A week later I was standing in front of a group of seventy graduate students who were taking my
course on shame and empathy. I was talking about the four elements of shame resilience when one of
the students raised her hand and asked for an example. I decided to tell the “egads” story. It’s such a
great example of how shame can happen at a totally unconscious level and how important it is to
name it and talk about it.
I set up the story by describing my blog and my new commitment to learn photography. I told them
that I felt vulnerable about sharing my pictures, and I felt ashamed and belittled when I received this
critical e-mail.
When I told them about my deep desire to respond with cruelty, several of the students buried their
heads in their hands and others just looked away. I’m sure some were disappointed by my lack of
enlightenment. Others looked plain scared.
One student raised his hand and said, “Can I ask a personal question?” Given that I was in the
middle of sharing a vulnerable shame story, I figured that it couldn’t hurt. I was wrong.
He bravely said, “I hear you saying that it was about feeling criticized about your photography, but
was that really the vulnerability? Did the shame come from feeling like you were being criticized for
a bad picture, or were you ashamed because you’re allowing yourself to be vulnerable and open
rather than closed and protected, and someone hurt you? Was it really about letting yourself be open
to connection and getting hurt?”
My mouth got dry. I started sweating. I rubbed my forehead and then looked straight at the red-
faced students.
“I can’t believe it! That’s exactly what happened. I didn’t know it until this minute, but that’s what
happened. That’s exactly what happened. I took a goofy picture in the theater—something I don’t
normally do, but I was with a close friend and we were feeling giddy and girly. I posted it online
because I was excited and thought it was fun. Then someone criticized me.”
A couple of the students glared at their brave colleague like, Way to go. You traumatized her. But I
didn’t feel traumatized. Or found out. Or exposed. I felt liberated. The story I needed to own in order
to access my worthiness was not a story of a rookie photographer struggling with criticism over a
photograph. It was the story of a pretty serious person being fun and spontaneous and goofy and
imperfect and having someone poke at that vulnerability.
Resilience is often a slow unfolding of understanding. What did that experience mean to me? What
were the gremlins mumbling? Not only do we need to own our story and love ourselves in the
process, we have to figure out the real story! We also have to learn how we protect ourselves from
shame if we want to develop worthiness.
What Does Shame Look Like?When it comes to understanding how we defend ourselves against shame, I have the utmost respect
for the work from the Stone Center at Wellesley. Dr. Linda Hartling, a former relational-cultural
theorist at the Stone Center and now the director of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies, uses the
late Karen Horney’s work on moving toward, moving against, and moving away to outline the
strategies of disconnection we use to deal with shame.^3
According to Dr. Hartling, in order to deal with shame, some of us move away by withdrawing,
hiding, silencing ourselves, and keeping secrets. Some of us move toward by seeking to appease and
please. And, some of us move against by trying to gain power over others, by being aggressive, and
by using shame to fight shame (like sending really mean e-mails).