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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Shame
Small changes work best. Shifting your chair back slightly, looking away for a moment, softening your voice, then checking what that was like for them. For a person whose nearness to others was never something they got to decide, being asked is itself the new experience. Ask lightly and take the answer without negotiating it, or the question becomes another test.
After the mistake and the covering up, 'his Lord brought him close, accepted his repentance, and guided him' (Quran 20:122). Closeness came after the exposure and was offered rather than demanded.
طه
ثُمَّ ٱجۡتَبَٰهُ رَبُّهُۥ فَتَابَ عَلَيۡهِ وَهَدَىٰ
later his Lord brought him close, accepted his repentance, and guided him
Qur’an 20:122read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A cross sectional study of people with alcohol dependence found that those who had taken negative stereotypes about themselves to heart had less confidence in their ability to refuse a drink, so shame eroded the very sense of agency that recovery asks for. It measures association at one point in time rather than cause, but it is a good reason to hand back small pieces of control wherever you can.
Schomerus G, Corrigan PW, Klauer T, Kuwert P, Freyberger HJ, Lucht M. (2011). Self-stigma in alcohol dependence: consequences for drinking-refusal self-efficacy.. Drug and alcohol dependence doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Being handed control over how close someone comes is the part that was missing the first time.
You did not choose which things hurt you. Where you are tender was set long before you had any say in it, and the only live question is what you do with it now.
If you can see shame arriving in someone, say so gently and make it welcome. Something like: it looks like there is some shame here, and it is alright that it came.
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.