The Silent Language of Shame

Written by Maura Carey, MIACP
Integrative Psychotherapist, Clinical Supervisor & Doctoral Researcher
Founder & Clinical Director, Cherry Blossom Therapy

Shame is one of those experiences that can be difficult to identify or put into words mainly because shame can be hidden, almost in plain sight. We tend to associate shame with embarrassment, humiliation or a wish to hide, yet the psychological literature has long suggested that shame reaches much further into our experience of ourselves and what we believe about ourselves, and the impact of shame in our life.

Helen Block Lewis (an American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, mother of Judith Herman and the President of the psychoanalytic division of the American Psychological Association), wrote extensively on this subject, her early work was influential in distinguishing between guilt and shame, she tells the reader that guilt is a feeling that is not attached to your identity, for example, a person experiencing guilt may recognise that they have hurt somebody, or acted against their values or failed to meet a responsibility. The emotional discomfort is connected to something they have done or believe they should have done differently. But for shame, Lewis tells us that the feeling extends beyond the behaviour and involves the person’s experience of themselves. Rather than feeling that a particular action was wrong, the individual experiences themselves as inadequate, defective or unworthy.

Psychologists June Price Tangney and Ronda L. Dearing developed Helen Block Lewis’s earlier distinction between shame and guilt, particularly the understanding of shame as involving a more global negative evaluation of the self, whereas guilt tends to focus on a particular behaviour or action. In their book, Shame and Guilt (2002), they explored how these emotions influence our relationships, our responses to perceived wrongdoing and our capacity to acknowledge and repair interpersonal harm. Their work suggests that shame can become particularly difficult to manage because the individual is not simply evaluating something they have done but is experiencing a fundamental sense of inadequacy or failure within themselves.

This provides a useful starting point for understanding shame, although I think shame becomes much harder to understand when we confine it to an internal judgement about whether we are good enough. Shame is also shaped by our relationships, the environments in which we develop, the expectations we internalise and the ways in which we come to understand ourselves through our experiences with others.

In therapeutic work it can be present in the person who works relentlessly and still struggles to experience what they have done as enough, or in somebody who finds criticism extraordinarily difficult to tolerate, shame shows itself in the person who apologises for taking up time or space, or in somebody who can speak openly about painful events while remaining strangely disconnected from what those experiences have meant for how they understand themselves. Do you see yourself in any of these statements?

Shame can sit beneath the need to remain useful, competent, agreeable or in control, and it can exist alongside considerable confidence, achievement and genuine strength. For that reason, I have become interested in shame not only as an emotion that somebody experiences, but as something that can influence the way a person understands themselves and, perhaps even more importantly, the way they anticipate being understood by other people.

There is a quality to shame that makes it different from many other painful emotional experiences, for example fear alerts us to danger (or perceived danger), grief comes from loss, anger can tell us something about frustration, injustice or violation, but shame has a way of turning our attention towards ourselves. Somewhere in the process, what happened, what we did, how somebody treated us, or what other people came to know about us can begin to acquire meaning about the kind of person we are. This is where the distinction between guilt and shame is important. There is a significant difference between regretting something we have done and experiencing ourselves as diminished because of it. When shame becomes deeply embedded, however, that movement from experience towards identity may happen without the person ever consciously thinking that there is something wrong with them. Instead, they can begin to organise parts of their lives around preventing other people from discovering whatever they fear might confirm it. For example, a person who grew up feeling that their needs were an inconvenience may become an adult who rarely asks for help, apologises excessively and works hard to ensure that nobody has reason to be disappointed in them. They may be highly capable, dependable and attentive to others, yet find it extraordinarily difficult to admit when they are struggling or when something is beyond their capacity. They may not consciously believe that there is something wrong with them, but the possibility of being perceived as needy, incapable or difficult can feel so uncomfortable that they organise their behaviour around avoiding it. Over time, what began as an attempt to protect themselves from the painful experience of shame can become an ordinary way of living, so familiar that they no longer recognise how much of their behaviour is directed towards preventing others from seeing the parts of themselves they have learned to conceal.

This becomes particularly important when we consider childhood because children do not interpret relational experiences with the perspective that an adult has. A child who is repeatedly criticised cannot easily take themselves outside of the relationship and look back in and make the connectiong that the adult is critical, emotionally overwhelmed or carrying unresolved difficulties of their own. A child whose emotional needs are dismissed is unlikely to understand that a parent may have very little capacity to tolerate emotional expression because of their own history. A child who is frightened, neglected, humiliated or hurt by somebody on whom they depend has to make sense of experiences occurring within the very relationships through which their sense of self is developing. Children are learning who they are partly through how they are received. The face that looks back at them, the tone in which they are spoken to, whether distress brings somebody closer or drives somebody away, whether mistakes can be tolerated, whether vulnerability is protected, whether their caregivers look at them in awe or they feel they are a burned to them all contribute to an emerging understanding of self in relationship.

Research examining the relationship between attachment and shame provides further support for understanding shame as something that develops within our relationships with others. In a recent study, Jiang and colleagues (2026) brought together findings from 56 research papers involving 15,651 participants to examine whether people who experience insecurity in their close relationships are also more likely to experience shame. Their findings identified a relationship between attachment insecurity and shame, suggesting that difficulties with feeling emotionally secure, accepted or safe in relationships may be connected to how individuals experience and understand themselves. However, this does not mean that everybody who experiences insecure attachment will develop a deep sense of shame, nor does it mean that shame can always be traced back to our earliest relationships. Our experiences of ourselves continue to be shaped by the relationships we form, the environments in which we live and the experiences we encounter throughout our lives. Human development is considerably more complicated than any single explanation can account for.

What interests me is the point at which an experience begins to alter not only how a child feels, but how the child imagines they are seen. There is an aspect of shame that is connected with exposure, and I think this can sometimes be missed when we concentrate primarily on the event that caused the pain. A child can be distressed by what is happening at home and at the same time become distressed by the fact that other people know.  If a father is violent, for example, there is the experience of the violence itself, but another layer can develop around the awareness that teachers know, relatives know, neighbours have heard or other children have somehow discovered what is happening. The shame may therefore become attached not only to the reality that “my father hits me,” but to the knowledge that “people know my father hits me.” These statements may appear similar, but psychologically they are not the same. The second makes it more relational and therefore the possibility that what has happened may alter how the child is regarded. The child is now negotiating not only the original experience, but the fact that now other  people know, there can be the fear of pity, judgement, difference, humiliation or being reduced to something over which they had no control.

For a child, this can create a complicated relationship with expressing their feelings, needs and vulnerabilities, particularly when they have learned that certain parts of themselves are more likely to be accepted than others Other people’s knowledge may bring protection and intervention, but it may also create exposure. Adults may lower their voices when the child enters a room, teachers may behave differently, relatives may ask questions, other children may make comments, or the child may sense that people know something about their family that was supposed to remain private. Even compassion can feel uncomfortable when the child does not yet have the language or psychological distance to understand what is happening. They can become conscious of being looked at through the lens of an experience they did not choose. The difficulty then extends beyond what happened to them and begins to involve what they imagine the experience says about them in the minds of other people. This is one of the places where shame can become woven into identity, because the child is carrying the experience itself while also trying to manage its social meaning.

We need to be careful not to assume that children understand their experiences in the same way adults do. For example, a child who is repeatedly criticised for expressing their feelings may not consciously think that their emotions are unacceptable or that there is something wrong with them. Instead, they may gradually become quieter, or stop asking for help or learn to hide their distress to avoid further criticism. Over time, these responses can become so familiar that the child no longer recognises them as ways of protecting themselves. They simply learn that certain feelings are better kept to themselves, without necessarily having the words or understanding to explain why. Do you recognise any of this in yourself?

