Shame was historically the first, and one of the toughest subjects, in my research. Jungian analysts metaphorically referred to shame as the swampland of the soul. It’s a powerful emotion, a universal one, and so devastating that no one wants to talk about it.

And the less we talk about it, the more we have it – and the more it defines our individual and collective behavior.

Originally coming into this topic from the field of psychiatry, where I consistently observed the connection of shame to cognitive distortions of major depression, including its chronic, subclinical forms, I then came to study shame through the lens of culture, group dynamics, and power relations.

Most of my findings about shame ran counter to our general cultural notions about it. What blows up my mind is that although we now have about 50 years of global shame research, key insights about it aren’t widely discussed because of the topic taboo, although they have massive implications for the way we live, work, manage, parent, and exercise our civil rights.

Shame and Guilt

Shame is fundamentally different from guilt. These two emotions are widely confused in the general culture, all the while they’re not only different in nature and neurobiology but also lead to radically different behavioral outcomes.

The difference is best understood like this: shame is I am bad while guilt is I did a bad thing. In other words, shame is a focus on self, and guilt as a focus on behavior. To enhance and expand this contrast: shame drives thinking I am bad because I did that bad thing, while guilt says, I am a good person, and it’s not good that I did that bad thing.

The ability to separate ourselves as a whole from our situational behavior defines the difference between shame and guilt. And here’s why this difference has massive implications.

Shame, feeling like you’re a bad person, means feeling unworthy of connection with others. Given the hardwired social nature of our species, that connection remains our basic human need. A threat to it, real or imaginary, is processed by the brain as a threat to survival on a very primal, evolutionary ancient neural level. As fMRI studies show, when we’re in shame the limbic system (a.k.a. the reptilian brain) takes over the control of our behavior the same way it does when we’re trying to escape a predator, a fire, or a threat. Things like critical thinking, strategic thinking, or contextual thinking go offline. That’s also why shame has clear physiological symptoms – increased heartbeat, tingling in the armpits, sweating, flushing, and also feeling small and worthless and wanting to hide. We all know this feeling – except that in order to protect ourselves, many bury this awareness.

What do we do when we’re in shame? There’s a widespread cultural sentiment that shame serves like a moral compass – that it keeps people in line and holds them back from destructive behaviors. Research provides zero evidence of this, and massive evidence of the opposite. Shame is highly correlated with aggression, violence, self-harm, depression, isolation, addiction, suicide, and terrorism.

Shame never leads to genuine apologies, reckoning with our mistakes, making amends and learning from them. Because shame, in fact, corrodes the very part of us that believes we’re capable of growth and change. In shame, all we do is deny, blame, and rationalize – because unlike guilt, it doesn’t make us think we made a mistake. It makes us think we are a mistake.

Guilt, while also feeling uncomfortable, sets us clear on that difference. It makes us align our behavior with who we want to be. Guilt, not shame, is what drives accountability: owning a mistake, making a genuine and appropriate apology, making amends, and embedding learnings from the mistake to prevent it from happening again. Guilt, as a higher cognitive function, doesn’t happen in the reptilian brain. It co-operates with critical thinking, empathy, curiosity and kindness both towards ourselves and others. Guilt doesn’t call our self-worth into question. Instead, it operates from the solid sense of self-worth, and, by aligning our behavior with our values, reinforces that sense in healthy, adaptive ways.

Shame resilience

Provided that shame is so devastating and doesn’t have any positive outcomes, individually or collectively, the question becomes: can we develop any skills to become resistant to it?

The answer is: no, but in reality that’s not what we really need in the first place.

Resistance to shame means no longer caring about losing connection to others. As long as you aren’t a sociopath, that’s not a realistic goal. Even if it were attainable, you wouldn’t want to: because then you’d also become unable to feel love, intimacy, and belonging. Just like shame, all these things we crave for are underpinned by vulnerability, and you cannot selectively numb vulnerability. As long as you remain human, with the perfectly health human needs to be loved, recognized, and belonging, shame will remain a possibility in your life.

The good news is, shame resilience is what you need instead. It’s a teachable and learnable cognitive-emotional skillsset that allows us to not be sabotaged by shame when it washes over us. Whether it’s about our competencies, our appearance, our identity, or our particular mistake, shame can still happen, but we will move through it with dignity and keep our behavior aligned with our values, rather than defined by shame. Shame resilience is the opposite of bottling it up, or working it out on others – rather it’s recognizing it, looking it in the eye, and saying: “I know who you are. I hear what you’re saying about who I am. And I’m not buying it anymore.”

