“Shame distracts you by making everything confusing and blurry. Shame focuses you on yourself; it’s an incredibly self-conscious emotion. You start focusing more and more on yourself and less and less on the people and events around you … That’s how you lose touch with present reality.” —Bret Lyon and Sheila Rubin

When we push away any of our feelings, they may disappear from our conscious awareness, but they don’t vanish. They operate unconsciously, suppressing our energy and contributing to anxiety, depression, or a vague mood of discontent. Oftentimes, when we can’t pinpoint what’s making us feel unhappy, it could be that our background operating system is being run by a subtle sense of shame.

The one emotion that’s especially adept at hiding out in the shadows is the emotion of shame. Author Brene Brown defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging—something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection.”

Shame affects how we relate to people. Gershen Kaufman, author of Shame: The Power of Caring, makes a similar point. He........

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