The Best Way to Resolve Your Shame

Take a moment and think about something in your life that you are terrified of anyone knowing about you. It could be a belief, a personality trait, a sick desire, or some horrible failure in your past that you’d rather pretend never happened. Whatever it is, the thought of this thing being exposed mortifies you. It causes you to want to curl up in a ball, pull a blanket over your head and hide from the world.

This feeling is what psychologists call “shame,” and we all have it to some degree. 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, poor physical health, and being a narcissistic asshole.

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. 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…