Is there something you've never said out loud, not to your closest friends, not to a therapist, not to your spouses, especially? Yet you know exactly what it is, the shape of it, the weight, and you've decided, a long time ago, that nobody can ever know. Because if they did, the world would just end. That's shame. And that's what we're here to talk about today. Welcome to another episode of the Meaningful Sh!t Show.

Vincent, and today we're talking about shame. What it actually is, how it turns on you — I almost say turns you on, turns on you — and what it feels like to be finally free of it. Before we dive in, I need to say this up front. I am not a licensed therapist, psychologist, medical professional. Nothing in this episode is a substitute for professional help. So if shame has gotten to a place where it's connected to thoughts of hurting yourself or others, if it's that heavy, please talk to someone.

A therapist, a crisis line, a professional, not a podcast. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please reach out to a crisis line in your country. If the behavior underneath your shame involves anything illegal, anything that harms others, especially minors, the path forward is not just action, it's getting professional help and taking accountability. All right, with that set, let's get into it. So, what is shame exactly?

This is how DBT tells you whether shame fits the facts, or what shame is. The case shame fits the facts is whenever you will be rejected by a person or group you care about, if your personal characteristics or behaviors are made public. DBT can be a little bit wordy, so let me go at that again. Shame fits the facts, shame is the case, basically, whenever you will be rejected

by a person or group you care about — important qualifier — if your personal characteristics or behavior are made public. There are handouts in the DBT guidebook, and they give you a family of words that live under the same name, or the same word, of shame, basically. Contrition, culpability, embarrassment, self-consciousness, humiliation, mortification. They have different intensity, of course, but they all point to the same thing. Note that shame is not "I did something bad,"

it is "if they knew, they would oust me." That's a different thing. And it tends to be social. There are shame societies, for example. It's about belonging and survival, and to sit with that for a second, shame isn't just about one big secret. The handout lists interpretations that trigger it, and they're basically everywhere. So, for example, believing you're not good enough, comparing yourself to others and thinking you're a loser, believing you are unlovable, thinking you're defective, looking in the mirror and hating what you see, walking into a room and feeling

like you don't belong. Scrolling Instagram and feeling like everyone else has it figured out, thinking your feelings are silly or stupid. All of that is shame. It doesn't need a dramatic effect. It just needs the thought: if they really saw me, all of me, they would leave. It's ancient because, for most of human history, being cast out of the group, being rejected, meant death. Actual, literal, physical death.

So your nervous system, over time, learned: whatever it is, mask it, hide it, because if you expose it, you will get rejected, and rejection meant death at the primal level. And your body knows this before your mind does. Emotion Regulation Handout 6 — I will link all of this in the show notes — lays it out. Shame lives in your stomach. A pain in the pit of it, a sense of dread.

The urge to sink down, to disappear, to cover your face. Your posture collapses, head down, shoulders in, voice drops, you stop making eye contact. So that is your body trying to make you smaller so the group doesn't see you, trying to disappear. Shame is doing something for you. It's not a flaw in your character. It's a nervous system doing its actual job. But there's an urge that comes with shame, and that is to hide, and hiding, over time, ends up being devastating, and maybe not in a way you might think.

Why is shame devastating? Let me be specific about what shame actually does when it runs unchecked and amok, because I think that people underestimate it. Chronic shame doesn't just sit in your head, it's corrosive to the entire — actually, that's what Van der Kolk's book, The Body Keeps the Score, talks about often. The title speaks for itself. Shame leads to depression, anxiety, addiction, isolation. It eats you, and I'll tell you how.

First, shame sets you up to behave like a metaphorical devil. And I don't mean you consciously decide, "well, I'm already a bad person, might as well be a devil." It's much subtler than that. You may subconsciously believe you're a devil or a bad person, and once that's the story, who cares? What's one more time? What's a little worse, right? Your shame is giving you a quiet pass because generally you're compartmentalized.

