281 - The Shame Game 1: Origins
Pinpointing origins
Shame is an emotion that trips us up a lot, and as such psychologists have been studying it for years, amassing a multitude of theories on its evolutionary development. Many of these researchers theorize that humans evolved to feel shame as a way to survive and preserve our relationships, and in turn keep our place in the group.
“[Shame is] the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”
Brene Brown
Studies have shown that the rate at which a community devalues a person correlates with how much shame the person feels. In the words of lead research author Daniel Sznycer, “The function of pain is to prevent us from damaging our own tissue. The function of shame is to prevent us from damaging our social relationships, or to motivate us to repair them.”
Additionally, it’s been theorized that children evolved to feel shame as a way to discourage abandonment by caregivers or other adults in the group.
Real life shame
Some external sources of shaming are usually the following:
Parents/family of origin.
Religion.
Past relationships.
Culture and society’s instillation of shame relating to differences in things like gender, race, sexuality, identity, etc.
Americans in particular often feel shame for feeling shame.
Internally, there are also many, many sources of shame:
Our inner critic.
Embarrassment or humiliation.
Feeling judged.
Feeling as though there’s something wrong with you.
Feeling disrespected.
Anxiety.
Feeling stuck or frozen.
Powerlessness.
Awkwardness.
Sometimes shame can “bind” to other emotions, like anger, sadness, fear, etc. to lower their charge.
Shame in relationships
Most commonly, our response to shame is one of four things:
Attacking ourselves: self criticism, perfection, feeling as though you deserve it or that you’re bad/toxic.
Attacking others: blame, outward critique, violence, contempt.
Denial: numbing, disassociating, self-medicating, telling yourself it wasn’t that bad or it could be worse.
Withdrawal: pulling away, mistrust, secrecy.
In relationships, shame can always be triggered by the internal and external factors mentioned, but it can also be caused in situations where we feel “dropped” or temporarily abandoned by a partner, such as:
They didn’t live up to our expectations.
They abandoned or neglected us in a time of need.
They didn’t receive a bid from us.
They rejected us in some way.
They are different from us in some way.
If something like this happens, then we may react the same ways outlined above, but also potentially by shaming ourselves/seeing ourselves as wrong or inadequate, or shaming the other person and making them wrong. And in a relationship, we often shame our partners through neglect, dismissal of their feelings, discounting their perspective, toxic criticism, or blame.
Stay tuned for next week’s episode, part 2 of our series on shame!
Transcript
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Jase: This episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we are talking about shame in relationships. In this two-parter, in this part one, we're going to be taking a deep dive into why humans evolved to feel shame in the first place. What does it actually look like? How does it show up as well as some of the theories about why we've developed that and how it can be good for us and also harmful for us.
Then, next week in part two, we're going to go on to talk specifically about how that shows up in non-traditional relationships like polyamory, as well as some concrete ways to counteract the shame that we level at ourselves and some healthy ways of applying and using shame in our lives.
Dedeker: Is it just me or is shame like real hot these days? Maybe it's just the circles that--
Jase: Is it?
Dedeker: Yes, it might just be the circles that I run in. I feel like, within the more therapeutic self-help circles, shame is starting to become a hot thing, but maybe I'm biased.
Emily: It just reminds me of the Steve McQueen movie with Magneto and Carey Mulligan about--
Jase: Right, about the affair or whatever?
Emily: I actually have no idea what happened.
Jase: I never saw that.
Emily: I didn't see the film, but it's called Shame.
Dedeker: By Magneto, do you mean Ian McKellen?
Emily: No, I don't.
Dedeker: You mean James McAvoy?
Emily: No, that's also not Magneto that's Professor X.
Dedeker: Sorry.
Emily: She is--
Dedeker: What's his name?
Jase: Which Magneto do you mean?
Emily: The more recent Magneto.
Emily: Wait, give me a second. Good Lord. Yes, Michael Fassbender.
Jase: Okay, right. Michael Fassbender.
Jase: Got you. Off to a good start. I feel ashamed about that.
Dedeker: I feel ashamed too.
Emily: I feel ashamed that I forgot what it is about.
Dedeker: Well, this is a good segue for me to ask. How does shame show up in your day to day life?
Emily: We're just going to dive right in here. Yes, I think I've talked about it before. I think the biggest way that shame tends to show up in my life is that I compare myself to the closest people in my life often. That tends to be the two of you, my partner, my mom, and my two best friends, and James and Arizona. The fact that all of you are like the smartest people on the planet, and I feel very inadequate in comparison in terms of my mental abilities. However, for whatever reason, y'all are around me and like me, so I guess that means something.
Dedeker: I guess.
Jase: Got you.
Emily: That tends to be the thing that makes me feel shame on a pretty consistent, if not daily basis.
Dedeker: Great. Great, good.
