Research Methods in Psychology

MANAGING SHAME

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Managing shame: An interpersonal perspective

Dawn Leeming & Mary Boyle

Abstract

Experiences of shame are often difficult to manage, not least because of their

interpersonal implications. However, limited research attention has been paid to the

management and repair of shame, and in particular to the role that social factors may

play in this. We aimed to explore these issues by obtaining 50 written first-person

accounts of experiences of managing difficult episodes of shame from a cross-section of

students and employees at a British university. These participant-generated narrative

accounts were supplemented by written answers to open-ended questions. Via a

contextual constructionist thematic analysis three overarching themes were identified:

The centrality of others’ evaluations of the self; Repositioning the self vis-à-vis others

and Being disabled by shame. Discussion focuses on the first two of these themes which

together suggest that because the participants saw their shame as produced in interaction

with others, effective management and repair of shame depended not just on a changed

view of the self but on a repositioning of the self in relation to others. This analysis

therefore suggests that repair of shame may often need to be mutually negotiated and as

such provides support for theoretical approaches to shame which emphasise the

centrality of others’ actual or perceived judgements of the self.

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Managing Shame: An Interpersonal Perspective

Although the management and repair of feelings of shame are relevant to a range

of social processes, shame has often been viewed within the psychological literature as a

clinical issue, in part because of the link between chronic shame and psychological

difficulties (e.g. Gilbert & Irons, 2005; Goss & Allan, 2009). Less attention has been

paid to shame by social psychologists. Alongside this, the clinical research literature has

often, though not always, constructed problematic and enduring shame as a matter of

individual psychopathology, conceptualised as either shame-proneness or internalised

shame, rather than a response to particular circumstances (Andrews, 1998; Leeming &

Boyle, 2004).

In line with this intrapsychic focus, several theorists have conceptualised shame

as primarily a matter of global negative self-evaluation (e.g. Lewis, 1993; Tangney,

Stuewig & Mashek, 2007; Tracy & Robins, 2004). However, other theorists emphasise

the role of others in shame, seeing such experiences as responses to social rejection or

social threat (e.g. Elison, 2005; Crozier, 1998; Scheff, 2000), or argue that our self-

evaluations and perceptions of others’ evaluations of us are often closely intertwined

(Gilbert, 2003). From this perspective experiences of shame are understood as a sense

of an inferior position in relation to a critical, powerful other, whether this relates to an

actual experience of being shamed by another person or to a more general sense of an

internalised critical other (Gilbert, Pehl & Allan, 1994; Lewis, 1971). This fits with

social constructionist perspectives which emphasise how becoming emotional enables

the enactment of social roles, such as being shamed before another (e.g. Averill, 1985),

and that these roles may vary according to cultural discourses which construct their

meaning and significance in particular social contexts (Parkinson, Fischer & Manstead,

2005). Emotions might therefore be understood as fuzzy categories of experience

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(Averill, 1998), with individuals applying similar emotion labels to experiences which

may share some features but not all and which may have differing meanings and social

implications. This view has not been central within literature on shame where, despite

some theorists’ conceptualisation of a ‘family’ of shame-related emotions (e.g.

Nathanson, 1997; Scheff, 2003), there has been a research emphasis on defining shame

and distinguishing shame from other experiences which might be labelled as guilt or

embarrassment (e.g. Keltner & Buswell, 1996; Tangney, Miller, Flicker & Barlow,

1996). Although we refer to ‘shame’ in this paper, we do not take this to be a universal,

unvarying phenomenon that can necessarily be distinguished easily from other

emotional experiences. Instead we see this as a useful label which, as indicated by

previous research (e.g. Brown, 2006; Lindsay-Hartz, de Rivera & Mascolo, 1995), is

attached within English-speaking cultures to experiences which seem connected by a

painful sense of the self as judged to be of less worth in some way.

Alongside the clinical literature there is now a body of theoretical work and a

growing research literature suggesting that a sense of a shamed and devalued self can

pose challenges for social processes. Although some shame-related experiences could

be seen as ultimately serving various social ends - alerting us to threats to our social

status and relationships (Elison, 2005; Gilbert, 1997; Scheff, 2000), promoting the

maintenance of personal and group values (Braithwaite, 1989; Lindsay-Hartz, de-Rivera

& Mascolo, 1995; Scheff, 1988) or moderating distance from others through greater self

awareness (Probyn, 2004) - feeling ashamed is likely to make it difficult to function

socially. Some of the limited research focusing on actual experiences of shame has

suggested that when ashamed we can feel paralysed, self-conscious or confused

(Brown, 2006; Gilbert et al., 1994; Lewis, 1971; Lindsay-Hartz, 1984). As such,

experiences related to shame may lead to social withdrawal, difficult interactions with

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others (Brown, 2006; Scheff, 2003) and greater difficulty resisting abusive or

oppressive shaming by others (Bartky, 1990; Gilbert & Procter, 2006; Seu, 2006).

Indeed, a collective sense of shame can be one way in which groups of individuals are

silenced and become further marginalised (Munt, 2008).