You're giving yourself permission to act out over here, where nobody sees, so that you can be a good boy or a good girl in the rest of life. That bar is already broken, so what does it matter? So shame isn't just failing to stop a behavior, it's actively licensing it. And sometimes it doesn't collapse, it lashes out. The DBT handout lists attacking and blaming others, victim thinking, as a direct after-effect of

shame. That surprised me at first, but it does make perfect sense. If you can make the other person the problem, you don't have to sit with what you feel about yourself. Shame can look like rage. It can look like picking a fight so you have an excuse to storm off. I'm certainly guilty of that. I have been guilty of that. It can look like, "oh, you're the one who, blah, blah, blah," when it's really, "I can't stand what I am right now."

Not everyone who gets ashamed gets quiet. Some get loud. Maybe you can imagine a difference between stereotypical male and female, or masculine and feminine. Second, it tends to turn you into a liar, not a dramatic liar, just a structural one. Your partner asks how your day was and you edit it. Your friend asks what's going on and you deflect. Every normal interaction becomes a small performance.

And over time, the gap between who you are and who people think you are gets wider. I call that the integrity gap, and of course it is draining to maintain. And eventually, you just stop feeling altogether. The handout calls it "shutting down, blocking all emotions." Deep, personal numbness. You're not even editing anymore. You've just checked out, on autopilot, going through the motions. And you couldn't tell someone how you actually feel because you genuinely don't know.

That's not peace, of course, that's a dissociated state. And it makes it almost impossible to solve the actual problems because you can't think clearly, because your entire system is offline. And here's what makes that worse. The people who love you, they're loving someone who doesn't fully exist. They're making life decisions — staying, committing, trusting — based on incomplete information. So you're not protecting them. That's the slow-motion betrayal.

You might think that you're shielding them from the evil that's living in the corner, but you're actually taking away their ability to see and choose you with full knowledge. The third thing: it spreads. Probably you didn't really invent your shame, you absorbed it from a parent who never talked about theirs, and things from your culture, from a household where some emotions were too much, where certain topics made the room go cold.

Nobody actually sat you down in the classroom and said, "you should hide." They didn't have to. You watched and you learned. And now, without meaning to, you're actually doing the same thing. You are modeling hiding for the next generation. You're not saying a word about it. You're just creating, perpetrating — perpetuating is the word I'm looking for — generational trauma. It doesn't need a dramatic origin story. It just needs silence, and, you know, repeat.

And let's say that the problem behavior, the shameful behavior, has victims. No accountability also means, of course, no stopping. And this is actually the norm, how harm perpetuates itself in the world. Shame doesn't prevent the behavior you're ashamed about, it actually enables it. So when I say hiding is devastating, that's what I mean. I'm not just saying it's uncomfortable — it is. And I'm not just saying it slows your growth — it does.

It damages you and your relationships with people, because shame's action urge is a protection mechanism with a body count. So that's why we want to work on that. I want to make a distinction, because shame is not the same as guilt. I did touch on this back in episode 3, but I want to be really crisp about it, because the distinction matters for everything that comes next.

Guilt says, "I did a bad thing." Shame says, "I am bad." And the guilt words are different too. Remorse, regret, feeling apologetic, feeling sorry — those are guilt. Notice how they all point outward, toward repair. The difference isn't just in your head. It's in your body. When you feel guilt, your face gets hot, you get jittery, although your face might get hot when you feel ashamed as well. But there's an energy to it.

Guilt wants you to move. Its action urge is to fix, apologize, make amends, repair the damage, so it's adaptive. It's useful. Shame is its opposite. It collapses you. Dread in the pit of your stomach. Remember, eyes down, voice drops, you withdraw, you avoid, you hide your face. Guilt gives you energy to repair. Shame takes your energy away, tells you to disappear. And here's the thing, the handout lists the after-effects of guilt.

Making resolutions to change, making changes in behavior, joining self-help programs. If you're listening to this podcast right now, that's guilt doing its job. That's the adaptive emotion working. Guilt brought you here. So let's make sure that shame doesn't take you back out. Here's one that trips people up. The handout says appeasing — saying you're sorry over and over and over — is a shame expression, not guilt, by the way, shame.