Much of this learning may never be articulated, A child does not have to consciously think that they are unworthy because somebody failed to protect them for experiences of protection and worth to become connected. They do not need to decide that vulnerability is unsafe in order to become increasingly reluctant to show vulnerability. When a child is repeatedly ridiculed for crying, or met with irritation when they ask for help, or finds that telling the truth leads to conflict, they begin to learn something about what is safe to express in their relationships with others. They may become quieter, conceal their feelings, avoid asking for help or carefully consider what they say to prevent further distress. They do not necessarily put these experiences into words or consciously decide that their feelings are unacceptable, but what they have learned can influence how they approach relationships long into adulthood. This is why I am cautious about reducing childhood experiences to a collection of beliefs that simply need to be corrected later in life. Some of the expectations people carry into adulthood developed because they accurately reflected the environments in which they grew up. A child who learned that expressing their needs led to criticism was not necessarily misunderstanding their circumstances. They were learning how to manage the relationships they depended upon, and what may appear to be an unhelpful pattern in adulthood may once have been a necessary way of protecting themselves.

Over time, shame can influence how much of ourselves we feel comfortable showing to others. A person may become very aware of how they are perceived, and learning which parts of themselves are welcomed and accepted and which might lead to criticism, rejection or disapproval. For some, this may mean working exceptionally hard to succeed because achievement brings recognition and reduces the possibility of being criticised. Others may become quiet and avoid drawing attention to themselves, while some become particularly sensitive to the moods and feelings of those around them, learning to adjust their own behaviour to keep other people happy and avoid conflict. Humour, achievement, attractiveness, caring for others, intelligence, emotional restraint and independence can all become ways in which people seek acceptance, maintain relationships or protect themselves from experiences they find painful. However, none of these qualities automatically indicates that a person is experiencing shame, and we need to be careful not to interpret every aspect of someone’s personality, ambition or strength as evidence of childhood trauma. What becomes important in therapy is understanding whether the person feels free to behave differently without experiencing significant emotional distress. There is a difference between enjoying success and feeling worthless when something goes wrong, between genuinely wanting to care for others and feeling responsible for keeping everybody happy, and between valuing independence and finding it almost impossible to ask for help because doing so brings feelings of inadequacy or shame. The question is not how a person behaves, but what happens emotionally when they can no longer maintain the behaviours that have helped them feel accepted, valued or safe in their relationships.

This is also why shame should never be equated with low confidence. Some people carrying significant shame are extraordinarily capable. They may lead, teach, care for others, manage organisations, raise families, build careers and hold considerable responsibility while finding it extremely difficult to admit that they are frightened, uncertain, lonely, hurt or in need of support. Strength and shame are not opposites, and I would be also be cautious about retrospectively interpreting every strength as a defence. Sometimes people are competent because they are competent. Sometimes they are resilient because they have developed resilience. Sometimes, however, a person may become so accustomed to being strong and capable that they find it difficult to allow themselves to be anything else. They may struggle to ask for help, admit when they are overwhelmed or allow others to see them at their most vulnerable. What becomes important is understanding whether being strong is something they genuinely choose or something they feel they must maintain because they fear how others might respond if they were no longer able to cope.

When shame develops relationally, closeness can become complicated because intimacy eventually involves being known by another person. A person may genuinely want connection while carefully controlling the conditions under which that connection occurs. They may be warm, empathic and deeply available to other people while remaining surprisingly guarded around their own vulnerable internal world. They may disclose considerable factual information about their history while keeping its emotional meaning protected. This is why disclosure should not automatically be confused with people displaying vulnerability. A person can tell somebody almost everything that has happened to them while still protecting the parts of themselves they fear might alter how they are perceived. The underlying concern is often connected with belonging, if being more fully known or seen will change the relationship, does acceptance have conditions, and whether the parts of the self that have been carefully managed will remain acceptable if they become visible to someone else.

When Shame Lives in the Body

Shame is not confined to our thoughts, memories or the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. It can also be experienced physically, sometimes becoming apparent in our behaviour before we have fully recognised or understood what we are feeling. A person may notice their face becoming hot, find it difficult to maintain eye contact, lower their head or suddenly struggle to find the words to express themselves. They may feel an urge to withdraw from the conversation or wish that they could simply disappear from the situation. Research by psychologists Jessica Tracy and David Matsumoto (2008), examining how athletes from different countries physically expressed pride and shame following success or failure, found that shame was associated with recognisable changes in body language, including a lowered head and slumped posture. Their findings offer an interesting perspective on how shame can be expressed physically, although they do not suggest that everybody experiences or expresses shame in the same way.

Further research by Lauri Nummenmaa and colleagues (2014), involving 701 participants across five experiments, explored how different emotions are experienced within the body. The researchers asked participants to identify where they experienced changes in bodily sensations when exposed to different emotional experiences. Their findings demonstrated that emotions were associated with different patterns of reported bodily sensations, supporting the understanding that our emotional lives involve much more than our conscious thoughts. This is particularly important when considering shame because a person may experience considerable physical discomfort without immediately recognising the emotion underlying it. For example, somebody discussing a painful experience in therapy may suddenly become quiet, look towards the floor or find themselves struggling to continue speaking. They may describe feeling uncomfortable or exposed without being able to explain exactly why. However, we need to be careful not to assume that these physical responses necessarily indicate shame. A person may avoid eye contact because they are anxious, overwhelmed, concentrating, because maintaining eye contact is uncomfortable for them, or perhaps even culturally unnatural. What becomes important within the therapeutic relationship is remaining curious about the individual’s experience rather than interpreting their behaviour on their behalf. Sometimes, paying attention to changes in how a person speaks, moves or responds during a conversation can provide an opportunity to explore feelings that they have not yet been able to recognise or express in words.

Understanding why we react in a particular way does not mean that we can change how we feel in the moment. A person may know that their partner is not going to respond to them in the same way a parent once did, that their therapist is not judging them or that making a mistake at work does not mean they are going to lose their job. Yet, despite knowing these things, they may still experience intense anxiety, embarrassment or fear, accompanied by physical reactions that feel difficult to control. Their understanding of the situation may have changed, but their emotional response may take longer to change. I think we need to be careful, however, about how we explain these experiences, particularly when using contemporary trauma language. There is a growing tendency to interpret physical discomfort, anxiety or difficulty managing emotions as evidence that the body is responding to unresolved trauma. While past experiences can influence how we respond to situations in the present, people become anxious, embarrassed, overwhelmed, defensive or physically uncomfortable for many different reasons. Not every strong emotional reaction is connected to trauma, and struggling to manage a difficult feeling does not automatically mean that something is wrong with a person’s nervous system. Being trauma-informed should encourage us to explore a person’s experiences with greater curiosity, taking account of their history, present circumstances and individual understanding of what is happening, rather than assuming that we already know the meaning of their reactions simply because we recognise a particular pattern of behaviour.

There is something difficult about the way shame can interfere with our ability to express ourselves, especially when we are already feeling vulnerable. A person may begin a conversation knowing exactly what they want to say, only to find that their words become increasingly difficult to access when they feel embarrassed, criticised or exposed. They may lose their train of thought, struggle to explain themselves or become unusually conscious of how they sound to the person listening. Their attention may shift away from what they were trying to communicate and towards how they are being perceived. They may begin to question whether they have said too much, whether their feelings are unreasonable or whether the other person is beginning to think differently about them. What makes this experience particularly uncomfortable is that the person may become increasingly aware of their own physical response. They notice their face becoming hot, their voice changing or their difficulty finding the right words, and this awareness can become another source of embarrassment. Someone who is already feeling ashamed may then begin to feel ashamed of the fact that they are visibly struggling, particularly if they believe they should be able to remain composed or manage the conversation without becoming upset.
Shame does not always lead to withdrawal, silence or an obvious reduction in confidence. Some people may respond to feeling embarrassed or exposed by becoming more animated, talking excessively, using humour or attempting to regain control of the conversation. Others may become irritated or defensive, particularly when they experience another person’s words as criticism or humiliation. A person who feels ashamed may begin explaining themselves repeatedly, challenging what has been said or directing attention towards the other person’s behaviour. These responses can sometimes serve to reduce the discomfort of feeling exposed, although it would be a mistake to assume that anger, defensiveness, humour or excessive talking necessarily indicates underlying shame. The same behaviour can have very different meanings for different people, and not everybody who experiences shame will respond in the same way.

