The Psychology of Shame
A Cautionary Tale: Mrs. Jekyll and Drunken Hyde
Guilt and Shame: It’s how we’ve made it to the top of the food chain and it’s how we’ve landed on the moon. And it’ll be how we cure cancer and colonize extraterrestrial worlds.
The Story
Once upon a time, there was a young woman who mixed work and play and often drank away the day. She was Dr. Jekyll by day and Mr. Hyde by night.
Hard working and respected, smart and generous. But reckless, erratic, impulsive, and – all too often – inebriated. Ambitious, but unhinged.
Just as the original story, she, like Jekyll, drank a magical elixir. A potion of sorts. One that granted her greatest, albeit most evil, of desires.
To act without consequence. To live without guilt, unbridled by the stifling shackles of society.
Let the ol’ id run loose and keep the ego and superego completely detached. Escape reality, lose the ability to make sound judgements. A perfect recipe for actions without consequences.
Except this story, unlike Hyde’s, is NOT a work of fiction.
And the main character will face some dire consequences. And the other star of this saga goes by the name of Shame. With a Grammy-Award winning cameo by Guilt.
Where the story truly begins and ends is hard to say. But, for the sake of time, let’s just start somewhere in the middle.
In Medias Res
This is the part where the main character (let’s just call her Belligerent Imbecile) is awoken at 6:30a.m one otherwise lovely mid-May morning…
Awoken by a stranger, surrounded by more strangers, who’d broken into a locked room where Belligerent Imbecile had passed out the night before – er, that morning, technically.
A LOCKED ROOM INSIDE HER OFFICE. Yes, her place of employment.
She is found by security and custodial staff, locked in a tiny room, inside the place where she works for a living.
Classy.
And that’s not the icing on the cake.
The icing on the cake is that the paramedics are also here with a stretcher for her because she’s unresponsive.
And I hope you like icing, because there’s plenty to go around yet…
When she finally comes-to, she has to answer a string of embarrassing questions:
“What is your name? Do you know where you are? What’s the last thing you remember? Are you sure you want to decline medical treatment? What about the rape test kit? Can we call anyone to come get you?”
I’d like to say it was so long ago that I barely remember those early morning details.
But I know I was answering his questions with swollen eyes and smeared mascara, wearing a dark, royal blue, dress from Express with an almost neon-green Ann-Taylor cardigan, and red ballet flats. I had accessorized with a matching Blue Sapphire necklace my college boyfriend bought me at a discount when I worked at Zales.
I particularly remember that because the necklace chain was broken, and it was the only nice necklace chain I owned. (Focusing on trivial problems while hitting rock bottom is definitely a nice, distracting defense mechanism.)
I also know I only half-jokingly asked the paramedic outright if I could just lie about my name. And I said of course I didn’t need the rape kit because I was with friends whom I trusted the night before.
I pleaded with him not to tell my boss and said my marriage was going through a rough patch and I’d been drinking way too much. But that I was totally fine (read: not dead as they’d initially suspected).
Spoiler: that last part was a lie. If hangovers could kill, this one should have done the trick. And I was on the verge of a full-blown panic-attack over a blurry night of pure chaos and debauchery.
He was kind and humorous, but said, “ma’am, no offense, but what kind of friends leave you in this state?”
I said, “Oh, well… I’m not only a bit of a drunk, I’m a stubborn, sassy, dramatic one.”
Point was, this wasn’t the first time (or even one of the first dozen) I’d drank an absurd amount and gotten myself into a shameful situation. I’m sure a friend did try to help me at some point.
And I’m damn sure I didn’t listen.
Oh, and yeah… I’m sure you’ve noticed the pronoun switch from “she” to “me.” Because, shamefully, this is my story.
And a perfect excuse to coin myself a trial-by-error expert on shame.
But I’ll leave it to the real experts to help you understand the moral of this story.
The Science
The good news is, I’m not a sociopath.
According to some scholarly research found from the Libing Shen published at NIH, to feel shame or guilt, one must first understand he or she has done something wrong.
Phew, at least I dodged one bullet.
And I’m two steps closer to amplifying my rather depleted mental fortitude. Because I felt both: guilt and shame.
But why? Why must we have to agonize over our wrongdoings? And why do some suffer extremely so – entering hopeless states of depression and self-isolation – whilst others can blissfully compartmentalize their misdeeds or write them off altogether?
What purpose does all this annoying guilt and shame crap serve from an evolutionary perspective?
As it turns out, guilt and shame are adaptive behaviors to help us survive.
“Shame and guilt are to morality as sight is to vision.” –Mark Zaslav Ph.D.
But first, let’s talk about how they’re different.
Guilt is healthier than shame, according to a bunch of experts with fancy PhD’s, extensive research, and weird experiments to back up their assertions.
Guilt is the icky feeling in your guts when you’ve caused someone any kind of physical or emotional pain.
Shame is a more convoluted (read also: toxic) slew of ick.
While guilt is typically tied to an action, shame is tied to one’s entire personhood. And this icky brew of sludge can leave individuals feeling worthless, deeply flawed or deficient, and incapable sound moral judgment.
It’s like if guilt, embarrassment, self-doubt, and guttural loathing had a scandalous 4-way affair yielding a monstrous love-child with the mark of the beast. At least that’s how I’d describe the shame I carried.
Shame can send a person into hiding. Maybe they move to a new state, change jobs, or disappear from their old social stomping grounds.
[Full disclosure: I completed two out of the three from the checklist above.]
A more guilt-prone response, on the other hand, is one in which the individual is more likely to attempt to make amends or otherwise compensate for his/her bad behavior.
And while both emotions often overlap when experienced, the nuanced differences offer important insights into the psyche of the experiencee.
Thankfully, I’m far more experienced and better at managing the roller-coaster of guilt versus shame – but the latter definitely makes a better story.
Ok, But Why?
The why of the matter is pretty simple.
Like wolves, individuals in groups fare better than those in isolation. Thus, keeping peace with the group is key to survival.
Cooperation is the fundamental glue holding the human species together. And it’s our only ticket to overcoming global challenges and crises.
It’s how we’ve made it to the top of the food chain and it’s how we’ve landed on the moon. And it’ll be how we cure cancer and colonize extraterrestrial worlds.
Even the most brilliant minds in the world can’t achieve such monumental feats alone. So it’s in everyone’s best interest to keep the peace as much as we are able with as many other individuals and groups as possible.
[Note: this is why the tribalism mindset will be all but extinct soon.]
And you can’t keep the peace with your family, your neighbors, your colleagues, and your communities at large without a moral compass keeping you in check.
Guilt and shame are, therefore, quite quintessential. They are part of a task force responsible for keeping that compass pointing to the True North of our human code of conduct (read: The Golden Rule)
Bottom line: in excess, both guilt and shame can lead to extreme anxiety, neurosis, and a debilitating dose of self-sabotage – but, without them, we’d all be living in a pretty virulent, violent society.
With that thought, I’ll end with some science from the experts:
In the aforementioned research, Shen observes:
“Since most human beings act in a tit-for-tat fashion and unconditional forgiveness is evolutionarily unstable, self-conscious emotions such as shame and guilt could evolve as psychological heuristic mechanisms to tackle our ever-present errors in a complicated social environment which have many opponents instead of one.”
