The Cost of Carrying Shame: How Therapy Helps You Let Go

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There are certain times of year when shame becomes harder to ignore.

The days after Christmas are one of them: everyone else seems to be relaxing and connecting and “making memories”, and you’re left with a familiar ache that something’s off inside you.

Generally, by the time folks find their way to therapy to work on shame, they’ve often been carrying it for years.

By this time, they’ve “coped”, functioned, done their jobs, paid their bills, put their kids through school, maybe even looked “fine” from the outside.

But coping isn’t really living.

Less a personal failing, it’s more a commentary on the kind of culture that many of us grow up in. In the UK, there’s a strong undercurrent of “who do you think you are?” And a lot of people end up in “respectable” jobs they never chose for themselves, pushed there by parental expectations, financial pressure, or perhaps a vague sense that following their own intuition would be silly.

Shame absolutely grows in that atmosphere. It can wear down the human spirit, in other words, our basic and existential right to follow what actually feels true for us. Many moons ago, when your intuition first ran into someone’s harsh reaction and nobody stepped in to correct it, this is what likely took intuition’s place “my sense of things can’t be trusted,” in other words, “I can’t trust myself.” And from there, any number of unhelpful ways of living can take root.

The cost of carrying shame is not that obvious at first glance. But it’s in your time, energy, money, nervous system, relationships and your sense of who you are.

This blog is about naming that cost, and about how therapy can be one place where you can start to put some of it down.

Shame’s In-Voice to You

It doesn’t usually come crashing through the door. It works more like a leech of a tax you keep paying off in the background.

And some of the items on that bill might look like:

1. Energy and stamina that leak like a bad tap

The effort it takes just to keep going is huge, for example:

• Replaying not just yesterday’s conversation, but whole old scripts like broken records, or

• Cycling through the same narratives and the same feelings, feeling like a let-down → doing something to offload that feeling → feeling ashamed about what you did to cope → repeat, or

• Holding up a persona so people don’t see how you really feel.

Over time, your stamina for this wears thin. The ability to “put on a face” becomes short-fused. Crises hit more frequently, and sooner. It shows in body language, expression and the way you move through the day.

2. Lost time and opportunities

Time is opportunity, especially when you think about the things that can’t simply be revisited later.

Shame can lead to:

• Putting off job applications because you’re convinced you’re not good enough, or

• Staying in dead relationships because your intuition feels too unreliable to trust, or

• Delaying physical or creative pursuits until later, only to find your body or circumstances don’t give you the same window again, and more…

It’s not that every opportunity has to be taken immediately, but shame has a knack for talking people out of even trying.

3. The financial cost of coping

Shame can be an expensive life in more than one sense.

When you feel awful about yourself and need relief, it’s very easy to end up spending money on:

• substances,

• food,

• shopping,

• online distractions,

• courses and programmes that promise to “fix” you, and more…

None of these are evil in nature and it’s the pattern that matters. If you zoom out, you might see a trail of spending aimed at numbing or outrunning shame, and then more shame piled on top about the money you’ve spent.

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4. Toll on your nervous system

Shame acts on the whole body and it covered extensively in my other blogs; heart racing, stomach in knots, muscles tensed, or even the opposite: numbed, flat, shut down. I speak about the nervous system extensively in an earlier blog:

You often only notice it after it’s had you in its grip for a while, unless you’ve practised spotting the early signs. Your physiological receptors, so to speak, go into overdrive, and the stress’ effect on the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis) become so taxing (Maté, 2019). Over years, this constant stress can feed into sleep problems, headaches, digestive issues, chronic tension, feeling permanently wired and exhausted.

It’s not that shame is the only factor in health, but it’s a big piece in the picture.

5. Relationships that never feel safe enough

Shame seeps into relationships in several ways:

• Over-apologising, even to the point of apologising for existing,

• Staying where you’re not really met because you don’t trust your instinct to leave,

• Reading other people’s reactions through the lens of “it must be me.”

If your earlier attempts to follow your gut got you in trouble and no responsible adult helped you make sense of it, it makes sense that you’d start to doubt yourself later. The cost is that you can end up tolerating far less-than-ideal situations for far longer than you’d want for someone you love.

I’ve explored relationship and attachment patterns in an earlier blog:

Self-Help Can Only Take You So Far

Let’s be honest, people are often incredibly resourceful before they ever consider therapy which can become a bit of a last resort to some.

It might sound like I’m devaluing self-help but this is not the case at all. In fact, there’s a lot that you can do alone like learning breathing exercises, doing movement and nervous-system work, or journalling and writing out your inner dialogue to get a bit of distance from it, and even reading about shame, trauma, attachment and so on, like I go on about in my blogs that you’re reading.