There can also be a difference between what somebody appears to be experiencing and what is happening for them internally. A person may continue smiling, speaking confidently or participating in a conversation while experiencing considerable discomfort. They may have become accustomed to concealing their embarrassment or managing how they present themselves, particularly if they have learned that showing vulnerability attracts unwanted attention or criticism. Someone who appears calm and composed may be working very hard to maintain that appearance, while another person may become visibly distressed in circumstances that others would consider relatively ordinary. Neither response tells us, on its own, how deeply the person is affected or what the experience means to them. Although research has identified common patterns in how shame can be expressed, we cannot assume that the absence of visible embarrassment means that shame is not present, any more than we can assume that a person who blushes or looks away must be experiencing shame.

Within psychotherapy, these experiences can become particularly relevant because discussing painful or personal material may involve revealing aspects of ourselves that we have previously kept hidden. A client may be speaking about an experience and suddenly become quiet, begin apologising or express concern about what the therapist must think of them. Sometimes, a client may begin explaining or justifying their feelings before the therapist has even responded, as though they are anticipating criticism that has not occurred. At other times, they may withdraw from the conversation or become reluctant to return to a subject that previously seemed important to them. These moments can offer opportunities for therapeutic exploration, but they also require considerable care. A therapist who immediately identifies a client’s behaviour as shame may unintentionally create the very experience of exposure that the client is struggling to manage. It may be more helpful to acknowledge that something seems to have changed in the conversation and invite the client to reflect on what they are experiencing, without assuming that the therapist already understands its meaning. The client may recognise embarrassment, fear of judgement, sadness, anxiety or something entirely different. What matters is allowing the person’s own understanding to emerge rather than imposing an interpretation upon them.

Shame, Secrecy and the Right to Privacy

Shame and secrecy are closely connected, but secrecy itself needs careful handling. There can be an assumption within therapeutic culture that psychological health requires disclosure and that whatever a person does not wish to discuss must represent avoidance. This can become another form of intrusion. People have a right to privacy, including within psychotherapy, and not everything needs to be spoken about, explored or made visible for somebody to be psychologically healthy. The distinction that interests me is between privacy that is freely chosen and concealment that feels necessary in order to maintain safety, acceptance or belonging. One person may decide that an experience is private because it belongs to them and they have no wish to share it. Another may guard the same information because they believe that if it becomes known they will be judged, rejected, pitied, humiliated or regarded differently. The behaviour may look similar from the outside, while the internal experience is entirely different.

This becomes particularly complicated in families where silence has been used to preserve an image of normality or to protect the family itself. Children can learn very early that there are things that happen inside the home that should never be discussed outside it, and that instruction does not always need to be spoken. Addiction, violence, abuse, financial difficulty, mental distress, affairs, imprisonment and family conflict can become surrounded by silence. The child can then carry both the original experience and a sense of responsibility for preventing its disclosure. Speaking about it may feel like they are betraying the family. Later, the adult may understand intellectually that they have every right to talk about their history while still feeling disloyal when they do so, which then can become difficult to hold both, They may immediately explain the circumstances of somebody who harmed them, minimise what occurred, compare themselves with people who “had it worse,” or become uncomfortable when a therapist responds critically towards somebody they still love. These responses should not automatically be read as denial or resistance. Love, loyalty, dependence, anger and shame can exist alongside one another, and therapeutic work becomes poorer when we require people’s relationships to fit into cleaner categories than they actually do.

The Shame We Inherit

Not all shame begins with an individual’s own experience. Families can carry shame across generations, particularly around experiences that could not be safely acknowledged within the historical and social conditions in which they occurred. Poverty, institutionalisation, addiction, imprisonment, abuse, pregnancy outside marriage, adoption, sexuality, mental illness and family separation have all carried different levels of judgement across different communities and periods of history. We do not need to rely on vague ideas that trauma somehow mysteriously passes between generations to understand how this can happen. Families transmit meaning in very ordinary human ways. They tell certain stories and avoid others, protect particular people, communicate what is respectable and what is embarrassing, change the subject, explain some events repeatedly and leave others strangely absent from the family narrative. Children notice the subjects that change the atmosphere in the room, the relatives who are rarely mentioned, the questions that receive incomplete answers and the things everybody appears to know but nobody names.

We do not have to look too far back into Irish history to understand how shame can become part of a family’s story and continue to influence later generations. Ireland’s mother and baby homes, which operated throughout much of the twentieth century, with the last of these institutions closing in 1998, provide a particularly painful example of this. Between 1922 and 1998, women who became pregnant outside marriage were subjected to considerable social and religious judgement, with many forced to enter mother and baby homes where they experienced isolation, stigma and separation from their children. These experiences are not confined to a distant period of Irish history. The last mother and baby home closed less than thirty years ago, meaning that many of the women and children affected by these institutions are still living with the consequences of their experiences today.

The 2021 report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes documented the experiences of women and children in these institutions between 1922 and 1998, including the influence of social stigma, family circumstances and the lack of support available to unmarried mothers.
The experiences of these women also need to be understood within the wider social and economic circumstances of Ireland at the time. A woman who became pregnant outside marriage could find herself facing rejection from her family, the loss of employment, difficulty securing accommodation and considerable uncertainty about how she could support herself and her child. For women who were financially dependent upon their families or the fathers of their children, the possibility of establishing an independent home could be extremely difficult. We also need to remember that women in Ireland were living within a society in which their opportunities for financial independence were restricted in ways that extended beyond unmarried motherhood. The marriage bar, which required women in certain areas of employment to leave their jobs when they married, remained in place in the Irish civil service until 1973. Although this restriction applied to married women rather than unmarried mothers specifically, it illustrates the wider social and economic expectations that shaped women’s opportunities to support themselves independently. Access to housing, employment and financial services was also influenced by inequalities in how women were treated, and the Equal Status Act 2000 introduced statutory protections against discrimination on grounds including gender, marital status and family status in access to services such as banking, credit and accommodation.

It was not until 1973 that Ireland introduced a specific social welfare payment for unmarried mothers who kept their children, known as the Unmarried Mother’s Allowance. Before this, women who wished to raise their children independently could face considerable financial hardship, particularly when they had little or no support from their families or the child’s father. The shame that this carried for many of these woman. The introduction of the allowance represented an important change in state support, although it did not remove the wider social and economic difficulties associated with unmarried motherhood. When we consider the decisions women made during this period, we therefore need to understand the circumstances in which those decisions were taken. A woman who entered a mother and baby home or whose child was subsequently placed for adoption may have been facing family rejection, social isolation, financial hardship and considerable uncertainty about how she could provide for herself and her child. What might appear, when viewed from the present day, to have been a personal decision may have been made within circumstances where the available choices were severely restricted. We cannot fully understand the experiences of these women without recognising the society in which they lived and the practical consequences of attempting to live outside its expectations.

Consider what this could mean within a family across several generations. A young woman becomes pregnant outside marriage and is sent away to a mother and baby home. Her child is subsequently placed for adoption, and she returns to her community, where the pregnancy and birth are never openly acknowledged. Years later, she may marry and have other children who grow up knowing very little about that period of their mother’s life. They may hear occasional references to a time when she was away, notice that certain questions make her uncomfortable or learn that particular relatives are not to be discussed. The mother may never tell them about the child she gave birth to, not necessarily because she wishes to deny that child’s existence, but perhaps because she has spent years living within a society that taught her that revealing this part of her life could bring rejection, humiliation or further loss. Her children may grow up without knowing the circumstances of their mother’s experience, yet they may still learn something about the importance of maintaining appearances, protecting the family’s reputation and keeping certain experiences private. These attitudes may then influence how they respond to their own children when questions arise about pregnancy, sexuality, relationships or anything else that might attract judgement from others.

