We’re delving deep into the roots of shame and how to address it
I’d always thought of shame as that awful face-burning feeling when you’re caught doing something wrong. But in his book, The Unshaming Way, David Bedrick describes something far harder to contend with – a phenomenon so embedded in our psyche that it is almost imperceptible.
“Most shame exists in people without them even knowing it,” David tells me on a video call from his home in the US. I nod in agreement, because I can attest to this: it wasn’t until my mid-30s that my queerness crept out of the darkness asking to be acknowledged.
For some people, shame may stem from a specific event or traumatic incident, but it can also be tied to personal aspects of ourselves, and, as David points out, societal conditioning can force us to mask certain parts of identity. The confusing nature of shame means that you often feel proud of how well you keep those aspects hidden. You may even be rewarded in the form of emotional validation, physical safety, or career success. But nevertheless, the shame is still there, silently convincing you that parts of you are unacceptable.
This, David argues, is the paradox that keeps so many of us stuck: the shame itself is shameful, making healing tricky to access.
Why does shame matter?
Over time, unaddressed shame has been linked with anxiety, mood instability, depression, and even a reluctance to seek help. Not only can shame lead to substance abuse, but the addiction itself then becomes shrouded in shame, making healing an essential component of recovery, as noted in PLOS One in 2022.
Another study, published in 2021 in the Journal of Nursing Scholarships, focusing on ageing adults, found that shame around physical disease can trigger defensive responses, isolation, hostility, depressive symptoms, and a lack of resilience.
But knowing that shame is hidden in plain sight, how do we recognise it?
Searching for shame
David suggests gently asking yourself a simple question: “What part of me do I want to get rid of?”
No doubt you’ll have at least one thing that comes to mind – whether it’s your eating habits, angry outbursts, lack of confidence, or propensity to procrastinate. Research shows that shame is commonly associated with a wide spectrum of concerns, from having psoriasis or Parkinson’s disease, to living in poverty, or even having a menstrual cycle.
Try paying attention to your ‘should’ statements, e.g. ‘I should be more organised.’ ‘I should handle stress better.’
When you catch this way of thinking, you’ve found your inner critic. David encourages ‘amplifying’ the voice, speaking it out loud in order to witness the intensity of it. When you do, you’ll see exactly how shame manifests in your head, demonstrating that shame is more than just a feeling; it’s a lens of self-perception.
Cleaning the lens of shame
Once you connect with that internal critic, you open up the route to healing, because you’ve identified a voice that has hurt you in the past. Most likely, it’s a parent, teacher, or other authority figure who didn’t offer compassion when you were experiencing some sort of hurt.
And because shame is created, or deepened, when someone’s pain is dismissed, denied, ignored, or blamed on the victim, responding with a compassionate internal witness becomes healing in itself, shifting the narrative from ‘I am broken’ to ‘I was hurt, and this is how I’m coping.’
You can become your own compassionate witness by simply allowing your emotional experience to exist, without trying to fix it. For example, when I walk into a gay bar and I hear the inner critic saying I don’t belong there, I remind myself that I’m welcome, that it’s OK to be a little nervous, and I’m doing great.
Another key shift is to acknowledge your distress as a result of that inner critic. E.g. instead of saying, ‘I’m really lazy today,’ say, ‘My inner critic is giving me such a hard time today.’ This subtle tweak helps minimise shame, and acknowledges the hurt you’re feeling.
Importantly, letting go of shame doesn’t mean allowing yourself to act on every impulse just because you’ve acknowledged the validity of your emotions. “Let’s say you’re a single mum, and you’re going to lose your job if you shout back at your horrible boss,” David says. “You probably can’t act on the feeling, but know inside yourself that there’s a loud voice that knows you were mistreated.”
This stops the emotions turning into self-criticism, halting shame before it comes embedded. You’re still in a tough spot, but you’re not thinking there’s something fundamentally wrong with you.
Somatic approach to shaming
Shame can also be addressed by connecting with what David calls the ‘intelligent wisdom’ held in the body. Take his work with a woman whose eating disorder caused throat tension. To explore this body sensation, David asked her to squeeze her hands around his arm as if it were her throat. “She showed a lot of power in that moment, a lot of strength,” he recalls. That simple, intuitive gesture helped her connect with something she’d been suppressing – a strength that then became key to her long-term healing.
This kind of somatic therapy is commonly used to treat trauma by focusing on internal sensations as a way to complete psychological and physiological defensive responses, as noted in a 2021 literature review in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology. Working with a trauma-informed somatic practitioner is recommended here, in order to decode the body’s wisdom safely.
For me, the somatic element of David’s work has been particularly effective. One exercise he offers is to think of a quality of yours that you would like to get rid of. Name the quality and your judgement about it. Then, without overthinking, allow your hand to make a gesture to represent the feeling. In the same way that you amplified the inner critic, now amplify the gesture. Exaggerate it, make it bigger, and be playful with the expression of it.
Often, in that weird hand movement there is a clear and powerful message that is asking to be heard. I did this exercise in relation to my LGBTQIA+ identity, and found myself stretching both arms to the sky, trying to take up as much space as possible – the complete opposite to what my internal critic would like me to do. The intelligent wisdom was: I want to exist as big and boldly as I can; I want to openly be myself.
The path to ‘unshaming’ is a deeply personal one that benefits from a combination of brave self-reflection and connection to the body. It’s not an overnight process, but can I say with confidence that when we stop trying to fix the parts of ourselves we’ve learned to be ashamed of, and listen closely, we can finally hear what they’ve been trying to tell us all along.
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