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The part where people tend to falter is not going into the genuine examination and exploration of shame from a centred, curious and neutral stance. Not neutral as in being passive, but neutral as in not instantly siding with either the inner attacker or the inner defender.

For example, noticing that there’s a self-hating voice, and instead of saying “I hate it back”, asking instead what it’s been trying to do for you, or staying in contact with the feeling in your body without collapsing into it or lashing out at yourself.

That level of presence, curiosity and active neutrality can be VERY difficult to hold on your own, especially when shame has been around for a long time. It’s a bit like trying to examine a tornado while you’re standing in the middle of it.

And learning about shame, from a distance in self-help books or wherever, intellectually, is a different experience to feeling it in vivo. Reading about shame doesn’t make your heart stop racing when it turns on. In the moment, your body moves fast internally in the form of heart rate spikes, breathing changes, or you might head towards shutdown. You usually notice the shame response during or after it’s taken hold.

Tools, books, even AI (which I’ve written about two blogs ago, link just below) can help you make sense of things. But there’s a limit to what they can offer without another human nervous system in the room with you.

How Therapy Helps with Shame

So what does therapy actually do about shame, beyond what you could do alone?

If I had to put it simply, I’d say that

Therapy gives you a place to examine your shame with another mind and another nervous system alongside you, where there is someone who isn’t inside your story, but one who also cares about it.

I’ll go into this and here are a few important things that matter:

1. Being curious and not condemning

In sessions, I’m not there as a judge, or as a coach trying to “optimise” you. I’m more like a co-philosopher.

We’ll take a sample of a shame-laden bit of narrative, something you believe about yourself, or a story you keep coming back to, and we can look at it together:

• Where did this begin?

• Whose voice does it actually resemble?

• What does it actually do for you (even if the cost is high)?

• How has it managed to keep going all this time?

Curiosity opens up paths that condemnation never can. It allows insights into history, function and how it impacts you in the present-day. Instead of shaming shame or trying to banish it, we get interested in it, this allows us to break the shame cycle. That doesn’t mean we support or endorse everything it says, it means we’re willing to understand it so it’s not just running things from the shadows.

2. Being seen and remembered

Humans are mammals. Our nervous systems are wired for connection and co-regulation. We simply don’t thrive, or live as long, in prolonged isolation and lovelessness as we do in warm, responsive environments.

In therapy, being seen and remembered is central to the actual work, not just a warm and fuzzy utopia:

• I remember details you’ve told me and bring them back when they matter, and

• I notice patterns not to catch you out, but to help you see what you’ve been up against, and

• I hold you in mind between sessions, even if you don’t see it happening.

Those experiences do add up and they’re part of what starts to contradict the deep-down negative belief systems that run your life.

I explore the phenomenon a bit further in an earlier blog:

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3. Saying the unsayable in front of a witness

You can, in theory, name and journal shameful things to yourself. But if there’s no one different there to receive those words, they don’t get metabolised in a new way.

There’s something powerful (and risky) about saying what you’ve kept to yourself for years in front of another human being. This is something I go into in more depth in an earlier blog, link just below.

In a good therapeutic relationship, those moments can be profoundly corrective. You expect the other person to run away, judge, pity or despise you. When they don’t, they stay put and interested, your nervous system receives an experience it never got earlier in life.

In a bad therapeutic relationship, of course, those same moments can be mishandled and become shaming. That’s why the quality of the therapist’s own self-awareness and ethics matters. If you’re looking for a therapist find one who abides by UKCP Code of Ethics, it’s the gold standard in the UK.

4. A place to experiment with boundaries and disagreement

Therapy is also a place to test out boundaries and disagreement without everything collapsing.

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Moments like you risking telling me that I’ve misunderstood you, or that you point out something that doesn’t sit right, or when you say no to a suggestion are signs of your agency coming online. Some clients are initially terrified to do this because they may have learned that challenging someone leads to punishment, withdrawal or chaos.

When you see that I haven’t run away, that I’m not calling you crazy, that we can talk it through and stay in relationship, something important shifts. It’s the sort of thing I imagine philosophers would approve of where two people are trying to figure out what a good and honest life looks like for you, not just what you “should” do.

The Cost of Therapy vs No Therapy

I’ll be straight. Therapy isn’t cheap.

£80 an hour can sound outrageous if you’ve never had it. People, very understandably, wonder:

“£80 for one hour? That’s what a junior lawyer charges. You’re going to get me ‘off the hook’ for my life in six sessions?”

I don’t push back against the skepticism because it makes sense. You can’t really know what it’s like until you’ve done it.

