On the 8th of May this year I did the softest of soft launches for my Creativity Considered project that I have been working on since July 2024. It’s an examination of creativity, and especially what people say about getting our creativity unstuck because I needed to get unstuck.
I sent the link to a few trusted friends who know my non-fiction and fiction writing. More importantly we have talked about our insecurities and worries about our writing before. I trust these people with things that matter to me. So, why, after I sent it to them, did I feel shame hit me like a tsunami?
Obviously, there was just the relief of pressing the ‘Go’ button. I’d worked on it for months. It could have been simply an adrenaline dump; I’d worked myself up into a state making sure that it was as good as it could be, and then once it was out there there was no going back.
But there was also embarrassment (which isn’t shame), that I know everything that is wrong with it, but I put it out there anyway.
I even wrote about shame in another Creativity Considered post, and I am certain it will come up again and again in it. But why? Why is this feeling of shame so prevalent in anything creative?
The Philosophy of Shame
The first time I spent time seriously thinking about what shame is was via Jean-Paul Sartre.
In ‘Being and Nothingness’ he writes about “The Look” (le regard). I’m going to paraphrase here:
Imagine you are in a hotel with long corridors. As you walk down one corridor you hear raised voices coming from one of the rooms.
As you walk you realise you’re getting closer to the room where the sound is coming from.
At it’s loudest, you put your ear against the door to try to hear what is being said.
Unable to hear clearly, you crouch down and look through the keyhole to try to see who is raising their voice.
Suddenly you hear footsteps in the corridor you were just walking down.At that moment, the moment when you hear someone possibly approaching you, you go from behaving as a Subject who is curious about what is going on behind the door, to realising that you are an Object in someone else’s world.
Furthermore, you are an Object in their world that they can judge. For Sartre, this is where shame can arise because their gaze mediates your sense of Self. “I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other.”
The thing that fascinated me the most about this scenario was that those footsteps you hear might not have even been coming your way, yet you still become aware that you are an object in someone else’s world, and they may judge you.
Sartre’s work reminded me very much of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.
From the video below: “The guard watches the prisoners. But the prisoners do not see the guard, and do not know when they are watched, and must therefore act as if they were always watched.”
For many people the guard that watches is God. No one sees God, but they say they behave as if God is always watching them.
And the list of what God watches for is long. Everything from killing someone, to drinking coffee, to just thinking about sex, lying and speaking. People say they modify their behaviour because they have internalised the possibility of God’s judgement.
The problem with this is that God doesn’t turn the corner of the corridor in the hotel and catch you peeping. God doesn’t come out of the Guard’s Room to discipline unruly prisoners. People do.
Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, understood this shame, this lack of freedom, this self-imposed behavioural modification, and living in the anticipation of being judged in a way that Sartre could not. Women are conditioned to see themselves as they are seen by men. Women internalise the male gaze, and make constant self-adjustments to avoid men’s (and women’s) judgement: adjusting your clothes, averting your eyes, smiling to avoid anger, etc. A woman’s body is an Object for men; a woman is socially defined in terms of her relationship to men: mother, wife, daughter, whore.
Similarly, Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks, and The Wretched of the Earth, talks about how when white people look at a Black person they don’t see a person, an individual, but they see a stereotype: “the Negro”, “the savage”, “the criminal”. To the white person, the Black body is anything but a human subject. Black people change their behaviour in order to be seen as human. For example, speaking “proper” French, without a Creole or African accent, only using African-American Vernacular English in particular environments, adopting the white colonizer’s religion, not wearing natural hairstyles, and skin bleaching, are all ways Black people make constant self-adjustments in order to avoid judgement.1
We internalise the possibility of the Other’s judgement.
This, for Sartre, was a denial of one’s true freedom: Constantly living in the anticipation of being judged. As you can probably imagine this constant anticipation may set you on edge. (Not in a good way.)
The Evolution of Shame
Some researchers believe that shame has an evolutionary purpose. We feel it as a kind of warning sign that our behaviour is putitng long-term social cohesion at risk. “The function of shame is to prevent us from damaging our social relationships, or to motivate us to repair them if we do,” says Daniel Sznycer from the University of Montreal.2
Researchers believe that “the intensity of anticipated shame…is an internally generated prediction of just how much others will devalue them if they take a given action.”3 What our ancestors 100,000 years ago considered ‘of value’ is quite different to what we consider valuable now.
Our ancestors did not have to deal with the kind of public shaming that can take place today. Monica Lewinsky’s TED Talk about public shaming is worth watching because her public shaming took place just before social media took off, and legacy media turned shaming her into an international blood sport. It makes money like sport does too - publicly shaming people on the internet makes a lot of money for site owners.
Like most of our evolutionary biology, feeling shame was meant to be a healthy thing that allowed us to stay in community and avoid death. But also like most of our evolutionary biology it can turn maladaptive.
Rather than alert us to the threat of our little community not caring to save us if we keep behaving the way we do, shame can twist itself up inside, metastasising until it fundamentally changes the way we see and value ourselves (see Sartre, de Beauvoir & Fanon above). We live with the constant anticipation of others saying not only “You did something wrong / disgusting / stupid / unloveable.”, but also “You are wrong / disgusting / stupid / unloveable.”
That we feel shame is a biological function that evolved so that we could survive as a species (nature). What we feel shame about, and how strongly we feel it, is largely cultural (nurture).
The Neuroscience of Shame
Constantly anticipating judgement puts your body in a perpetual state of preparation to deal with the threat of judgement. Your brain processes the threat of being shunned by your community as it would process any other threat.