Jase: Right.
Dedeker: Great. How about you, Jase?
Emily: Great. So great.
Jase: I know. Well, Dedeker, when you were talking about how shame is trending or it's hot right now, I'm like, "I've been way ahead of this thing."
Jase: I think for me, it shows up specifically in never forgiving myself for things in the past that I've done wrong that I think I was wrong about, even if I didn't think I was wrong at the time. That's one way it shows up for me a lot, and I think that other ways, one that as maybe you've related, but I feel like I've been getting better about this one. That's that, for some reason, from the time I was pretty young, I had this sense that if you ever were wrong, like wrong in answering something or if you answered a question in class or you stated some facts that then turned out to be wrong, that that was something to be super ashamed of, and so you always had to be very, very careful of that or find ways to avoid that possibility.
Anyway, and that's something that I noticed, though, years ago of like, "I feel like a disproportionate fear of that ever happening," which is weird and not very productive for my growth as a person. That's something I've actively worked on for a while of just letting go of that and just realizing like, "Hey, actually that doesn't have any bearing on anything," so there's my long answer. What about you?
Dedeker: Wow.
Emily: What about you?
Dedeker: I think for me, I have a big complex of feeling ashamed around anything that's not perfect within myself.
Jase: Within yourself.
Dedeker: Yes. Well, as you're talking, it brought back a bunch of childhood memories for me, is that from the time I was very young, I felt a lot of shame about not being an adult, if that sounds weird.
Emily: Interesting.
Dedeker: I was mostly raised around adults. Outside of going to school, I didn't have a lot of like other kids my age around. Historically, it just carried a lot of shame about being a child actually, and not being mature enough and not knowing things, and not being able to do things, and not being able to be like the adults around me. Now that's changed into being ashamed of any time that I was younger, or less experienced or had a less evolved opinion, or didn't have skills that are as good as they are now. Then I know that 10 years in the future, I'm going to be ashamed of the skills that I have now, so it feels-- Yes, shame is the same as a doozy. It's a doozy.
Jase: It's a doozy. Yes. Clearly, in picking this topic, we've picked something that's very relevant in all of our own lives, as well as something that we see for a lot of other people too.
Dedeker: Yes. Let's dive right in and talk about how are we going to define shame for the purposes of this episode.
Emily: A lot of people are familiar with Brené Brown's definition of shame, and so this is what it is, "It's the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging." That's, to me, a really good definition, that is what it feels like. It's almost also like a thing that you put away at the back of your mind, it's always there, but you try to not look at it as much as possible because it simply exists and you don't want to talk about it or think about it as much as you can, but it still always manifests in a variety of ways in your life.
Dedeker: It's like the skeleton in the closet emotionally in some way. It's occurring to me that maybe it's Brené Brown's fault why shame is so hot right now.
Emily: Oh, of course.
Dedeker: She did a TED Talk three years ago and then put out a couple of books.
Jase: I see. Right.
Emily: Well, there's another one, a clinical psychology professor Gershen Kaufman said that; "Feeling shame is the result of a breaking of the interpersonal bridge between ourselves and another." See, that's very specific shame about another person or about perhaps something that you did to another person or an interaction that you had with another person that caused you shame after the fact.
Dedeker: Well, what I see in these two definitions that seem to be a point in common is that it's connected to belonging in a particular way, belonging in love, that it's connected to the social relationships around you. My experience of shame, is I feel like it's something that both occurs because there's some disconnect or some break in some relationship around you. Then also, causes you to want to pull away from those relationships as well. That's a little bit of a-- Whatever the fancy Latin name is for that state that eats its own tail.
Jase: I didn't realize that, a fancy Latin name, that's cool. I think that these two definitions are also getting at something that we're going to discuss later, as we go on in this episode too, is teasing apart different aspects of shame, maybe even giving different names to some things that you could call shame. I think that's worth keeping in mind, that in one definition, it's just about feeling that we're flawed and feeling pain about that, and the other one, it's more specific to the breaking of an interpersonal bridge between ourselves and another, or perhaps a group of others also.
In looking at this, one of the things we wanted just to figure out for this episode is where did shame come from at all? Why do we feel this at all? There's actually been a lot of research into the phenomenon of shame, and there are a variety of theories that point toward it being a fundamental emotion that humans evolved for survival, ultimately, for the preservation of our relationships and our place in the group, which I think it's been a while since we talked about this on the show, but with a lot of evolutionary psychology, that's the idea is that as humans, we don't live very well on our own. Like a lot of our strength as a species comes from our community working together and not just from having cool fangs or armor or claws or anything like that, like we're fairly squishy and helpless. We evolved to be very, very good at having these cohesive groups and working together, and so the idea that shame evolved to help facilitate that.
