What this covers
What's shame got to do with it? Join Ven. Tenzin Chogkyi, a respected Buddhist monastic and meditation teacher, and Dr. Eve Ekman, a renowned emotions researcher and Director of Cultivating Emotional Balance, delve into the complex emotions of shame and guilt. This insightful conversation explores the cognitive, emotional, and somatic impacts of these self-conscious emotions on our daily lives, recorded during the "Healing the Body, Healing the Mind" event organized by Science & Wisdom LIVE in collaboration with Jamyang London Buddhist Centre and Land of Medicine Buddha.
Ven. Tenzin, who took novice ordination with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 2004, is known for her dedication to teaching Buddhist philosophy and meditation, as well as her commitment to social justice and interfaith efforts. Dr. Eve Ekman brings her extensive background in clinical social work, integrative medicine, and emotion awareness to this discussion. Together, they address whether emotions like shame should be avoided or if they serve a deeper purpose in our psychological landscape, and how we can manage these emotions with mindfulness and compassion.
🗣️ Learn more about our guests: Tenzin Chogkyi: https://sciwizlive.com/speakers/tenzin-chogkyi/ Dr. Eve Ekman: https://sciwizlive.com/speakers/dr-eve-ekman-2/
Science & Wisdom LIVE brings meditation practitioners in conversation with scientists to address the problems of contemporary society and come to new possible solutions. Addressing topics such as AI ethics, gender equality, climate change, and the benefits of mindfulness and meditation.
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Shame is a self-conscious emotion rooted in the belief that something is fundamentally wrong with you, distinct from guilt, and while it evolved as a social cohesion mechanism in small tribal groups, it now operates destructively in modern individualized society unless we develop somatic awareness and self-compassion to metabolize rather than escape the discomfort.
- Shame involves identification with fundamental wrongness ('I am bad') while guilt targets specific actions ('I did something bad'), making guilt a more productive moral emotion for repair
- Shame functioned historically to psychologically reintegrate wrongdoers into tribes through community shaming and reinclusion, but modern isolation prevents this reintegration process
- The self-criticism mechanism evolved to monitor social status but now operates on overdrive in complex modern social contexts, requiring somatic metabolization of discomfort rather than cognitive combat
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In ancestral environments with closed social systems of approximately 100-150 people, self-monitoring of social status was occasional and situation-specific, but in modern complex social contexts, this same self-monitoring mechanism operates on overdrive with constant evaluation in every situation.
“so he said self-criticism evolve to determine our place in the hierarchy to avoid shame attacks from others right so like you were just saying our tribal past where we only related to maybe you know they estimate 100 or 150 people in our lifetime like we had this kind of closed system are our self-monitoring really of where are we in that hierarchy and then you figured it out and you didn't have to do it constantly but for us now we're having to do it all the time because we're in these complex social situations so what started as adaptive and functional now is on overdrive”
Historically, shame functioned to maintain social order in small tribal groups by psychologically imprisoning wrongdoers through shame rather than physical incarceration, followed by community reintegration, but in modern individualized society people hold shame alone without the communal reintegration process.
“we incarcerate people when they do wrong we put them somewhere else and we lock them up not a possibility when we rely upon every member of our tribe to survive so then what do we do well we kind of psychologically imprison them we make them feel bad by shaming them yeah and then re-including them reinviting them back in right so i don't know because like everyone else i don't have a time machine can't go back to our environment of evolutionary adaptedness and be like why is why does shame work and yet i think if we theorize if if we think hm how could have this helped us maintain social order we might get a glimpse of how shame is useful however in our enormously individualized society and context in most of the modern world that shame is something we hold alone and that we're not able to reintegrate in that communal way”
The Dalai Lama did not initially understand the concept of self-hatred when Sharon Salzberg discussed it at a Mind and Life conference, requiring Alan Wallace to attempt extensive explanation in Tibetan, and the Dalai Lama's response was to ask if such people needed to be institutionalized.
“there's a uh psychotherapist and compassion teacher paul gilbert who's written a lot of books and i love his work and right after actually last year right after the beginning of the pandemic he released this whole series of videos... there's a uh a video i listened to recently so there's a uh psychotherapist and compassion teacher paul gilbert... one thing you you mentioned just now was you know kind of getting into trauma and i know we've both been engaging in the work of resmenicum and in fact you did this brilliant interview in the in the kind of 20th anniversary of the mind and life destructive emotions series that was just amazing and... his holiness the dalai lama didn't seem to understand the concept of self-hatred i think it was sharon salzberg that was talking about self-hatred and you know he's like wait a minute what is that and then alan wallace tried to explain it to him in tibetan for like ages and he still totally didn't get it and then he comes back i remember from the transcript his holiness the dalai lama comes back and says are these people violent do they need to be institutionalized and sharon salisbury is like it's all of us”
Shame is a feeling that there is something fundamentally wrong about you—something that if discovered would lead others to dislike or even feel disgusted by you—involving a strong identification with what is wrong about oneself, distinct from guilt which focuses on having done something wrong rather than being fundamentally wrong.