The child who was adopted may grow up in another family, perhaps knowing very little about their origins or the circumstances surrounding their birth, or even if they were adopted. They may encounter unanswered questions about their identity, experience discomfort when asking about their birth family or gradually come to understand that their adoption was connected to circumstances that other people considered shameful. It is important not to assume that every adopted person experiences shame or that adoption inevitably produces psychological difficulties. However, when information about a person’s origins has been withheld, concealed or surrounded by secrecy, the individual may be left trying to make sense of their own history without access to the people or information that could help them understand it. The shame originally imposed upon an unmarried mother can therefore have consequences for a child who did nothing to create the circumstances into which they were born. The child may grow into adulthood carrying questions about their identity and belonging, while the birth mother may continue to live with the consequences of a separation that was shaped by the expectations and judgements of the society in which she lived.

What I find important about this example is that shame does not have to be consciously passed from one generation to another for its influence to continue. A mother does not have to tell her children that pregnancy outside marriage is shameful for them to learn that certain subjects are difficult to discuss. A family does not have to explicitly teach a child that its reputation must be protected for the child to notice how adults respond when something happens that might attract criticism from the wider community. These attitudes can become part of ordinary family life, influencing what is discussed openly, what is concealed and how people respond when someone behaves in a way that challenges established expectations. The original circumstances may have changed considerably, yet the ways of responding to them can remain familiar within the family long after the social conditions that first gave rise to them have begun to change.

We also need to be careful about where we locate the shame in these experiences. The women and children who entered Ireland’s mother and baby homes were not inherently shameful, nor was there anything shameful about a child being born outside marriage. Shame was imposed upon them through the social, religious and institutional attitudes of the time, and many were left to carry the consequences of judgements that should never have been placed upon them. When we consider how shame may continue across generations, we therefore need to look beyond the individual and examine the wider circumstances in which particular experiences became associated with disgrace, secrecy or rejection. What may appear within a family as an unwillingness to discuss the past may have developed in circumstances where speaking openly carried very real social and personal consequences. Understanding this history does not mean assuming that every family affected by these institutions continues to experience shame in the same way. It means recognising that some of the silences, fears and expectations people carry may have their origins in experiences that were shaped not only by their own families, but by the society in which those families had to live.

Historical context matters enormously here because it prevents us from judging previous generations solely through contemporary psychological ideas. Sometimes secrecy protected family reputation because reputational damage had genuine consequences. Sometimes women concealed pregnancies because disclosure carried severe social consequences. Sometimes poverty was hidden because poverty meant humiliation, and sometimes families remained silent about mental illness, addiction or abuse because there were few safe or compassionate places in which those realities could be held. Understanding the context does not erase the harm that secrecy may have caused, but it gives us a fuller account of why it existed. Intergenerational shame therefore needs to be considered alongside social history, class, religion, gender, community and power rather than treated purely as a family pathology.

When Society Creates the Shame It Later Asks the Individual to Heal

This is where psychotherapy needs to become more critical of its own traditions. Shame has often been researched and treated as though it were primarily something happening withing an individual, yet Leeming and Boyle (2004) challenged the idea of shame as a context-free internal disposition and argued for greater attention to the social conditions, identities and encounters through which shame is produced and managed. That critique remains important because societies establish hierarchies around what is considered desirable, respectable and successful, and people encounter those hierarchies long before they ever enter therapy. A person may come to believe that there is something wrong with them, but we also need to ask where that belief came from, who communicated it, what happened when they failed to meet the expectations placed upon them and whether those expectations continue to shape how they are treated. Shame does not always begin with an individual privately deciding that they are inadequate. Sometimes it develops through repeated experiences of being made to feel that an aspect of one’s body, family, identity or circumstances makes them less acceptable to other people.
Poverty can be shaming, bodies are shamed, disability can be shamed, sexuality can be shamed, mental distress can be shamed and addiction can be shamed. Families can be judged because of where they live, what they own, how they speak, what kind of work they do or whether their lives have a a socially preferred version of success. These judgements are not experienced in the same way by everyone, and an aspect of life that brings criticism in one family or community may be accepted without question in another. Nevertheless, when somebody internalises such messages, it is not right to locate the distress inside the peronsn. Some expectations of judgement developed because people genuinely were judgemental. Some fears of exclusion developed because exclusion occurred. Some vigilance developed because the environment required vigilance. A critical psychotherapy has to be capable of holding both the internalised meanings a person carries and the external conditions that helped create them.
When I think about poverty and shame in an Irish context, I remember milk being brought into my primary school and only certain children receiving it, I was one of them, and my family could not afford the money to subsidise the strawberry flavoured milk, it seems like an ordinary childhood memory, but it makes me think about how easily a child’s circumstances could become visible in a classroom. I cannot assume that every child who received milk understood it as a sign of financial need, or that every school distributed it for the same reason. What interests me is how a child experiences being one of those who receives something when others do not, particularly if the difference is understood by the children around them as being connected to what their family can afford. Practical assistance may be needed and welcomed, while the manner in which it is provided can still leave a child feeling exposed. A child does not need to understand household income, social welfare or the wider inequalities affecting their family to recognise that other children have noticed a difference. If questions, comments or ridicule follow, they may begin to associate receiving help with having something about their home life revealed. Which can be deeply shaming for a child.

Poverty could become visible in many other ordinary moments of school life. There was the child who could not bring money for a school tour, whose uniform had been handed down several times, whose shoes were repaired rather than replaced or who knew there was no point in asking at home for the things other children seemed to have. A child might say they did not want to attend an event because admitting that their family could not afford it felt more exposing than missing out. They might dread a teacher asking for money in front of the class, a conversation about summer holidays or an invitation to bring friends home. In a small community, a family’s financial circumstances could also become known through where they lived, whether a parent was working or whether they were receiving social welfare. Adults might discuss these matters within earshot of children, without considering what it meant for a child to hear their family described as poor, struggling or somehow less respectable. Not every child growing up with limited money experienced shame. Some were surrounded by kindness, discretion and a strong sense of belonging. Others encountered comparisons, comments or exclusion that taught them to conceal what was happening at home.

There is an important difference between experiencing financial hardship and being made to feel ashamed of it. A family may be struggling to pay bills while remaining secure in their sense of dignity and belonging. Shame becomes more likely when the difficulties they face are treated as evidence of poor character, laziness, irresponsibility or failure. We can see how this operates when people who need assistance are expected to repeatedly explain their circumstances, when receiving social welfare is spoken about as though it reveals everything worth knowing about a person, or when the ability to buy a home, own a car or provide particular experiences for one’s children becomes a measure of whether somebody has succeeded in life. These attitudes can be particularly painful for parents who are already doing everything they can with the resources available to them. A parent may feel ashamed that they cannot provide what other families appear to provide, while a child may interpret the family’s financial difficulties as something they must keep private to protect the people they love.

I recall the butter vouchers that were part of life for some Irish families during the 1980s and 1990s. They were intended to help households with the cost of an everyday food item, but I think about the experience of being a child who was asked to bring those vouchers into the local shop. A parent might hand the child the vouchers and ask you to get the butter, or perhaps ask you to see whether the shopkeeper would let you use them towards something else the family needed. As a child, you might not fully understand the financial pressures at home or why your parent was asking you to do this. You might only know that you were about to stand at a counter and ask for something that other children did not seem to have to ask for. If the shopkeeper refused, questioned you or explained in front of other customers that the vouchers could only be used for butter, an ordinary job could suddenly become an experience of embarrassment. Even if the shopkeeper responded kindly, the child might still feel exposed by having to ask.

