You should be ashamed of yourself. Seriously. You should be seriously ashamed of yourself.
I can see why people avoid feeling ashamed like I avoid climbing into the crawlspace in my basement. It's gross, terrible, and whenever I do it, I don't ever want to have to do it again. However, there's a problem if I'm avoiding feeling ashamed: I'm aiming at the wrong target. The feeling is one of the many gifts bestowed by human nature. It's an alarm that goes off whenever my behavior is incongruous with the shoulds and should-nots of life:
I should have sent them a card.
I should have studied.
I should have been on time.
I shouldn't have eaten so much.
I shouldn't have made fun of my classmate that time in 5th grade.
I shouldn't have lied.
Part of the problem is I also feel shame for things I shouldn't. Knowing when the alarm is false isn't always so easy. So I develop skills to tamp down the fires of shame. But if I'm not mindful, these can be used nefariously by the devils in my subconscious.
Behavior is action. It's a cause. Shame is an emotion. It's an effect. It's a powerful shaping tool for my future self. It's also a source of truth. But there's a skeleton key to the padlock of shame: justification. For an action to be justified it has to be right or reasonable. But who gets to decide what's right or reasonable? That depends. Society, community, culture, era, and upbringing all have a hand in molding what I believe to be right, but there's another force that guides me: my conscience.
"Should I throw this handful of gravel at my friend when he's not looking?"
Of course not. Why? Because it's wrong. How do I know? How DO I know? If no one ever told me not to do that, how would I know it was wrong? Well...I might not. I might have to do it at least once to see the result before making that distinction. And when my friend kicks my ass for throwing gravel at him, I have my answer. We're so social as a species, the offense needn't be so obvious for us to get useful feedback. When a 6-year-old me is cruel to someone on the playground, I see the sadness in their reaction and instantly know what I did was wrong.
But does that mean my conscience isn't something I'm born with? Is it simply the sum of every external influence combined with the "clinical trials" I run through personal experience? (Gravel throwing and playground cruelty were both busts, apparently.) I don't know. But not knowing doesn't change the fact that humans often use justification as a crutch to manipulate how we address the shame we feel from behavior that is wrong. However, since shame is a visceral and unavoidable emotion, justification must be applied as an ex post facto adjustment. I have to consciously find an excuse that falsely suppresses the shame I'm correctly feeling, thus leaving the door open for me to repeat my mistake.
So how do I fix this? How do I use shame as a tool as opposed to pretending something I did was justified? Primarily I have to remember the object is not to avoid feeling shame but to do with it what nature intended. So instead of inventing a reason why my action or inaction was justified, I need to examine the action itself and extract what precisely caused the shame.
The magic of this approach is it can even be applied to things I'm still actively justifying. A little less than 10 years ago, the company I work for moved to an office in a neighboring town. The space was beautiful. It was more modern, cleaner, and had plenty of capacity for us to grow into. But there was one sore spot for our CEO: the break room windows. It had these four tall majestic panes and the view was...brick. If I had to guess, the adjacent building was constructed after ours and what once was a pleasant vista was now a sheer wall. The CEO hated this and he wanted me to design a wrap to cover the windows completely so at least we'd have something cool to look at. I said I would do it. Then I got "busy". He reminded me every few weeks and I continued to agree to work on it. But I didn't. I convinced myself it was one of those nice-to-haves that people ask for that they don't really need but would get done if I made time for it. It was not like that for the CEO. I know this because, in a one-on-one meeting a few years later, he intimated he just stopped asking because he was tired of hearing me claim I'd work on it without doing so. Fast forward to this week, I was talking to a friend of mine about that conversation with the CEO, and I said out loud I had more important things to work on and that's why it never got done. Now here's the magic part: I feel deeply ashamed that I dropped the ball, yet my ego won't let me admit that on the record. However, I simultaneously internalized that shame and use it every time I tell someone "I'll get it done." So even when I'm still lying to myself (and others, apparently) about it, my shame is working correctly in the background to adjust my present and future behavior.
Like having good posture or getting enough sleep, forming good habits with my shame takes practice. One fly in the ointment is how tough it is for people with an overactive sense of shame to remain balanced. It helps to contrast my shame with how the causal actions align with my personal goals. I always keep 2 potential future Tims in my mind: "Tim A", who has achieved all he can for himself and his family, and "Tim B" who has fallen into a dark pit, never to emerge. I try to plan my actions so they keep me running toward Tim A and, just as importantly, away from Tim B1. So the question is - for those who feel shame for things they shouldn't - which "You" are you aiming at as a consequence of your behavior?
Every time I justify away an action that diminishes me as a person, I feed a dragon I should have slayed instead. If I make a habit of this, the dragon grows and eventually obscures my ability to even recognize when I'm doing it. If you've ever known a narcissist, you've seen how this can become permanent. So when I say you should be seriously ashamed of yourself, I mean that literally. Take it seriously.
I first heard this concept during this lecture. In the same clip, he describes why it’s important to slay your dragons while they’re still small enough to do so.