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I don’t lecture clients about “investment” during sessions, but I try to have them wonder, that say they’re around mid-life and what they want to work on feels deep-seated, a long-term commitment of weekly sessions for a year, or perhaps even two, amidst a backdrop of 40-50 years of backlog sounds like a hell of a deal to me. If we can do without the thought experiment I’d rather they look back after, say, six or ten hours and decide for themselves whether it’s been worth it.

For some people, being able to breathe a bit more easily after just the initial hour can be worth its weight in gold.

• Your decision-making is no longer dragged down by old baggage to quite the same extent.

• You feel more able to trust yourself.

• You don’t default as quickly to self-destruction when shame comes online.

You can’t put a simple price tag on what it means to have a live, non-judgemental human being who is there for you, with no other agenda. Friends can be judgemental and parents very often are. A therapist isn’t perfect (we’re human too), but the commitment to not sit in judgement is part of my job description.

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The cost of not doing the work is harder to see, but it’s in the:

• Physical deterioration if your way of coping is through substances, food or other self-punishing habits, or

• Psychological deterioration in the sense that you never really get to follow your intuition or find out who you are, or

• Living a life that remains largely unexamined, as Socrates put it, “the unexamined life is not worth living,” which can lead to

• Social and relational deterioration, reinforcing physical and emotional isolation so you never get to negotiate and reshape or fully discover your identity and growth of your personality.

You can go through decades replaying the same scripts (often out of your awareness) and feeling the same sense of stuckness. Regret is a harsh companion, especially later in life when some options genuinely are no longer available.

It’s never about scaring you into this work but it’s about being honest that doing nothing also has a steep price.

What Therapy Can and Can’t Promise

I can’t promise that therapy will “fix” you, or get rid of shame indefinitely, or turn you into a permanently confident and always-calm person. In fact, one of the paradoxes of therapy is that people come because they want change, but they also bring a very understandable pull to stay how they are. The aim of therapy isn’t to create a brand new person, it’s more like excavating the person who’s been buried under years of layers of defence, expectation and shame.

Shame probably isn’t going anywhere entirely. The aim is to change your relationship to it and to know what it’s about, to notice it earlier, to have options beyond weaponising it or being flattened by it.

All I can realistically promise is that for the hour we are together, I will be there with you. If you want to head into the trenches of your experience, I’ll go there with you. We will take your life seriously, we’ll allow room for humour and curiosity, and you won’t be shamed for struggling, or for being ambivalent, or for not turning up as your “best self” every week.

Image Credit: Dominic Kurniawan Suryaputra

The more you turn up as yourself, the more alive the work becomes. And it’s also okay if you can’t always do that. Part of the fun, strangely enough, is noticing the masks and defences together.

Therapy doesn’t have to be a drudge. It can be demanding and meaningful and, at times, even exciting.

It’s Never Too Late

Philosophers and writers across the ages: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, Camus, Homer and countless others have wrestled with questions of belonging, exile, responsibility and what makes a life worth living, in each their own ways.

• Nietzsche reasons that we can live the good life by embracing our instincts, passions and desires that society often suppresses.

• Kierkegaard said that anxiety is an essential part of the human condition and from it often lies the catalyst for self-discovery, personal growth and achieving an authentic and meaningful life. You read that right: anxiety helps us achieve those things!

• Freud explored how civilisation demands we push parts of ourselves underground and that suffering is inherent.

• Camus wrote about the absurdity of trying to find meaning in a world that doesn’t automatically give us any.

• Homer’s Odyssey gives us a very old story of a long, winding journey home back to onself, arguing against a life of isolated pleasure and instead choosing a mortal and meaningful life.

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Shame sits right in the middle of all that which is the fear of exclusion, the pressure to fit, the parts of us we banish, and ultimately the long journey back to ourselves.

It is absolutely not too late to step onto that path. Even if you’ve spent years in jobs you never wanted, relationships that didn’t fit, or habits that hurt you and others, there is always the possibility of doing something different with the time ahead of you.

You don’t have to be a different person to be worthy of this. You don’t have to have your life tidy first. You don’t have to earn the right to ask for help.

You’re allowed to be exactly where you are now and decide you’d like company in working some of this out.

If You’d Like a Space to Start Living the Good Life

If you’ve recognised yourself in this shame blog series and you’re curious about what therapy might be like, you’re welcome to get in touch.

I offer online (and in-person Dorset) hypno-psychotherapeutic counselling for people who feel weighed down by shame, self-criticism and a sense of never quite being “enough”.

You don’t have to arrive with a perfectly prepared story. You don’t have to know exactly what you want from it. And you don’t need to unravel it all in the first session. You just need enough curiosity to see what happens when someone else is in the room with you.

It’s your life and you only get one shot at it. You don’t have to keep paying the hidden costs of shame on your own.

References

Maté, G. (2019). When the body says no. Vermillion.