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!