What Is Shame? Why Do People Feel Ashamed, and When?
Shame is an assessment of a person that is much lower than they consider themselves, and which they thus cannot agree with. That is, someone else evaluates the person in a way that is lower than the person considers themselves, and it causes a blow to that person’s sensation of their “self.”
They are then ashamed that they received this message from their surroundings. It does not have the same impact if they reached the same conclusion by themselves. If the evaluation is not under the power of others, then they usually forget about it.
Shame is a very heavy state that emerges in order to bring about changes in people. At the end of the day, we need to change, to do something in order to bring us out of our hiding places. When we understand this need to change as a result of a revelation of shame, and we somewhat aim ourselves in such a direction, then we undergo a certain correction.
Since we do not want to change by nature, we can then end up hating people who shame us. There were such times when people who brought shame to certain people were killed. If we do not use shame as a means for self-transformation, then we are simply ready to annihilate those who awaken these negative feelings.
Shame also marks a certain level of human development. People who feel no shame are undeveloped. However, we each have a threshold of shame where if we are pushed beyond our respective thresholds, we can no longer agree to it.
Shame is an essential part of our being such that our main concern is to cover ourselves from shame. In the Bible, it is written that when Adam and Eve “realized they were naked, then they sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves” (Genesis 3:7). That is, when the feeling of shame first appeared, people felt naked, uncovered, which was a very difficult revelation.
The revelation of shame was the first social problem that manifested where people had such inclinations that they could not be proud of, but rather that they were ashamed of. They thus covered themselves. What happens when we cover ourselves? No one then knows or understands what we truly represent and what we hide.
Therefore, in early times, people covered themselves materially with clothes, and over time, these clothes turned into an element of pride. People started adorning their clothes with gold and couturiers appeared. Clothes became not just covers of shame, but on the contrary, demonstrations of wealth and social status. It is a natural inversion because we cover what needs to be covered with what strikes other people’s eyes. We then relate to clothes not simply as covers, but as expressions of how people wish to reveal themselves to others. We do so in order to eliminate any possibilities for others to somehow belittle us.