What is the opposite of shame?

Shame is a deeply human experience, but is much more than a painful feeling. Unlike guilt, which is typically tied to a specific action or transgression, shame is a destabilizing and disruptive process that can permeate, corrode, and shape our entire sense of self. It can become so embedded in our personality and our relationships that it remains hidden, perpetuating its own darkness and isolation.

Shame is usually understood as the deeply felt sense that there is something wrong with us, that we are somehow unacceptable, broken, insufficient, or worthless. Thinking of shame as the feeling of not being good enough is a start, but it fails to capture its complex and profound impact on our psyche, the existential dread and anxiety that it often creates, and the intricate ways our mind will find to protect itself against it.

The origins, functions, and experiences of shame can vary widely, making it very difficult to put in words. The same is true when trying to think about its opposite. Some authors have proposed a few answers - empathy, self-acceptance, self-compassion. While important, each one of them feels incomplete, parts of a bigger picture, catalysts rather than ways of being.

Single answers are tempting as they offer the promise of a roadmap out of painful experience, but can lose sight of its depth and complexity. The opposite of a shame is akin to a mosaic, a multilayered tapestry with different, interconnected layers and threads. Below are a few thoughts on some of them, based on my clinical work. This is neither a complete nor exhaustive list, but it may help us begin to glimpse what it would mean to live beyond the grip of shame.

Healthy Narcissism

The word “narcissism” is often used pejoratively, but the development of healthy narcissism is essential to experiencing a cohesive and positive sense of self. When our emerging self is challenged, undermined, or unwelcomed from an early age, our personality might become subordinated to other people’s expectations, wishes, or needs. The sense of who we are becomes unstable or fragile, leading us to fear failure, exposure, or unworthiness.

Healthy narcissism is not the same as grandiosity (which is usually a defense against shame). Instead, it allows us to recognize our value and our limitations without collapsing, while being able to sustain an internal sense of aliveness, worth, and agency. This capacity is not free from tension, because it requires us to recognize both positive and negative aspects of ourselves.

The opposite of shame, in this view, is not arrogance, immunity to criticism, public confidence, or “pride” in the everyday sense. It is a state of psychological and emotional strength and resilience that allows the self to feel worthwhile even in the face of failure, challenge, injury, or disappointment. It involves a realistic appraisal of who we are, feeling free from who we were told we should be, yet open to be moved, influenced, and changed by others.

Mutual recognition

Shame is created in relationships. What might seem like an internal emotion is the result of relational ruptures in our past including, but not limited to, our early experiences with our caregivers. Shame arises most profoundly when our need for recognition is denied, distorted, or ignored, leaving us feeling alone, rejected, abandoned, or humiliated.

This is not only about being seen by another person, but about being known. “Mutual recognition” involves not only our need to be mirrored, but to be recognized as a subject in our own right. When this doesn’t happen, we may internalize the belief that our very existence is disruptive, unrecognizable, or even contaminating. Shame can feel profoundly lonely and detached, but it is not simply a feeling. It becomes a way in which we structure and make sense of our experience, leading us to live in a world that preempts connection.

The opposite of shame is not autonomy or confidence, but the restoration of our capacity for relatedness and intimacy. Mutuality, in this context, involves openness to receive the other with empathy and understanding, and the experience of being received, held in mind, and recognized as our own person.

Integration

Shame often represents a failure of internal cohesion, leaving parts of ourselves unintegrated and dissociated. This happens not only at a conscious level, when we are able to articulate what we are ashamed of. The more subtle and pernicious aspects of this fragmentation are generally unconscious. Entire sections of our inner world are disavowed because they led to intense anxiety, suffering, pain, or fear.

These unacceptable elements remain unintegrated and unspeakable. We become unable to think our own thoughts. We may internalize a sense of “badness” as an attempt to keep the attachment with our caregivers. Our authentic experience might become dissociated as we develop a “false self” in response to our relational environment. No major traumatic event is required. Chronic misattunement, loneliness, or disappointment, particularly in the absence of someone who can help us make sense of our experience, may lead to this process.

The opposite of shame can be thought of as a process of psychic integration. Therapy can support the developmental and relational capacity to own the disavowed parts of the self without collapse or retaliation. Integration involves a recognition and tolerance of multiplicity: anger and tenderness, desire and fear, strength and need, can all coexist within ourselves.

Desire

At the core of our experience, connected with our needs and wishes, lies a deep sense of longing and lack. This longing propels our sense of desire and our striving for fulfillment, connection, and meaning. Our encounter with others in the world, starting with our caregivers, gives shape to these wishes and desires, as we long for the other’s gaze, recognition, and love. At the same time, that encounter is inevitably marked by disappointment, misrecognition, or disconnection.

As a result, we enter a complicated and sometimes turbulent relationship with our deepest wishes and needs, which plants the seeds for the raise of shame. Being seen becomes at the same time a deep longing and a source of anxiety. When additional layers of dismissal, rejection, neglect, or abuse are added, we learn that our needs and wishes are dangerous and unacceptable. As a result, we will disavow or dissociate our own desire, as a way to avoid further pain and suffering.

In this view, the opposite of shame involves reclaiming our own desire, even if that desire is uncomfortable or anxiety-provoking, as it carries the risk of rejection or isolation. This entails developing a different relationship with ourselves, one that recognizes our longing and our passion, as well as our limitations, incompletion, and imperfection.

Dignity

Shame has the capacity to seize our body and mind. Our voice is silenced, our eyes shut, and our whole body shrinks, feels smaller, or wants to disappear as we fear being exposed. Shame disrupts not only our sense of self but, as a result, our sense of belonging. At its most intense, it makes us question our right to exist and participate in humanity.

We develop our sense of self and belonging in relationships. From an early age, we depend not only on receiving care, love, and recognition; equally important is the experience that what we have to offer is also received. When our emerging self is not met with attunement, curiosity, and acceptance, we may internalize the rejecting and at times dehumanizing reactions from others.

If shame makes us feel unacceptable to ourselves, dignity restores our ability to inhabit our own body and mind, to own up to our own experience and meet the gaze of the other without fleeing or falling apart. Dignity is not free from discomfort and does not imply becoming impervious to change, but it is a stance that affirms that our self, even in its vulnerability, remains worthy of standing.

Putting it all together

Shame is not just a feeling, but an experience of profound psychic disintegration. It transforms our wishes and longings to be seen and known into fears of being exposed, humiliated, or rejected. It erodes our sense of coherence and belonging, disrupting the core of the relationship we keep with ourselves and others.

The opposite of shame is not singular. It includes navigating experiences and recovering capacities that make it possible for our self to exist with meaning, purpose, and direction. Healthy narcissism, mutual recognition, integration, desire, and dignity are not mutually exclusive categories. They are intertwined dimensions that can create, over time, a different texture of being, one that honors the depth of our history and the complexity of our inner world.

If you would like to start the process of working through shame in therapy, please don’t hesitate to contact us today!

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Photo credit: Romario Roges