Emily: You two talked about apologies last week and I wasn't here for that episode, but it made me think about how sometimes when you want an apology from someone, you also want them to feel shame. I know that I've been in situations where I'm like, "Well, okay, you're saying you apologize, but it doesn't seem like you really understand what happened or that you hurt me or something," and it's like, you almost want that person to feel shame, which now I feel shame for ever feeling that way.
It's interesting how those two can coexist at the same time. I'm assuming we'll talk about that as the show goes on a little bit more.
Dedeker: Yes. That's true. That makes sense. Thinking back to our apology episode, that for some people a big part of receiving an apology is hearing regret, and regret seems to have its basis tied in feeling shame, to a certain extent. As far as studying this, I mean, evo psych I always try to take with a grain of salt, but I read about this research study that wasn't just like modeled on how we think we may have behaved as early human beings, but actually, did actual research and surveying in extent societies today. Specifically, there was a group of researchers in 2016 and they came from University of Montreal, UC Santa Barbara among a number of others.
They interviewed about 900 people from around the world, and they focused on 15 smaller societies. From what I saw on their map, mostly societies that were not in North America. Pretty much everywhere else, but in places like the Andes in Ecuador, in small farming and fishing communities in Japan, village in a remote part of Siberia, among just all these different societies.
They asked participants about different hypothetically shameful situations that one might be in. As in someone's committed a robbery or an infidelity, or they are lazy or they're stingy and greedy, things like that. The participants were asked to rate on a scale how shameful they think that someone outside of them might feel about being in that situation. It's like, yes, your neighbor is super lazy. How ashamed do you think they feel about that? They were also asked how much did they think that the whole community itself might devalue that person for being lazy or for being stingy or whatever.
Then they were also asked how ashamed would you yourself feel if you were in that shameful situation or circumstance, if you were the one who committed a robbery, or you were lazy, or stingy, or stuff like that.
Emily: They found that the amount of community devalues a person is strongly commensurate with how much shame that person feels. It's important here to highlight that this is different from other negative emotions that are sometimes attached to shame, like things like sadness or anger or anxiety. I definitely feel a lot of anxiety attached to my shame, and I think that that tends to make me more anxious about speaking sometimes, especially to very intelligent people around me. The amount of anxiety or sadness that you might feel as an individual does not necessarily correlate to the same amount of negative fallout that you might get from your community.
Jase: I know. It's hard to even wrap my brain around exactly what this is saying here. It's essentially that in measuring this question of how much shame would you feel and also how much would you devalue someone else, and then taking all those answers in aggregate and looking at it and going, "Oh, the amount you feel you would be ashamed is pretty much directly tied to how much you would also devalue that person in your community," versus if it was like, how sad would you be if you did this thing, or how angry would you be, or how much anxiety would you feel? That those didn't really have a correlation.
That's interesting too, because when I try to think about that, I'm like, what is shame? What does shame feel like? Because I feel like it's all those things. It's like, Oh, there might be sadness. There might be anger. There might be anxiety. There might be fear. That's interesting too, of like, how do you tease apart this one thing that is shame, because apparently, we can, if you ask us what's shame versus what's those, we can give you a different answer as humans, but that'd be really hard to explain what that difference is.
Emily: Shame involves all of those things, it seems like, and that's a fundamental part of what shame is, is that it can involve so many different things. Okay, Daniel Sznycer?
Dedeker: This is four consonants in a row in this person's name. I'm sorry about that, Emily.
Emily: Yes, S-Z-N-Y-C-E-R, Sznycer says that the function of pain is to prevent us from damaging our own tissue, and the function of shame is to prevent us from damaging our social relationships or to motivate us to repair them. This person who said this was the lead author of the paper based on this study that we're talking about here. He's saying that it's similar to pain, that it's also like an inherent response within us that occurs to try to help us to motivate us to repair a relationship.
Dedeker: It's like the way that pain helps us protect ourselves. It's a signal that's like, "Hey, you better not overdo it or you better slow down because this is painful and you don't want to hurt yourself more," that they theorize that shame as that same function. Instead of protecting your physical body, it's like protecting your relationships and protecting the connections that you have with other people.
Jase: This just reminded me of something that I heard a while back that's a theory about why we blush. Specifically, like why do we blush when we're lying? Why do we have tells when we're lying? Basically, the line of questioning goes, okay, if we start from the assumption that like, if we're going to lie, getting caught for it's bad. Why would we evolve to do a thing that gives away if we might be lying or hiding something? The argument like this one for shame is that perhaps we evolved that specifically so we would get caught sooner before we've done more damage to our standing in the community.
The idea being, if you tell a little lie and you get caught right away, it's like, "Oh gosh, yes, sorry. I was keeping that from you," as opposed to, you have no tells and you get away with it and you get away with it. It grows, and lies grow on themselves to this point where, "Oh my gosh, you've been lying to me for so long. How can I ever trust you?" You're kicked out of the society and now you're dead.
