the same speech alone. What kept them going over it was shame, not fear, anger or sadness.

Replaying isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you. Feeling judged is one of the things that keeps a mind going round and round. Our article on overthinking has more on why that happens and what helps it settle.

Shame can push you forward

Shame doesn’t only make us hide. Sometimes it does the opposite. You get a difficult performance review, and by midnight you’ve signed up for three online courses. Someone tells you that you came across as rude, and you decide to become a completely different person by Monday.

A large review of the research found that shame can push people toward repair, apology and self-improvement, but mainly when the damage feels fixable. When it doesn’t feel fixable, the same shame pulls people away and makes them want to hide.

So the question shame is asking is “can this be fixed?” If the answer feels like yes, shame can push you forward. If it feels like no, it pulls you back.

Fixing what happened, or fixing who you are

There’s a catch, though. When people remember real moments of shame, it’s shame, more than guilt or regret, that goes with wanting to change who they are. Regret goes more with wanting to undo or repair the specific thing that went wrong.

Those are very different projects. “I’ll apologize to Sam and check my tone in the next meeting” has an end point. “I need to become a better person” doesn’t, and it’s so big and so vague that it’s very easy to give up on, which then feels like one more failure.

Fixing what happened is something you can actually finish. Fixing who you are never is.

The perfectionist and the inner critic

Maybe you rewrite an email eight times so there’s nothing anyone could possibly criticize, or feel like you have to earn a rest. If this sounds like you, shame may be doing some of the driving.

In one small study, people who held themselves to very high standards felt more shame after failing. But the ones who did worst were those who believed other people’s approval depended on them being perfect. People who aimed high without that fear felt proud of their successes and less ashamed of their failures.

Researchers also describe two kinds of self-criticism. One says “I’m not good enough.” The other says “I can’t stand myself”, and it’s the harsher, more harmful one. People who could also reassure themselves were less caught up in it. So talking to yourself in a voice you’d never use with a friend can feel like motivation, but it’s often shame dressed up as motivation.

Being kind to yourself doesn’t make you lazy

A lot of people worry that if they stop being hard on themselves, they’ll stop trying altogether. The research points the other way.

In a set of experiments, people who were encouraged to be kind to themselves after failing a test went on to study longer for a retest than people who weren’t. After thinking about something they regretted, they were more motivated to make amends and not do it again. These were small studies, so they’re a strong hint rather than proof. But in them, kindness after a mistake made people try harder, not less (take that, inner critic). Our article on self-compassion goes further into why being kind to yourself can feel so hard.

Four directions shame can send you

A psychiatrist called Donald Nathanson noticed that when shame hits, people tend to go in one of four directions. He called it the compass of shame.

Some people withdraw: they go quiet, cancel plans and hide. Some attack themselves: they put themselves down before anyone else can. Some avoid: they distract themselves, make a joke, numb the feeling or act as if nothing happened. And some attack others: they get angry, blame or put someone else down.

Later, researchers turned his idea into a questionnaire and found that these four really do come out as separate patterns, and that people tend to use the same ones from one situation to the next. Many of us lean on one direction more than the others, and it probably made sense at some point. Nathanson saw all four as ways of protecting yourself from the feeling for a moment, and the rest of this part looks at what some of them can cost.

When shame turns into blame

Your partner gently points out that you forgot to pay the bill, and before you know it you’re snapping at them about something they forgot last month.

People who are prone to shame are more likely to feel angry, resentful and suspicious, and to blame others. Guilt, once you separate it from shame, goes the other way. When researchers looked more closely, shame on its own wasn’t linked with aggression. The link ran through blame.

A study of several hundred people leaving jail showed the same thing. Shame only went with reoffending when it turned into blaming others. So if you find yourself snapping when you feel ashamed, you’re not a monster, and the damage mostly comes when shame turns into blame.

Numbing it

You drank more than you meant to last weekend, you feel awful about it, and so you have a drink to stop feeling awful about it. People who are prone to shame are more likely to drink to cope with anxiety and low mood.

In one small study, people who had recently stopped drinking talked about their last drink, and researchers watched their body language. Those who looked the most ashamed were more likely to start drinking again in the months that followed. That’s one small study, not a prediction about you. If you’ve gone back to drinking after a break, it’s a reason for more support, not more shame.

The bigger picture is more mixed. Across dozens of studies, shame had no clear link with how much people drank or used drugs, and only a small link with how many problems it caused them. So these studies don’t back the old idea that feeling ashamed of using is what helps people stop. A habit like this is often doing a job for you, like quieting a feeling.