Paradoxically, shame may also lead to destructive and violent behaviour (Scheff,

1995a), as humiliated fury enables us to bypass, deny or resist a painful state of

shameful disablement (e.g. Lewis, 1971; Nathanson, 1992, 1997). Research within

sociology and criminology has provided empirical support for links between shame and

bullying others (Ahmed & Braithwaite, 2004) and for the way in which perpetuating

cycles of conflict might arise from reciprocal unacknowledged shaming, for example

within family groups (Retzinger, 1991; Scheff, 1995b). Although the focus of the

research reported here is on the immediate interpersonal context of shame, it is also

worth noting that a collective sense of shame within a community has been linked to so-

called ‘honour’ killings (Cohen, Vandello & Rantilla, 1998) and to cycles of conflict

between nations (Scheff, 1994; Wyatt-Brown, 2004). Given the significance of shame

to social relations and both the personal and interpersonal challenges that can arise from

experiences of shame, it would seem useful to develop understanding of how such

experiences might best be managed, both individually and interpersonally, and a sense

of shame repaired. However, as others have also noted (e.g. Gilbert, 1997; Van Vliet,

2008), there has been surprisingly little research on the repair and management of

shame.

Although there has been considerable discussion of how therapists might be able

to help their clients overcome feelings of shame (e.g. Gilbert & Irons, 2005; Harper &

Hoopes, 1990; Lee, Scragg & Turner, 2001; Nathanson, 1992), this has not been the

focus of much research (though see Deblinger, Mannarino, Cohen & Steer, 2006: Rizvi

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& Linehan, 2005; Gilbert & Procter, 2006). In particular there has been little empirical

evaluation of therapeutic work with shame which is directed at interpersonal and

systemic change. As shame may be as much about one’s position in relation to others as

a private emotional experience (Gilbert et al., 1994) relations with others may be crucial

for managing and repairing shame. This assumption has been underscored by two

recent interview-based qualitative investigations of ‘natural’ recovery from prior

experiences of shame which have opened up research into this area (Brown, 2006; Van

Vliet, 2008; 2009). These studies have suggested that repairing shame may be more

complex and context dependent than some of the therapeutic approaches advocating

intrapsychic change suggest. In particular, the researchers noted the importance of

connecting or reconnecting with others in overcoming shame and the role of others in

helping to normalise and contextualise shaming events, for example by recognising the

societal construction of shared ‘failures’, so that reappraisal was possible. The

importance of connection with others in repairing shame by subverting a shared

supposedly shameful identity and asserting a collective sense of pride has also been

noted by cultural theorists (e.g. Munt, 2008), for example in relation to Gay Pride.

Brown (2006) and Van Vliet’s (2008, 2009) studies of recovery from prior

experiences of shame focused on longer-term repair and were less concerned with the

ways in which their participants managed shaming experiences and interactions at the

time of their initial occurrence. Nathanson (1992; 1997), amongst others, has suggested

that strategies for coping with immediate shaming situations may not necessarily be the

same strategies that lead to the longer-term repair of shame. He proposes four defensive

orientations to coping with shame: attack other, attack self, withdrawal from others, and

avoidance of feelings of shame, all of which may offer some means of resolving an

immediate situation but be problematic as long-term repair strategies. A few studies

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have addressed the immediate management of shame. They offer some support to

Nathanson’s model, suggesting that both self and other blame are common responses to

a range of potentially shaming situations (e.g.Ahmed & Braithwaite, 2004; Gilbert &

Miles, 2000; Elison, Pulos & Lennon, 2006). However, research in this area is under-

developed and has generally relied on responses to hypothetical scenarios to generate

information about individual coping styles or dispositions. In what, to our knowledge, is

the only study examining aspects of immediate coping in real-life shame experiences,

Silfver (2007) found that individuals do sometimes deal with shame by ways other than

Nathanson’s four defensive orientations. She found that some participants managed

their shame with reparative and pro-social responses. This is interesting data given that

there are conflicting views within the literature about the possibility of reparative and

pro-social responses to experiences of shame (compare Harris, Walgrave & Braithwaite,

2004; Tangney et al., 2007) and the likelihood that such responses would be more

productive in some situations than others.

To conclude, although some theoretical accounts of shame focus on social

processes, research to date seems to have taken limited account of these, focusing on

measurement of the individual rather than on interpersonal processes and the social

significance of shame. Therefore, we have as yet only limited understanding of the ways

in which individuals negotiate shaming or potentially shaming encounters with others in

various contexts and the role that others might play in recovery from shame.

The aim of the present study was to extend the emerging literature on managing

and repairing shame by exploring first-person accounts of managing difficult episodes

of shame. We aimed to explore the participants’ perspectives on both their immediate

management of a situation they found shameful and also on their subsequent repair (or

non-repair) of feelings of shame. While exploring their understanding of more general

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factors which impacted on the repair of shame, we paid particular attention to the

meaning and relevance of relations with others for this. By recruiting participants

outside of a context where shame might be expected to be problematic (e.g. therapeutic

setting), we also aimed to obtain accounts which varied with regard to the extent to

which the feelings of shame had been resolved, thereby enabling us to investigate the

sense that participants made of factors which facilitated or obstructed the processes of

managing and repairing shame across a range of contexts.

Method

Qualitative data were collected from 50 students and staff at a British university

in the form of written first-person narratives of experiences of shame.

Written Narratives

A methodological challenge was posed by the need to collect in-depth but

sensitive information where participants may wish to remain anonymous. Previous

research had suggested that although some people will disclose painful episodes of

shame, they generally find it more difficult to disclose shame than other emotions and

some participants may not be keen to do so (Macdonald, 1998; Lindsay-Hartz, 1984).

