The things we don't want anyone to know: Understanding Shame and Why We Hide

There are things most of us would prefer other people didn't know about us. Not necessarily enormous secrets or terrible things we've done, but the ordinary, slightly uncomfortable things that don't quite fit with the version of ourselves we'd like to present to the world. Maybe you're jealous of a friend you genuinely love. Maybe your relationship isn't as happy as people assume. Maybe you secretly have no idea what you're doing at work despite being very good at your job. You might resent someone you're supposed to love, feel lonely in a room full of people, want more sex or less of it, regret becoming a parent, regret not becoming one, or simply look at a life you worked incredibly hard to build and wonder why you aren't happier in it.

Often, the uncomfortable part isn't the thing itself. It's what we think somebody knowing it would say about us.

This is where shame becomes interesting, because we tend to talk about it as though it's an entirely internal experience: I feel ashamed of myself. But shame is remarkably preoccupied with other people. More specifically, with how we might be seen by them.

A woman sits alone, with her head bowed, on a vibrant pink surface, surrounded by abstract curves.

There is some fascinating research behind this. One theory proposes that shame evolved, at least in part, to protect us from social devaluation: the possibility that information about us could make other people value us less. Researchers have tested this across different cultures and found that the things people anticipate feeling most ashamed about tend to be the very things other people say would make them think less of someone.

In other words, shame appears to be remarkably good at reading the room.

This doesn't mean every shame response is rational, accurate or useful. The room we're reading might be one we left twenty years ago. The audience might be our parents, an old partner, our school friends, our culture or an imagined collection of people who aren't actually paying nearly as much attention to us as we think they are.

But the alarm still goes off.

What is shame?

Psychologically, shame is often described as a painful negative evaluation of the self. This is where the familiar distinction between shame and guilt comes from: guilt tends to focus on something we've done, while shame is more likely to become a judgement about who we are.

That's useful, but we think it only tells half the story.

Shame isn't just I don't like this part of myself. Very often, there is another fear underneath it: what happens if somebody else sees it too?

That makes shame as much about belonging as it is about self-esteem.

For some people it passes relatively quickly. For others, particularly when shame has been reinforced repeatedly through childhood experiences, relationships, family expectations, identity or culture, it can become a much more persistent way of relating to themselves. This is sometimes described as chronic shame or toxic shame.

Rather than feeling ashamed about one particular event, the underlying belief becomes something closer to there is something about me that isn't quite acceptable.

And that's where shame can begin quietly organising a life.

We're more visible than ever. We're also very good at hiding.

There is an odd contradiction in modern life. We share an enormous amount of ourselves, but we've also become exceptionally sophisticated at deciding which self gets shared.

Social media is the obvious example, but it would be far too easy to blame Instagram. We do it everywhere. There is a work version of us, a family version, a relationship version, a version for the school parents and another for the group chat. None of this is inherently dishonest; human beings naturally behave differently in different relationships and environments.

The interesting question is what happens when maintaining those versions starts requiring quite a lot of work.

Perhaps everyone knows you as incredibly capable, which makes admitting you're overwhelmed strangely difficult. Perhaps you're the relaxed one in your relationship, so you've become very good at pretending things don't bother you. Maybe your family thinks you're successful and you can't bear the idea of telling them you've made a mistake. Or perhaps you've spent so long being the person who takes care of everybody else that needing something yourself feels vaguely embarrassing.

We often describe these qualities positively. Independent. Easygoing. Driven. Generous. Reliable. High-achieving. And they may well be. But the same behaviour can come from very different places.

Shame doesn't always make a life smaller

We tend to imagine someone struggling with shame as withdrawn, insecure or visibly lacking in confidence. Sometimes they are. Sometimes shame builds a spectacularly functional adult.

If being unsuccessful feels shameful, achievement becomes particularly important. If depending on people feels dangerous, independence can become an identity. If criticism touches something much deeper than the thing being criticised, perfectionism makes perfect sense. If disappointing people threatens your sense of being a good person, saying yes becomes considerably easier than saying no.

