Shame Is Learned and It Can Be Unlearned
It’s hard making mistakes and looking messy as an adult.
A lot of the time when we’re trying to acquire new skills or try something for the first time, we’re going to be bad at it, we’re not going to have great results right away, we’re not going to know where we are in the process or what the end goal looks like. All of that “mess” of being in the thick of it can be excruciating because it activates our fear-minds, which is the part of your brain that is wired to protect you from danger. The problem is it doesn't know the difference between actual danger and the discomfort of being a beginner. So it treats looking messy, not knowing what you're doing, or failing publicly the same way it would treat a real threat. And once it's activated, the self-talk starts. You're not good enough, you don't know what you're doing, everyone else has it figured out. And eventually you stop feeling bad about the work and start feeling bad about yourself.
It’s like the pursuit of that one thing we think we want brings so much pain and stress, we want to give up. Even if we don’t give up, we’re pulled toward that solution sometimes. But when we’re kids, we don’t have that same problem. we’re allowed to just try, and not know exactly what the outcome will be. We’re allowed by ourselves (and by our brains), by our lack of life-long evidence of things going wrong or pursuits feeling humiliating… we’re just used to being in the thick of it without shame attached to it. Our curiosity is stronger than our critic, perhaps because when we’re children, we’re younger and have been on earth for less time.
Shame is an inherited skill, it's not something that is hardwired into us when we come into life. Babies and toddlers don't have it. Watch a three year old try something new and fail and try again without a single thought about what anyone in the room thinks of them. We absorb shame from the people around us, from the moments where we learned that certain behaviors got approval and others got rejection. We filed it away into our subconscious as a survival tool, a way to navigate social belonging. “This is how to fit in,” it says. “This is how to be safe being seen.” “This is how to conduct yourself.” It kept us safe in classrooms, families and friend groups where fitting in felt like the most important thing in the world. Shame exists because humans are social creatures who needed to belong to survive, and at some point we confused belonging with performing.
The human impulse that was there from the beginning is curiosity. The desire to explore, try, make things without needing permission, that's what shame overrides. And because shame was never truly ours to begin with, it will always steer us away from the wonder and creativity we keep trying to get back to.
And that's why it's hard to make mistakes as adults, because we filter everything through shame. The antidote to shame is self-compassion, which is the ability to meet yourself with kindness in the moments where your instinct is to be cruel. It's what happens when you mess up and instead of spiraling into 'I'm a failure,' you're able to say 'I'm learning and this is hard and that's okay.' We're born with the capacity for it because self-compassion is rooted in the same system that bonds us to other people from the moment we arrive. It's how we're wired to respond to suffering, with care, not punishment. Shame has to be taught. Compassion is already there. It just gets buried under years of learning that being hard on yourself is the same thing as being disciplined. It's not. Self-compassion is something we're able to form and live into, just as much as a shame-based life and identity. I know this is always lacking when I'm not feeling right.