And what about the parent who carried the shame of having to accept butter vouchers. What interests me about this memory is how easily a child could come to carry shame that belonged neither to them or their parent. A parent asking a child to see whether a voucher could be used towards something else may simply have been trying to make limited household resources stretch a little further. There is nothing shameful about that. Yet a child who felt embarrassed at the counter might begin to associate asking for help with being judged, or come to believe that their family’s financial circumstances were something other people should not know about. They might become anxious about going into that shop again, worry that the shopkeeper would remember them or hope that nobody from school had overheard the exchange. Years later, the person may remember the discomfort of standing at the counter more clearly than the practical reason they had been sent there. It is a reminder that shame can develop around very ordinary experiences, not because a child has done anything wrong, but because they have become aware that their family needs something and that needing it may be viewed differently by the people around them.

The meaning attached to those experiences can remain long after a person’s financial circumstances have changed. An adult who once felt exposed when they could not pay for something may become uncomfortable accepting generosity, asking for help or admitting that money is tight. They may work exceptionally hard to ensure that their own children never experience the same embarrassment, feel distressed when an unexpected expense leaves them dependent on somebody else or become preoccupied with appearing financially secure. Some people may avoid spending money even when they can afford to, while others may feel a strong need to own particular things because they associate them with having escaped the circumstances in which they grew up. None of these responses, taken alone, tells us that somebody is carrying shame. Their meaning has to be understood within the person’s own experience. What matters is that a response which appears excessive or difficult to understand in the present may have developed in circumstances where having less money meant being treated differently. A particular memory of my own, was baking bread for my children, as I had no money to buy a loaf of bread, but I had ingredients that would stretch further than the shop bought loaf, I would send my children off with their packed lunches, and they never had “nice things” because I couldn’t afford them. The often laugh about this now, but when they bring it up, the shame rises in me, that shame was also an intergenerational shame showing up too.

Where somebody grows up can also become a source of shame independently of how much money their family has. In Ireland, an address can carry assumptions about class, education, employment, crime or the kind of family a person comes from. A child may become aware that mentioning a particular estate, housing development or townland changes how other people respond to them. They may hear adults speak dismissively about people from a certain area, notice that classmates make jokes about where they live or learn that a parent’s occupation is regarded as less respectable than another parent’s. A person may begin to alter how they speak, avoid mentioning their address or feel compelled to demonstrate that they are different from the assumptions attached to their community. Yet the same area may also be a place of deep belonging, friendship, mutual support and pride. The problem is not the address itself, but the meanings other people impose upon it and the consequences those meanings can have for the person who lives there.

Family circumstances can attract similar judgement. A child may be identified through a parent’s addiction, a relative’s imprisonment, a family separation or an event that occurred before they were born. A lone parent may encounter comments suggesting that their family is incomplete, while someone whose parents had little formal education may become conscious that their family’s knowledge and experience are valued less than other forms of achievement. In smaller communities, where people may know one another across several generations, a person’s family history can sometimes precede them. They may find themselves trying to establish an identity separate from a story that other people have already decided tells them who they are. When this happens repeatedly, shame can become attached not only to what a person has experienced but to their sense of where they come from and who they are permitted to become.

Body shame provides another example of how social judgement can gradually become part of a person’s relationship with themselves. How ordinary it was for people to comment on weight, shape and appearance. Somebody could arrive at a family gathering and be told that they had put on weight or lost weight before anyone asked how they were. A teenager might hear that a particular outfit did not suit their figure, that they should watch what they were eating or that they would look lovely if they lost a little weight. A woman might be praised for getting her figure back after having a baby, as though the physical changes associated with pregnancy were something she was expected to reverse as quickly as possible. Men and boys were not exempt from judgement. They could be ridiculed for being too thin, too heavy, too short, insufficiently muscular or for having a body that did not fit expectations about how a man should look. These remarks were sometimes made casually, sometimes under the guise of concern and sometimes with the intention of humiliating. Their impact depended on the person, the relationship and the wider experiences in which they occurred, but repeated comments could teach someone that their body was something other people were entitled to inspect, assess and discuss.

The wider culture reinforced those messages. Magazines, television, celebrity photographs, slimming clubs, diet products and exercise videos presented bodies as projects that required constant attention. Weight loss was frequently celebrated without much curiosity about why somebody had lost weight, while weight gain could be discussed as though it revealed a failure of discipline. Speaking with a woman recently, she told me in her line of work, he male bosses told her that she needed to lose weight because the company was not taking serviously they suggested she looked lazy, and if she lost weight she would be taken more seriously. Conversations about food often carried an underlying moral judgement, with people describing themselves as good for eating one thing and bad for eating another, or speaking about the need to compensate for what they had eaten. A young person growing up around these messages could begin to associate their appearance with whether they would be liked, admired or accepted. The shame did not necessarily arise from one particularly cruel remark. It could develop through years of ordinary conversations in which bodies were repeatedly compared, criticised and treated as evidence of personal worth.

For a child or teenager, the experience of body shame could become particularly intense in situations where the body was visible to others. Changing for PE, wearing a swimsuit, buying clothes with friends, being photographed or simply going through puberty could become occasions for comparison. A girl who developed earlier than her classmates might feel exposed by attention she had not invited, while another might worry that she was developing too slowly. A boy might become conscious of his height, build, body hair or physical strength because of the comments made by other boys or adults. Acne, sweating, menstruation, skin conditions and the ordinary physical changes of adolescence could all become sources of shame when they attracted unwanted attention. Some young people withdrew from activities, others tried to change their appearance, made jokes about themselves before anyone else could or became highly attentive to how their bodies looked from another person’s perspective. The difficulty is not that every comment necessarily causes lasting harm, but that a person can encounter so many small evaluations that being watched and judged begins to feel like an ordinary part of having a body.

Body shame can follow people into adulthood and become attached to experiences that are part of ordinary human life. A woman may feel that she has to apologise for how her body looks after pregnancy, avoid being photographed because she does not want to see herself as she imagines others see her or feel embarrassed by the changes associated with menopause. A man may feel ashamed of losing strength, gaining weight, losing his hair or developing a physical condition that changes his appearance. Someone living in a larger body may encounter assumptions about what they eat, how active they are or whether they have sufficient self-control, while a person who is very thin may be subjected to intrusive comments about their health or eating. Shame can also become attached to infertility, miscarriage, illness, disability, scarring, ageing and changes following medical treatment. These experiences are different and should not be collapsed into a single account of body image, but they demonstrate how easily people can come to feel that they owe others an explanation for their physical existence. In therapy, it is important not to assume that a person’s discomfort with their body exists independently of the comments, expectations and treatment they have encountered throughout their life.
Mental distress has its own history of shame in Ireland, and it is a history that remains visible in the buildings and institutions that formed part of our communities. In Mullingar, my local town, St Loman’s Hospital opened in 1855 as the Mullingar District Lunatic Asylum. Elsewhere, there was St Brendan’s at Grangegorman in Dublin, St Ita’s at Portrane, St Finan’s in Killarney, St Conal’s in Letterkenny and St Otteran’s in Waterford. These were places where people received psychiatric care, but the history of institutional mental health care in Ireland also includes long periods of confinement and an approach to treatment that was often shaped by the limitations and attitudes of its time. We need to distinguish the experiences of individual patients and staff from the wider history of the institutions, rather than assume that everyone who entered them had the same experience. Nevertheless, the language once used to describe these hospitals and the people who lived in them tells us something about the social attitudes surrounding mental distress.