Therefore we chose to collect anonymised written narratives. Using written data rather

than interview transcripts also made it possible to collect data from a larger number of

participants about a wider variety of experiences. This was important given the paucity

of research in this area and the assumption that repair of shame would vary depending

on the context and related meanings. However, as written accounts do not enable the

researcher to probe the participants’ experiences (Gough & Madill, 2007), we added

supplementary questions to the request for an open-ended narrative, in order to prompt

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further disclosure related to the aims of the research. This was important given that

shame is often associated with hiding, avoidance and limited disclosure (Tangney,

1995; Macdonald & Morley, 2001). These questions were broad enough to be

applicable to a range of shaming situations.

The questionnaire began by asking for demographic data and then asked for a

written narrative with the following prompt:

The remainder of the questionnaire is about experiences of shame which have

taken place in front of one or more other people. Please describe the most recent

situation you can clearly recall where you felt particularly shamed in front of

other people, whether or not you think it was sensible to feel like this.

When telling the story of what happened, please provide as much detail

as you can about the specific moment (if there was one) when you felt most

shamed and the events before, during and after this.

The request to focus on a situation with others present enabled a clear focus on the

interpersonal management of shaming episodes. This was added following a pilot study

with 19 participants that had included a more general request for an account of an

experience of shame. It was notable that relations with others featured in all of the

responses to the pilot study, though the exact role of others was not always made

sufficiently clear to address the aims of the research. Therefore we decided to focus

only on situations with others present and include more questions on interactions with

others, in order to explore the interpersonal negotiation of shaming episodes in more

depth.

The 38 supplementary questions on the final questionnaire asked about events

prior to and immediately following the situation described, those present and their

relationship with the participant, what the participant and others did or said, attempts to

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reduce feelings of shame and the value of these, other emotions and physical sensations,

whether and how shame was disclosed to others, helpful and unhelpful responses from

others immediately and in the longer term, events and feelings following the episode,

factors affecting any change in feelings of shame, views about what might have made

things better or worse and what might lead to repair of shame, and also the meaning of

the experience for the participant. Although this second part of the data collection was

necessarily more researcher-structured than is typical for qualitative investigations,

participants were encouraged to recount their experiences as freely as possible by use of

open-ended questions and the provision of two blank pages for the initial unstructured

participant-generated narrative accounts i .

Participants and procedure

Following appropriate ethical approval, 50 participants were recruited from a

British university by means of an e-mail request for participation in a study of

experiences of shame to approximately 1200 academic, administrative and support staff

and postgraduates and a similar appeal to 350 undergraduate students at the end of

introductory psychology lectures. Questionnaires were distributed either by email or at

the end of a lecture and were completed and returned anonymously by 96 participants.

However, 25 of these questionnaires were removed from the current sample either

because they seemed to be written in a jocular manner about an inconsequential

situation or because they did not provide an account of a specific episode of shame with

others present. Given the intention to conduct as in-depth an analysis as possible, 50 of

the remaining 71 questionnaires, representing as broad a range of demographic groups

as possible, were then chosen for detailed analysis ii .

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In the final sample there were 29 women and 21 men with 37 of the participants

identifying themselves as middle class and 13 as working class. Thirty-one were

undergraduates between 18 and 22 years, 11 were mature students (undergraduate or

postgraduate) and 8 were university employees. Four were over 40 years of age, with

the oldest being in the 50-59 age-range. The sample was predominantly white, with nine

describing their ethnic origin as African, Afro-Caribbean, Asian or mixed race. None of

the students was classed as overseas. Twenty-one indicated a religious affiliation

including Islam, Hinduism and Judaism, though with Christianity cited most frequently.

The sample therefore reflected a variety of understandings of shame relating to various

cultural, religious, age-related and class based perspectives. However, the largest group

of participants was white, middle class, young adults.

Analytic Approach

We were interested in both what the accounts revealed of prior lived experience

of repairing and managing shame and also what they said about the construction of

possibilities for managing and resisting shame in relation to wider cultural discourses.

These twin interests implied differing epistemological assumptions about the data

(Willig, 2008) and, although it is possible to combine research aims arising from such

differing epistemologies (see Frost et al., 2010 for discussion), it seemed that, with the

present data, greater coherence, clarity and depth of analysis could be achieved by

conducting two separate analyses. A discursive analysis of the data is reported

elsewhere (Leeming, 2007). The present analysis is broadly in line with the contextual

constructionist epistemology articulated by Madhill, Jordan and Shirley (2000). This

treats first person accounts as to some extent representative of current and prior lived

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experience, rather than treating them as a means of managing stake and accountability

(e.g. Potter & Wetherell, 1987), whilst acknowledging that knowledge is partial and

contingent on interpretative processes. By focusing on this one epistemological

position we hoped to engage as fully as possible with the perspectives of our

participants and draw tentative conclusions about their prior and ongoing experiences.

To this end we carried out an inductive thematic analysis as this seemed suited

to our aim of theorising aspects of experience across 50 individuals rather than

conducting in-depth phenomenological analysis of a small number of individual

experiences. As Braun and Clarke (2006) note, there are numerous precedents for using

thematic analysis within a contextual constructionist framework. The analysis was

carried out following procedures similar to those described by Braun and Clarke and by

Hayes (2000), but was also informed by methodologies that incorporate analysis of

themes as a central tool (e.g. Henwood & Pidgeon, 2006; Smith & Osborn, 2003).

