The 12 "shame categories" she researched that are the most familiar in the human experience include: appearance and body image, money and work, motherhood and fatherhood, family, parenting, mental and physical health, addiction, sex, aging, religion, surviving trauma, and being stereotyped and labeled.
Developing Shame Resilience
Brené Brown outlined four key elements: Recognizing, naming, and understanding our shame triggers. Identifying external factors that led to the feelings of shame. Connecting with others to receive and offer empathy.
"If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive," says Dr. Brene Brown.
Studies from psychology show that shame often leads to withdrawal, isolation, and hiding,6 and is associated with depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, and impaired empathy, among other negative outcomes.
According to Brené Brown, a researcher at the University of Houston, shame is an “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” It's an emotion that affects all of us and profoundly shapes the way we interact in the world.
Shame has a central social component, and involves fears of being judged, criticized or rejected by others rather than just judging oneself. The origins of shame can almost always be tied back to past experiences of feeling judged, criticized, or rejected by someone else.
Field says shame often leads to a “sunken” body posture, a physical expression of wanting to disappear. And because it's a type of stress response, it can also lead to common symptoms of sympathetic activation, like blushing cheeks, increased body temperature, sweating, or queasiness.
Two key areas of the brain are activated by shame: the prefrontal cortex and the posterior insula. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain associated with moral reasoning. This is where judgements about the self occur. The posterior insula is the part of the brain that engages visceral sensations in the body.
Be aware of the physical signs of shame
Slumped shoulders, lowering our head, looking down, avoiding eye contact, hesitant speech patterns – these are clues that we feel unworthy and want to avoid letting anyone else see into us.
We feel shame when we violate the social norms we believe in. At such moments we feel humiliated, exposed and small and are unable to look another person straight in the eye. We want to sink into the ground and disappear. Shame makes us direct our focus inward and view our entire self in a negative light.
People who live with shame often avoid relationships, vulnerability, and community. Research shows that shame leads people to hide and self-conceal. [i] People who feel ashamed hide from community and friendship. They avoid vulnerability and never share their true selves with the world.
Getting beyond shame means acknowledging it and sharing our experiences with the trusted people in our lives, the ones who know we aren't perfect and love us anyway. Their empathy will allow us to keep our sense of shame in perspective, as well as help us come up with strategies for dealing with it.
Hence, shame has recently come to be identified in the trauma literature as part of a constellation of negative emotions (along with fear, horror, anger, guilt) that are common for trauma survivors in post-trauma states.
Shame causes people to hide from the sanctions of cultural norms, which leads to perceptions of brokenness or being bad (Arnsten, 2015). Empathy has the opposite effect. It creates a space where people can process their circumstances without shame's debilitating effects.
People who feel shame have a tendency to cover their shameful truths, or, if they have been exposed, to hide or disappear4. The typical body language of ashamed people is a 'shrinking' body, bowed head, and averted eyes2.
Body Language Tip for You: Watch out for any time someone touches the side of their forehead or blocks their eyes. It likely means they are a little ashamed or embarrassed, and it might be time to back off.
The narcissistic patient lives without the ability to experience shame in well-modulated, stable states of mind.
Sharing is caring! You won't find “disorders of shame” as a category in the DSM-5 (the official American catalogue over mental health diagnoses), and yet shame is probably the biggest single cause of most of our psychological problems.
When faced with shame, the brain reacts as if it were facing physical danger, and activates the sympathetic nervous system generating the flight/fight/freeze response. The flight response triggers the feeling of needing to disappear, and children who have this response will try to become invisible.
Sometimes shame comes first and leads to depression. Unlike guilt, which motivates a person to change their behavior, shame makes a person feel as though change is impossible. This is because the person sees themselves as being the problem, a mindset that can lead to depression.
For example, if you are called out for a mistake in public, or humiliated by someone walking in on you naked. This is typically what many people think of when you mention shame. Disappointed expectation is the third type, which is when you set out to do something and you fail.