Posted on February 7, 2025

The Best Way to Resolve Your Shame

This feeling is what psychologists call “shame,” and we all have it to some degree.1 Deep inside each of us, there is some unsavory part of ourselves that we camouflage from the world and pretend is not there.

Shame can fuck us up. Feelings of shame are associated with all sorts of awful stuff like depression, uncontrollable anger and hostility,2 poor physical health,3 and being a narcissistic asshole.4

It’s for this reason that shame has become a sort of boogeyman in the self-help world. Expose your shame. Eliminate your shame. Liberate your shame. Invite your shame to junior prom and dance with it to some sweet, soft Barry Manilow tunes.

John Bradshaw popularized the evils of shame in his 1988 self-help classic, Healing the Shame that Binds You.5 Since then, many other researchers and self-help authors have picked up the shame-obliteration mantle, most notably Brené Brown, who points to shame for “our inability to change,”6 and Deepak Chopra, who has weird pseudo-scientific theories about shame, inflammation, and a “falsely colored reality” or something.7

And so the key to the promised land of super-awesome love and totally rad happiness, we’re told, is to eradicate shame and guilt from our lives, to blast it out of our psyche with a proverbial bazooka—usually involving some sort of hug circle or a really, really expensive seminar.

Some thinkers even go so far as to say that shame isn’t “real”—that it’s invented by society or religion or your super-evil parents to, as the filmmaker Blake Edwards puts it, “exploit the human race.” Or even if it’s not exploiting you somehow, it is, as Anaïs Nin said, “a lie someone told you about yourself.”

The overriding point here is that shame is like, really, really bad. And we should get rid of it. All of it. Every last ounce of it!

Okay… stop the train.

While it’s pretty clear that most of us struggle with shame and guilt, I think we took the shame train a little too far into Woo-Wooville and I’d like to back us up a few stops, re-evaluate why we feel shame in the first place, and maybe come to some more nuanced conclusions about why so many of us often feel like a bag of dog turds and what we can do about it.