It reminds me of that same idea of like, it might seem to us to be counterproductive as something to evolve, but maybe actually is very helpful to us to keep us in a group, to keep people from wanting to kick us out eventually. There's also some theories that shame evolved in children, specifically, to avoid abandonment or harm by their caregivers, where that's their parents or people-
Emily: Really resonated.
Dedeker: I watched, recently-- It's a very long explanation why, and I'm not going to give it, but YouTube sometimes serves me up like video recordings of sociology and psychology experiments with children, especially with just to demonstrate brain development and stuff like that. Yes, they talk about from a very, very early age, children learn to monitor their behavior specifically to avoid adult anger, even when the anger is not directed at them. Shame is part of that response, it's part of that survival response.
Dedeker: Well, and again, that's like with the apology thing, like I know over many years of me being a child around my mother, if I didn't clean my room or if I did something wrong in any way, I felt as though I was expected to feel shame about it, and then, therefore, love would be given back to me in some way. I was like, yes, that definitely makes a lot of sense in given context about children and how they relate to their families.
Jase: A little bit later, we're going to talk about the difference between toxic shame and healthy shame, which sometimes is also described as toxic shame being shame and healthy shame being guilt, and trying to apply this. Just so you know, we're going to get into that later. If that's something that's jumped out for you of like, "Hey, this seems like there's a few different things going on." Yes, you're right.
We're also going to talk a little bit about how some studies have shown different ways that guilt versus shame have maybe given us different adaptations or maladaptations to our lives as humans.
Emily: Let's first talk about how all of this plays out in real life. Dedeker, you wanted to give it a little bit of a shout out here.
Dedeker: Yes. I am in the middle of doing training with the Center for Healing Shame based in Berkeley. They do a lot of specific workshops, more for therapeutic professionals, people who are therapists, counselors, coaches, things like that, specifically, to give them resources for healing shame and working through shame with clients. However, they do have workshops and stuff that are open to laypeople, as it were, and we'll talk a little bit more about that at the end of the episode.
Emily: Awesome. Let's talk about how all of this shame can play out in real life. We have a lot of external sources of shaming, the one that we just talked about, which is our parents or our family of origin, that definitely can come out in so many ways throughout our lives and throughout fights that we have with our partners. For example, disagreements that we have with our friends, challenges that we have internally, all of that can happen because of our family of origin, and the way in which our parents treated us while we were growing up.
This is something that I don't have to deal with, but I know the two of you have had to deal with it is the shame that comes from religion, the concept of original sin from Christianity, things like that. I don't know if you two want to speak on that a little bit more.
Jase: This one, I think really varies depending on how you were brought up religiously. It is tied to this idea that maybe you should feel a certain amount of guilt or shame just for existing at all.
Emily: That's where the original sin--
Dedeker: It's this idea of from the moment you're born, you are sinful.
Jase: You're inherently bad.
Emily: You suck.
Dedeker: Inherently and your entire life's work is to try to undo that, essentially, become more perfect and less sinful in order to get closer to God or in order to get into heaven.
Emily: Jeez, what's the point of getting on the earth at all?
Dedeker: I think even if you weren't necessarily raised religiously or Christian, that is like, this is still so pervasive especially in Western culture.
Jase: This is also not something limited to Christianity specifically. That's just the one that we have personal experience with. Other external sources of shaming is things like Emily, you touched on this a little bit, but past relationships. Perhaps there was something that came up as an issue in that relationship that your partner shamed you for. Gloria Jackson Nefertiti talks about that a little bit about shame coming from a partner, specifically, rather than this internally generated shame.
There's also like religion, our culture in our society at large, often instills shame often related to being different, whether that's about gender, or race, or sexuality, or identity, or relationship style, or any number of things. This idea that-- I remember once I heard a reverence sarcastic story trying to point this out, is that as a human being, as a member of society, it's your obligation to always have your shit together at every moment and to always be totally confident in what you're doing and to always be correct and never make mistakes. If you can't do those things, at least have the dignity to be ashamed of that. It's just really pointing out like that's how we're treated a little bit. How we treat ourselves, I guess, and each other.
Dedeker: That leads to my next point, which is that I think Americans, in particular, often feel shame about feeling ashamed at any given point because I think there is that expectation of, you got to be number one, and you got to be somebody. You got to be independent, and you got to be your own voice, and stand out from the crowd and do your own thing, and fight for the American dream, and stuff like that.
Admitting to any failure or feeling the shame of any failure or any difference is also seen as it's this weird catch-22, of like, "Well, you should feel ashamed about that, but no, you should also be confident. You shouldn't really be sinking into shame about that." I think it's a really toxic push, pull that a lot of people find themselves caught in of like I feel shame about certain things, but I'm also not really allowed to acknowledge that shame because to acknowledge the fact that I have shame is a shameful thing. Then the spiral just goes down and down and down.