Because when someone is apologizing on repeat, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm really sorry," you're not really repairing. An apology without a behavior change is just water under the bridge — no, that's not the right expression, but it's nothing. Apology by itself is not repair. You need a behavior change to be associated with that. So an apology is not fixing anything. That's just trying to make the rejection stop, the uncomfortable feeling of having

upset someone. So it looks like guilt. It sounds like guilt. But it's actually shame wearing guilt's clothes. So, which gets really interesting, they of course are connected to each other, and to a certain extent they feed each other. So you lose your temper at your partner. You say something genuinely cruel, something you can't take back. Guilt shows up first. "Oh, that was horrible, probably need to apologize."

Now that's a healthy urge. But if shame is already in the room, and for most of us it will be, guilt becomes this raw material. "I lost my temper" becomes "I am an actual abusive person, deep down. I'm toxic, a devil, and if they really saw me, they would leave, and they should." So once shame takes over, you're not really trying to fix anything anymore.

You're just trying to survive it. Disappear, mask, give yourself permission to keep going just on the down-low, where nobody sees it, because why fight? You are already the bad thing, and that is the trap that keeps you stuck. All right, let's get a little personal. So for a significant chunk of my life, I also had a private behavior, a habit I told no one about.

I never told anyone about it. You can watch my episode about addiction if you want to know more about that. But the point here is that it wasn't just a secret, it was something that could not be spoken. I didn't really even have a language for it in my own head. It lived behind a wall. I had my normal life over here — relationships, work, friendships — and this thing over there, in a room that nobody was ever going to see, designed to be hermetically closed.

And I don't mean that I chose not to show it. I mean that it didn't really occur to me that showing was a responsible possibility. So, over time, it, of course, escalated because it wasn't checked. The shame had already told me who I was. I was someone who did this, right? Can't take that away, that was the identity. And once that's settled, once you've accepted "this is just who I am,"

there's no reason to hold the line. You've already lost. What's one more thing to hide when you're already hiding everything? The shame wasn't making me fight harder. It was just giving me permission to stop fighting, but to hide. And there's this other layer. The shame wasn't just about the behavior. It was also about allowing myself to become someone I didn't like or recognize, someone who lied

by omission, never said a word. And it wasn't that I was choosing this silence every day. It's just that I genuinely decided, at some point, without ever really deciding, this was something that I would take to the grave. And that is what shame does. It doesn't say, "oh, just don't tell anyone right now." It says, "you have to hide this permanently. This wall is load bearing."

You have to carry it in your own vault. If you take it down, everything will come crashing down. You will not survive this. So you stop even thinking about it as a choice, a weight you have to carry through your life. And of course, that silence has its own cost, because the person on the other side of the relationship, you know, wouldn't see the whole person.

And I knew that. And that knowledge also has its own kind of shame, because you're hiding. So it compounds. All right, so let's get to Emotion Regulation Handout 11. So the guilt and shame — that's the same handout again, I'm going to link all this — it gets really interesting. It asks you two questions. Is this shame justified? And separately, is the guilt justified? So your answers determine what comes next.

First, you determine if the shame is, you know, justified. Would people actually reject you if they knew? Not "would they be surprised," not "would they have opinions" — you actually have to sit with the mental simulation of, would they actually leave? And then the second question: does this actually violate your own values? Right, not someone else's, yours. Because if it does not, the guilt is not justified.

That gives you combinations, and each has a different path forward, according to DBT. Let's start with number one: neither are justified. An example: survivor's guilt. I moved to the States. I made good money, I have privileges, and I have quite some opportunities that none of my friends back home have. So there's this guilt, like, "I don't deserve it, and I'm evil for having it." Shame about doing well, about having more,

when people I love and respect are struggling. But I like to think that nobody in my life would actually reject me for being successful in my way. And it certainly doesn't violate my values. Having privilege isn't a moral failure. What you do with it can be. The guilt isn't earned, and the shame isn't real. So the work here is simple. Stop hiding something that doesn't need to be hidden.

