8. Places We Go When We Fall Short

Shame, Self-compassion, Perfectionism, Guilt, Humiliation, Embarrassment

Shame

Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.

Shame thrives on secrecy, silence, and judgment.

The antidote to shame is empathy. If we reach out and share our shame experience with someone who responds with empathy, shame dissipates.

Self-Compassion

Three elements: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness.

• Self-kindness vs. self-judgment: Self-compassion entails being warm and understanding toward ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism. Self-compassionate people recognize that being imperfect, failing, and experiencing life difficulties [are] inevitable, so they tend to be gentle with themselves when confronted with painful experiences rather than getting angry when life falls short of set ideals.
• Common humanity vs. isolation: Self-compassion involves recognizing that suffering and personal inadequacy is part of the shared human experience—something that we all go through rather than being something that happens to ‘me’ alone.
• Mindfulness vs. over-identification: Mindfulness is a non-judgmental, receptive mind state in which one observes thoughts and feelings as they are, without trying to suppress or deny them. We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time. At the same time, mindfulness requires that we not be ‘over-identified’ with thoughts and feelings, so that we are caught up and swept away by negative reactivity.

Perfectionism

Perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought: If I look perfect, live perfectly, work perfectly, and do everything perfectly, I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame.

Shame is the birthplace of perfectionism. Perfectionism is not striving to be our best or working toward excellence. Healthy striving is internally driven.

Perfectionism is externally driven by a simple but potentially all- consuming question: What will people think?

One of the biggest barriers to working toward mastery is perfectionism. Achieving mastery requires curiosity and viewing mistakes and failures as opportunities for learning. Perfectionism kills curiosity by telling us that we have to know everything or we risk looking “less than.”

Guilt

Guilt is an emotion that we experience when we fall short of our own expectations or standards. With guilt, our focus is on having done something wrong and on doing something to set things right, like apologizing or changing a behavior.

Remorse, a subset of guilt, is what we feel when we acknowledge that we have harmed another person, we feel bad about it, and we want to atone for our behavior.

Humiliation

Humiliation is the intensely painful feeling that we’ve been unjustly degraded, ridiculed, or put down and that our identity has been demeaned or devalued.

Humiliation is most similar to shame in that we feel fundamentally flawed. But the most relevant distinction is that humiliation arises because someone else pointed out our flaws, and we don’t feel we deserved it. The entire key to understanding humiliation is that when it happens to us, it feels unjust.

Embarrassment

Embarrassment is a fleeting feeling of self-conscious discomfort in response to a minor incident that was witnessed by others.