Old shame

Some shame is decades old. It's the sentence from chapter 1, or a memory attached to it. It might be something that was said to you, or done to you, or something you did at nineteen that you've never told anyone. Most days you don't think about it, until something brushes against it.

The natural thing to do with shame like this is to hide it, and hiding feels like safety. If nobody knows, nobody can judge.

Research on secrets suggests the hiding costs more than it seems to. Michael Slepian and colleagues, across a series of studies, found that the harm of keeping a secret doesn't come mainly from the effort of concealing it in conversation. It comes from how often your mind goes back to it when you're alone. In a later set of studies covering several thousand secrets, the more shame people felt about a secret, the more their minds returned to it. Guilt didn't have that effect. So you've hidden the thing from everyone except the one person it hurts, and that person keeps going back to look at it.

There's a second cost. Something you've never said aloud has never been tested. Your only opinion on it is the one you formed at the time, often as a child, often under the influence of the person who shamed you. It's been kept out of sight for thirty years at full strength, with nothing to contradict it.

If what you're carrying is tied to abuse, assault or other trauma, read the last paragraph of this chapter before you try anything else in it.

For everything else, the main suggestion of this chapter is to tell one person.

Choose carefully. You want someone who's been trustworthy with smaller things, who doesn't gossip, and who doesn't rush to fix or to judge. It shouldn't be the person who shamed you, or someone who might use it in an argument. It could be a good friend, a sibling you're close to, a partner, a counsellor or a minister. You don't need to make a ceremony of it. "There's something I've never told anyone, and I'd like to tell you. I don't need advice."

What happens next is usually one of two things, and this is my observation, not a research finding. Often the person says some version of "me too", and you learn that the thing you thought put you outside the human race is fairly common. Otherwise they're simply not horrified. They listen, they're sorry it happened, and they go on treating you exactly as before. Either way, the belief at the centre of the shame, that anyone who knew would turn away, has been tested against a real person and has failed.

Now and then it goes badly. The person flinches, or lectures, or makes it about themselves. That tells you that you picked the wrong listener. It tells you nothing new about the thing you told them. A counsellor is a safer second try than another friend, because listening without judging is the job.

If your shame is about a plain fact of who you are, as described in chapter 3, the people most likely to say "me too" are those who share it. Finding some of them, in person or online, does the same work as telling one person, many times over.

There's a written exercise that helps as well, especially with a sentence from childhood. Put the sentence at the top of a page, and answer some plain questions underneath. Who said it? How old were they, and how old were you? What was going on in their life that year, with money, work, their marriage or their health? What had happened just before they said it? What would a stranger in the room have seen?

People are often struck by the ages. You were eight. An eight-year-old who forgets her PE kit isn't revealing her character. And the speaker was thirty-one, with three children and a husband out of work, or was a teacher with thirty-five in the class and a headteacher breathing down her neck. Read chapter 5 again with that person in mind. Quite likely they were feeling a flush of their own, and you were the nearest safe place to put it. You've carried the sentence as a fact about you. At the moment it was spoken, it was mostly information about them.

That explains it without excusing it. Nothing here requires you to forgive anyone, or confront anyone, or feel warmly towards them. Some readers will want to talk to the person. Many won't, or can't. The exercise works either way, because its purpose is to move the sentence out of the category of things you know and into the category of things someone once said.

Some readers will have a further layer, which is shame about the shame. "It was thirty years ago. Other people had it far worse. I should be over this by now. I'm just too sensitive." Look at that last sentence and you'll see it's a label, and quite possibly one you were given at the time, by the same person, when you cried. The length of time a sentence has lasted tells you how early it arrived and how often it was repeated. It doesn't say anything about weakness in you. Nobody decides how long a thing learned at seven will stay learned.

I'm not going to promise that the voice stops. For most people I don't think it does, entirely. What changes is that you recognise it. The glass breaks, the voice says "clumsy, as usual", and a second thought arrives behind it. "That's Dad's sentence." It loses its authority well before it loses its volume. Over months, many people find it comes less often, though I can't tell you it will for you.

An important limit. If your shame is tied to abuse, assault or other trauma, please don't try to work through it alone with a notebook. That kind of shame is heavy, and it's often attached to things that were never your responsibility in any way. A therapist who works with trauma is the right company for it. There are also therapies built for people with high levels of shame and self-criticism. Compassion-focused therapy, developed by Paul Gilbert, is one. An early pilot study was small, with six patients and no comparison group, and the results were encouraging. A doctor is a reasonable place to start asking.