Shame and Embarrassment

Have you ever farted in public?  Now that I have sufficiently lowered the tone and set your expectations for this post I would like to ask the question again, but with all seriousness intended and humour aside.  Have you ever done something that everyone does at some point but in a public setting where it caused you deep embarrassment?  I had something of a baptism of fire with this concept when I was a child in school and pissed myself, I must have been 5 or 6 years old at the time.  Whilst the experience was humiliating, I survived and within a few days everyone moved on to something else to talk about and forgot about the experience which taught me quite early in life that collective consciousness is fluid and rarely stays in the same place fixated on the same thing for very long.

There are of course exceptions to that rule, notably within politics which seems to love stagnation but there at least I think the prevailing attitudes can be explained by a desire to stymie progress because preserving the current state of affairs is usually beneficial to politicians.  This in many ways reflects society in general and our tendency to fixate on particular moments.  Embarrassment in and of itself does not determine how long we dwell on a particular incident but rather what is gained by prolonging attention paid to it.  When you experience particularly embarrassing moments and one or more people try and make sure you never forget it or never move on from it, the reason they do this is because it gives them power over you, it gives them strings that they can pull to manipulate your emotional state.  The easiest way to cut those strings is to embrace whatever it was that caused you embarrassment and take ownership of it.  If you fart in public and feel embarrassment therefore, the best approach is to laugh it off, not to try and deny it ever happened or hide in your shell just embrace the fact it happened and laugh at how embarrassed you were.

I have said many times there are very few things I regret in life due to the fact that I believe you only ever do in the moment what you think is right, in many ways my relationship to shame and embarrassment reflect this mentality in that most things that cause me embarrassment in the moment are things that I either could not prevent or I did not have the forethought or foresight to know not to do - and even in hindsight as with regret it is often the case that even if I possessed both of these I probably would have done it anyway so I can't fault myself in that regard.

In both of these scenarios there is an underlying truth that is mere inches from your grasp if you can just brush away the surface and really examine what is going on, that truth here is that shame, embarrassment, and regret, are all sentiments that we feel out of expectation, they are based on other peoples perceptions of us and our actions not our own.  You never regret things until you are given context, you never feel shame until you are given context, and you never feel embarrassed until you are given context.  That context can come from others reactions to your behaviour and their surprise at your deviation from societal norms.  That context can also come from figures of authority that attempt to correct that behaviour in an attempt to control how you will behave in future.  That context could also come through your own realisation of that deviation or the development of beliefs that plant the idea in your head that this was somehow wrong.

Once you realise this relationship exists between other people's perceptions of you and your actions as determining shame, embarrassment, and regret, you can pick those concepts apart further and ask what those three feelings are in reality.  By my estimation all three are in reality manifestations of fear.  Both shame and embarrassment are the fear of judgement from others, whilst regret is the fear of missing out on what would have happened if you had acted differently.  Regret however is about more than missing out, it incorporates the judgement of others as to whether that alternative outcome would have been better.  Missing an opportunity in and of itself won't necessarily cause regret, curiosity will always make you contemplate what might have happened had you acted differently, there has to be a desire for the alternate outcome which in most cases is rooted in the belief that people would judge the actual outcome of your actions against the alternate outcome and deem the alternative to be preferable.

Being able to identify the origin of our emotions helps us to understand exactly who and what have influence over our lives.  Just as the ideal method of overcoming embarrassment is to take away the control that it gives others over you, the same is true for regaining emotional stability in life in general.  If you can recognise the origin of your emotions and underline why you feel the way you do then it can be easier to develop strategies to alter the thought processes that amplify those emotions as I discussed a while ago when I wrote about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy techniques.  Understanding the root of your emotions is an extension of understanding the root of your thoughts.