Jase: We keep coming back to this dragon eating its tail or a snake eating its tail.
Dedeker: Yes, I looked it up.
Emily: I said it to you too.
Jase: What is it? Ouroboros.
Dedeker: Ouroboros.
Emily: Ouroboros
Dedeker: It's Greek actually. Okay.
Emily: Egyptian iconography. That's a cool name. There's a lot of different nuances surrounding how shame can feel in our bodies and just in our heads, and where they originate from and how they manifest in our psyche. We've talked about some of these things, but one thing is the inner critic that we have a little voice in the back of your head telling you that you suck, or that you can't do X, Y, and Z thing or comparing you to other people.
Then embarrassment or humiliation when something that you do makes you super embarrassed. I don't know. You say something on a podcast and you're like, "Shit, why did I say that? Then it's out there for the whole world to hear forever. Feeling judged by others, definitely. Especially, I think when that other is somebody that you're close to, whether it'd be your partner or your best friends or your parents, something along those lines, thinking that there's something wrong with me.
That's definitely something that I felt before. There's just something inherently wrong with me. I think a lot of people who are in non-traditional relationships feel this way before they start learning more about that non-traditional relationship. I know all of us felt various parts of that, and you talk about it a lot, Dedeker, like maybe there's something wrong with me. Then feeling disrespected by another person.
Dedeker: Yes, this is an interesting one. I think because Americans and some people, in particular, often feel shame about feeling shame, that sometimes we either lose track of what shame even feels like at all in the first place, if we're so used to just tamping it down. Emily, like you, said about shoving it to the back, and it's there, but we don't want to look at it, and we don't want to acknowledge it. That sometimes your body and your emotions still find a way of it coming out.
Just sometimes just slightly different words. That can be something you're talking about with the inner critic, like perfectionism, often is based in the shame of not being perfect. Then perfectionism is a response to that and same with this disrespected one. This is one that someone who doesn't feel very comfortable with the idea of admitting to being ashamed will admit to feeling disrespected, which is, to me, it feels like just another word for feeling shame. It's like there's these subtle little nuances of emotion, and a feeling, and of even language that surround shame, especially the shame that feels so intense that we can't even really look at it head-on.
Jase: That's a way to put it outside of yourself and to be on the attack about it. It's like, "Oh, I'm being disrespected," not, "I feel this thing about myself." Also, like Emily mentioned earlier, it can show up as the feeling of anxiety. I think that often comes up as like, "I don't want something to happen that I might feel shame about, so I'm going to feel anxious about it," or it can be, "I feel anxious because I feel ashamed and I'm afraid someone's going to find out what a terrible person I am." Maybe like imposter syndrome sometimes too.
It can also show up as just feeling frozen, just feeling stuck, or frozen, or similarly, maybe feeling powerless, or just feeling awkwardness, or uncomfortableness. I've often described that as just feeling like I don't feel comfortable in my own skin in a literal sense, not just as a metaphor, but literally, physically feel like uncomfortable.
Dedeker: I know for myself personally, shame often shows up as feeling stuck or feeling like I've hit a dead-end in some way. Sometimes it feels like the gas and brake are being pushed at the same time, to a certain extent. As I've started to learn more about shame, it's really opened up a lot of stuff where, for instance, if I have a task on my to-do list that keeps getting put off and keeps getting put off and keeps getting put off, or I keep forgetting about or I keep on not doing and I start to feel stuck on, that's become a cue for me of like, "I wonder if I'm feeling any shame related to this," and pretty much 9 times out of 10 I am.
It's a weird shame of like, I feel ashamed preemptively that I can't do this right, or I feel ashamed because I've already done this really poorly and I don't think I could do it again, that there's always somebody little bit of shame in there when I'm feeling stuck or frozen in some particular way.
Emily: God, that reminds me of practicing, like, if I have a particularly difficult voice lesson and my voice teacher is like, "Well, you need to practice more. You're clearly doing poorly with that or x, y, and z thing." Then I'll feel anxiety about it or stuck. Then it makes me not want to practice. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy of that I suck again in the lesson or whatever. I’ve never been good about practicing. Thank you for showing me why, Dedeker, well done.
Dedeker: Let me tell you that I've also started doing this with my clients as well. As soon as someone says like, I feel stuck, or I feel frozen about this, I'll start to gently start asking about shame. Most of the time, it's the elephant in the room. It's been a big factor influencing the situation. There's a particular psychologist, Sylvan Tompkins, who describes shame as a "binding" emotion. He made the argument that shame binds to other emotions, other hotter emotions like anger or sadness or fear in order to lower their charge. His thinking behind this was that, if you have anger or sadness or some very intense emotion comes up, shame helps to dampen it again to help preserve your relationships so that you don't fly off the handle in a rage or just collapse in a crying jag.