“shame is really a feeling that there's something fundamentally wrong about you something that if it was discovered people wouldn't like you people might even feel disgusted by you and with that it's a real identification with this idea of what's wrong about us so the simple distinction between that and guilt is i did something wrong”
Brené Brown defines shame as the fear of disconnection rooted in being hardwired for love and belonging, making shame powerful because it threatens the core human need for connection when we believe we are unlovable or do not belong.
“brene brown and and on a podcast a recent podcast she said shame is the fear of disconnection we're so hardwired for love and belonging so shame is so powerful the fear of disconnection we haven't lived up to an ideal or accomplished a goal but makes us worthy of connection it's this idea i am unlovable or i don't belong”
Paul Gilbert theorizes that human social hierarchy, unlike other animals based on physical strength, is based on social attractiveness—a combination of physical attractiveness, empathy, emotional intelligence, intellectual intelligence, and sense of humor—and self-criticism evolved to monitor one's place in this hierarchy to avoid shame attacks from others.
“human beings socially our hierarchy unlike some other animals that it's based on maybe physical strength or ability to hunt like a pack animal like a wolf or something it's sort of like the the pack is like who's dominant is who's strongest and who's the cleverest at the hunter whatever he said you know we have a little bit of that as human beings but her hierarchy is mostly what he calls social attractiveness so it's a combination of being physically attractive being empathetic and engaging what you know dan goldman might call emotional intelligence actual intellectual intelligence maybe sense of humor yada yada all of these qualities that make us attractive and that's our hierarchy so he said self-criticism evolve to determine our place in the hierarchy to avoid shame attacks from others right”
What is commonly called 'shaming' in public discourse about cancel culture is actually the expression of contempt or disgust rather than shame itself, creating semantic confusion about what is being weaponized.
“i don't know if that resonates with kind of this function of shame idea yeah i um i'm glad you bring up paul gilbert i love um the simplicity of how he tries to translate very complex neural phenomena into something that makes sense for everyday folks and related to what you were saying you know this over developed sense of self monitoring who am i in relation to this who am i relation to that are they better are they worse are they the same right and that constant um evaluation which you know we will i'm sure get into soon tenzin but that's really related also to contempt and what paul gilbert also talks about is our underdeveloped drive which is self-soothing”
Paul Ekman's research on facial expressions of shame shows that the last thing a person experiencing shame wants is for others to know they are ashamed, because if discovered, others will experience disgust toward them.
“in an interview with your dad dr paul ekman that i found online from a couple of years ago he said... the last thing you want when you're ashamed is for others to know you're ashamed because if they discover it they will be disgusted with you”
John and Julie Gottman's research on married couples predicting divorce reveals that couples who feel anger or contempt toward each other have worse outcomes than expected, but couples who feel disgust will almost certainly not stay together because disgust signals fundamental rejection.
“john and julie gottman the kind of very well-known researchers and trainers around relationship who've studied married couples for decades and looked at conversation between couples and are able to predict what 10 years out which couples stay together the couples who feel anger and even contempt towards one another they they bucket contempt and disgust together which i don't think is is is is is quite um uh specific maybe enough because if you feel angry or wish that someone would do better you're still in the game with them if you feel disgust towards them the relationship will not survive”
Contempt is characterized by feeling superior to another and is expressed through a unilateral facial expression designed for the other person to experience shame, whereas the contemptuous person does not themselves experience shame.
“contempt is i feel superior right how could you do that i can't believe you would do that my god and we you know you may think oh yeah that i don't have that um and the more subtle forms of contempt are the way that we as we are moving through the world look at people and evaluate like why are they wearing that i can't believe they stepped right in front of me didn't they see me so these kind of like small ways that we are evaluating and judging others and our facial expression of contempt which is unilateral it's the only unilateral so is meant for someone else to experience shame but we're not”
Emotions are temporary states lasting approximately 25 seconds to 90 seconds maximum, but shame is often experienced as ongoing because people repeatedly retrigger shame through habitual thoughts and limiting self-beliefs rather than responding to fresh emotional stimuli.
