Shame is a painful and complex emotional experience tinged with embarrassment, guilt, sadness, and self-reproach. Whether that shame is related to how we look, how we behave, how we learn, or how we feel, it can quickly send us into a downward spiral of self-sabotage and loathing.
After a lifetime of internalizing negative messages, it may feel as though shame is rooted into your very core. But there are many ways you can weed out shame and the embarrassment, self-criticism, and unhealthy behaviors entangled with it.
The process of freeing yourself from shame requires you to recognize it in all its forms. To do this, you must understand its lifecycle — how it morphs through different stages, from embarrassment to unhealthy coping strategies to isolation. Once you’re familiar with how the cycle works, you’ll be empowered to stop it.
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Stage 1: Embarrassment, Guilt, and Frustration
Let’s imagine you slept in and missed your exercise class, or you stopped for fast food on your drive home from work rather than eating the salmon you defrosted at home. Immediately, you start to feel negative emotions about the decision you made. Maybe you feel embarrassed that you lacked the motivation to exercise or guilty that you succumbed to that fast-food craving. You may feel frustrated with yourself for falling short of the healthy goals you established.
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Stage 2: Negative Self-Talk
These negative emotions lead to overly critical self-talk; you begin hurling hurtful remarks at yourself that you would never direct at a friend. A thought like “I messed up by not going to the gym” can easily turn into “I’m a complete failure. Why am I so lazy?” These messages, in turn, lead to sadness and hopelessness.
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Stage 3: Unhealthy Coping Strategies
A direct path connects negative self-talk to maladaptive behaviors. If you feel as if you’re a failure, unworthy, or a hopeless case, you’ll have very little motivation to expend the energy required to reach your goals or break unhealthy, even dangerous, habits. If missing a session at the gym causes you to conclude you’re a failure, why bother forgoing the midnight french fries that are so appealing? Since you’ve already eaten the fries and feel doomed to fail, why not smoke a few cigarettes or stay up late doomscrolling?
These coping strategies come from an understandable impulse to alleviate stress, but they create more suffering in the long term. They can also quickly develop into a vicious loop. We feel guilty, embarrassed, and self-critical, so we disengage from our values, goals, and support networks, which makes us feel even worse and makes us disengage even more.
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Stage 4: Clutching the Cactus of Shame
When we experience shame, embarrassment, negative self-talk, loneliness, and sadness, our instinct is to hide these negative feelings. We want to clutch our pain in tightened fists like a spiky cactus we don’t want anyone to see. The harder we hold onto it, however, the more painful it becomes. While it may seem counterintuitive, the only way to find relief from the pain of the “shame cactus” is to open our hands and let go. Yes, others will see what we’ve been holding, but that’s an essential step in healing.
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Stage 5: Letting Go of Shame
Shame makes us feel as if we're solely responsible for things that have gone “wrong” in our lives. To reduce the emotional weight of shame, take a step back and recognize the many factors at play that may be beyond your control. If you’re harboring shame about your eating habits or body size, for example, these are just some of the biological and societal forces that you have little power to change:
- Genetics. Genetic factors can influence not just our body size but also differences in hunger hormones, satiation, and metabolism. While one person can lose weight on a 1,600-calorie-a-day diet, another may have to drop down to 1,200 for the same effect.
- Prevalence of fast food. Fast food and processed foods are pervasive in our culture and are often the most accessible options in terms of cost and convenience. Though tasty and convenient, they are less nutrient-dense and higher in calories than home-cooked food.
- Portion size. In restaurants and even with prepared food, portion sizes are larger than what we may need.
- Busy schedules. Juggling work and responsibilities can make it difficult to find time to exercise or prepare nutritious food. Stress only compounds the problem.
- Body size stigma. Cultural messages tend to blame people who have large bodies, which drives body shaming.
Though shame makes us feel like we are fully and solely to blame, many factors contribute to our bodies and our health. Take time and space to recognize some of those factors; doing so will lift some of the emotional weight of shame.