That shame made it in theory, a little bit safer to have this emotion because it helped lower the affect of it or lower the heat of it. Which I think is interesting, I've definitely seen that, I've definitely experienced that. Personally, I've also seen the opposite of this where sometimes if an emotion comes up, that you just cannot shake or if you feel like you're having an emotional response that's not necessarily appropriate to the scope of what's happening, A, that could be a clue there's maybe some trauma behind that.
B, I've also seen it sometimes that implies that there's a layer of shame here also that's adding fuel to the fire of making the anger more unbearable, or making the fear more unbearable, or making the sadness just more unbearable and untenable and harder to deal with. That's at least what I've seen, but I've probably not done as much research or written as many books as Silvan Tomkins has, so I don't know if I can-
Emily: Nothing to feel shameful about. That's interesting that sometimes, I know in relationships where I've been with fairly volatile people that the emotion of anger comes first and then maybe hours later, the emotion of shame comes. Yes, the anger is at the forefront but then later, they'll come back and be like, "I'm really sorry, I should have acted better, X, Y and Z thing," then that's the-- I don't know, that's interesting that it can be an afterthought and then in some ways, that can be at the forefront.
Dedeker: I've also heard theories that like really the first thing you feel is shame, that moment when you feel disrespected or not heard or disappointed in some way, that the first thing you feel is shame, but then the secondary emotion that helps to cover up the shame is the anger or the sadness or anxiety.
Emily: Sometimes that pushes through more--
Dedeker: Yes, I don't know. I think because there's so many theories around this, it just boils down to the fact that this is such a personal experience for people the way this emotion comes up for them and how they deal with it.
Jase: Yes, it's interesting. This whole conversation about the fact that shame maybe shows up as all these different emotions and that it's not always clear on how each person experiences or experiences it, or where exactly it comes from, it reminds me a lot of the conversations we've had about jealousy. That's also similarly this emotion that when you really start to tease it apart, it's like, "Oh, actually, maybe this isn't just one thing" but it's attached to a lot of other things.
I would say probably, also very much attached to shame. That's interesting too and that might be something to explore in the future, this relationship.
Dedeker: We'll talk about a little bit later when we're talking about specifically how shame shows up in non-traditional relationships, like polyamorous relationships or non-monogamous relationships. Before we do that, we're going to take a moment to talk about support for this week's episode.
All right, so let's talk about what are our most common responses to shame? What are the things that tend to happen in our feelings, in our bodies, in our actions that help us avoid actually feeling the discomfort of shame and actually looking at it?
Jase: Thinking back about that analogy of shame being the equivalent to our social well being as pain is to our physical well being. The point of pain is so that you stop doing the thing or you change your behavior somehow, right? Like you take your hand off the hot thing or you don't put so much pressure on that foot or whatever it is. It's interesting thinking about it this way is like, what's the equivalent of that from a social standpoint of shame?
It's interesting because I think there's some good ways we can do it and some not so good ways.
Dedeker: Definitely. I think a really common not so good way that we respond to shame is by attacking ourselves, maybe needlessly. That's things like really intense or really harsh self-criticism, perfectionism--
Emily: Ton, perfectionism is you, but self-criticism is me.
Dedeker: Different sides of the same coin or maybe the same side of the same coin, I don't know. Thinking things like I deserve this or I deserve this bad thing that happened or just I myself, I am inherently bad or toxic as a person. Now, the other side of this is that we can also respond to shame by choosing to go outwards and attack others. That's things like blame or pointing the finger outward, critique, really harsh outward critique, contempt, or even violence as well.
Jase: Or we can go the route of denial, which is often associated with that shutting down or freezing like we talked about before, which is numbing, disassociating, or self-medicating like drinking, or smoking, or something like that. Or just trying to almost ignore it, like, "It wasn't that bad or it could be worse."
I feel like sometimes, we actually add to our shame or to other people's shame by them comparing it to other people's situations. It's like, "Oh well, at least you don't have it as bad as these other people or this other person." While maybe that can be helpful sometimes for gaining perspective, it also is denying that shame, which then you can sometimes feel shame about the fact that you even felt that way at all and the whole cycle starts again.
Or another one is withdrawing, which is pulling away from society, just going into isolation or mistrusting people or keeping everything a lot more secret like, "Oh, well, if I don't tell anyone about my weird sexual fantasies, then no one can shame me for it. I'm just going to keep that to myself and keep it secret."
Emily: I thought of my mom like not having great relationships throughout her life and how now she lives alone. She feels very comfortable with that, and I think that that is the thing but I wonder if any of that comes from shame over not being great at romantic relationships in her life. I wonder how that manifests in a variety of people who just choose ultimately, "Hey, it's better if I'm just alone."