Following several close readings of the questionnaires, all text relevant to the aims of

the research was coded using Nvivo software, with codes being developed and revised

through engagement with the data. As many participants wrote quite succinctly, codes

were applied to short phrases as well as to longer paragraphs. The interpretative aspect

of the analysis was facilitated by use of focused coding, memo writing and constant

comparison (Charmaz, 2008; Henwood & Pidgeon, 2006), so that themes and further

overarching themes were developed, able to capture theoretically significant aspects of

the data. This involved repeated reviewing of themes as we moved back and forth

between coded data extracts, the broader data set and the developing themes. Although

codes were developed inductively, rather than predetermined, two queries were used to

guide the analysis:

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a) from their own perspective, how did participants manage / cope with /

negotiate / repair experiences of shame and what did this process mean to them?

b) what role did they see other people as having in their management and repair

of shame?

In addressing these concerns we analysed the questionnaires holistically, rather than

analysing each of the 38 questions in turn, so that development of themes was not

guided by the structure of the questionnaire.

Data and results of Analyses

Nature of the data obtained

The completed questionnaires described events that had taken place between

several hours and 25 years previously, with 36 of the participants describing an event

within the past 2 years. The scenarios included causing distress to others (e.g. being

aggressive, lying or stealing), poor performance (e.g. in sports or exams), presenting an

unacceptable image (e.g. being seen as prejudiced or overweight), rejection or

humiliation (e.g. being mocked, attacked or avoided), exposure of a private aspect of the

self (e.g. sexual revelations, public emotion) and connection to others who were thought

to have behaved shamefully (e.g. family members becoming drunk). The initial

narratives ranged between 23 and 369 words (mean length = 142 words) and the

combined number of words provided in response to both the narrative and additional

questions varied between 160 and 802 words (mean total participant words = 354).

Some questions were left blank though most participants answered most questions.

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Thematic analysis

Three primary overarching themes were identified as illuminating some of the

processes involved in managing and repairing shame and some of the barriers to this:

The centrality of others’ evaluations of the self; Repositioning the self vis-à-vis others

and Being disabled by shame. The themes appeared strongly linked, and together

suggested that because the participants’ shame was produced in interaction with others,

effective management and repair of shame depended not just on a changed view of the

self but on a repositioning of the self in the social world. However, this was difficult to

achieve. Not only did participants have to rely on the co-operation of others, many also

felt to some extent disabled by their shame – feeling physically shaken, damaged,

inferior and in a relatively powerless position. As issues closely related to the third

theme (Being disabled by shame) have been explored several times in the research

literature to date (e.g. Brown, 2006; Gilbert et al., 1994; Lindsay-Hartz, 1984), yet

social processes relating to the first two themes have not been investigated so

thoroughly, this discussion will focus primarily on the first two themes and their

implications for repairing shame.

Theme One: The Centrality of Others’ Evaluations of the Self

This first theme captures the way in which participants did not arrive at a sense

of themselves as shameful autonomously but derived this to a large extent from how

they thought they appeared to others. Although this theme was therefore not primarily

about the repair and management of shame, it was developed within the analysis

because it helps to explain why relations with others became crucial for repairing

shame. All but two of the 50 participants explicitly related their shame to others’

negative or potentially negative views of them and the remaining two were sufficiently

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concerned with others’ views to say they had tried to find out what these were.

Although we had asked the participants to write about an experience of shame that took

place ‘in front of’ other people, it was still possible for the participants to write about

their own negative evaluation of themselves. While many did so, the extent to which

others’ evaluations dominated the accounts, and often seemed crucial to the experience

of shame, was noticeable. Some of the literature has conceptualised shame primarily as

a matter of one’s own negative evaluation of the global self. However, the data for the

vast majority of the participants instead supported Crozier’s (1998) suggestion that

many experiences of shame involve a shift to an outsider perspective on the self so that

the individual views him or herself as they think others would, sometimes internalising

this perspective as their own. This outsider perspective was particularly evident where

shame was described as becoming more intense when the participant knew that others

knew of their shameful behaviour. For example, one of the younger undergraduates iii

gave an account of her friend discovering that she, the participant, had lied about the

reasons for not attending the friend’s baby’s christening as godparent, having been to a

concert instead. She concluded the account by suggesting that her shame intensified in

the knowledge that her parents were aware of her shameful behaviour:

Narr: iv My mum later told me that my friend sounded very upset and angry that

I’d let her down …. v

I felt most ashamed when I knew that my parents knew what I’d done to

my friend

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Other participants indicated that their sense of shame came from being observed,

including one of the younger undergraduate women:

Why did you judge this aspect to be shameful?

The family was asked to leave in front of people that stood to watch [following

cousin’s angry outburst in hotel] vi

In several of the participants’ accounts others’ judgements of their behaviour or

selves took precedence over the participants’ own judgements. This was more apparent

for participants whose shame was about poor performance, image, reputation or being

mocked and rejected. Accounts of shame relating to perceived moral failings were more

likely to note the participant’s own disapproval of his or herself alongside concern about

others’ disapproval. However, in four of the accounts of perceived moral failings

participants appeared also to be so strongly orientated to others’ judgements of them

that they described feeling ashamed in front of others even though they felt they had

done nothing wrong. This was in the context of relationships they appeared to value,

and three of them felt shame in front of someone who was also perceived to be in a

position of moral authority (teacher or parent). For example one Muslim participant,

who had felt shame as a teenager four years previously after being caught lying to her

parents about her whereabouts when she went to a forbidden party, indicated that she

saw her behaviour as quite reasonable at the time, but then added:

Narr: I personally did not feel shame until my parents told me how ashamed

they were of me, and I was going to go to hell. My mum still brings it up and

when she mentions it I feel ashamed and try to change the subject.