Putting it off

You have an assignment due, so you put it off. Then you feel ashamed about putting it off, so you avoid thinking about it, which means putting it off some more.

Putting things off goes with shame more than with guilt, partly because shame keeps you feeling bad and going over it in your head. One study makes the practical point well: students who forgave themselves for procrastinating before their first exam procrastinated less before the next one.

Forgiving yourself for putting something off can make it easier to start the next time. If starting is the hard part, try giving it just ten minutes.

Keeping it secret

You stop opening the banking app because you’re ashamed of what’s in there, and so you miss the bill, which gives you something new to be ashamed of.

Studies of thousands of secrets found that the hardest part of keeping one isn’t hiding it in conversation. It’s how often your mind wanders back to it all on its own. And the secrets people feel ashamed of are the ones their minds wander back to most.

This may be how a small moment turns into months of avoiding something. Therapists have described this kind of loop for decades, and it’s often called a shame spiral: you feel ashamed, then ashamed of feeling ashamed, then hide from the whole thing. Nobody has measured it as one single process, but several pieces of it fit what the studies above found.

What shame travels with

You feel low, and then you feel ashamed of feeling low, because other people have it so much worse. If that’s familiar, you know how quickly one feeling can pile on top of another.

Across more than a hundred studies, shame was more strongly linked with depression than guilt was. It’s also linked with anxiety, with the lasting effects of trauma, and with eating problems, most of all shame about your body and shame about eating. Worrying about how others see you, more than judging yourself, is the kind of shame most tied to social anxiety.

None of this means shame is behind all of these problems. It means that when someone is struggling, shame is often somewhere in the picture.

Linked isn’t the same as caused

Most of these studies are snapshots, measuring shame and symptoms at the same time. One long study that followed teenagers suggests shame can come first: those who were more prone to shame were more depressed two years later.

Most likely, shame and these problems feed each other. But nobody can yet say how much shame causes them and how much they cause shame.

Guilt isn’t automatically the healthy one. Guilt about things you couldn’t control, or guilt that hangs around with nothing in particular attached to it, was linked with depression just as strongly as shame. Feeling guilty after saying no to someone is a good example of guilt that doesn’t fit the facts.

The part you don’t say out loud

Shame makes people hide things from exactly the people who could help. In one study of people being treated for depression, about half had kept a symptom or an experience from their therapist, and shame was the most common reason. Hiding it went with feeling more depressed.

So if there’s something you haven’t said in therapy, or to your doctor, because it feels too shameful, that’s very common. The thing that feels too shameful to say is often exactly the thing worth bringing!

Shame is also linked with hurting yourself. If the feeling of being wrong ever gets so big that you think about hurting yourself or ending your life, please tell someone today. If you feel you might act on those thoughts, call your local emergency number or go to the nearest emergency room now. Our article on suicidal thoughts has more on what helps and who you can contact. Our helplines page has the crisis lines and emergency numbers for your country.

What children learn from how we react

“What is wrong with you?” can slip out of any tired parent after the third spilled drink of the day. A child who hides the broken plate instead of telling you is usually a child who expects something worse than a broken plate.

Children who grow up with harsh, rejecting parenting are more likely to become prone to shame. Guilt, on the other hand, seems to point children the right way. Toddlers who showed more guilt when they thought they’d broken something went on to break fewer rules later (don’t worry, the researchers rigged the toys to break. No real heirlooms were harmed). And in a study that followed several hundred children into early adulthood, those who were more prone to guilt took fewer serious risks, while those more prone to shame took more.

The practical lesson for parents is a kind one: talking about what a child did, rather than who they are, is more likely to teach the kind of guilt they can do something about, instead of shame they have to hide. The same goes for praise. Our article on praising effort explains how praising a child for being clever can make them feel more ashamed when they fail, especially children who already feel bad about themselves. Letting a child make some of their own decisions can teach the same thing: a wrong call is something you can repair, not something to hide.

When your child’s meltdown makes you ashamed

Your child throws themselves on the floor in the supermarket, people turn to look, and your face goes hot. It’s not only children who feel shame in moments like this. Parents who felt ashamed about their child’s behavior, mostly because others were watching, were more likely to react in ways that didn’t help. Parents who felt guilty instead were more likely to react in ways that did.

So a meltdown in public is hard partly because you feel judged too. Noticing that can be enough to change what you say next.

Culture sets the alarm, it doesn’t invent it

Lots of people grow up with “What will people think?” behind every decision. Others move countries and find that something normal at home is embarrassing in the new one, or the other way around.