Open up. Handout 13 adds something that I love: repeat the behavior that sets off the shame, over and over, without hiding. Don't just stop hiding once, keep doing the thing openly until the shame loses its grip, because that's how you retrain your nervous system. I genuinely love that. It's another radical, do-it-all-the-way DBT thing. So, great tip. But what if the shame isn't justified, but the guilt is?

I like to think about any cheap dopamine behavior I engage in or engaged in. Think of things that are relatively normal and accepted in society, such as doom scrolling, excessive gaming, pornography, pick your flavor, binging series. Nobody in my life was going to reject me for any of that. I mean, it's normal, everybody does it. So the shame isn't justified. But the guilt, that is real, because every hour I spend doom scrolling was an hour that I wasn't building the life that I said that I wanted.

That gap between who I was and who I wanted to be, that's where guilt lives. And maybe it's in relation to relationships as well, as in, "I'm numbing out, I'm doom scrolling," that means I'm not engaging in the relationships in the way that I want to engage with them. Maybe, you know, that's true for sources of cheap dopamine, because that means that you're not going for the expensive dopamine that comes from having fulfilling relationships, for example.

So it's justified. So the work here is about the behavior, not the self. So contrary to the previous point, I don't need to repeat the behavior until the shame goes away. And I don't need to hide either. I need to change. I need to put in some boundaries, some things that prevent the doom scrolling, or, you know, the infinite scrolling, or something like that. All right.

Next one. Here's the one that breaks my heart a little bit. Shame is justified, guilt not justified. I would say, this podcast. I know that there are people in my life who would judge me for being this publicly vulnerable, for talking about addiction, about therapy, about my childhood. It's cringe. But as someone said in my acting class, being human is cringe. So, you know, one could say the shame is

justified because the rejection is real, and that would be the reason for hiding. But the guilt? There's nothing to feel guilty about, because this doesn't violate my values. It actually is my values. And Handout 13 gives you a real menu here. You can hide what will get you rejected if you want to stay in that group. Or you can try to change their values. I like that.

Or you can find a new group that fits yours. It's a real choice. And sometimes you do all three. You hide in one space, you push back in another, and find your people in a third, and you validate yourself. That's in the handout, validate yourself. Because when you're doing nothing wrong and people still reject you for it, the voice in your head starts to wonder if maybe they're right.

Well, they're not. But the one thing you don't do is change yourself to match a group whose values aren't yours. That's another conversation, honestly, mostly about, you know, I talk about that in episode 21, beliefs. That leaves us with door number four, the fourth combination, the hard one. Shame is justified, and guilt is justified. Relates to the story that I've told throughout this podcast, the personal one.

Sorry, people might leave if they know, probably. It violated my own values. Both were real. So what do you do when everything is justified? And to a certain extent, this is, of course, the meat of the episode and the meat of the DBT handouts here, because this is the tough one, the really tough one. Well, finding a new group of people can be really challenging. So, when everything is justified, right,

when both are justified, you have to deal with both sides. And this is where people get confused, because the shame path and the guilt path, they pull you in opposite directions. Shame is justified, people really might leave, that's real. So you can't just announce it to everyone. You need to be strategic. So the handout says, find people who won't reject you. That might mean hiding from certain groups while you do the work, and that's not cowardice, that's surviving, right?

You're not obligated to hand ammunition to people who will use it against you. But the guilt is also justified, because it actually violates what you believe in. So you can't just hide and move on. You have to do the repair work. Apologize to anyone you've hurt, and primarily to yourself for disappointing yourself, and fix what you can, commit to not repeating it, although probably you will a couple of times. Accept the consequences gracefully.

This is an important part, as part of the repair, not as punishment. And keep forgiving yourself all the way, not half heartedly, not one toe in the water, all the way. Don't keep repeating the story of being the devil, right? Especially when you're on the path, doing this work, you are not the devil anymore, you're doing Lord's work — sorry, to get all religious on you, right — so it's important to speak to yourself in that manner.