An older participant similarly described feeling ashamed whilst thinking that her

behaviour had in fact been acceptable and well-intentioned, when her friend’s partner

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interpreted her reported comment about him as malicious and became angry towards

her:

Narr: I saw this [newspaper] article [about the friend’s terminally ill partner

giving up smoking] & happened to say to her [friend] jokingly & genuinely in a

fond manner “the old hypocrite!”... later that evening I had a phone call from

him and he want absolutely berserk at me calling me all sorts of names, … I felt

totally ashamed of myself although I knew how I had felt when I said these

words.

She felt misjudged as her intentions had been misunderstood:

What was distressing about the situation, if anything?

Partly that I had upset him and partly that my friend did not support me in

explaining that I had meant no malice.

Her concern was with what her behaviour was taken to imply about her as a person -

that she was malicious. Drawing on Sabini and Silver (1997), Crozier (1998) suggests

that the key focus of shame is not on behaviour but on what the behaviour is taken to

reveal to others about the self. Therefore shame can become dependent on others’

potential and actual judgements rather than our own. As such, concluding that others’

negative judgements are unjustified does not necessarily dispel both a sense of shame

and the desire to distance oneself from an unwanted identity.

Although this first theme is not explicitly about managing and repairing shame,

the implications for overcoming shame are clear. Shame for almost all the participants

meant a concern with being judged negatively, and this seemed particularly pertinent in

the context of valued relationships. Shame was then a felt shift in social position vis-à-

vis others such that, as suggested by Gilbert et al. (1994), the participant’s relationship

to the critical other was an integral part of the experience. As such, a key aspect of the

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repair of shame might be expected to be a corrective shift in this position, or a

perception that one has repositioned oneself in some way and is no longer judged so

negatively. In fact, when asked “What would make the feeling go away completely?”,

although many participants were doubtful that this was possible, some, such as the

following young woman undergraduate, answered as if the crucial change would be an

absence of others’ judgement:

If my friend forgot about it [caught reading friend’s private letter]

Theme Two: Repositioning the Self in the Social world

Although many participants expressed pessimism about being able to repair their

shame completely, 37 wrote about their feelings of shame having become less

pronounced at least to some extent, or about factors that enabled them to cope a little

better. For all the participants who indicated that they were able to achieve some

improvement in their feeling of shame, this involved, to some extent, repositioning

themselves in relation to others, particularly with regard to those who were critical of

them. As discussed below, this was either by (i) changing their own understanding of

the situation to arrive at a different conclusion regarding their position vis-à-vis others

or (ii) enacting a particular role vis-à-vis others, either at the time of the shaming

incident or subsequently.

Subtheme (i): Reinterpreting the situation to arrive at a different

understanding of one’s position vis-à-vis others. Several of the participants achieved

this repositioning by redefining their position within the relationship in which they had

been shamed. For example, several of the participants readjusted their understanding of

a shaming situation so that they now played a different role, by adopting an alternative

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framework of moral or other values. Instead of seeing themselves as the wrongdoer they

were now the victim of another’s unjustified critical attack. One of the younger

undergraduates described a lessening of her feeling of shame about having shouted

abuse at a teacher, when she shifted from analysing the situation through the lens of a

moral code about respect for teachers to using a different one which was concerned with

the problem of abusive behaviour by authority figures:

Narr: I said something to a teacher who had been particularly abusive …towards

me over the past year. I said something that I knew would upset her…. I was

taken to the reception where a number of teachers had ‘a go’ at me and even

though I do not regret what I did at that moment in time I felt ashamed. None of

the teachers ever believed me and I felt pretty bad. In retrospect I shouldn’t have

felt ashamed because of what the teacher had been like towards me but normally

I would never had said anything like that to a teacher so I felt shame.

How do you generally feel when you think about the incident now?

I feel I did the right thing although I don’t think I should have felt shame.

She now no longer allowed the teachers to occupy the position of judge in relation to

her and no longer felt the need to submit to their shaming criticism. An alternative way

in which some participants resisted shame by redefining relationships was by devaluing

their relationship with someone to whom they had caused distress. For example, the

younger participant discussed above who lied about her reasons for missing a

christening explained in the questionnaire that the incident had led to the end of the

friendship. She wrote in response to the question “Why do you think the feeling of

shame has / hasn’t changed?” that the feeling of shame had lessened because “I don’t

miss the friendship as much and don’t think about it as much”.

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Other ways in which the participants reinterpreted their position in relation to

others included repositioning themselves against a perceived societal norm by

recontextualising their behaviour as in fact similar to that of many others and not, after

all, deviant. For example, a mature student who had initially felt ashamed after making

a negative comment about Muslims, “without thinking”, to Muslim friends explained in

her narrative that “Having grown up in India – in almost an all-Hindu environment this

comment would have been ignored”.

An alternative way in which some of the participants repositioned themselves

was by distancing their current self from the self who had behaved shamefully. As such

they no longer occupied the shameful role or position that they had played during the

episode recounted and their previous behaviour no longer had any impact on their

positioning in relation to others. To achieve this several participants interpreted their old

shameful self as belonging to an earlier period of their life. For example, although one

participant had experienced an episode many years ago when he had been caught in the

bath with his wife’s friend and had found this deeply shaming (particularly when his

mother heard about it), he wrote:

How do you generally feel when you think about the incident now?

I am amused by it. Sort of an anecdote. I am a different person as a result of the

whole experience (divorce changes people).

This participant (and others) seemed able to reflect on the shame of an earlier self, in

much the same way that he might have recounted a story about another person’s shame.

