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Shame and Avoidance

Shame is the painful sense that something is wrong with the self and that this defect could lower one's standing in other people's eyes. It may follow a public failure, but the audience can also be imagined or internalized. A person can feel exposed while alone.1

This makes withdrawal an intelligible response. If being seen is the threat, hiding reduces it. Avoidance may mean leaving a conversation, concealing a mistake, delaying a task, declining help, numbing the feeling, or steering one's attention away from it. These behaviors differ on the surface but share an immediate aim: reduce contact with an experience that says, “If this is seen, I may be rejected.”

Shame-Avoidance Loop

Avoidance often works in the short term. A cancelled appointment prevents scrutiny. An unopened message postpones criticism; concealment prevents another person from responding. That relief teaches the person to avoid the next cue as well.

The longer-term effects can create more shame:

  1. Shame makes exposure, action, or disclosure feel dangerous.
  2. Avoidance removes the immediate threat and brings relief.
  3. The person loses a chance to repair the problem or discover that the feared judgment would not occur.
  4. Unfinished tasks, secrecy, isolation, or missed care produce new problems.
  5. Those consequences become evidence for another global judgment of the self.

This is a plausible maintenance cycle, not a single causal law established across all forms of avoidance. Much of the evidence is correlational and relies on self-report. For example, one cross-sectional study found that experiential avoidance statistically mediated the association between early shaming experiences and depressive symptoms, but its design cannot show which variable caused another.2

Avoidance can also hide the emotion from observers and from the person experiencing it. Someone may present as indifferent, evasive, perfectionistic, angry, or chronically busy rather than visibly ashamed. Nathanson's influential “compass of shame” groups defensive responses into withdrawal, avoidance, attack on self, and attack on others. Recent reviews find that researchers define and measure these responses inconsistently, so the compass is best used as a map of possibilities rather than a diagnostic test.1

Shame does not always cause withdrawal

Shame can motivate repair when a person believes recovery is possible. Across five experiments, Ilona de Hooge and colleagues found that people tended to approach when they could restore a threatened self-image and withdraw when restoration was too risky or unavailable.3 Two later experiments even found a preference for being with other people after induced shame rather than being alone.4

Context therefore changes the response. Withdrawal may protect someone from genuine humiliation, prejudice, or abuse. It becomes costly when the prediction of rejection is treated as certain and generalized to situations where contact, disclosure, or repair could help.

Guilt also points toward a different behavioral target. Shame evaluates the whole self—“I am bad”—and commonly promotes hiding or defensiveness. Guilt evaluates an act—“I did something bad”—and more often promotes confession, apology, or repair.5 The distinction is useful but imperfect: people can experience both emotions, and some forms of guilt are also maladaptive.

Interrupting the loop

The practical counter-move is tolerable approach, not forced exposure. Separate the event from the identity claim, then choose the smallest action that tests the feared outcome or repairs the actual harm. That might mean naming the feeling, opening the message, describing the mistake without defending it, returning to a task for ten minutes, or telling one trustworthy person.

Self-compassion can make that approach easier because it replaces self-attack with a response that allows the failure to be examined. Evidence for shame-focused treatment is promising but still limited. A scoping review found that successful interventions often combined psychoeducation, experiential work, social support, and emotional expression. The sixteen included studies were too weak and varied to identify which ingredients reduced shame.6

The goal is not to eliminate shame but to regain enough distance from the global self-judgment to decide whether protection or repair fits the situation.

References

  1. “Conceptualization and Assessment of Shame Experience and Regulation: An Umbrella Review of Synthesis Studies,” Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 2025. ↩ ↩2

  2. Jordan Farr, Margo Ononaiye, and Chris Irons. “Early Shaming Experiences and Psychological Distress: The Role of Experiential Avoidance and Self-Compassion,” Psychology and Psychotherapy, 2021. ↩

  3. Ilona E. de Hooge, Marcel Zeelenberg, and Seger M. Breugelmans. “Restore and Protect Motivations Following Shame,” Cognition and Emotion, 2010. ↩

  4. Ilona E. de Hooge et al. “The Social Side of Shame: Approach Versus Withdrawal,” Cognition and Emotion, 2018. ↩

  5. June Price Tangney, Jeff Stuewig, and Debra J. Mashek. “Moral Emotions and Moral Behavior,” Annual Review of Psychology, 2007. ↩

  6. Susanne J. Norder et al. “A Scoping Review of Psychosocial Interventions to Reduce Internalised Shame,” Psychotherapy Research, 2023. ↩