So both at once: protect yourself from the groups that would reject you, and repair what needs repairing with the people who won't. That's the hardest path, because it asks you to do two things, to hold two truths simultaneously. "I need to be safe, and I need to make this right." That's a dialectic if you've never seen one. Opposite action — opposite action I talk about in the context of DBT a lot — like, a lot of DBT is checking the facts, making sure that your emotions fit the facts, and then either problem solving

or going opposite action. So we see opposite action, you know, repeating itself through the curriculum, because part of what we're doing when we're doing DBT is we're training our responses to be different. The moment that we do opposite action, our nervous system, us reflecting, we'll see positive results. We will autocorrect. But we need to go against our instincts at first, because, you know, our instincts used

to be right, but they're not right for us anymore. So we need to retrain. This is what opposite action is all about. What it's not about is pretending that you're fine. Also, the opposite of hiding isn't just broadcasting into the world. It's just not hiding from one person, one safe person, and that's it. That's the bar. And if no one in your current environment feels safe,

a therapist bound by confidentiality is absolutely the place to start. It absolutely counts, and it is super opposite action. One more thing from the worksheet, and I love this as well, because it's super concrete. It tells you to go against your body's urges, what happens when you feel shame. So change your body posture, lift your head, open up your chest, maintain eye contact, keep your voice steady.

Your nervous system listens to your posture. If you carry yourself like someone with something to hide, you will feel like someone with something to hide, and you will act like someone with something to hide, and people will interpret you as someone with something to hide. So you have to give your body different information. You have to tell your body that we're no longer hiding. Right, so different information.

This is where people do get stuck, because they understand opposite action, probably makes sense, sounds good, they're willing to try it, but they don't know who to tell. And that matters, because I want to highlight this: telling the wrong person doesn't reduce the shame, it confirms it, right? You will get rejected if you share something vulnerable with someone who is silent, who flinches, who moralizes, who lectures you, uses it against you — even worse.

Your nervous system will register that. It will register that as evidence. This is the shame loop, and it will say, "see, I told you so, stay hidden." So you need to find a safe person. Someone — and if you want to find that in your immediate surroundings, try to think of someone who has shared something vulnerable with you first, a sign of emotional maturity. Or, and or, find someone who doesn't moralize when you're

struggling. It also doesn't moralize to themselves when they're struggling. And also someone who, when they've seen you at less than your best, didn't use it against you. You're not looking for someone going like, "oh, that's nothing, don't worry about it, you're fine," then dismissal. That's not safety. You're looking for someone who can actually hear you, sit with you, and see the whole you. And you have to do this in a responsible manner, right?

So this requires practicing. I once heard an analogy of communication that when you're giving someone a message, sometimes the message is a bowling ball or a cannonball, and if the person is ready to accept a ping-pong ball, that's a messy experience, right? So there's a responsibility of the sender and the receiver to make sure that the message is transferred appropriately, not that you're just throwing

a cannonball at someone's chest and running off when they expected a ping-pong ball, right? So in my experience, the first person you tell is usually not in your inner circle. You definitely don't want to start with your partner. The stakes are just too high. Your muscle isn't built yet. Chances are that you'll fuck it up. Start with someone a little further from your ego. Actually, I thought about this right now, in the moment.

It's kind of like weightlifting in a way, or exercising in general, right? You can't just go to the gym and immediately bench or squat your body weight. You don't know the movement patterns yet. It's irresponsible, and it's going to fuck you up, right? So you want to go with someone a little further from the center of your ego. Again, the therapist, the therapy group, a men's group, a women's group can be really powerful, right?

Like if you're with peers, and usually there's the group leader, et cetera, et cetera, but there's not always just a trained professional that you're talking to. Also, groups tend to be cheaper. Groups are great for that, or you have local groups as well. A friend who has clearly done their work would be great too. I call those people my mental health friends, the people that help you build the mental

muscle, to learn what it feels like to say it and survive, and then bring it to the people at the center slowly. They deserve to know the full you too. But once you start, it'll get easier. How did it play out for me? I was already in a therapy group that helped. At some point, I also joined a men's group, and in that group, I finally, you know, was able to say everything out loud, things that I had been so certain could never be spoken about.

