"If it hurts this much, it must be true"

An example. A man in his fifties gives a presentation at work, and it goes fine. Afterwards a colleague says, lightly, "bit disorganised, that". For the rest of the day he can't concentrate. By evening he's sure everyone in the room saw a fraud. He knows this is out of proportion. He also can't shake the thought that a remark couldn't hurt this much unless it had hit something real.

That thought deserves a proper look, because it holds a lot of old shame in place. The reasoning goes that false accusations bounce off and true ones sting. This one stings, so it must be true.

Start with why being judged hurts at all. The usual explanation is that humans have always lived in groups and depended on them, and a person who was thrown out didn't last long. Whatever the origin, we have a fast, physical reaction to signs that others think less of us. I'll call it the flush. It's heat in the face, a drop in the stomach and a wish to be elsewhere. There's measurement behind this. A review of 208 laboratory studies found that the tasks most reliably raising the stress hormone cortisol were those where people could be judged negatively by others, especially when they couldn't control the outcome. Hard tasks without that threat of judgment did much less.

Now look at what sets the flush off. It responds to the threat of being judged, and it has no way of checking whether the judgment is correct. It fires when a stranger sneers at your coat. It fires harder when the speaker matters to you, and hardest of all when the speaker was a parent and you were small.

A child can't weigh the source. An adult who's called stupid by a tired, frightened or drunk person can, on a good day, think "that's about them". A seven-year-old can't. The adults are the authority on everything, from what's for dinner to whether the sun will come up. When one of them says "you're lazy", the child files it with the other facts. If it's said often, it stops being something she was told and becomes something she knows. That's how another person's sentence ends up sounding like your own voice in an empty kitchen.

So the strength of the sting measures how much the speaker mattered, how young you were, and how often it was said. None of those is accuracy. The remark about the presentation hurt the man in the example because it touched a sentence laid down forty years earlier by someone else. It tells him about his history. It tells him nothing about his presentation.

That deals with the pain. It leaves the question of whether the label might be true anyway. Perhaps you really are lazy, or selfish, or too much.

Look at what a label is. It's a summary with the evidence taken out. Somebody saw a few events, such as homework not done and a room not tidied, and compressed them into one word about your character. The word then travels without the events. A label is like a bill that shows a total and no items. You can't check it, you can't dispute any line, and you can't tell what you're being charged for.

This makes a label useless even when there's something behind it. Take "lazy". A child who doesn't do homework may be tired, or frightened of getting it wrong, or unable to see the board, or bored, or unclear about what was set. Each of those has a different remedy. "Lazy" hides all of them and offers no remedy at all. It sounds like an explanation, and it explains nothing.

This chapter's exercise needs a pen. Take the label you've carried longest and write it at the top of a page. Underneath, write the events it was built from, as a stranger standing in the room would have seen them. Use no character words. "I left my homework until Sunday night, most weeks, when I was eleven." "I cried at my uncle's funeral and couldn't stop." "I forgot to collect my brother, once."

Two things tend to happen. The list is shorter and more ordinary than the label suggested. And the items turn out to be the kind of thing that happens in most families, to most people, without anyone drawing a conclusion about their whole nature.

Sometimes the list comes out empty, and that's worth knowing too. A good deal of shaming was never about anything you did. Children get shamed for their weight, their accent, their family's money, a stammer, a disability, their skin, being gay, or being the unsporty one in a sporty family. There's no event to find because there wasn't one. You were being told that a plain fact about you was a fault. In that case there's no information to keep. The whole message was label, and all of it can go back. That's easier to write than to do, particularly when the contempt came from many people over many years, and chapter 12 has more to say about it.

There's an honest objection. Sometimes the list isn't ordinary. Sometimes you did something that hurt a person badly, and the events on the page are ugly. A label still won't help you. Guilt will, because it's the right tool for a bad act and it has a job attached. You apologise if you can, you repair what can be repaired, and you work out what you'll do differently. "I did a harmful thing and I'm putting it right" is a hard sentence to live with. It's also far more useful than "I'm a terrible person", which asks nothing of you except suffering.

So the practice is the same either way. Keep the information and hand back the label. If there's an event in the criticism, it's yours to deal with. The verdict on your character was never evidence of anything, except perhaps the state of the person who delivered it.