There is a lot of evidence that shows that the amygdala (part of the brain that plays a major role in processing fear, threats, and emotional memories) is highly active during experiences of shame, thus triggering fight / flight / freeze / fawn responses. 4
Living in a state of constant threat fries your sympathetic nervous system, the part that is responsible for connecting organs to your brain. Shame activates increased heart rate, redirects blood flow away from organs like the skin towards our muscles, increases cortisol levels, reduces activity in the region of the brain responsible for rational thinking and emotional regulation.
Here’s the shitty thing about our brains: our brains don’t distinguish between threats. Our brains don’t even distinguish between what’s real and what’s not real.5 To your brain, there is not much difference between the threat of being ostracised by your tribe, and the threat of being eaten by a shark or attacked by a bear or a man. Your body just does what it is meant to do: keeps you safe.
What’s more, if you experience severe psychological trauma, whether it’s via combat, assault, or accidents (PTSD) or experience ongoing trauma such as childhood abuse, domestic violence, repeatedly witnessing or being subject to violence (CPTSD6), you are more likely to have this response to any threat. You’re more likely to experience chronic, maladaptive shame and more likely to engage “in self-destructive and aggressive behaviours, [or] withdrawing and isolating from others”.7
“Shame has been associated with the tendency to socially withdraw, hide, disappear, inhibit social interactions, and to isolate oneself from others.”8
And that is exactly the instinct I have after I post anything.
Being Seen
Shame isn’t just a brief moment of pain or embarrassment. It’s a deeply rooted cultural, physiological, and psychological phenomenon, that blooms in the anticipation of being seen and judged. It sets off the alarm bells that we are in danger if exposed, and that visibility is a risk.
Do you know what requires visibility? Creativity.
I have to remember that every time I put something out into the world, I fly in the face of my neural wiring that is programmed to believe that I don’t matter and that everything I do is shit. I hit ‘Post’ and I give the finger to evolutionary instincts that tell me to hide. I say ‘Fuck you’ to social conditioning that says, Don’t be too much, You will never be enough, You’re too complicated, It’s not that deep, No one cares. This isn’t personal, this is the remains of cultural programming designed to encourage people to be small, silent, and above all, safe. We all feel this way at some point.
Creativity is, by its nature, relational. It can’t exist in isolation. Creativity has to resist shame’s impulse to hide.
I don’t think I’m ever going to get to a state where I don’t feel shame; eradicating shame entirely would be dangerous anyway. However, I can understand what it really is: a faulty alarm, an ancient survival mechanism that’s been adapted and maladapted over the years.
The footsteps in the corridor might not be coming for me, or maybe they are and they want to look too. The guard in the panopticon might be asleep or not even there.
And even if people see - what then?
THIS WEEK:
Most listened to song: I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) by Whitney Houston
Favourite thing I’ve watched: Panthers vs. Maple Leafs - Game 7
Favourite thing I’ve read: An email from my aunt.
I’m most excited by: Frost vs. Charge - Game 2.
If you want an exceptional depiction of what de Beauvoir and Fanon mean, read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.
Estrada, A. (2018) Why did we evolve to feel shame?, Futurity. Available at: https://www.futurity.org/shame-evolution-survival-1866792/
D. Sznycer, D. Xygalatas, E. Agey, S. Alami, X. An, K.I. Ananyeva, Q.D. Atkinson, B.R. Broitman, T.J. Conte, C. Flores, S. Fukushima, H. Hitokoto, A.N. Kharitonov, C.N. Onyishi, I.E. Onyishi, P.P. Romero, J.M. Schrock, J.J. Snodgrass, L.S. Sugiyama, K. Takemura, C. Townsend, J. Zhuang, C.A. Aktipis, L. Cronk, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby, Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 115 (39) 9702-9707, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1805016115 (2018).
Sznycer, D., Tooby, J., Cosmides, L., Porat, R., Shalvi, S. and Halperin, E., 2016. Shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation by others, even across cultures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(10), pp.2625-2630.
Dickerson, S.S. and Kemeny, M.E., 2004. Acute stressors and cortisol responses: a theoretical integration and synthesis of laboratory research. Psychological bulletin, 130(3), p.355.
Dickerson, S.S., Gruenewald, T.L. and Kemeny, M.E., 2004. When the social self is threatened: Shame, physiology, and health. Journal of personality, 72(6), pp.1191-1216.
Eisenberger, N.I., Lieberman, M.D. and Williams, K.D., 2003. Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Science, 302(5643), pp.290-292.
Michl, P., Meindl, T., Meister, F., Born, C., Engel, R.R., Reiser, M. and Hennig-Fast, K., 2014. Neurobiological underpinnings of shame and guilt: a pilot fMRI study. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 9(2), pp.150-157.
Tangney, J.P., Stuewig, J. and Mashek, D.J., 2007. Moral emotions and moral behavior. Annu. Rev. Psychol., 58(1), pp.345-372.
This is one of the reasons actors often fall in love with each other because if they’re behaving romantically towards their scene partner there is no message to the brain that says ‘Hey, you’re acting, this isn’t real.’ The body/brain just does what it does when it kisses someone - dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin party!
This is my experience.
López-Castro T, Saraiya T, Zumberg-Smith K, Dambreville N. Association Between Shame and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Meta-Analysis. J Trauma Stress. 2019 Aug;32(4):484-495. doi: 10.1002/jts.22411. Epub 2019 Jul 10. PMID: 31291483; PMCID: PMC7500058.
de Hooge, I. E. et al. (2018) ‘The social side of shame: approach versus withdrawal’, Cognition and Emotion, 32(8), pp. 1671–1677. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2017.1422696.