“emotions are temporary emotions are are triggered in a 25th of a second and last usually no longer than 30 seconds sometimes 90 seconds most of us experience shame as something that feels very ongoing so we are consistently retriggering and that we're getting actually more into the territory of you know habits and beliefs as opposed to emotions”
Western culture often teaches 'original sin' doctrine—the belief that humans are fundamentally flawed from the beginning—which contrasts with Buddhist original goodness doctrine and shapes how people relate to shame and self-criticism.
“this buddhist idea that's so you know not really supported sometimes in a culture that many of us come from where there's this idea of original sin that you're kind of flawed from the very beginning which i think whether we were raised religious or not we can just sort of absorb almost through osmosis if something is fundamentally flawed from the very beginning and i'm just trying to scramble rather than attuning to you know and trying to uncover in a way this this essential innate goodness”
Middle school lunchroom scenarios exemplify shame-triggering social evaluation where adolescents fear sitting with high-status peers (risking shame from rejection) or low-status peers (risking identification with them), requiring constant real-time evaluation of social positioning.
“the example that comes to mind is like the middle school lunchroom so there you are the new kid in class and you're standing there with your tray and you know if you go sit with the really cool kids if you're not the coolest kid you're going to get a shame attack right so you're trying to evaluate where am i and then you don't want to sit with the kids that are like total losers because then you're going to be identified and not like you're evaluating”
Spiritual practice practitioners sometimes attempt to bypass personal psychological work ('spiritual bypass'), skipping the necessary process of sitting with uncomfortable feelings to reach peace and contentment, but this avoidance eventually requires the psychological work anyway.
“i find people often when they're drawn to spiritual practice sometimes there's a wish to you know leap over all the messy personal psychological mess and jump right to the bliss and the contentment and the peace of mind and you know as i as somebody who's been practicing for decades you're always going to have to go back so you might as well just start there and just delve into it”
Body image standards vary significantly across cultures—what is considered attractive weight was different in India in the early 1990s (where being chubby was attractive) compared to the United States, illustrating how cultural context shapes shame triggers around physical appearance.
“when i first started traveling in india and there being at least back then i think now in india they're more influenced by western culture but back in the early 90s being chubby was seen as attractive you know in ways that it wouldn't be in the united states at that time and it was just a whole other thing again it was around body image but the standard of what was you know seen as attractive was was quite different”
Paul Gilbert emphasizes that human beings have an underdeveloped capacity for self-soothing while having overdeveloped capacities for self-monitoring and self-criticism, and cultivating self-soothing and the ability to hold oneself in love is as foundational as receiving love from community.
“what paul gilbert also talks about is our underdeveloped drive which is self-soothing so we're very good at monitoring and criticism and yet our capacity to self-soothe has been deeply compromised i mean of course having our community hold us in love non-negotiable we need it and we still need to be able to hold ourselves in love right”
Guilt can be productive as a moral emotion because it focuses on specific actions ('I haven't been available in the last 11 days' rather than 'I'm a bad friend'), which creates possibility for behavioral repair and relational maintenance
“guilt can be a productive moral emotion... wow man in these last 11 days it's been so hard for me to follow up on emails i you know i i feel bad about that i know my friend's going through a hard time and i haven't been able to be there for her so those are different right... that behavior or action is something i would like to repair”
Renée Brown's work on shame, particularly her viral 2014 YouTube video, helped clarify the distinction between shame and related emotions like guilt, regret, and anxiety for people learning about emotions.
“it's it's actually been a bit of an easier job since 2014 so that's when renee brown's uh youtube video kind of went viral i think i received it at least a dozen times of the month and it was great because prior teaching cultivating emotional balance shame was an emotion that people really struggled with especially struggling to disambiguate between guilt or regret or overall feelings of anxiety and fear”
Shame develops developmentally around age four or five, coinciding with the recognition that others think differently from oneself and the emergence of true empathy and the capacity for shame.
“our very early part of life that point around four or five years old when we start to recognize that others are thinking different than us and we gain an ability to both have true empathy and shame”
Self-shame may function preemptively to prevent shame attacks from others—people develop a harsh inner critic partly to anticipate and manage external shame before it can be imposed by others.
“it's almost like we have self-shame to prevent shame attacks from others in this kind of weird way”
Brené Brown argues that shame is not an effective tool for social justice and is actually a tool of injustice that causes destructive behaviors rather than preventing them or creating change.