This is one reason shame, perfectionism and people-pleasing can become so closely intertwined.

The result can be a life that looks very good from the outside.

The question isn't whether ambition, independence, generosity or conscientiousness are secretly psychological problems. They're not. The better question is how much freedom you have around them.

Can you do a mediocre job at something without thinking about it for three days? Can someone be disappointed with you without immediately trying to make it right? Can you ask for help before you've exhausted every other possible option? Can you change your mind after saying yes? Can you be misunderstood without producing a closing argument for the defence? Can you rest when nothing has been earned?

That last one catches more people than you might expect.

The difference between a value and a rule is often what happens when you try to break it.

A statue of Lady Justice stands tall against a gray sky, holding scales and a sword, symbolizing fairness and the impartiality of judgment.

Your body may know you're being judged before you've worked out why you care

There is another reason shame can feel disproportionately powerful: social evaluation isn't only an intellectual experience.

Researchers studying what they call social-evaluative threat have compared people completing stressful tasks while being judged by others with people completing similar tasks without that element of evaluation. The socially evaluated groups didn't simply report feeling differently; they also showed stronger cortisol responses.

A much larger review of more than 200 laboratory studies found something similar. Stressful situations involving the possibility of negative judgement, particularly when combined with a lack of control, produced some of the strongest cortisol responses.

It makes sense of those strangely physical moments of shame. The hot face. The stomach drop. Wanting the conversation to end immediately. Replaying what you said hours later even though another part of you knows it really wasn't that serious.

Your nervous system isn't necessarily responding to the objective size of the mistake. It may be responding to the possibility that your social standing has changed.

Which is why telling yourself to just stop caring what people think has never been particularly sophisticated psychological advice.

We are built to care.

The more useful work is understanding whose opinion has become so important, and why.

You don't actually have to do anything wrong to feel ashamed

This might be one of the most useful things shame research has given us.

Shame is often treated as though it is evidence of wrongdoing. We feel ashamed, therefore somewhere underneath it all we must believe we've done something shameful.

Not necessarily.

Research examining what triggers shame has found that social devaluation itself can be enough. We can experience shame when we imagine other people thinking less of us even when there has been no moral wrongdoing at all.

That distinction matters.

People feel shame about their bodies, sexuality, being divorced, being single, infertility, losing money, being made redundant, having a mental health problem, struggling as a parent, not earning enough, earning more than their partner, their family, their education, their accent or simply needing help.

None of those things inherently constitutes wrongdoing, but all of them can collide with an idea we've absorbed about the person we're supposed to be.

Sometimes shame isn't telling us I've done something wrong.

It's telling us I've broken a rule about who I'm allowed to be.

There is a difference between Privacy and Hiding

Therapy has occasionally inherited the idea that disclosure is inherently good: say the thing, tell the story, get it out. We don't think it's quite that simple.

Privacy is healthy. You are not required to turn yourself inside out in the name of emotional wellbeing, and there are parts of ourselves that we are perfectly entitled to keep for ourselves.

But privacy and shame don't quite feel the same.

Privacy says, this belongs to me and I choose who gets access to it. Shame says, if people knew this, something would change.

One has choice in it. The other has fear.

Psychologists have studied this tendency as self-concealment, particularly the deliberate hiding of personal information we experience as distressing or negative. A large review spanning 137 studies found self-concealment associated with differences across emotional regulation, social wellbeing and psychological and physical health.

Importantly, the researchers described a tension at the heart of concealment: wanting to reveal something while simultaneously wanting to hide it.

Most of us probably know that feeling without needing a psychological term for it. You desperately want somebody to know, while desperately hoping nobody ever finds out, which can be an exhausting place to live.

Veiled in light, a figure hides behind a curtain, embodying a sense of shame and vulnerability.

The pursuit of being a good person can have a dark side

There is another form of shame we see that is much harder to recognise because, on the surface, it looks virtuous.

Some people don't simply want to behave well. They need reassurance that they are good.

That distinction becomes important when something goes wrong.