He was no longer relating to others as if he was that previous shameful self, and

therefore no longer needed to submit to a shamed position in relation to others’

judgements about how the previous self had behaved.

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Some form of reappraisal has often been considered an important part of

managing and repairing shame (e.g. Lee, Scragg & Turner, 2001; Tangney & Dearing,

2002; Van Vliet, 2009). What this sub-theme from the present data suggests is that this

may often be a reappraisal, not just of personal qualities, but of one’s position in the

social world. In line with Gilbert’s (Gilbert et al., 1994; Gilbert, 2003; 1997) view of

shame and symbolic interactionist perspectives on emotion (e.g. Denzin, 1985), it

seemed that the participants needed to adjust their perception not only of how they

existed for others but how they existed in relation to others. However, as the next sub-

theme indicates, this was usually determined not by the participant autonomously but in

negotiation with others.

Sub-theme (ii): Enacting a different position vis-à-vis others. All but one of

the 37 participants who had experienced some lessening of their feelings of shame

wrote about the role that their interactions with other people and their management of

these had played in overcoming their shame. For a few, this was a case of hiding or

fleeing from others. For example, one participant in his thirties who wrote an account of

slapping his ex-wife across the face some years ago during an argument in front of

passers-by finished the narrative by stating:

I felt instantly shamed by both the reactions of those around me, but mostly by

the way in which I had behaved. It was deeply humiliating and I literally ran

away.

However, many wrote about remaining within the situation and attempting to bring

about a change in their position relative to others (even though they might also have felt

a desire to hide).

Five of the participants attempted to manage the initial shaming episode by

outwardly ignoring the potential for shame and continuing to relate to others as if they

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had nothing to be ashamed of. For example, a woman in her twenties wrote that she felt

ashamed when she became tearful telling a work colleague that her relationship had

ended, adding that “failure of relationship can feel like personal failure” and that

“exposing emotions in public” was shameful. However, she recalled using humour to

restore more comfortable interaction:

What did you do or say when you began to feel shamed?

Smiled at my colleague. Then made a joke.

Did you try to do anything to avoid feeling shamed or reduce the strength of any

feelings of shame?

Joke-making & smiling (as before). Changed the subject quickly.

When asked “How successful was this?”, she answered “quite successful”. As Goffman

has argued (1959, 1967), others need to support the performance of an absence of shame

in order for it to achieve any effects and this was not the case for other participants. For

example, one of the younger undergraduates wrote about her distress when

acquaintances covertly mocked her dancing and described the difficulty of trying to deal

with this by pretending it was not happening:

(Narr) … my dance rhythm was all wrong. I didn’t know this until I saw the

expression on their faces. I felt like running away and never coming back…I felt

hot, I couldn’t move, even walking was a problem. So I just stood in a corner by

myself and engaged in some ‘deep’ thoughts

What did you do or say when you began to feel shamed?

I said that I didn’t feel like dancing anymore

However, this attempt to ignore what she saw as shameful was not supported by the

others, about whom she wrote, “they all looked at me, with this mocking smile which

actually showed in their eyes that they were laughing inside.” When asked how

MANAGING SHAME

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successful this strategy had been in lessening her feelings of shame, she wrote “not at

all”.

Rather than acting as if the shaming incident had not happened, more

participants managed their shame by either publicly challenging the validity of others’

shaming interpretations of a situation or alternatively by later disclosing their feeling of

shame to someone who offered some form of acceptance and validation. This was more

likely where the source of shame was public and difficult to deny. Challenges to others’

shaming appraisals were based on either reinterpretation of the situation by citing

mitigating circumstances, denial of the reality of the situation or reattribution of blame

elsewhere. However, many of these public reappraisals were seen by the participants as

of limited veracity and as such not particularly helpful. For example, one of the younger

undergraduates wrote:

Narr: My mum caught me with it [money the participant had stolen from her

brother] yet I insisted on lying on to her and felt very bad that I didn’t tell the

truth. When my brother found out and asked if I had taken the money I still lied,

knowing that it was wrong. I felt very ashamed that I was such a liar.

Similarly, the participant, mentioned above, who was caught reading a friend’s private

letter wrote:

Did you try to do anything to avoid feeling shamed or reduce the strength of any

feelings of shame?

Yes passed…the blame onto my friend

How successful was this?

Made me feel worse

As argued previously (e.g. Scheff, 1995a, 1995b; Stuewig et al., 2010; Tangney &

Dearing, 2002) externalisation of blame can be a problematic response to shame

MANAGING SHAME

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because of the link with aggressive behaviour and the negative impact on relationships.

However, it also seems important to consider the context in which this takes place and

whether or not the reappraisal necessary to resist blame is internalised as a valid

reappraisal. In the two extracts above it seems that it was not and, as such, publicly

resisting criticism did not appear to contribute to the repair of shame. However, as the

previous subtheme suggested, a shift in attribution of blame can be experienced as

highly useful where this is then internalised as a valid means of resisting what comes to

be seen as inappropriate blame, for example where others are perceived as abusing their

authority to pass shaming judgement.

Although repositioning oneself by public resistance to shaming criticism seemed

of value sometimes, many participants found it more useful for long-term repair to

disclose feelings of shame in a situation where this might lead to acceptance and

validation of an alternative and non-shaming view of their behaviour. For example, the

participant who had made a derogatory comment about a teacher whom she felt had

been abusive to her wrote:

Afterwards:

I was escorted out of the school and couldn’t see my friends which was hard as

they always supported me, but when I had spoken to them later I felt I had done

the right thing.

