When criticism turns to shame (and when it doesn’t)

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A man stands up to give a lecture to a group of people. In the middle of the conversation, someone shouts, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.

The speaker stops speaking. It is freezing. He doesn’t know what to do or say. The audience also freezes and waits to see what he’s going to do.

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Inside he thinks, “What did I do wrong? Maybe I didn’t prepare well enough. How come I can’t figure out how to respond to this person? Everyone looks at me and sees me looking like a deer in the headlights. I should be able to do something, but I can’t. What’s wrong with me, do I have to do something?

Many people confuse being criticized with shame.

They are not the same. However, shame can result from being criticized.

Three things happen in this story.

First, the man was criticized in public. Public criticism is even more difficult for many people to handle than private criticism. Criticism pierces him. It hurts like hell.

Second, no one in the audience responds. No one bears witness to the pain of the event. No one challenges the reviewer or even says, “Wow, how rude.” Or, “Ouch, that must have hurt.” Or, “Is that okay; that would be super hard for me.”

Third, inside the man he is questioning himself, thinking about what he did wrong or what he should be able to do. He believes he must overcome his hurt, his humiliation and his immobility. He believes he should be louder, clearer and react differently.

Take them one at a time:

1) Everyone experiences criticism several times in their life.

Criticism is often like aggression; it can hurt, knock you down, or bring you down. If done in public, it can be even more painful, even humiliating.

However, criticism by itself does not create shame (although when we listen to experts give us examples, they almost always tell stories of people criticized).

What could happen that would make him unashamed?

The person may not feel hurt or hurt at all. Sometimes criticism is not taken into account, it does not pierce the psyche. We fire the person who criticized us or we may even know that the criticism has a bit of truth that we are well aware of and therefore no longer affects us. We can be relatively detached.

Or, the person may be able to respond and defend themselves. They could stop and say. “That’s a very harsh criticism you made. I felt dumbfounded for a moment. I’d love to hear your perspective, but I’m not just open to how you yelled at me. Let’s talk .”

Or they might even say, “Not only do I disagree with your statement, but I find your behavior disturbing and unacceptable. I have something very important to say here and I won’t be yelled at like that.

Why wouldn’t that lead to shame? The person witnesses the event, the reaction to the event and their feelings. When this happens, the criticism can still be hurtful, but the person is much less likely to walk away thinking there is something wrong with them or that they don’t matter, characteristics of shame .

2) The audience did not serve as a witness. No one spoke up and indicated that they had seen what had happened and had any sympathy for the speaker.

When someone gets hurt and no one responds, the person is likely to think their feelings are wrong, their response is wrong, or not worth considering. This would make it more likely that the speaker would walk away thinking that something is wrong with him or that he and his feelings just don’t matter. That’s a shame.

However, if the audience responded, showing care for the man, compassion and empathy for the man, or even anger at the man who criticized the speaker, it is more likely that he will not feel ashamed. I say “more likely” because if the man’s inner life is vulnerable to feeling that something is wrong with him and he doesn’t matter, the public may be able to completely shield him. of shame.

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The point here is this: how we witness when we are criticized, or when we tell a story of being criticized, impacts whether or not we feel shame.

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3) The man immediately went into a painful self-examination of what he did and how he reacted. He did not witness the attack. He did not testify to his injury. He showed no protective or self-defense reaction.

If he could testify to his inner experience in this way, he might still have felt hurt, but his experience would not be shameful.

I understand that it is not an easy task, to have that kind of self-awareness and presence to recognize your inner experience in difficult circumstances. But we have to ask ourselves this: why is it so difficult?

The reason: We have had past experiences of critics where we were attacked and hurt and no one acted as an UnShaming witness.

Essentially, the person has not internalized an UnShaming witness; instead, he has internalized a shameful witness, who analyzes him to understand what was wrong with him, who disregards his real emotional experience and who creates his hurt as if it were irrelevant .

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