Notes from My Shame Hole

How we inherit ways of seeing ourselves—and mistake them for the truth.

 TL;DR: Many of the painful beliefs we hold about ourselves are the result of other people’s opinions. This essay explores what happens when we mistake those voices for our own.

A few years ago, after a particularly intense Ashtanga practice, I was standing in the changing rooms of a sheeshy yoga studio – looking like a saturated dishcloth – when I overheard two women talking about me. Or rather, about how much I was sweating.

If you've ever done Ashtanga, you'll know that sweating is pretty much part of the deal. By the end of a practice, most of us are peeling ourselves off our mats with a noise like a fanfare of wet farts. I happen to sweat a great deal even by those standards. On this occasion, one of the women glanced in my direction and described me as "a public swimming pool." Her friend laughed like she'd said something genuinely brilliant.

My response was to find a fascinating crack in the changing room floor and stare at it intensely, then skulk home with the insouciance of a person who was completely fine. I was not fine

Looking back, what interests me is not the comment itself. People say unkind things in changing rooms; it is practically the rule. What's strange is how fast their voices got in, set up camp, and started sounding exactly like my own.

The Ground That Was Already There

I was just five when I first heard one of my parents call me fat. By seven I’d mastered calorie maths with the precision of a wartime grocer weighing out rations. By my teens my family had corralled me through the Cambridge Diet, the black coffee diet, the Grapefruit Diet, and a rotating cast of meal-replacement products that tasted of little more than chalk and disappointment.

My body was not the only thing my family had formed strong opinions about. As I've written before in How to Be a Bitch, families can teach us a great deal about who we are long before we are old enough to question them. The lesson wasn't just about my body. It was about what kind of girl I was, and what kind I wasn't. Smart, I was told. Repeatedly. My younger sister was the pretty one. My sister became one of the ways I learnt to measure myself. I looked at her and saw everything my own body seemed to lack. I don't think I knew then how to separate loving her from comparing myself to her. 

It's only in hindsight that I realise how many small moments seemed to gather around my body. Some were obvious. Others barely registered at the time. One of them has stayed with me. I remember coming home once after playing with friends –  I was super happy and full of energy, the way kids are when they've been running around all afternoon. I was a little sweaty but I was mostly thrilled with myself. My mum, on the other hand, was not. She took one sniff, pulled a face like I’d been rolling around in bin juice, and marched me straight to the bath.

I've often wondered whether that afternoon quietly reinforced an older lesson: that the visible signs of a body fully alive — hot and sweaty from actually using it — were evidence of excess rather than a good time. I hadn't done anything wrong. I'd been playing with my friends, and I'd come home looking and smelling like a child who'd spent an afternoon doing just that. Whether that particular moment matters as much as I sometimes give it credit for, I can't know. But it's the one I still remember.

That wasn't the only moment that stood out. Mealtimes were also part of the same education — not only what I was eating, but how much. Less dinner than Spanish Inquisition. My parents weren't cruel people. They just didn't want a fat child, and this was how they thought they could stop me from becoming one. They would look at my plate, question my food choices, and check my portions. And when I got it wrong, there was mockery and name-calling that I think they genuinely believed was encouragement. It was the '70s, after all!

The effect, whatever their intention, was that I became acutely aware of being watched. Eating wasn't something I could just do without thinking about it. I learnt to notice how much was on my plate, whether I was taking too much, whether somebody else had noticed me taking too much. Even hunger became complicated. Wanting food could mean being greedy, lacking self-control or confirming the thing everybody seemed so worried about in the first place: that left to my own devices, I would balloon.

By my thirties I had developed anorexia and bulimia - the double bill! I say "developed", although it may be more accurate to say that something cultivated over decades finally came fully into bloom. For years, I lived with the exhausting sense that my body required constant surveillance. Even when nobody else was watching, I had learnt to do the job perfectly well myself. I am recovered now, though I use that word cautiously. The residue remains. It lives in my nervous system, surfacing long after the mind has understood the story.

What the Body Remembers

I practice Ashtanga seriously now: five days a week, 90-minutes a time, the same sequence with the disciplined repetition the practice demands. I mention this not to be boring about it — though I appreciate that listing one’s Ashtanga hours is a particular kind of social risk — but because shame is not interested in evidence. It does not care what my body is capable of now. It’s loyal to an older story.

I think body dysmorphia is one of the places I notice that story most clearly. One of the peculiar things about body dysmorphia is that it doesn't really matter what the mirror says. I can look at my reflection, know perfectly well that my perception is distorted and still believe it anyway. For years I imagined this was due to a glitch between my eyes and brain. But now I'm not so sure. I'm starting to think that I learned to see my body in a certain way before I even really knew what it looked like. No amount of reassurance helps either.  I can know perfectly well that what I'm seeing is distorted and still believe it. The same is true of sweating. Intellectually, I know it means I'm hot, but this does not stop me from making the old and completely irrational leap from sweating to being fat.

Sometimes I wonder what my relationship with my body might have been had nobody explained it to me before I had the opportunity to know it for myself. I can't answer that, of course. I only know this body, the one I've spent most of my life looking at through other people's eyes. Even now, I'm not always sure which bits of what I see actually belong to me.