Shame resilience consists of four core skills:

• recognizing shame when it happens. This means having the courage to explore your shame triggers, both individual (coming from family, childhood and personal experiences)and identity-related (coming from sociocultural expectations around gender, race, class etc.) It also involves knowing the physiological symptoms of shame and being on the lookout for behavioral patterns it commonly drives (like denial, blame, and rationalization).
• practicing critical awareness. This skill enables us to zoom out and see our shaming experience in the context. It means critically thinking on the following questions: Are we the only ones struggling? What systems create this struggle? Where do they come from, how do they enforce their messages, what impact does it have, and who benefits from it?
• reaching out to people you trust. Shame makes us feel lonely, unworthy, and disconnected, so one of the most counterintuitive things is sharing our shame story with someone else. Considering this possibility along may trigger a new wave of shame for us: What will they think of me? Shame means being vulnerable, and vulnerability is weakness. I should be tough, and tough people don’t do shame. Tragically, if you keep your shame in silence and secrecy and douse it with self-judgment, it festers and proliferates exponentially. Exposing your shame means being excruciatingly vulnerable – so it’s not worth doing with everybody. But when you do it with people who, as you know from experience, respond with empathy, shame has no chance to survive.
• speaking shame. It means calling shame by its name when talk about it, instead of using euphemisms and misidentifiers like embarrassment, guilt, or perfectionism, which mean different, although related, things. Shame cannot stand being spoken, and when you speak it, it loses its oppressive power.

Shame and empathy

As mentioned in the previous section, genuine empathy from one person is a powerful antidote to shame in another. But the relationship between shame and empathy has another dimension, practically important everywhere from families to schools to organizations to entire society.

Within one person, shame and empathy are mutually exclusive. In other words, you cannot be feeling shame and exercise empathy towards others at the same time, for at least two reasons. First, shame is a tightly self-focused emotion controlling your cognition. Other people’s feelings and needs just fall out of your cognitive horizons when you’re in shame. Second, empathy can only operate from the platform of solid self-worth. When your self-worth sinks, even temporarily during a shame attack, empathy gets blocked by definition.

The crucial implication is: if your goal to see others empathize, don’t use shame to bang them over the head. That’s what’s happening so often in conversations around equality and diversity: far too many people still think that shame is a social justice tool. That’s where name-calling, hate speeches and offensive memes against those supporting sexism, white supremacy, and homophobia emerge. This only serves to offload emotion and move everybody further away from critical thinking.

Another implication is: even if you frame your arguments in the most generous and non-shaming way, but you see another person respond with shame-driven behaviors – denial, blame, and rationalization – walk away from this conversation instead of trying to steer it back into constructive course. Your attempts to address another person’s shame will fail once it’s been triggered.

What helps here though is to inoculate people against its attacks. For example, if you want to embed empathy as a practiced value into your corporate culture, shame resilience workshops are an imperative, not an option. Or, if you’re doing diversity work in your school or organization, then leading meaningful conversations about privilege and its inherent relation to shame in the culture of meritocracy before exploring the particular topics of gender, sexuality, or race will minimize the risk of shame sabotaging these conversations.

In the context of an organization, shame resilience skills translate into the culture of accountability that creates agility in employees, fosters trust in customers, and increases long-term stability and growth. By contrast, a workplace culture defined by collective shame implies cover-ups, complicity, favoritism, corruption, using fear and control as management tools. As a corporate leader, that’s the last thing you want to see – and if you see it, you yourself need shame resilience to address and manage it, as opposed to denying it and letting it grow.

Shame and scarcity

Scarcity is a cognitive counterpart to shame as an emotion. It’s the tape of thoughts that keeps itself on repeat in your head, revolving around the words not enough.

I’m not good enough. I’m not intelligent enough. I’m not brave enough. Not pretty/handsome enough. Not young/old enough. Not fresh/experienced enough. Not educated enough. Not creative enough. Not strong enough.

The relevance of those tapes can very based on your personal experiences and gender, race, cultural background, but the idea holds the same: you don’t have enough of what it takes to be seen as worthy.

When shame is chronic and unacknowledged, scarcity starts cognitively projecting from ourselves to how we see the world. There’s not enough money. I never get enough sleep. There’s not enough opportunity for everybody to succeed.

This aspect of scarcity doesn’t take any evidence into account, because it’s emotionally underpinned. Behaviorally, it translates into greed, disengagement, withholding and abusing power. On the level of corporations and governments, scarcity-based thinking becomes the law of the jungle: a vision of the world where for a privileged minority to be rich, the majority has to be suffering and surviving.

One of the most important qualities of effective social justice leaders is noticing and debunking ideas of scarcity, especially nostalgic ones. Strategically, when we operate from the belief that the world has enough opportunity for everyone, we end up with systems that are not only fairer and more equal, but also more prosperous.

In corporations, watching out for and addressing scarcity means, among other things, challenging the traditional paradigm of power, i.e. power over, and replacing it with power with and power among, all the while maintaining the hierarchy of accountability. This way, we make sure that decision-making tables have enough seats for everybody to make a contribution; that multiple perspectives get aggregated to come up with best solutions; that innovation and creativity are fostered instead of perfectionism; that resilience in the face of failure becomes part of the culture.