Jase: I feel like there's a lot of other factors involved in that, though.
Emily: A lot of things to unpack there, yes.
Jase: I think there's also something to be said for getting away from this idea that you can only be happy in a relationship and actually being comfortable on your own, so I don't know, I don't know. I think it really depends on the circumstance there.
Dedeker: Like you said, many factors, shame could be a part of that too. There's people that I know who decide to be single or unpartnered and decide for very, I guess, self-fulfilling reasons, and it feels good for them and it feels right for them. I also know a lot of people where it's like, I've just had such terrible experience and burned so many times that it's easier to just pull away and isolate and not trust anybody than to try again.
Jase: To then go back to this analogy of shame being like pain, there's also some more constructive ways, and we're going to cover this more in the second part of this where we really talk about healthy ways of dealing with shame and addressing it. I think it's worth talking about here too that shame isn't necessarily always a bad thing. Again, maybe you'll call this guilt instead of shame, but other things we might do is to try to immediately make amends with whoever it is that-- if we did something wrong, trying to make amends for it,or apologizing as I talked about in the last episode.
Or it could be trying to find relationships where you're not shamed for that, moving away from the source of pain and toward ones that aren't. There's positive things that can happen as well, so I don't want us to get too caught up in like, "We're always going to do bad things when we feel this." Because as we talked about, this is something that we evolved to have to preserve our social relationships, so it's worth just acknowledging that.
Dedeker: I definitely want to make sure that people don't take away this idea of like, "Oh, shame, shame equals bad. Okay, don't feel shame." Just don't feel it.
Jase: And now I'm ashamed that I feel it.
Emily: Yes, you're probably going to feel it at some point.
Jase: Right.
Emily: Yes, and that's okay. Before we wrap up this part one of this episode series here on shame, we want to talk about how this plays out in relationships. Shame can really be triggered by all of the external factors that we just mentioned, but they can also be triggered in relationships whenever we feel dropped by a partner, like a partner doesn't live up to what we expect from them in various ways.
Yes, things like, we expected something from them, they didn't live up to those expectations, and so then we feel shame surrounding that. Or they abandon us or they neglected us at a time of need. This can happen a lot in relationships. We're going to talk about non-traditional relationships next time, but that's what came to mind immediately, is that "I can't go on to say it with you because my primary partner or whatever has something that they need, so I'm going to drop you for them in this moment.
They didn't receive a bid from us. We've talked about bids, even if it's a small thing, or if it's something like I want to have sex right now, or please watch this YouTube video or whatever, and then they ignore that bid. Or they rejected us in other ways or they're different from us in a very distinct way. There are problems that people tend to have that are just perpetual problems, but Gottman's talk about this and that they're not going to ever necessarily be solved or fixed, and you have to learn to live with them in various ways, if you're going to choose to be with that partner. Those things can include things like punctuality, or sex, or cleanliness, or any variety of factors that just perhaps are not going to be solved within your relationship, but you can feel shame surrounding those.
Jase: I definitely feel like sex is a big one for that. Especially, I think in a partnership where you didn't know all this upfront, I guess, and I think I would say it's impossible to know every single thing about someone's sexual feelings upfront, like at the beginning of the relationship because that's always evolving. It's always developing, there's lots of layers there, but this, as far as the source of shame, I've at least experienced this in lives of people that I know and in my own, when you're getting into relationships, with this idea also related to shame of like, we can't talk about sex. Then over time, as we're now feeling ashamed about not having as good a sex life as we think that we should, then trying to talk about it, bumping up against that shame we felt that kept us from talking about it in the first place.
Emily: Or maybe not as good of a sex life as we once did have.
Jase: Yes, absolutely. That too, because that's a normal part of moving from NRE to later is that the sex life will change, but then yes, we put meaning behind it and this shame then can do that. I think the same is true with the other stuff we mentioned, like punctuality or cleanliness or things that might not reveal themselves till later, but I just wanted to mention sex specifically because it's one that--
Emily: There's a lot of shame surrounding sex in general in our society.
Jase: Yes. We don't feel the same shame talking about punctuality as we do about sex. I would say maybe money would be the other one that there's a lot of shame connected to even talking about it at all. That can sometimes cause like an extra level.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely. When something like this happens and we feel dropped by a partner in some way, when we feel neglected, or abandoned, or some micro rejection, or become aware of the fact that they have this extreme difference from us, the shame that arises from that it can manifest in of those like common responses that we talked about, like denial, withdrawal, attacking others, attacking self, self-critique, things like that.
