The behaviors you’ve been trying to change for years stay stuck precisely because of the shame around them.
“Shame is the lock that keeps the chains of bad habits in place.”
The Mechanism
Shame blocks emotion from moving. When you shame something, you can’t feel it all the way through. So you keep returning to the same pattern, trying to access the blocked emotion.
“You shame something and you can’t feel anything all the way through. And so you just keep on coming back to trying to find that emotion and you’re repeating that pattern over and over again.”
The Evidence
Look at society: whatever one political side shames the other for, they keep doing. Shame never creates change—it entrenches behavior.
Look at parenting: tell a child they’re “naughty” and watch them grow up naughty.
Look at yourself: the things you’ve been ashamed of longest are the things you’ve done longest.
Joe’s Experiment
At 28, Joe wrote down honest truths about his behavior. Months later, he checked which had changed. The unchanged ones? All the things he’d been telling himself he “should” do.
Related Concepts
- Should creates stress, not change
- Resisting parts of yourself creates more of that behavior
- Self-judgment is a defense against feeling emotions
- Shame locks in the very habits it punishes
- Shame stagnates emotional fluidity
- Shame addiction keeps you stuck in the patterns you regret
- Shaming a behavior is the best way to guarantee it repeats
- Feel what’s underneath the shame to break stagnation