There are many situations that set off this insecurity in me. Walking into a room and noticing people looking at me. Having my photograph taken. The particular horror of catching sight of myself unexpectedly in a shop window. Or trying on something that objectively fits but feeling as though I've somehow put it on somebody else's body. I know what comes next before it even arrives. I become self-conscious and start hyper-fixating on my body. How am I standing? Does my stomach look like a pregnant cat's undercarriage? Can people see how much I'm sweating? Thirty seconds earlier I was fine — now I’m running a full body analysis on myself while apparently also trying to enjoy a soya latte with a friend.

And the interrogation doesn’t stop at my body. It can also flare up during sex, at work, in relationships, and pretty much whenever I get something wrong. The circumstances change, but what follows generally leads to me forensically combing through what the other person has now seen in me, and whether it's the thing I've been trying so hard to hide.

The women in that changing room did not create this way of seeing. They just found the door unlocked. Sometimes I wonder whether I'd have remembered their comment at all had it come knocking somewhere that wasn't already expecting company.

Making Sense of Shame

There is a distinction worth making here, although it took me an embarrassingly long time to get why it mattered. Guilt and shame are not the same thing. Guilt tends to attach itself to something we've done — which is almost a relief, because it means there's something to repair. Shame doesn't offer that mercy. It doesn't stick to behaviour. It goes for the whole person. It tells you, “There’s something wrong with you”.

This helps me understand why, when I get something wrong, it feels so wildly out of proportion to the mistake itself. A clumsy comment, a poor decision, or the possibility that I have disappointed somebody can quickly become evidence that I am, in some more fundamental way, defective.

What's frustrating is I know all of this intellectually. I know five-year-olds shouldn't be called fat. That bodies aren't moral projects. And yet here I am, still completely in shame’s grip. I can explain where my beliefs come from, identify exactly why they're unreasonable, and still find myself right back inside them — like someone who's read the manual cover to cover and still can't assemble the flat-pack. For a long time I treated this as another personal failure. Surely all those years of therapy were meant to produce something more impressive than a woman who can narrate her own shame in faultless detail while remaining helplessly hostage to it.

Even as I write this, I notice my shoulders beginning to creep up like oversized earrings. Apparently my body would like to demonstrate the point.

Gestalt gives me another way to understand what is happening. Historically, I mostly thought of shame as something lodged inside me: an especially stubborn personal defect that I could not seem to shift. Gestalt brings my attention back to relationship and to the repeated ways in which I have been seen and spoken to by the people around me. This changes something important for me. Instead of continuing to ask why I can’t stop feeling ashamed, I find myself asking a different question: whose voice am I hearing when I look at my body and immediately find it lacking?

The experiences themselves may be long over, but they still seem to shape the way I see myself. I think that's why the changing-room encounter stayed with me. That woman's comment was cruel, but its real power came from how familiar it felt. Within seconds, I was no longer overhearing two strangers being unkind. I was back inside a much older experience, finding it obvious that the problem was me.

But how do other people's ways of seeing us come to feel so completely our own? Gestalt calls this process introjection: beliefs, values and ways of seeing ourselves, swallowed whole before we've had the chance to digest them. They come from families, schools, culture — any source of authority — long before we know we're allowed to disagree. Mine sound a bit like this:

"There’s something wrong with you.”

"Your body is a problem."

"You’re not the pretty one."

None of these beliefs originated in me. Yet somewhere along the way they stopped sounding like other people's voices and became indistinguishable from my own. Perhaps this is why introjects can be so difficult to recognise.

The changing room also showed me another familiar move. Standing there, something in me wanted to object. To challenge what had been said. Instead, that energy did a U-turn and folded back in on itself. Rather than questioning their judgement, I quietly made it my own. By the time I got home, I was no longer arguing with them. I was busy agreeing with them. This is what Gestalt calls retroflection: what wanted to move towards them turned back towards me instead.

Even now, writing about it, another voice joins the conversation. A part of me still wonders whether I have remembered it accurately or somehow exaggerated the whole thing into an essay. I have learnt to pay attention when that voice appears—not because it is always wrong, but because I now recognise whose language it speaks.

Shame, Shame but Different

As a therapist who works with shame, I’m beginning to realise that insight alone doesn’t quite cut it. Many of my clients can effortlessly describe their shame and yet somehow it continues to completely shape their lives. This brings me back to the relationship. It seems to me that if this is where shame first develops, it’s where healing must happen too. Not by talking someone out of how they see themselves, but through the repeated and rather ordinary experience of being met without judgement — and discovering, slowly, that the world did not end.

I’m also beginning to wonder if the real work is to turn towards the parts of ourselves we’ve spent years trying to outrun. To stop joining in with the voices that first taught us there was something wrong with us. I’m learning to do just that with the younger version of me. The fat, sweaty kid who grew up believing she was somehow both not enough and far too much. She spent long enough hearing those things from other people. She doesn’t need to keep hearing them from me.

Of course, knowing this and doing it are very different things — especially when the shame in the room turns out to be mine.

