Four things people do with shame

Shame is hard to stay in. It's one of the most unpleasant feelings there is, and people get out of it as fast as they can. The psychiatrist Donald Nathanson described four exits. Later researchers built a questionnaire around them and found that the four did show up as separate patterns. I'll give them plain names.

Hiding. You leave, or you go quiet, or you stop answering messages. You skip the reunion. You don't put your hand up again that term, or ever.

Turning on yourself. You join in with the attack. "I'm such an idiot, I always do this." It has a logic to it. If you punish yourself hard enough, perhaps others won't need to, and at least you're on the side of the people judging.

Covering it over. You change how you feel without touching the cause, with a drink, a joke, a shopping trip, three hours of extra work, or a boast. From the outside this one often doesn't look like shame at all. It can look like confidence. Relentless achievement can be this exit too. Some people cover an old sense of being worthless with a long list of things that prove otherwise, and find the list never gets long enough.

Turning on someone else. You find fault with another person, fast. The one who criticised you is an idiot. Your partner made you late. The child who embarrassed you in the shop is a brat.

Here's an example of all four from one event. Four people are each told by a manager, in front of the team, that their report was sloppy. The first says nothing for the rest of the meeting and eats lunch alone. The second spends the evening listing every mistake she's made since she joined. The third goes to the pub and is very funny about the manager. The fourth goes home and tears into his teenage son about the state of his bedroom.

Most of us have a favourite and use all four. You'll probably recognise yours quickly. If not, think of the last three times you felt the flush and what you did in the next hour.

Each exit works for a few minutes, which is why we keep using them. None of them touches the event. The report is still sloppy, if it was. None of them settles the feeling either. They postpone it, and the first three deepen it, because hiding, self-attack and numbing each give you something new to be ashamed of.

The fourth exit needs the closest look, because the rest of the book turns on it.

It works like this. Shame says the defective person in the room is you, and that's close to unbearable. If the defective person could be somebody else, the feeling would lift. So the mind goes looking, and it's fast and not fussy. Within a second or two you're angry, and anger feels much better than shame. Shame makes you small and anger makes you big. You're no longer the one in the wrong. You're the one pointing.

The research on this is consistent. In one early study, Tangney and colleagues found that people prone to shame were also more prone to anger, resentment and suspicion, and to blaming others when things went wrong. People prone to guilt weren't. Later work by the same group looked at how shame connects to aggression. People prone to shame weren't more aggressive across the board. They were more aggressive to the extent that they blamed others, which makes blaming the link between the two.

Look at who receives it. The fourth man in the example didn't tear into his manager. He tore into his son. Shame that gets turned outward tends to run downhill, towards whoever is safest to attack. That might be a child, a junior colleague, a partner who'll put up with it, or a stranger on the internet. It usually arrives in the form it was received. He was called sloppy in front of others, so his son is called a slob with the door open and his sister listening.

The son now has a flush of his own and four exits to choose from.

That's the mechanism I mean by handing it on. Most shaming is done by people who feel small in that moment and have found a way of feeling bigger. Few of them feel superior while they do it. It moves through a family or an office like a debt that nobody pays and everybody passes to someone weaker.

This is uncomfortable if you recognise yourself in it. It's also good news of a practical kind. If your shaming of others starts with your own flush, then the flush is a warning you can learn to read, and you'll get it a second or two before the sentence. Chapter 10 builds on that.