Growing up in or around a town where a large psychiatric hospital was part of the landscape could mean becoming familiar with its name long before understanding what happened inside it. A person might hear a hospital mentioned as a warning, a joke or a way of dismissing somebody whose behaviour was considered unusual. Families might avoid discussing a relative’s admission because they feared what neighbours would think, while someone who had received psychiatric treatment might worry about how that information would affect their relationships, employment or standing in the community. A person could be experiencing depression, anxiety, psychosis or another form of mental distress and still feel that the most difficult part of seeking help was the possibility that other people would find out. The history of St Loman’s is especially close to home for those of us in Westmeath. The building is a familiar part of Mullingar, but its history also invites us to think about the people whose lives were lived within it and the meanings attached to psychiatric care in the wider community.

The shame surrounding mental distress was not confined to psychiatric hospitals. It could be present in a family where nobody spoke openly about depression, where a parent was described as having had a breakdown without anybody explaining what that meant, or where a person was told to pull themselves together because their difficulties were interpreted as weakness. Someone experiencing panic attacks might conceal them for fear of being considered incapable. A person who had been admitted to hospital might avoid telling a new partner or employer because they feared that their entire character would be judged through that one part of their history. Parents could feel ashamed when they were struggling emotionally because they believed they were expected to remain capable and available at all times. Professionals working in caring roles might find disclosure particularly difficult if they feared that acknowledging their own distress would call their professional credibility into question. In these circumstances, a person is not only dealing with the original suffering. They may also be using considerable energy to ensure that nobody else becomes aware of it.

Shame can also surround suicidal distress and bereavement following suicide. A person experiencing suicidal thoughts may fear that speaking openly will lead others to regard them as selfish, weak, dangerous or incapable of making decisions about their own life. Those fears can make it more difficult to disclose how much they are struggling, particularly if they have previously heard suicide discussed in judgemental terms. Families bereaved by suicide may encounter a different but related burden. Alongside grief, they may face intrusive questions about what happened, speculation about the person’s relationships or circumstances, and suggestions that somebody should have recognised the danger or prevented the death. In a close-knit community, a family may become aware that an intensely private and painful experience is being discussed by people who know very little about it. Some families speak openly about their loss and find considerable support, while others feel pressure to conceal the circumstances of the death or avoid conversations they fear will expose them to further judgement. Neither the person who died nor those who loved them should be made to carry shame for that death. Where shame arises, we need to consider how it may have been shaped by the responses people encountered at a time when they needed compassion and support.

In Ireland, this shame also has a legal and religious history that is not too far from from 2026, Suicide and attempted suicide remained criminal offences until 9 July 1993, when the Criminal Law (Suicide) Act 1993 came into effect. Although prosecutions had become rare, the law still treated suicidal behaviour as a criminal matter rather than solely as a question of human distress and the need for care.
The influence of the Catholic Church also shaped how suicide was understood within many Irish families and communities. Under earlier Catholic canon law, people who died by suicide could be denied a Church funeral, although individual circumstances and judgements varied. Suicide was removed as a specific ground for denying funeral rites in the revised Code of Canon Law in 1983.
For a family living within a community where religious practice, burial and public reputation were closely connected, the possibility of being denied familiar funeral rites, or of having the circumstances of a death discussed in moral rather than compassionate terms, could add another layer of fear and isolation to an already devastating loss. Changes in the law and Church practice did not necessarily remove the attitudes that families had lived with for generations. Neither the person who died nor those who loved them should be made to carry shame for that death. Where shame arises, we need to consider how it may have been shaped by the responses people encountered at a time when they needed compassion and support.

Disability can carry shame when people are repeatedly made to feel that their needs are inconvenient, that independence is the measure of human worth or if support is required it makes them a burdn. In an Irish school, a child who needed additional support might have become conscious of being treated differently from classmates, particularly if that support was provided in a way that drew unwanted attention. An adult with a physical disability might encounter inaccessible buildings, intrusive questions or assumptions about what they could achieve. Someone with a less visible disability might feel compelled to justify why they needed an accommodation, especially when other people questioned their difficulties because they did not fit a familiar image of disability. There is an important distinction between the challenges associated with a person’s condition and the additional distress created by environments that exclude them or require them to repeatedly defend their needs. A person who has learned to avoid asking for assistance may not simply have a personal difficulty with dependence. They may have encountered enough impatience, disbelief or humiliation to conclude that asking carries a cost.
Sexuality and intimate relationships have also been subjected to considerable judgement in Irish families and communities. For someone growing up in a household or community where certain sexual identities or relationships were spoken about with disgust, ridicule or moral condemnation, concealment could become a way of protecting themselves from rejection. A young person might carefully monitor what they said about friendships and relationships, avoid asking questions or feel unable to speak openly about whom they loved. Shame could also become attached to sexual activity, sexual inexperience, pregnancy outside marriage, infertility or difficulties within an intimate relationship. Someone who experienced sexual violence might encounter disbelief, blame or questions that suggested responsibility for what another person had done to them, statements such as, “look what she was wearing, what did she expect” were and still are common to hear. In such circumstances, shame can become attached to the person who has been harmed rather than to the actions of the person responsible. These experiences show why we cannot assume that reluctance to disclose something intimate always reflects an internal inability to accept oneself. Sometimes people have learned, through direct experience or by observing how others were treated, that disclosure may place important relationships or their sense of safety at risk.

Addiction provides another example of how personal suffering can become entangled with social judgement. In Ireland, where alcohol is part of many social occasions, a person may find that drinking is encouraged in one setting while difficulties with alcohol are treated with contempt in another. Someone experiencing addiction may already be living with painful consequences in their relationships, employment, finances or physical health, while also fearing that seeking help will expose them to further judgement. Families can experience shame by association. A child may learn not to invite friends home because they do not know what they will encounter there, while a partner may conceal what is happening because they fear that others will judge the whole family. A person in recovery may continue to be identified by their past, even after making significant changes. Recognising the role of shame does not require us to minimise the harm addictive behaviours can cause or remove responsibility for actions that have affected others. It means understanding that humiliation, secrecy and fear of rejection can make it more difficult to speak openly, seek support and remain connected to relationships that may help a person change.

These examples bring me back to a concern about how psychotherapy understands and responds to shame. When someone enters therapy carrying a belief that they are inadequate, unacceptable or fundamentally different from other people, it is important to explore the meaning of that belief and the experiences through which it developed. Yet there is a risk that we can become so focused on the individual’s internal world that we overlook the social circumstances that contributed to their distress. We may help somebody challenge the belief that they are unworthy while failing to acknowledge that they have repeatedly been treated as though they were unworthy. We may encourage a person to disclose their feelings without adequately considering whether disclosure has previously resulted in humiliation, rejection or a loss of safety. We may interpret vigilance as an unhelpful response without recognising that, for some people, carefully monitoring how others respond to them has been necessary in environments where judgement and exclusion were genuine possibilities.

Recent research into women’s experiences of seeking support for complex trauma illustrates why this matters within professional services as well as wider society. Wu and Salter’s (2025) qualitative study of nineteen women in New South Wales, Australia, described shame associated not only with interpersonal violence but also with the systems through which women subsequently sought care. Participants described experiences of stigma, exclusion and professional interactions that could themselves become shaming. The authors argue for shame-sensitive and dignity-affirming practice, extending the familiar principle that services should understand trauma towards the equally important question of whether the way help is delivered can reproduce shame. Their study is small and its findings should not be assumed to represent every person seeking support, but it raises an important question for psychotherapy what happens when a person who has repeatedly been made to feel unacceptable enters a professional relationship and once again feels judged, disbelieved, reduced to a label or required to defend their need for help?