The shame alarm itself looks much the same in every culture where it’s been tested. What differs is what sets it off, how openly it’s shown, and whether it’s seen as a failing or as a sign that you care about other people. In Japan, for example, students saw shame as a more common and more acceptable feeling than students in the United States did. Among salespeople, shame led Filipino workers to put more into their relationships with customers, and Dutch workers to pull back.

One explanation is about how easy it is to make new relationships. Where it’s hard to find new friends or start again somewhere else, losing the people you have costs more, and the shame alarm goes off more easily. Everyone has the shame alarm. Culture decides what sets it off, and what you’re supposed to do with it.

Name it

The simplest step is also one of the most useful. Saying “I feel ashamed”, even just to yourself, puts a little distance between you and the feeling. Putting feelings into words seems to calm the parts of the brain that react to threat.

Nobody has tested this for shame specifically. But just saying “this is shame” can help, and it also makes it easier to see what the feeling is trying to get you to do.

Separate what you did from who you are

When you catch yourself thinking “I’m such an idiot”, try turning it into “I made a mistake, and here’s what I can do about it”.

There’s no study that tests only this one change. But almost everything in this article points the same way. Guilt about a specific thing tends to lead to repair, and shame about your whole self tends to lead to hiding. The more you can shrink it from “I am” to “I did”, the more there is to actually do.

Ask whether it can be repaired

If it can, repair it. Apologize for the thing you did, not for existing. Our article on apologizing explains what makes a genuine apology work, and it’s a lot less about groveling than you might think.

If it can’t be repaired, ask what you’d want to do differently next time. That’s still something you can do.

And a word on forgiving yourself. Real self-forgiveness includes owning what happened. It isn’t the same as pretending it didn’t matter. People who forgive themselves tend to have better health and well-being, although those studies can’t show which comes first.

Tell one safe person

Shame loves secrets. It tells you that if anyone knew, they’d think less of you. Telling one person you trust is often how that story loses its grip.

People who had confided a secret to someone felt more able to cope with it and thought about it less. That doesn’t mean telling everyone. You get to choose who hears what, and one safe person is enough!

And if someone tells you something they’re ashamed of, the most helpful response is often the simplest one: “Thank you for telling me.”

Talk to yourself the way you’d talk to a friend

If a friend told you they’d forgotten their best friend’s birthday, you probably wouldn’t call them a terrible person. You’d say it happens, and ask whether they’d like to call her now.

In a small study, people who wrote kindly to themselves about a shameful memory felt less ashamed than people who only wrote about how they felt, and two weeks later they were less prone to shame and less low. Speaking to yourself the way you’d speak to a friend is a promising thing to try.

If you’d like to plan ahead, our article on if-then plans shows how to decide in advance what you’ll do in the moment: if I notice I’m hiding, then I’ll send one line.

When someone keeps making you feel small

Sometimes the shame isn’t only coming from the voice in your head. It’s coming from a real person: a partner who mocks you in front of friends, a boss who picks apart your work in every meeting, or a parent who still asks “What is wrong with you?” when you’re forty.

That kind of shame deserves to be taken seriously. Worrying about how other people see you is the kind of shame most strongly linked with feeling low, and when someone keeps putting you down, that worry has something real to feed on.

Being shamed by someone else tells you how they’re treating you, not who you are. It can help to name it to yourself (“This is them making me feel small”), to spend less time around them where you can, and to tell someone you trust what’s been happening. If you feel afraid of this person, or they control who you see, where you go or what you spend, that’s more than shame, and it’s worth talking to a professional or a support service about it.

When the person you’re afraid of watches your phone, your money or where you go, reaching out can feel unsafe, and sometimes it is. It’s fine to plan how you do it: use a phone or computer they can’t see if you can, and know that many domestic abuse helplines will talk it through in confidence. You can find one where you live on our helplines page, and if you’re in immediate danger, call your local emergency number.

When it’s worth getting help

Sometimes shame is too big or too old to shift on your own. You might have carried something for years that you’ve never told anyone, or notice that shame decides what you do most days.

Several kinds of therapy work directly with shame. Compassion-focused therapy was designed for people with a lot of shame and self-criticism, especially people who find being kind to themselves difficult, or even frightening. Acceptance and commitment therapy and some forms of cognitive behavioral therapy have also reduced shame in trials. The trials are promising, but most are small. If shame is shaping your days, it’s worth bringing to a therapist.

It wasn’t built to decide who you are

Shame is one of the most human feelings there is. It seems to exist because we care what the people around us think, and most of the time that’s a good thing. It keeps us connected, and it can nudge us to put things right.

It just wasn’t built to decide who you are. When it starts doing that, the kindest and most useful thing you can do is notice it, name it, and bring it somewhere safe.