“in a recent podcast renee brown was talking about how shame can be weaponized in relation to what is commonly called cancel culture which has been a real issue you know in the united states somebody says something and then they get like they lose their job or you know this whole repercussions especially around social media and everything that everyone says being suddenly immediate public information and she said quite strongly she said shame is not an effective social justice tool it's a tool of injustice not a tool of justice it's much more likely to be a cause of destructive behaviors instead of the cure”
Resmaa Menakem describes somatic abolitionism as the practice of metabolizing shame, guilt, and discomfort in the body rather than the mind, particularly in relation to recognizing one's inadvertent participation in systems of harm.
“res momentum who does work on somatic abolitionism meaning how do we manage a lot of the shame a lot of the guilt a lot of the discomfort of recognizing um what we many of us um well let's just say most white folks um living anywhere that isn't completely uh white so everywhere and anyone are inadvertently creating harm and we hear that and you know for some of you on the call you might be have been doing this work for a while and it's a bit more familiar but when that is especially first kind of made clear i think that there is a somatic experience of either wanting to run away or to fight depending on your your specific strategy of choice”
Working with shame directly as practice—rather than seeing it as an obstacle to practice—represents a fundamental reframing where difficult emotions become the soil ('mud') from which insight ('lotus') grows, and this process is never complete but ongoing.
“and i think it's really important for us to not think that god i just have to deal with shame so that i can be a i can do my practice this is the practice this is practice in action so it's also shifting our attitude to become interested and excited that this is the mud from which we then create the lotus uh from which there is then more mud and more it's not it's not a thing we're gonna get done”
Tenzin's theory that shame might be underlying most destructive emotions—that if people found ways to accept and work with shame, they might erase many unwanted emotional episodes—is 'not wrong' and worth further exploration
“i have this theory that we you know that shame might be underlying most destructive emotions and you kind of said you might not be wrong let's think about that”
Buddhist and psychological approaches to shame work synergistically because while psychology can explain why shame beliefs are cognitively false, Buddhist cultivation of inner goodness provides the felt experience necessary to transform shame, which knowledge alone cannot accomplish.
“this is where buddhism and psychology so beautifully can support one another because psychologically i can tell you why none of that is true but through the cultivation of knowing our inner goodness that is actually the way we can start to meet those feelings and transform them because the knowledge only gets you so far right it's important and useful to identify and yet we need to have that felt experience”
Subtle forms of contempt manifest in everyday ways—evaluating how people dress, judging them for stepping in front of you—showing that contempt operates not just in overt judgment but in constant low-level social evaluation
“the more subtle forms of contempt are the way that we as we are moving through the world look at people and evaluate like why are they wearing that i can't believe they stepped right in front of me didn't they see me so these kind of like small ways that we are evaluating and judging others”
An anger management and violence prevention program for incarcerated men involved teaching participants to sit with their full range of experiences and emotions, and 100% of the 26 men in the program had experienced sexual, physical, and emotional assaults as children, demonstrating the strong connection between trauma and shame.
“when you say that it reminds me of a program that i used to do with um people experiencing incarceration and it was a year-long anger management violence prevention program and a big part of that program was exactly what you're talking about like teaching people ways to just be with all of their experience in that class we did it was amazing it was about 26 men it was in a men's prison all of whom you know we did these sort of surveys at the beginning as we were starting the work and all of them had experienced sexual physical 100 emotional assaults as children like so much trauma from childhood you know so much shame about the offense that had gotten them into prison”
People can experience shame about destructive emotion episodes, shame about overexpressed emotions (anger expressed too much), or shame about underexpressed emotions (anger withheld when one should have asserted oneself).
“we can have a lot of shame about our expressed especially overexpressed emotion or underexpressed emotion and i didn't say anything i didn't stand up and i should have so we can have a lot of shame about our expressed especially overexpressed emotion or underexpressed emotion”
Genießer's [Jeanne Tsai] cross-cultural research on emotion is the most well-known, and has worked to translate emotional scales and surveys across cultures to understand differences in emotional expression and triggers.
“genie psy is kind of the most well-known cross-cultural researcher of emotion if folks do want to look at that and has worked pretty hard at translating different scales and surveys to understand the differences of that right right”
Paul Ekman, Eve's father, experienced significant uncontrolled anger while Eve was growing up but was fortunate to not experience shame about it, though many people who express anger do experience shame afterward.
“my dad you know again world's expert on anger quite an angry guy and um and had a lot of uncontrolled um anger when i was growing up especially and i think experienced a lot of regret and guilt and i don't think shame he was he was pretty lucky to not not really go there”
Eve Ekman was photographed in 250 photographs at age 16 as part of her father's research on facial expressions, establishing her early expertise in facial expressions of emotions.
“eve is the expert because she was photographed in 250 photographs in her 2016... at the age of 16 years old she was already the expert in the facial expressions”