This requires us to consider shame not only in the lives of the people who seek therapy, but also in the language, assumptions and practices of the services they encounter. A person who has struggled with addiction may be described in ways that reduce their identity to their behaviour. Someone living in poverty may be regarded as unmotivated when they cannot attend appointments because of transport costs, childcare difficulties or unpredictable working hours. A person with a disability may be expected to adapt to a service that has not adequately considered their needs, while somebody experiencing mental distress may feel that their account of what happened to them is given less credibility once a diagnosis appears in their records. A client who struggles to speak about an experience may be interpreted as resistant, and a person who becomes distressed during an assessment may leave feeling that their response has been treated as a problem rather than understood within the circumstances of their life. None of this means that professional assessment, boundaries or clinical judgement are inherently shaming. It means that how we communicate, how we interpret behaviour and how much room we make for a person’s circumstances can influence whether seeking help becomes an experience of dignity or another occasion on which they feel exposed and diminished.

A critical psychotherapy has to be capable of holding both the internalised meanings a person carries and the external conditions that helped create them. It must also be willing to consider whether those external conditions are still present. Helping someone question a belief that they are unworthy is important, but it does not remove discrimination, exclusion or material hardship they may continue to encounter. We need to consider the difference between a person who anticipates judgement because of earlier experiences and a person who continues to face that judgement in their everyday life. Both may benefit from exploring how shame has influenced their sense of self, but the work cannot be identical if one person is now safe from the circumstances that shaped their shame while the other remains exposed to them. If we understand shame only as something that exists within the individual, we risk asking people to change how they think about experiences without adequately recognising what happened to them, how they were treated or what may still need to change in the world around them.

Shame, Self-Criticism and Compassion

For some people, the judgement once encountered externally gradually becomes part of the relationship they have with themselves. They no longer require another person to identify their perceived shortcomings because they have become extraordinarily efficient at doing so themselves. Gilbert’s work on shame, self-criticism and compassion has been particularly influential here, including the observation that warmth and self-acceptance can themselves feel difficult or threatening to people who are highly self-critical. An early pilot study of compassionate mind training reported reductions in shame and self-criticism, although it involved only six participants and had no control group, so it should be regarded as preliminary rather than definitive evidence.

The clinical idea remains useful because self-compassion is sometimes presented in a way that makes it sound remarkably straightforward. Telling somebody who has spent decades attacking themselves to “be kinder to yourself” can become another instruction they believe they are failing to perform correctly. They now have the original shame and an additional sense that they are apparently doing recovery badly as well. I am more interested in what the self-criticism has been doing for the person. For some, it may have operated as an attempt to get there before anybody else does if I identify every weakness first, perhaps nobody can expose me with it. For others, criticism has become connected with achievement, control, morality or the belief that without relentless internal pressure they will somehow become inadequate. Understanding the function of self-criticism does not require us to endorse its cruelty, but it does allow us to approach it without adding another layer of judgement.

How Therapy Can Reproduce Shame

Therapists need to consider our own participation in shame because psychotherapy does not sit outside these processes. One person enters the room as the professional, carrying theoretical knowledge, clinical language and an implied capacity to interpret what the other person brings. The client can very easily become positioned as the person whose reactions require explanation while the therapist occupies the position of observer. For somebody already organised around the fear that something is wrong with them, therapy can unintentionally provide a sophisticated new vocabulary through which to reach the same conclusion.

We can do this through language. Independence becomes hyper-independence, or vigilance becomes hypervigilance, privacy becomes avoidance, reluctance to trust becomes an attachment difficulty, emotional intensity becomes dysregulation, and an understandable adaptation to a difficult environment becomes a symptom. These concepts can be clinically valuable, but their usefulness should never be assumed simply because they are familiar to therapists. Language is not neutral, the need to remain interested in what our language does to the person sitting opposite us is important, does it allow them to understand themselves with greater context and compassion, or does it leave them believing that there are now even more things wrong with them than they previously realised?

Therapy can also intensify shame when curiosity comes faster than trust has been developed. A therapist may experience a question as clinically appropriate while the client experiences it as exposure, the therapist may interpret silence when somebody simply needs silence, pursue childhood material because a theoretical connection tells us to or become so interested in trauma that the person gradually disappears behind their trauma history. Even empathy can become uncomfortable if it is experienced as pity. None of this means therapists should become afraid of asking questions, or developing formulations or naming patterns. It means that our intention cannot be the only measure of an intervention. We have to remain interested in how it was received, and to be open in how it is received.

Rupture and repair are particularly important because therapists will inevitably get things wrong. We will misunderstand, make assumptions, forget details, respond too quickly, ask something at the wrong moment or fail to recognise the significance of what has just happened. A therapist who needs to maintain the position of always being attuned can create another difficulty because the client may begin protecting the therapist from knowing when something has gone wrong. Repair requires us to tolerate discovering that we have had an impact we did not intend. An apology, where appropriate, does not weaken the therapeutic relationship. For somebody who learned that people with greater power did not acknowledge the impact of their behaviour, it may provide an entirely different relational experience. The client who says that something upset them and encounters curiosity rather than retaliation learns something about relationship. The client who disagrees and discovers that the relationship remains intact learns something. The person who says no to a question and discovers that the boundary is respected learns something. These experiences matter because shame is relational, and what has been learned through relationship may sometimes need to be reconsidered through relationship, and this goes both ways.

When Shame Begins to Lose Its Authority

I am cautious about language suggesting that people need to eliminate shame. Shame belongs to ordinary emotional life and can sometimes tell us something meaningful about our behaviour, relationships and social world. Nor should psychological health be measured by how vulnerable somebody becomes, how much they disclose or how little they care about what other people think. Human beings are relational, and belonging matters, privacy matters, reputation can matter, and there are many circumstances in which being selective about what we reveal is entirely sensible.
The more meaningful change may occur when shame begins to lose some of its authority over someones identity. A person can experience embarrassment without experiencing themselves as embarrassing, make a mistake without becoming a mistake, encounter rejection without automatically concluding that they are inherently rejectable, or recognise that somebody failed to protect or love them without using that failure as evidence that they were not worth protecting or loving. The distinction may appear small when written down, but psychologically it can be enormous because the self is no longer required to absorb every painful relational experience as information about its worth. This is not an easy task to separate the event, the meaning the person puts the event and the understanding of what that now means about them, and what other now think and believe about them.

There may also be a growing capacity to tolerate being known more by another person. This does not mean you need to tell everybody everything. It may mean allowing carefully chosen people to see parts of yourself that were previously protected through silence, competence, humour, perfectionism or self-reliance and discovering that connection can survive that visibility. The person may begin asking for help before reachinga crisis, acknowledging that something hurt them rather than pretending it did not, admitting uncertainty without immediately apologising for it, or receiving care without feeling compelled to repay it straight away or that they are under obligation. These changes can appear ordinary from the outside, yet for somebody whose relationships have been organised around avoiding exposure, they can represent something quite profound.

There is something deeply human underneath all of this. We learn about ourselves through relationships, but relationships are imperfect places in which to learn who we are. The people who first reflected us back to ourselves had histories of their own. They had their own limitations, fears, prejudices, wounds, beliefs and capacities that existed before we arrived. Families and communities added further messages about what was acceptable, what should remain hidden and what kind of person deserved approval. Wider cultures added more again. Some of what we eventually came to believe about ourselves therefore belongs to our own experience, some belongs to relationships, and some belongs to the social world in which those relationships existed. Untangling these strands is considerably more complicated than replacing a negative belief with a positive one.

Perhaps this is why the language of shame can remain silent for so long. It becomes embedded in ordinary ways of living and can hide remarkably well inside competence, accommodation, privacy, humour, achievement, self-reliance and the careful management of what other people are allowed to see. The purpose of understanding shame is not to dismantle everything that helped somebody survive, or is it to reinterpret every strength as evidence that an injury happend. It is to create enough room for the person to consider what they still need to protect themselves, what they may no longer need to carry, and which conclusions about themselves were formed under circumstances that no longer deserve the authority to define them.