For many participants, support from others was crucial for solidifying and

internalising a less shaming interpretation of their behaviour. Support could also

include validation of the participant’s more general character, as described by the

participant discussed above who had angered her friend’s partner by referring to him as

“the old hypocrite!”:

MANAGING SHAME

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Did you try to do anything to avoid feeling shamed or reduce the strength of any

feelings of shame?

I explained what had happened to my husband

How successful was this?

Very – he knew I would not intentionally have hurt anyone.

As Brown (2006) and Van Vliet (2008) found in their interview studies, others’

validation seemed crucial for repairing shame, not only by contextualising the incident

and supporting alternative non-shaming formulations, but also by reconnecting the

participants with others. For many of the participants whose shame was about the

negative effect of their behaviour on others, disclosure, reconnection and validation

often took the form of apology and forgiveness. Reparation in the form of apology has

been associated with guilt rather than shame (e.g. Tangney et al., 2007; Lewis 1971),

the argument being that with guilt others are seen as relatively powerless victims rather

than shaming critics. However, many of the accounts seemed to contain appraisals of

others as both victims and critics. As Gilbert (1998) suggests, this casts doubt on the

value of differentiating many real life emotional episodes as either guilt or shame.

Certainly many of the present participants seemed to feel that their sense of shame had

been repaired through apology to and forgiveness from those who were in some way

victims of their ‘shameful’ behaviour, or represented victims, but were also critics. For

example, one mature student had upset her elderly, recently disabled mother by arguing

with her father at a family gathering and was criticised for this by her sister:

Narr: My mum … cried out & said to stop it… said how awful she felt. My

sister backed her up & said “poor mum” she’s been through a lot & she can’t

join in. I felt hot & cold all at the same time & so ashamed that I had been so

thoughtless in following my own agenda & not thinking of how she felt.

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Afterwards:

I cryed & cryed [sic]. My sister was cross with me & said how I shouldn’t have

gone on & on. I blamed myself - I felt stupid & selfish & very sorry for my

Mum…Eventually I felt forgiven by my family.

What did you do or say when you began to feel shamed?

Sorry & explained how wrong I was

She was aware of herself as devalued before critical others but also as someone who had

wronged another. Therefore she apologised and was “eventually forgiven”, which seems

in some way to have resolved the situation. Similarly, another of the younger

undergraduates whose shame was about having been caught stealing his mother’s credit

card and purse felt better about the situation only after he was forgiven:

Did you try to do anything to avoid feeling shamed or reduce the strength of any

feelings of shame?

Yes for weeks I did as much as I could do in order to try to help my mother and

make myself feel better.

How successful was this?

It only worked after my mother excepted [sic] my apology.

For both these participants, and for others, forgiveness as a route out of shame was a

matter of repairing the relationship and reconnecting with the other person, rather than

reappraising the shameful behaviour or self. The participant who upset her elderly

mother wrote:

Why do you think the feeling of shame has / hasn’t changed?

Has - time & very good relationship with my family

The route to repair of shame appeared for some of these participants to be,

paradoxically, an expression of shame through apology. This enabled the person to

MANAGING SHAME

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distance his or herself from the shameful behaviour and position him or herself

alongside potential critics as someone who found the behaviour in question

unacceptable, thus enabling repair of the relationship.

Therefore, from the perspective of the participants, disclosing shame offered a

way of gaining acceptance from others so that the participant and the other person were

now positioned in relation to each other as they had been previously. However this

worked in different ways. Some participants were able to engage others in reinforcing a

reappraisal of themselves as not at fault. Others acknowledged and communicated their

sense of shame, aligning themselves with their potential critics, in order to demonstrate

that they were worthy of forgiveness. What appeared to be the most important factor in

repairing shame was acceptance and validation from others. Regardless of being

rejected in one situation, the participant felt accepted as a valued group member

elsewhere and it was often this that made the difference between managing and

repairing their shame. From reviewing the entire data set it appeared that all of the

participants who described some lessening of their shame in the period immediately

following the shaming incident had experienced some sort of forgiveness or validation

of their behaviour, intentions or self-worth from someone. In the longer term, all but

two of the 14 participants who indicated that they now felt no significant shame about

the incident explicitly referred to support or positive feedback from others. Although

such validation was not always sufficient for repair of shame it certainly seemed

extremely important for almost all experiences of repair.

Conclusions

Having approached the research aiming in part to explore the meaning and

relevance of interpersonal factors in the management and repair of shame, we were still

MANAGING SHAME

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struck by just how important they were for our participants. The present data suggest

that the process of managing and repairing shame was as much a social one as an

intrapsychic one. Rather than being a matter of repairing self-image or achieving self-

acceptance, the meaning of overcoming shame for the participants seemed to be of

repairing their sense of their position with regard to others and managing an unwanted

identity (Ferguson, Eyre & Ashbaker, 2000) which needed to be mutually renegotiated.

Therefore, although self-evaluation and re-appraisal were important parts of repair, this

was re-evaluation of an inter-related, rather than autonomous self and, in line with

symbolic interactionist accounts of emotional experience (e.g. Denzin, 1985; 1990), the

meanings that the participants ascribed to their experiences arose in interaction with

others. As such, participants were sometimes able to lessen their shame by minimising

the importance of the relationship within which shame had arisen or by accepting

forgiveness from others, even if they continued to believe that the shameful situation

did actually reflect badly on them. Conversely, some of the participants stated that they

did not blame themselves for a shaming incident but found it difficult to resist the

shaming appraisals of others. However, the suggestion that shame may often be

managed and repaired through social interaction should not be taken to suggest that this

is easily achieved. Many of the participants felt that their shame had initially left them

disabled and powerless as social actors and were pessimistic about being able to

overcome the feeling of shame, sometimes because it seemed to them that shame was

deserved. In many cases, the possibility of repair seemed to be in the hands of others

who could choose whether to support, accept and forgive the participant or shame him

or her further.

