How Shame Loses Its Grip– The Courage to Be Known
Written by: Catherine Morrill, LMFT. This is Part 2 in our series: “Shame: From Hiding to Health.”
Have you ever had a breakthrough in therapy or your own self-reflection that suddenly made your struggles make more sense? Maybe you connected a current challenge to experiences from your past and finally understood your reactions. There's relief in understanding yourself, and for a while the shame that you're defective or inadequate begins to soften.
But when old feelings return, many people find themselves wondering:
"What's wrong with me? Why am I still struggling?"
If you've ever asked yourself that question, you're not alone.
If you've felt discouraged because new insight hasn't brought the change you hoped for, it doesn't mean you've failed. Understanding the roots of shame can help us make sense of our struggles, but insight alone is rarely enough to loosen shame's grip.
Insight is an important beginning—but it is rarely the end of the journey.
Psychologist Patricia DeYoung, a leading researcher and clinician on shame, describes four important steps in working through deep shame:
Notice shame.
Name shame.
Share the experience of shame with another person.
Survive being known.
In the first two posts of this series, we explored the work of noticing and naming shame. In this post, we'll focus on the final two steps: sharing our experience with another person and discovering what happens when we risk being known.
Shame is Relational
Shame often grows out of experiences in which our emotions, needs, struggles, or vulnerabilities felt unseen, misunderstood, rejected, or too much for others to handle. Over time, shame can become woven into our sense of who we are.
While insight helps us understand our experience, shame is fundamentally relational and embodied. Lasting change comes through new experiences of connection that gradually reshape how we experience ourselves and others.
In both my personal journey and my work as a therapist, I have found that shame loosens its grip gradually through repeated experiences of connection, understanding, and grace.
Because shame thrives in hiding, we may imagine that one courageous moment of honest confession will be enough to free us from it. While bringing shame into the light is an important step, shame is weakened gradually.
Each time we reveal a little more of ourselves and find a way to stay connected to ourselves and another person, shame loses a little of its power.
This is where the real work begins.
Self-Protection
We long to be known and loved. Yet when it comes to the parts of ourselves we experience as shameful, we instinctively hide. Ironically, the very thing shame tells us to avoid—allowing ourselves to be known—is what begins to loosen its grip.
We've developed countless ways of protecting ourselves, hoping to avoid the pain of rejection, exposure, or disconnection. We may withdraw, become self-critical, intellectualize our feelings, keep others at a distance, or hide behind perfectionism and people-pleasing. Sometimes shame appears as irritation, criticism, or contempt toward the very people who are trying to help.
Being known takes courage because working through shame is rarely straightforward. It involves gradually bringing the vulnerable parts of ourselves into a relationship and discovering that the relationship can survive them. There may be moments when we want to hide, change the subject, push someone away, or insist that we don't need anyone. There may be moments when we feel misunderstood or exposed. The work of loosening shame's grip often involves returning to these moments rather than escaping them.
Safe Enough Relationships
A healing relationship is one in which both the shame and the ways we protect ourselves from shame can be understood with compassion. It is a relationship where difficult feelings can be tolerated without being dismissed, condemned, or overwhelmed.
Over time, as shame is named and shared, and as its accompanying fears, defenses, and vulnerabilities are held within a safe-enough relationship, something begins to change. The experiences that once felt unbearable become more manageable. The parts of ourselves we feared would lead to rejection become less frightening to reveal.
Fred Rogers captured this beautifully when he wrote:
"Anything that's human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. … The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone."
For some, a sibling, spouse or close friend can be this trusted person with whom shame becomes less overwhelming. For others, a therapist is the one who finally helps identify, hold and process the deep shame.
Nervous System Activation
When deep, chronic shame is activated, objectively non-emergency situations can evoke fight, flight, or freeze responses.
A small criticism may feel devastating. A difficult conversation may feel intolerable. Conflict, disappointment, vulnerability, or disapproval can trigger intense emotional or physical reactions that seem disproportionate to the circumstances.
The nervous system responds to emotional exposure as though it were danger.
The Self and Relationships Grow Stronger
DeYoung's last step—surviving the experience—may be the most powerful. We gradually discover that we can be seen in our struggles, fears, imperfections, and vulnerabilities and remain connected to others. The relationship endures. We survive being known.
With repetition, these experiences begin to shape us at a deeper level. Instead of expecting rejection, humiliation, or disconnection, our nervous system gradually learns that vulnerability can be met with understanding and care. What once triggered intense anxiety, defensiveness, collapse, or withdrawal becomes more tolerable. We may still feel shame, but we become less overwhelmed by it and more able to remain present with ourselves and others.
As shame is acknowledged and tolerated rather than avoided, we develop greater compassion for ourselves, greater freedom in our relationships, and a deeper confidence that our worth is not dependent on how well we hide our struggles. In the presence of compassion, understanding, and grace, shame begins to lose its power to define us.
The goal is not to become a person who never experiences shame. The goal is to become someone who can recognize shame when it appears, respond to it with compassion, and remain connected to themselves and others.
As we have these experiences again and again, shame gradually loses its grip. We become less afraid of being seen, less dependent on hiding, and more able to bring our whole selves into relationship. The self grows stronger—not because shame disappears, but because it no longer gets the final word.
Acknowledgment: Many of the ideas in this article are drawn from the work of psychologist Patricia DeYoung, particularly her book Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: Healing Right Brain Relational Trauma.
In our next post, we'll explore how we relate with ourselves — and how it can either reinforce shame or help loosen its grip.
