Suppressed Shame
Someone describes how hard it was to get a foot in the door. You hear yourself thinking, “I worked hard. Nobody handed me anything.” You did work hard. But as you begin defending your effort, there is less room to hear what made their path different, or what helped yours.
What is Suppressed Shame?
Shame can be hidden through attributing our own privilege to merit. Doing so shields us from relational impact but reinforces disconnection and hierarchy. This causes us to avoid discomfort by attributing difference to others’ failings.
In this pattern, shame may be hard to recognize beneath certainty or irritation. Acknowledging an unfair advantage can threaten our sense of being deserving. Explaining that advantage through good choices or hard work can restore comfort, while making another person's difficulties seem like evidence of poor choices. Their experience becomes easier to dismiss, and we lose a chance to be changed by it.
Our effort can be real while privilege helps it pay off. The question is whether defending our effort closes off attention to unequal conditions. Disruptive empathy can help us listen to what unsettles that familiar explanation and make room for a fuller understanding.
Applications in therapy
- Explore what feels threatened when acknowledging an advantage seems to diminish a client's hard work.
- Notice when your explanations of a client's difficulties turn unequal conditions into personal shortcomings.
- Seek consultation when defending your own achievements makes a client's experience of inequality hard to hear.
Applications in community
- Notice when “they should try harder” ends a conversation about barriers some members face.
- Question whether ideas about who deserves flexibility excuse unequal treatment within your organization.
- Let accounts of exclusion inform changes to practices you have been defending as fair.
Evolution of Suppressed Shame in Relational-Cultural Therapy
Earlier RCT writing placed shame within relationships shaped by social power. In Shame and Humiliation: From Isolation to Relational Transformation (2000), Linda Hartling described how blaming people for their own humiliation protects the practices of dominant groups from scrutiny. In her contribution to the same paper, Judith V. Jordan examined defensive responses to shame and challenged the myth that people get what they deserve. These accounts help explain how judgments about personal failings can conceal the conditions producing unequal treatment.
Maureen Walker addresses suppressed shame directly in When Getting Along Is Not Enough: Reconstructing Race in Our Lives and Relationships (2020). She notices that custodial workers' personal phone use attracts scrutiny while her own goes unquestioned. When she raises this difference, others explain her freedom as something earned through education or professional achievement. Describing unequal treatment as deserved can push its discomfort out of awareness. Walker places this workplace example within a larger discussion of systemic privilege and the advantages American culture grants to White people.
Walker also describes the relational cost of suppression: defenses against shame can narrow our awareness of our own experience and make us less willing to know and be known by others. The explanation that restores comfort may also keep another person's reality from affecting us. Her account connects an apparently ordinary justification with a loss of authentic engagement.
BCC's definition highlights this movement between privilege, shame, and blame. Recognizing it gives us an opportunity to hear what our explanation has left out and consider our part in sustaining unequal arrangements.
Questions
- What do you rush to explain when someone names an advantage you have?
- Whose difficulties become easier to judge when you focus only on effort?
- What feels at risk if your success has more than one explanation?
Relational Challenge
Recall a moment when someone's account of inequality brought up an urge to explain how hard you had worked. Notice what you wanted them to understand about you, and what became harder to hear about them. Try holding a fuller sentence: “My effort mattered, and there were conditions that made my effort more likely to pay off.”
If you choose, explore this with someone who shares that advantage and can help you stay curious. Notice whether a fuller account changes how you understand the other person's experience. The person whose experience unsettled you does not owe you reassurance.
Our humanity is on the line and we develop elaborate strategies of disconnection that thwart our authentic engagement in relationship.