Do you yearn to be seen for who you really are but dread being exposed and rejected?
I wanted to write a bit about shame today: I think it's the most corrosive and insidious of all emotions.
It's actually quite unusual for someone to recognise that what they are feeling is shame; often it doesn’t look anything like what we imagine shame to look like.
It can look like struggling to hold somebody’s gaze when eye contact suddenly feels too direct... seeing a message from somebody you care about and finding yourself unable to reply... changing the subject when somebody asks how you really are... or feeling an inexplicable urge to pull away shortly after you’ve felt particularly close to someone.
There is a beautiful line from the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott that I think about often: “It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.”
It captures something of the essence of shame, particularly the kind of shame that can develop when we grow up without enough emotional attunement.
There can be this extraordinary contradiction inside us: I desperately want you to know me, and I am terrified that you will.
We begin life wanting to be known. We want somebody to be interested in our inner world, to notice what excites us and frightens us, to understand why something matters to us even when it doesn’t seem important to anybody else. This is part of how we gradually develop a sense that who we are makes sense, and that it is safe to be ourselves in relationship with another person.
But what happens when the people around us are emotionally unavailable, preoccupied or simply don’t have the capacity to meet us in the way that we need? Perhaps our sensitivity is treated as overreacting, our excitement as annoying, our sadness as inconvenient, or our need for reassurance as neediness.
Sometimes nobody needs to say any of this explicitly. A child becomes exquisitely sensitive to the sigh, the eye roll, the impatience in someone’s voice or the parent who seems to withdraw whenever feelings enter the room.
And children are extraordinarily adaptive. If being fully ourselves seems to threaten the relationships we depend upon, we learn which parts of ourselves are acceptable and which need to be hidden away. Perhaps we become easy, independent, helpful, funny or high-achieving. Perhaps we become very good at knowing what everybody else needs and stop asking for anything for ourselves.
There is something both beautiful and intelligent in that adaptation. If you learnt to hide important parts of yourself, you didn’t do so arbitrarily. At some point, hiding protected something precious. It allowed you to preserve the relationships you needed, while also protecting those vulnerable parts of yourself from being repeatedly misunderstood, criticised or shamed.
The difficulty is that we don’t automatically unlock those rooms when we become adults.
And so we can find ourselves living with a painful paradox. We ache for somebody to really understand us, yet when somebody begins to do exactly that, it can feel terrifying. Someone asks a question that goes a little deeper than expected and suddenly you can’t think. Someone notices you’re not quite yourself and, rather than feeling relieved, you immediately reassure them that everything is fine. Someone responds warmly to something you expected them to dismiss and you find yourself wanting to retreat.
Through the distorting lens of shame, being seen is not automatically experienced as comforting when being seen has historically been associated with being judged.
Your adult mind may know that this person cares about you, while another part of you is already preparing for what used to come next: What if they think I’m ridiculous? What if I’m too sensitive? What if I’ve said too much? What if I’m being needy? What if they really see me and decide that they don’t like what they find?
This is why I don’t think healing is simply about learning to 'be more vulnerable'. Vulnerability without sufficient safety isn’t necessarily healing, and the goal isn’t to become completely open. We are allowed privacy. We are allowed boundaries. There are parts of ourselves that are precious precisely because they belong to us.
What can begin to change is whether hiding feels like a choice or a necessity.
This is where a really strong therapeutic relationship can help. Not to force open the parts of you that have needed to remain closed, but to create a relationship in which, gently and incrementally, you can experience what it is like to be known without being shamed.
Perhaps you tell me something and immediately want to minimise it. Perhaps you struggle to meet my eyes when we’re talking about something that matters to you. Perhaps you find yourself making a joke, changing the subject or saying that it “doesn’t really matter”. Rather than seeing these as things we need to get past, we can become curious about them together. They may be traces of a younger you who became extremely good at recognising when it was safer to disappear.
We don’t need to drag that part of you out of hiding. We can allow them to discover, gradually and through experience, that things might be different now. That you can have a feeling without being told you’re overreacting. You can need reassurance without becoming a burden. You can be sensitive without apologising for your sensitivity. You can let somebody see a little more of you and discover that they are still there afterwards.
We need the freedom to have an inner world that is ours alone, but we also need the experience of somebody wanting to find us there.
For those of us who learnt very early that being found could hurt, the task isn’t simply to come out of hiding. It is to discover, slowly and with people who have earned our trust, that we can be found without being shamed for it.
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