Shame is considered one of the most intensely painful and isolating feelings to manage. It’s a self-conscious emotion that appears from a perceived failure to meet personal or social standards, leading to feelings of worthlessness, inadequacy, and a desire to hide or withdraw.

Shame can significantly impact a person’s psychological, emotional, and relational well-being. It can manifest itself through negative self-talk, low self-esteem, feeling worthless, perfectionism, isolation, poor posture, avoiding eye-contact, feeling frozen, shyness, self-consciousness, tension in the body, stomach issues, or even self-harm. According to a leading researcher and author on the topic, Brene Brown says that shame needs three ingredients to grow: secrecy, silence, and judgement. These three ingredients ultimately give shame more power to thrive.

If you are tired of fearing shame and want to learn how to work through the emotion rather than fueling it, here are some tips:

Recognize the emotion: While shame can be a very painful emotion to experience, you need to be aware of the feeling to work through it. Self-awareness is the key to change. Focus on the emotion rather than the experience which brought on shame. The emotion is separate from the behavior.

Have self-compassion: The antidote to shame is self-compassion. It’s not helpful to pound on yourself when you are already down, this makes it worse. Instead, show yourself kindness, forgiveness, and provide a space to grow-just like you would for a friend. The point of self-compassion is not to take away the shame, it’s to accept the feeling as it is without trying to make it go away. This is possible.

Identify your triggers: Think about what thoughts, experiences, or beliefs bring on the emotion of shame. You can explore this with a therapist if this step is too difficult to do on your own.

Seek Professional Support: It’s okay to need help when working through your stuff! Therapists can help challenge negative self-talk, separate shame from one’s identity, and emphasize strengths and values.

Don’t judge yourself: Experiencing shame is a completely normal and human emotion. Judging yourself for how you got to the emotion is not going to help you heal from it. “We cannot shame ourselves into change, we can only love ourselves into evolution.”

We need to focus on how to exist and work through shame without avoiding or aiming not to experience it at all—because this is unrealistic. Shame is often a core fear for many people along with its buddy guilt-which is more about a specific action than being flawed as a whole. You can learn to accept this emotion and practice skills to get through it. Learning to exist with shame is not a destination, it’s something one must practice and put the work into continuously. How would your life be different if you didn’t fear shame? Are you ready to find out? Give us a call, let’s go, you got this!