For me, this is where the silent language of shame begins to change. It may not happen when somebody finally manages to say, “I am ashamed,” although finding language for an experience can certainly matter. It can happen when an imperfection is allowed to remain an imperfection rather than becoming evidence of a defectiveness, when another person’s rejection can hurt without defining themselfs, when needs can be expressed without feeling humiliation, when privacy becomes a choice rather than something enforced by fear, and when the person can look at their history and recognise that what happened to them, what other people knew about them, what their family could not speak about, and what the wider world taught them to conceal may all be part of their story without any one of those things being entitled to determine who they are.

Writing My Own Story Understanding the Shame I Have Carried

As I continue writing my memoir, I am discovering that writing about my life is very different from remembering it. I might sit down intending to write a particular chapter, only to find myself returning to a memory or an experience that raises questions I had not considered before. Sometimes I become so curious about what is emerging that I put the memoir aside and begin writing an article about the wider human experience contained within that particular part of my life. That is how I came to write about shame. As I have been writing, I have found myself thinking about the different ways shame can become part of a person’s life, and I am beginning to recognise more clearly how those different influences have shaped my own understanding of myself. Some shame develops through our personal experiences, particularly when we have been criticised, humiliated, rejected or made to feel that something about us is unacceptable. Some is carried within families, through the stories that are told, the experiences that remain unspoken and the expectations that are passed from one generation to another. Some is created by the wider society in which we live, through judgements about poverty, bodies, mental health, sexuality, disability, family circumstances and what it means to be considered respectable or successful. These influences are not always easy to separate. What we experience as an intensely private feeling about ourselves may have developed through a combination of what happened to us, the attitudes we encountered growing up and the meanings that were already present within our families and communities.

Writing my memoir is helping me recognise these different influences within my own history. Some of the shame I am uncovering is connected to experiences I lived myself, while some appears to have been inherited through family silences, expectations and ways of responding to experiences that were considered difficult or unacceptable. There are memories I had not necessarily thought about in terms of shame before, including ordinary moments that I would not have considered particularly significant at the time. Yet writing about them has made me more curious about what I understood then, what I felt and what I may have learned about myself through those experiences. I am also becoming more aware of how difficult it can be to distinguish between what we came to believe about ourselves and what other people taught us to believe. An experience that I may once have understood as evidence that something was wrong with me can look different when I consider the circumstances in which it occurred, the expectations that surrounded me and the understanding I had available to me at that particular time in my life. This does not mean that I can now explain every feeling or trace every experience of shame back to a particular event. It means that I am becoming more willing to question meanings I may have carried for years without recognising where they came from.

There is also a fear in telling some of these stories, and I think it is important for me to acknowledge that. Shame can make us want to conceal the very experiences we are trying to understand, and writing a memoir means deciding what I am prepared to share about parts of my life that I may once have felt compelled to keep private. I am conscious of how exposed I may feel when other people read these stories, and of the possibility that experiences I have carried with shame may once again become subject to somebody else’s judgement. There is something particularly difficult about finding the words for an experience privately and then considering what it will mean to allow those words to be read by others. Understanding where shame originated does not mean that its influence simply disappears. I can recognise that something was not mine to feel ashamed of and still experience the fear associated with allowing it to be seen. I am learning to make those decisions as I write, recognising that I can tell my story in my own way and that understanding myself does not require me to disclose every part of my life.
What continues to compel me to write is the possibility that these experiences may help other people recognise something in their own lives. My personal history is not the same as anybody else’s, and I would never want to suggest that my understanding of an experience explains how another person must have felt in similar circumstances. Yet the feelings of shame, the fear of judgement, the need to belong and the ways we learn to conceal parts of ourselves are experiences that many people will recognise. Sometimes reading another person’s story allows us to find language for something we have struggled to explain within our own. It may help us recognise that an experience we have carried privately was shaped by circumstances beyond our control, or that a feeling we have interpreted as evidence of personal inadequacy has been influenced by how we were treated. I cannot know what another person will take from reading my memoir, but I hope that telling my story, including the parts that remain difficult for me to share, may contribute to conversations in which people feel less alone with experiences they have carried in silence.

Exploring my own history is also helping me in my work as a psychotherapist. It reminds me that what a person brings into therapy may have taken years to find words for, and that the shame they carry may be connected to personal experiences, family histories and social circumstances that are not immediately apparent. I find myself listening with an even greater appreciation of how much courage it can take to speak about something that has remained hidden, particularly when the fear of being judged has been reinforced by real experiences of judgement. I am also reminded of the importance of remaining curious about the meaning an experience holds for the person sitting in front of me, rather than assuming that my own understanding of shame gives me an understanding of theirs. My personal reflections can deepen my awareness and inform the questions I ask, but they cannot replace another person’s account of their life. Writing has made me more attentive to the ways shame can exist beneath what is spoken, in the hesitation before somebody answers a question, in the subjects they move away from or in the difficulty they may have accepting that their experiences can be met with compassion rather than criticism.

As I continue with my memoir, I am beginning to understand that writing about shame is not simply an attempt to revisit painful experiences or make sense of the past. It is also an opportunity to examine the meanings I have carried into the present and consider which of them belong to me, which developed through my relationships and which were shaped by the society in which I grew up. Some of those meanings may have influenced how I understood myself for many years, even when I was no longer living within the circumstances in which they first developed. I do not expect writing to resolve every question or remove every feeling of shame, and I am still deciding how much of my story I want to share. What matters to me is that I am beginning to approach parts of my own history with a greater understanding of the person I was, the circumstances in which I was living and the ways I learned to respond to them. If sharing that process encourages somebody else to look at their own experiences with greater curiosity and compassion, then the stories I have been afraid to tell may come to hold a meaning beyond the shame I once attached to them.

When Writing Becomes Difficult

As I read back over this article, I am beginning to understand why I put both it and my memoir aside in June and did not return to them until very recently. At the time, I might have described it as a writing block, a loss of momentum or simply having too many other things to do. There were certainly other demands on my time, but reading these words now, I am curious about whether there was more happening than I recognised. Writing about shame has brought me into contact with memories, feelings and parts of my personal history that I had not fully understood in this way before. Some of what I have written has required me to remain with experiences that I may have spent years trying not to think about too closely. I can see now that putting the writing aside may have given me some distance from material that was difficult to sit with, even though I did not consciously decide that I needed that distance.
It has also made me think differently about what we call a writing block. We often describe it as an inability to find the words, a lack of discipline or difficulty knowing what to write next, but I wonder whether, at times, the difficulty lies in knowing more than we feel ready to put into words. Writing a memoir is not simply a matter of recalling events and arranging them into chapters. It involves deciding what those events meant to us, what we understand about them now and what it might feel like to allow somebody else to read our account of them. When shame is part of that history, writing can bring us close to the very feelings that once made us want to keep an experience hidden. The hesitation may arise before we have consciously recognised what we are afraid of revealing. I do not think every writing block has a deeper psychological meaning, and I would be cautious about interpreting an ordinary period of tiredness, distraction or creative difficulty as evidence of something unresolved. In my own case, though, returning to the memoir and this article has helped me recognise that there may have been an emotional weight to the writing that I had not fully appreciated in June.

What I find particularly interesting is that I have been able to write extensively about other subjects during the months when I could not bring myself back to these pieces. The difficulty was not simply that I had lost the ability or desire to write. It seemed to be connected to what this particular writing was asking of me. As I return to it now, I am beginning to appreciate that I can be committed to telling my story and still feel afraid of what telling it may expose. I can want to understand my own shame while also feeling the familiar pull to move away from it. Recognising that does not mean I need to force myself through every difficult memory or treat each pause as something to overcome. It gives me a different way of understanding the time I spent away from the writing and a little more curiosity about what happens when I find myself unable to continue. I had thought I was putting the article and memoir aside. Reading them again, I can see that I may also have been putting some distance between myself and the shame I was beginning to uncover.

Sometimes the hardest part of telling your story is not remembering what happened, it is confronting the shame that taught us we should never speak about it. And finding the courage to put into words the parts of ourselves we have spent years trying to keep hidden.