You will, at some point, be selfish. You'll hurt someone you care about, misunderstand something, behave badly, choose the wrong thing or discover that somebody has a version of events in which you are not the hero. That's an unavoidable consequence of having relationships with other human beings.

Guilt gives us somewhere to go with that. If we can tolerate the possibility that we've behaved badly, we can listen, apologise, repair something and perhaps behave differently next time.

Shame makes this considerably harder because the stakes have changed. We're no longer asking, Did I get this wrong? We're asking, What does getting this wrong say about me?

That's when we start explaining, defending, replaying conversations and recruiting friends to the jury. Sometimes we're not actually trying to understand what happened. We're trying to restore a particular version of ourselves.

There is something quietly liberating about accepting that you will never assemble enough evidence to prove that you're an entirely good person. None of us will.

The more useful goal might be developing enough security in who you are that discovering something uncomfortable about yourself doesn't require either collapsing under it or arguing it away.

A cute puppy sits on a concrete step, gazing upwards with an adorably bashful expression.

Can therapy help with shame?

At Syné, we're wary of treating every uncomfortable human experience as a symptom requiring elimination. We don't think the goal of therapy for shame is to become endlessly calm, perfectly boundaried, permanently self-compassionate and completely unbothered by what anybody thinks of you. Apart from being unrealistic, it sounds exhausting.

There is ancient wisdom in accepting that discomfort is part of being human. Our emotions have functions, even when those functions have become overactive, outdated or attached to rules that no longer make much sense.

Therapy can instead offer somewhere to become curious about shame: where it came from, what it might be protecting, whose expectations you're still carrying and how it has shaped the way you relate to yourself and other people.

Shame can tell us that we've behaved outside our own values. It can tell us that belonging matters deeply to us. Sometimes it reveals an old rule about the kind of person we believe we're allowed to be. Sometimes it belongs to a family, culture, relationship or period of our lives that we've long since left, but whose expectations we are still quietly obeying.

Rather than immediately asking how do I stop feeling ashamed?, there may be more value in asking what the shame is protecting.

What would somebody supposedly discover about you if you stopped working so hard to manage their impression? And what would actually happen if they did?

If shame, perfectionism, self-criticism or the feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong with you has become a familiar part of your internal world, you can read more about [shame therapy at Syné Collective →].

Something to take into your week

You don't need a journal, a worksheet or twenty minutes of breath-work for this one.

Simply notice the moments when you edit yourself.

Not every edit means something profound. We would strongly recommend continuing to edit at least some of your thoughts before sharing them with colleagues, family members and strangers on public transport.

But notice the ones that have some charge behind them: the thing you almost said and then changed, the help you nearly asked for, the boundary you softened, the opinion you pretended not to have, the mistake you over-explained or the compliment you immediately deflected.

Then get curious about what you were managing in that moment. Were you protecting your privacy, or protecting a version of yourself?

There is no correct answer. That's rather the point.

Your ritual, your reprieve

One of the reasons we think of therapy as a ritual rather than simply a treatment is that it creates something increasingly rare: a regular space in which there is very little to perform.

You don't need to arrive at Syné with the sensible version of the story. You don't need to know why you did it, have the lesson neatly extracted or reassure your therapist that you're actually doing fine. The contradictory, embarrassing, petty, uncertain and distinctly unpolished bits are allowed into the room too.

Tania Grippi, Psychotherapist at Syné Collective, works particularly with shame and the patterns that can grow around it, including perfectionism, high-functioning anxiety, people-pleasing, overthinking, identity and self-worth. Her relational and psychodynamic approach offers space to explore not only what you're feeling, but where some of those rules about who you're supposed to be may have come from.

[Meet Tania →] or [explore shame therapy at Syné Collective →]

Sometimes fifty minutes of reprieve isn't about escaping the chaos outside. It's a reprieve from managing who you need to be within it.

Syné Collective offers counselling and psychotherapy from our Sydney CBD rooms at Level 12, 347 Kent Street, with online therapy available Australia-wide.

Ancient Wisdom for Modern Minds.