Compassion is the Remedy for Shame

In his recent book The Good Life, Robert Waldinger, the current director of the longest running psychological study in human history, the Grant Study of Adult Development at Harvard Medical School, writes, “If we had to take all eighty-four years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living, one life investment that is supported by similar findings across a wide variety of other studies, it would be this: Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.”

Unfortunately, there is one incredibly common experience that prevents many people from getting into good relationships and many more from deepening into them: shame, the painful belief that we are, in some way, unworthy of love or belonging.

Perhaps the biggest reason shame has such a corrosive impact on our relationships is because it prompts what researchers call “self-verifying” patterns: relationship patterns that verify or confirm our negative beliefs and feelings about ourselves. For instance, over several decades of meticulous, painstaking research the social psychologist William B. Swann has shown that people with firmly-held negative self-views (e.g. “I am unlikable”) tend to:

• seek out and embrace partners who verify their negative self-views;

• provoke others to treat them in ways that confirm their shameful self-views;

• solicit feedback from others that match their negative self-views;

• be less committed to partners who appraise them positively;

• withdraw emotionally from spouses who view them positively;

• leave relationships in which they fail to receive self-verification.

In other words, while people who like themselves tend to like people who like them and dislike people who dislike them, people who dislike themselves tend to like people who dislike them and dislike people who like them.

What’s worse, our self-verifying tendencies are stubbornly resistant to change because, as the research on self-verification theory shows, we selectively attend to evidence that confirms our negative self-views, remember self-verifying evidence better, and even interpret evidence that disconfirms our shameful self-views in such a way that it seems to confirm them. As Abraham Maslow said, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Which is probably why, when an interviewer asked Harville Hendrix what in his half-century of experience working with couples his clients have found most difficult about the process, he said, “Surrendering their self-rejection/hatred and letting themselves be accepted and loved.”

All of which raises a vexing question: why on earth would it be so difficult?

The main answer that has emerged from the self-verification research echoes the proverb “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.” Between life-patterns that are painful yet familiar and life-patterns that are potentially liberating yet unfamiliar, most people choose the former simply because they provide a sense of familiarity, predictability and control, albeit at an immense cost.

A second answer is that despite the considerable suffering they cause, our inner critics may ironically believe they are protecting us from pain and keeping us safe and on-track. They may, for instance, hope that if they can shame us into being a certain way (accomplished, beautiful, fit, enlightened) then we won’t get judged or rejected and will win approval or love. Or they might hope that by keeping us scared or small or shut-down, they will keep us safe from attack. Or they may have no redeeming value whatsoever and simply be automated recordings of parental scripts playing on repeat.

Either way, the remedy is the same: compassion.

Conventional self-compassion practices, which have a robust evidence-base thanks to the research of Kristin Neff, Chris Germer and Paul Gilbert, encourage us to notice when our inner critics attack, understand their motivations, allow ourselves to be moved by the pain they cause, extend compassion to the parts of us in pain, and then replace self-criticism with a kinder response.

Deeper forms of self-compassion, like the Internal Family Systems process, encourage a similar approach except that after understanding our inner critics’ hopes and fears, they emphasize the importance of compassionately witnessing the situations in which we got saddled with shame and then, harnessing the science on memory reconsolidation, use our imaginations to offload that shame before updating our inner critics and inviting them to take on more helpful roles.

On their own, however, neither of these approaches are enough. Just as the Grail King’s wound in Parsifal can only be healed by the spear that caused it, because shame is a relational wound it requires a relational remedy. Paradoxically, only you can do it, but you can’t do it alone.

Seth is a Registered Clinical Counsellor, Marital and Family Therapist and Board Certified Life Coach. He works with individuals and couples in private practice. You can reach him at sethshugar@me.com or book a session at www.sethshugar.com