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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Shame
Learn your own version so you can catch it early, and learn to spot it in others without pointing at it like a diagnosis. When you notice the collapse in yourself, start with the body rather than the argument. Feet on the floor, a slower breath out, chin up a fraction. That is not positive thinking. It is a refusal to fold while you work out what just happened.
After the first mistake, 'they became conscious of their nakedness and began to cover themselves with leaves from the garden' (Quran 20:121). The scramble to cover is described as something bodily, which is still where shame shows up first.
طه
فَأَكَلَا مِنۡهَا فَبَدَتۡ لَهُمَا سَوۡءَٰتُهُمَا وَطَفِقَا يَخۡصِفَانِ عَلَيۡهِمَا مِن وَرَقِ ٱلۡجَنَّةِۚ وَعَصَىٰٓ ءَادَمُ رَبَّهُۥ فَغَوَىٰ
and they both ate from it. They became conscious of their nakedness and began to cover themselves with leaves from the garden. Adam disobeyed his Lord and was led astray
Qur’an 20:121read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a cross sectional study of undergraduates, higher mindfulness and self compassion were associated with lower proneness to shame, which supports building shame work on the skill of noticing. It is a student sample measured at a single point in time, so it shows the two travel together, not that noticing reduces shame.
Woods H, Proeve M. (2014). Relationships of Mindfulness, Self-Compassion, and Meditation Experience With Shame-Proneness.. Journal of cognitive psychotherapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The posture and the feeling hold each other up, so easing one loosens the other.
Shame does something cruel. It makes you want to disappear from the very person whose warmth would settle it, so if you notice yourself going quiet and pulling back, that pull is the shame talking rather than the truth about you.
A friend or a counsellor telling you that you are not a monster helps, and it only takes you so far. The shame usually sits with one particular person, and it eases most when that person hears the thing and stays.
When someone tells you they have failed, the most useful thing you can do is nothing clever. Let your face stay soft and keep looking at them.