In relationships specifically, it often results in either, A, either we shame ourselves, we set ourselves as wrong and inadequate, or, B, we shame the other person and we make them wrong. So we can use sex or money or any of those things as an example. If I have an extreme difference in the kind of sex that I like to have, that's different from my partner's, very often what you'll see is either I'll make the choice to be like, "Oh, there's something wrong with me. I need to adjust myself sexually or I need to make some change in how I approach sex or I need to get over my sexual hangups or whatever it is."
Or it's very common to see the tactic of, "Oh, I'm going to shame my partner for being weird, and gross, and different, and why do they want this thing? Why do they want sex in this particular way? That's not normal and they're the ones who are wrong about this. Same thing with money, same thing with punctuality, same thing with cleanliness. Like you can see it all across the board.
Jase: That it can go either direction too. Like with sex, it can be as simple as feeling like the other person, "I should make them ashamed." Not that you think this so logically, but, "I should make them feel ashamed for not wanting as much sex as I do, because that means they don't love me or they don't care about this relationship."
Or it could be the opposite of like, "They should feel shame about being so sexually motivated because that's not what love is about and that's not the core of our relationship." It's so easy with any of those things, with money about the way that we spend it or save it, is another like real common example of that, of, either way, you can shame it. It's not just like one person's the outlier and the other shames them for not being normal. Especially for sex and money, there are things that, because we don't talk about, I think it's easier to then shame either way that we're already sensitive to, because it's something we already feel shame about.
Dedeker: In relationships, it feels dang easy to shame a partner, I find. It's just so dang easy to do it. It can happen on a scale. Like you said, Jase, it's not always this hyper logical like, "I'm going to shame this person for this." That it can be like very, very subtle ways. It can show up in the ways that we ourselves were shamed as children or from other partners, that often, we pass that on, again, in sometimes very small ways or sometimes very large, obvious ways.
We can shame our partners through neglect, through dismissing their feelings. This is a huge one. This is a huge one that shows up all the time by dismissing their feelings, by saying like, "Oh, were you really--"
Emily: It's almost like gaslighting.
Dedeker: Yes, sometimes it can start to approach gaslighting. We've talked about this on past episodes, that it can even come from a good intended place, a well-intended place of like, "I'm trying to reassure my partner by telling them like, "Oh, no, no, you don't need to be upset. You don't need to be sad about this. I'm here. It's okay. You should know that I'm here. You should know that I'm supporting you. You really don't need to be worried." Sometimes that can come across as just being dismissed, like not actually sitting with your partner's feelings and receiving them, but just straight up dismissing them, and then that can engender a feeling of shame even when you didn't intend for that to be the result.
Can include behaviors like discounting their perspective by claiming like, "No, I'm the one who understands how that fight went down. No, you're not remembering it correctly." It could be things like toxic criticism, like we've covered in previous episodes, or just straight up blame as well.
Jase: Just hearing you go through this list, in my mind, I was taking a little trip down memory lane, of all sorts of old relationships and things where these things have come up, often in little ways, but that would then maybe build up over time, of just more and more of a little thing adds up to something bigger, or sometimes being just outright gaming for something, like-- Oh gosh. I'm scared to even think of concrete examples right now. Just knowing that all of these things have absolutely shown up in relationships of mine in the past.
Emily: I feel like the big ones sometimes are dismissal of someone's feelings or discounting their perspective. Those are two really big ones, especially when you are feeling particularly defensive in the middle of a high octane moment in your fighting or in your relationship, about anything. Deflecting seems to be a big thing for humans wanting to make that pain or that shame go away, and so, instead, you're going to discount someone else and how they felt or what their perspective on an issue was.
That's a good reason to halt, or to take a breath. or to take a moment and let those emotions subside before you really go there, but it can be difficult to do in the moment.
Jase: Yes, absolutely. I think it's worth noting the fact that, usually, you're not doing this intentionally, I would say most of the time, you're not, and most of the time your partner's probably not, which is always one of those things that jumps out to me as like, this is a thing really worth spending some time learning about and thinking about, because we're so blind to it before we notice it. Then once we start to notice it, it's like, "Oh, gosh, there it was," and then the next step is, "Can I get good enough to notice it as it's happening so that we can short circuit that cycle and stop that ouroboros from keep on chomping.
Emily: Eating themself.
Dedeker: From chomping its little tippy tail. Anyway, this is a huge topic, and we don't have the time to necessarily cover the full breadth of this topic today. That's why we are bringing you a two-parter. Next week when we tackle part two of talking about shame in relationships, we're going to be talking about specifically how shame shows up in polyamorous and other nontraditional relationships.
We're going to be talking about what healthy shame might look like versus unhealthy shame or toxic shame. We're going to be talking about counter shaming, so specific things that you can do to help counteract shame. We're also going to be talking about healthy shaming, which I hope is an intriguing topic to you all listening. It's definitely an intriguing topic to me and I can't wait to talk about it.