I think of one session in particular. The client had spent much of her life suppressing her anger. Our work together slowly helped her to see how, whenever she wished to object or push back, she would turn this back on herself instead. Hoping to help her experience something different, I offered her an ‘empty chair experiment’ where she could express her anger directly to the chair, while imagining whoever she was furious with sitting there. In hindsight, I think I asked for more than her nervous system could cope with. Her anger came. Just not where either of us expected. It came at me.

What surprised me was how quickly my own body stopped paying attention to hers. Within moments my whole focus had swung inward. I felt exposed. Incompetent. It wasn’t just that she’d criticised an intervention — somewhere underneath, it felt like she’d confirmed something much older: that there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

For days afterwards I kept replaying that session in my head. Not because I was still trying to understand what had happened for my client, but because I’d become completely consumed by what it said about me. I started imagining how a better therapist would have handled it. I buried myself in books. Planned sessions more carefully. Questioned interventions I’d previously not thought twice about.

At first I thought this was just me being conscientious. I believed I was working hard because I cared about my clients. That was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth. I later realised it was also an attempt to protect myself — that if I could be thoughtful enough, prepared enough, good enough, perhaps nobody would ever make me feel that way again.

Of course, it didn’t work. My client’s anger hadn’t created my shame any more than those women in the changing room had. It had simply sunk its hooks into something that was already ripe and tender. Shame doesn’t always turn up as collapse. Sometimes it comes dressed as competence.

I notice the shift first in my body. My breathing gets shallower. My attention turns inward and I start micro-assessing everything from what I’ve just said to how it landed, to what I should say next. It’s so ordinary I often miss how it quietly hijacks my attention. I stop being with the client and start trying to rescue myself. None of which helps the client, obviously. The work is no longer what is happening between us.

For years I assumed good therapists needed to be completely sorted and scrubbed of their own histories. I thought with enough therapy and supervision, I too could arrive in the room as a completely blank slate. These days, I’m less convinced that’s even possible. Our histories come with us whether we like it or not. The question is whether we know them well enough to recognise when they’ve taken hold of what’s happening between us and the client.

That matters even more when it comes to shame specifically. Shame might be experienced privately, but it’s a nightmare to carry alone. Within the therapeutic relationship, the client’s shame can awaken my own. It only takes something in me that’s already familiar with it. Before I have the chance to catch what’s happening, it can begin shaping what unfolds between us.

The opposite is true as well.

I think of another client who’d spent decades making herself as small and unobtrusive as humanly possible. In one session she tentatively shared something about wanting more from her life. Her cheeks immediately flushed and she quickly began walking that back. I shared how I’d noticed she often apologised for wanting things at all. This seemed to stop her in her tracks. Her eyes filled with tears. I don’t think it was what I said that resonated for her. I think it was that, for a few moments at least, she didn’t have to apologise for wanting.

I’ve learned to accept that my history will inevitably follow me into the room. Sometimes it may need me to keep it in check with a few deep breaths. Sometimes it’s part of what helps me notice when a client’s shame story is emerging, and to find a way to stay alongside it. When I sit with someone who feels ashamed of their body, something in me just — knows. Not the specifics. Their story is their own. But the general shape of it. The way it sits in the chest. I’ve spent a long time in that neighbourhood.

Perhaps that's one of the gifts hidden inside the work I do. I don't think my wounds become virtues, or that suffering somehow justifies itself because I'm now a therapist. But staying curious about my own experience, rather than trying to outrun it, seems to deepen my capacity to notice shame in someone else before they've said a word. And to stay close by, a little longer than they expected anyone could.

A Continuing Practice

I began with a changing room and a throwaway comment that I apparently decided to carry around for years like an emotional house brick. I end here having written about it, which is itself a small act of defiance against shame's preferred conditions. Shame asks us to conceal. To edit ourselves before anybody else has the chance to see it. Certainly not to turn the whole thing into an essay.

The internal critic has been faithfully present throughout the writing of these pages. It has wondered whether I am oversharing, whether the personal material is professionally dubious, whether readers will quietly conclude that therapists ought to be more sorted than this. These are familiar voices. They still arrive with impressive confidence. The difference now is not that they have disappeared. It is that I recognise them sooner.

For a long time I imagined that recovery — from an eating disorder, from shame, from the long afterlife of childhood — would eventually arrive as a kind of certainty. That one day I would simply inhabit my body without self-consciousness. Hear other people's judgements without turning them into evidence against myself. Make a mistake, and just let it be a mistake.

I'd be lying if I told you shame no longer turns up. The truth is, I still judge my body. And given a strong enough Ashtanga class, I could still be mistaken for a public swimming pool. I’m just less inclined to mistake sweat for evidence now. Or shame for truth. I’m learning, slowly, to turn towards that fat kid. To meet her with a bit more kindness and a bit less judgement. She’s waited long enough for me to take her side.

The story of fundamental wrongness was never mine originally. It was handed to me long before I had the language to question it, swallowed whole before I had the teeth to chew. I still find myself living inside that story from time to time. The difference is that I no longer mistake it for the only story available.

I am still, at times, in the process of spitting it out.