The analyses presented above suggest that the significance of relations with

others may sometimes have been underplayed in previous discussions of managing and

MANAGING SHAME

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repairing shame. However, there are several reasons to exercise a degree of caution in

drawing more general inferences from our data. Firstly, interpersonal factors are more

likely to be prominent where shame is experienced with others present, as was the case

in the current study. The perception of acceptance by others may be less salient in some

private experiences of shame (Gilbert, 2003), though an internalised critical other may

still feature in many experiences (Crozier, 1998; Lewis, 1971). Secondly, it is possible

that others’ evaluation may have been particularly difficult to resist for several of our

participants who were recounting situations when they were still young enough for

others (e.g. parents, teachers) to be deemed to have the right to make judgements about

their behaviour. Thirdly, our research cannot be considered to have captured the full

range of public experiences of shame, especially as some experiences may be too

painful or shaming to be acknowledged or recounted to others. We should also exercise

caution in extrapolating from the present accounts which report one-off experiences of

shame, with a predominantly white, young, middle-class group, to repeated or ongoing

experiences of shame sometimes faced by those who are particularly marginalised

within society and for whom an aspect of their identity is stigmatised in some way.

Equally, our analysis has not enabled sufficient attention to differences in experiences

of shame between social groups and to experiences which may be more relevant in

certain cultural contexts. For example, issues of public honour and shame seem to have

particular resonance within families of South Asian heritage (Gilbert, Gilbert &

Sanghera, 2004). Fourthly, although the use of written anonymised data may have

enabled disclosure of some situations, the resulting responses were limited in detail

compared to the data that might have been obtained via interview. In particular the data

were possibly constrained by a perceived requirement to provide a coherent narrative,

the structure of the questions posed and the lack of opportunity for either the participant

MANAGING SHAME

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or researcher to question each other’s meanings. Further research might usefully explore

some of the issues discussed above in more depth via either an interview or a more

participant-led method of data collection such as a diary. Finally, by taking the

participants’ accounts as attempts to convey their subjective experiences, the present

analysis did not interrogate what discursive work the accounts achieved. Other

qualitative work on emotion has highlighted the ways in which emotion terms can be

invoked to manage accountability, for example by explaining actions or aspects of

performance as understandable or by discounting the responses of others (e.g. Edwards,

1999; Locke, 2003). We have argued elsewhere from a second discursive analysis of

the data that, depending on the context, either acknowledging or denying a sense of

shame can be a way of managing a potentially shameful identity (XXX, 2007). While

shame can be shameful (Scheff, 2003), in other contexts shamelessness might be more

risky (Skårderud, 2007). Further research which examines what is achieved by talk

about shame in specific interactional settings, and which explores the various discursive

strategies available to resist particular shameful identities in particular social contexts

would be useful in developing an understanding of shame, shaming and shame

management as social processes, as well as personal experiences. Such research might

usefully employ live materials rather than individual narratives in order to focus

explicitly on interpersonal processes, as discursive research on other emotion-related

talk has done (e.g. Cromby et al., 2010; Edwards, 1999; Hepburn & Potter, 2007) and

qualitative sociological research on shame (Scheff 1995a; 1995b).

Despite these qualifications of our findings, it is worth noting that other recent

open-ended studies of real-life experiences of both private and public shame with a

range of participants (Brown, 2006; Silfver, 2007; Van Vliet, 2008) have also strongly

supported our key conclusion regarding the importance of connection with and

MANAGING SHAME

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validation from others for repairing shame. This view of shame as a relational and

interdependent phenomenon has sometimes been associated with shame in Eastern

rather than Western cultures (e.g. Bagozzi, Verbeke & Gavino Jr., 2003; Mesquita &

Karasawa, 2004). However, these recent findings raise the question of whether this

cultural difference has sometimes been over-stated. It may be the case that this study

and others which have used open-ended qualitative methods are more sensitive to the

social context of shaming experiences than research methodologies which focus on the

measurement of an individual’s shame-related behaviours and thoughts. Therefore

previous commentary based on quantitative research findings which has downplayed

the importance of others’ evaluations in experiences of shame, may have missed some

of the interpersonal context of these. As Scheff (2003) has proposed, the shamed self

may be more socially embedded in the West than has sometimes been assumed,

although as supposedly autonomous westerners we may not always wish to

acknowledge this.

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i A copy of the questionnaire is available from the first author.

ii In the original sample of 96, white women undergraduates outnumbered all other demographic groups.

Therefore 21 questionnaires from this group were randomly excluded from the present analysis in order to retain as broad a mix of participants as possible. iii

‘Younger undergraduate’ refers to those in the 18-22 age-group, as opposed to ‘mature students’.

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iv ‘Narr’ indicates that the quotation is from the open-ended narrative rather than in response to a specific

question. Regular typeface indicates answers provided by the participant. Questions and prompts are indicated by italics. v ‘…’ indicates material omitted from the quotation.

vi Explanations of the shaming situation in squared brackets are provided by the researchers, based on the

participant’s account.