It just came out. Nothing collapsed. Nobody left the room. Nobody looked at me funny. I was still me. I was just fucked up. Doesn't mean you're just done overnight, right? You don't just say, "you're done." No, you need great distance between you and the thing before you trust or have proof for yourself that this is actually behind you. And with that distance, you learn that some things that are fine for other people might not be fine for you, because they can be triggering.

You need your own rules to stay safe. I go deeper into all of that in episode 13 on addiction recovery, if you want to go there, which turns out DBT has a chapter on as well. At the top of the episode, I asked, is there something you've never said out loud? I'm not asking you to say it now. I'm asking you to notice what happened while you were

listening. Because if something came up, if a specific thing flashed through your mind, then part of you already knows it's there. And that's, that's not the problem. It's the beginning. Shame needs you to believe that the wall is load bearing, that if you move it, everything comes crashing down. I believed that for years. What I found on the other side is that the wall was just the wall.

And that behind it was just me. Like I said, fucked up, lighter, not fixed. I still have to do work, but so much lighter. So find out which box you're in. Is the shame justified? Is the guilt? Your answers give you the path. And then you remember, you don't need to tell the entire world. You need one person, one safe person. A therapist counts, a group counts. Start where it feels survivable, and go

from there. The hiding costs more than the telling. It always does. Thank you so much. This has been Vincent for the Meaningful Sh!t Show. I hope you enjoyed that, and this is, um, gosh, I think this is the fourth take that I did. Man, long-form content, it's a lot of work, you guys. It really is. When you start with an episode, with an end,

I always think, "oh, this is going to be easy, I'm just gonna sit down and do it." And even in this day and age, where AI is so helpful in doing all the research, you know, so helpful drafting scripts, so helpful fact-checking — fact-checking especially is really useful. Like, the third take, after the third take, I rewrote some things, and I fact-checked everything with, like, the DBT PDF next to it, and there were some factual mistakes in there.

It's really, it's really helpful to get, like, better quality content there. Plus, I don't know, I'm probably the only one noticing, because I'm an audio-video nerd, I really leveled up my game as well with my audio video stuff, not only my recording, multiple audio streams to make sure that I always have a useful one. Like, my lighting situation is pretty professional, I've got a second angle these days.

So, yeah, it's some — it's fun stuff, but it's also a lot of work. It's also a lot of work. But, um, I learned so much doing it. That's why I've learned things about guilt and shame as I've been creating this. I've also been thinking about, you know, what are some of the things that pop up in my head, because, of course, it's not that

there's just like one shameful topic in your life. There's always things that are like sort of like a — I want to say pyramid, but I guess it's not really a pyramid, but — you first take care of the big things, but then you're finding out little things, like, "oh, I guess that I've been hiding this as well." And there's always priorities to things as well, right, there's many things to do in life, you know.

So, yeah, it's always a juggle to do all of these things. And, um, yeah, no, and it's also funny, because my last take was actually pretty decent, and I probably would have put it online, but I just had coffee before that. So I had a nice coffee mustache. So that's just kind of funny, as you upgrade your audio video equipment, these things are suddenly important.

But yeah. All right, I'm just ad-libbing here, because I see that as my little reward towards the end of everything that I've done, for the unlikely person that is still listening to me ramble. You know, thanks for, thanks for listening to all of it. Thanks for showing up, adjusting my content. I don't know if this is something I probably should start mentioning, that I am doing much more work, um, long form — this long form is my main content, but I'm using that to write Substack

essays, so I have The Meaningful Sh!t Show on Substack. I have Instagram, also The Meaningful Sh!t Show. And of course, you can always go to TMS.show. That's The Meaningful Sh!t Show, so TMS, the meaningfulshit.show, or just themeaningfulshitshow.com. That's a website where I index everything. So I link to Instagram posts, Substacks, the different, you know, YouTube podcasts, et cetera, et cetera. Um, so that's where you can always find the latest and greatest of what I'm working on.

So yeah. All right. I think that's it for me. See you around, and thank you.