Is it what I did that shames me, or the hiding?
When we are tormented by shame, it is not only because of something we did. The act itself may be part of what shames us, but we feel more shame in the course of hiding it than from the act.
When there is something about us that we think makes us less, we try to hide it. We try to hide who we are, and we try to hide what we have said or done. It is at the very moment we try to hide that the shame is felt. So you can take it that the act of hiding is itself what creates the shame.
If you admit a mistake, have you lost?
We can make mistakes and get things wrong. We can behave childishly or immaturely too. Every human being does. Accept that as natural, and if you made a mistake or fell short somewhere, admit it. “I made a mistake.” “I fell a bit short.” “I didn’t think it through.” Just say it like that.
But people who are tormented by feelings of inferiority believe that saying this means losing. So they cannot bring themselves to say that they made a mistake, that they were wrong, that they fell short. That is what is truly pathetic. In fact, the person who says, “I was wrong, I made a mistake,” is the strong one, the one worth admiring.
Whether I am right or not, take a quiet look at the people you have met over the years in your relationships. The ones people like, the ones who are popular, the ones whose words carry weight, are remarkably free. They do not hide or cover up their mistakes and wrongs; they say straight away, “Ah, I made a mistake. I was wrong.” When they do that, things in the relationship are easily sorted out, and people actually respect someone who talks like that. They feel grateful to them and want to be near them.
If we cannot do that, it is because we have long told ourselves that doing it would make us look truly pathetic and inadequate, nothing but a bundle of mistakes. In reality it is the opposite.
Why does it show more, the harder we try to hide it?
When we want to be recognised, want to put ourselves forward and hate to lose, fights start and conflicts break out. Yet in that very process, the side of us we did not want anyone to see is laid bare instead. What we meant to hide keeps leaking out.
Try to grab water with your hand and it all runs out of your hand. In the same way, the more we try to hide something and hold on to it, the more it all leaks away. People know. And the more we do it, the more people look at us and think, “How pathetic. How childish.”
What happens inside us when we hide and cover up?
Hiding and covering up can make us feel shame, but it also opens up the road to lying. We end up lying. And as we do, we keep wearing away our own worth by our own hand.
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board