What is the purpose of Shame?

Photo by Akshar Dave on Unsplash

Shame is one of those uncomfortable feelings that most of the human population has felt at least once. Sometimes the feeling only lasts for a few minutes and other times it lingers with us for years. It is an emotion that can be very intense and painful. There are so many situations that can cause people to feel shame. It can be from something embarrassing that happened in the cafeteria in 7th grade or it can come from a more severe trauma. Maybe you have really high expectations placed onto you from others or yourself.

Although shame is a natural human emotion, it can eat away at you over the years causing all sorts of other mental symptoms as well as physical symptoms. It can be easy to be angry with yourself for feeling this type of emotion. Which just intensifies the feeling of shame. It can be really difficult to break yourself out of that cycle.

There is a few things that I’ve done in order to come to terms with shame. And one of them was to understand the primal purpose for shame. Our mind and body doesn’t just feel things for no reason. Even though it may feel like that at times. Every human emotion has a purpose, even the negative emotions. The primal purpose of shame is to protect our social relationships. It can also help to motivate us to repair our social relationships. If you think of social relationships on a primal level, they are extremely important for our survival. Humans/ humanoids that traveled together were safer than those who were alone. In today’s world, our social relationships help us with our mental health. We receive support, advice, love, friendship etc.. from our social relationships. Social relationships also do help to keep us safer from both physical and mental attacks. It makes sense that our bodies would have a mechanism that makes us want to protect our social status.

Once I began to understand why my body decided I needed to feel this uncomfortable emotion. I stopped beating myself up about it and starting to utilize coping skills that actually made the situation better.

Thank you all for reading!

Kate

Co-Owner Nordic Moon