This episode compares and contrasts two different experiences I had with shame recently, each affecting me, my body, and my reactions in distinct ways. It helped me understand the difference between the natural feeling of personal shame and the feeling of being shamed by another person. Shame and shaming are two very different things, and the degree of guilt involved, as in the degree of personal responsibility we take for the shame, makes a big impact on how that shame affects us and how we react.
In my experience, personal shame manifests as an unpleasant feeling in my gut, like a black hole sucking me inward. It makes me feel like I want to disappear into myself in order to avoid the pain of others seeing my mistakes.
Shaming, on the other hand, seems to activate my threat response before I’m even conscious of being in shame at all. This adds another layer of complexity on top of the pure pain of shame, as our threat response shuts off our prefrontal cortex, the logic center of the brain, leaving us to the whims of our archaic limbic system. Our threat response pressures us to enact one of several inauthentic survival strategies that are inevitably outside our values and tend to make matters even worse, including fight, flight, freeze, please, and denial.
I found that the gut pain of pure personal shame was perhaps more unpleasant physically than my threat response, but actually easier to manage strategically. Though I had an almost comical urge to look down and avoid eye contact, it felt like I had greater access to my prefrontal cortex and was able to make more rational decisions about how I wanted to react to the situation with integrity. In this particular case, I decided to apologize to the people involved and be vulnerably honest about why I thought I had made the mistake in the first place. This strategy worked out well.
In the shaming situation, however, when I was caught in my threat response, I noticed that my negativity bias was going crazy filling in all the blanks of the story that weren’t yet clear to me. All I could imagine was all the ways that I may have screwed up, and all the ways that everyone might be judging me, rejecting me, or laughing at me.
Fortunately, I was able to lean into my flight reflex in order to buy some time and space. Instead of just ruminating, as is often the case when in flight mode, I managed to wait until my threat response died down and then made the rational decision to ask for clarity from the people involved in order to counteract my negativity bias, or what Brené Brown would call my “shitty first draft”.
Ultimately, as I had logically suspected all along (though my threat response willfully ignored it), the whole shaming situation turned out to be a big misunderstanding. The upside is that it made for a great learning experience!
