The sentence in your own mouth

Very few people think of themselves as someone who shames others. The word suggests a bully, and you're not one. You love your kids. You're decent to your staff. So I'll set out the ordinary forms, the ones decent people use, and you can see which are familiar.

• Labels. "You're so lazy." "Don't be such a baby." "You're hopeless with money."
• The question that isn't one. "What is wrong with you?" "How many times do I have to tell you?"
• Comparison. "Your brother never gave us this trouble." "Sarah's team manages to hit their numbers."
• "Always" and "never". "You never think about anyone else." These are labels dressed as observations.
• Correction in front of others. Telling someone off at the dinner table, in the meeting, in the group chat, at the school gate.
• The story told in their hearing. "You won't believe what this one did yesterday."
• The face. The eye-roll, the sigh, the look exchanged with someone else over their head.
• The archive. Bringing up a mistake from three years ago that was supposedly finished.
• Withdrawal of warmth. Going cold until they've grovelled enough.
• The joke with a target, followed by "can't you take a joke?"
• Online, the quote-post with a sneer, where the point is for others to see.

None of these needs a raised voice. Some of the most effective shaming is done quietly, by people with good manners.

There's one more form, and people rarely count it. It's what you say about yourself in front of others. A mother who stands at the mirror and calls herself fat and disgusting is shaming herself in her daughter's hearing. So is a father who calls himself an idiot every time he drops a screw. The children are watching a daily demonstration of how a person gets spoken to after a mistake, and I'd expect them to pick it up along with everything else.

If several are familiar, the next part matters more than the list. Think back to the last time you used one, and look at the few seconds before it.

Here are some examples of what people find there. Your toddler has a screaming fit in the supermarket and people are looking. What you feel, under the irritation, is exposed as a parent who can't control her child. That's a flush. "Stop it, you're embarrassing me, what's the matter with you?" comes next.

Or a member of your team makes an error, and your own boss spots it in a meeting and asks you about it. You feel incompetent in front of your manager. An hour later you're telling the team member that he's careless, with the office door open.

Or your partner mentions, at dinner with friends, that you still haven't fixed the gutter. You feel small. On the way home you tell her she's a nag, just like her mother.

In each case you were handed a dose of shame, and you passed it to the nearest person who couldn't hand it back. The toddler wasn't trying to humiliate you. She's two. The label she got had very little to do with her and a great deal to do with the people watching you.

I'm not saying this is the only source. Sometimes people shame because they're tired and it's quick. Sometimes it's the only method of correction they were ever shown, and that's the second thing to notice. The sentences are inherited. People are often startled to hear a parent's exact phrase come out of their own mouth, with the same stress on the same words. We pick up the phrases of correction in childhood the way we pick up an accent, by hearing them daily, long before we could judge them. Under pressure we speak the way we were spoken to.

This isn't a chapter about blaming your parents. They were handed their sentences too, often in harder times and with rougher delivery, and many of them softened what they got before passing it to you. Explaining where a habit came from is different from excusing it, and it's your mouth now. Knowing the origin does help with one thing. It removes the idea that your shaming expresses your real opinion of the people you love. Mostly it expresses your own flush, in borrowed words.

For the next few days, try to catch the moment before. You're looking for the flush, your own sense of being exposed, judged or made to look bad, in the seconds before you say something about what another person is. When you catch it in time, the simplest course is to say nothing about the person. Deal with the milk, the error or the gutter, and leave the rest unsaid. Chapter 10 covers what to say instead. For now, silence about someone's character is always available, and it's enough.