Disorganizing Shame
How to create organizations where people and communities grow
The choir had just finished singing. Amidst this calm and stillness, the director started speaking gently to the large audience, offering comments on the song they’d sing next. Suddenly, someone’s cellphone started ringing. Loudly. Boisterously. The noise was a stark contrast to the more sacred sounds of human voices that had come before.
The director paused, and for just a split second, she looked curious. Then, her face rapidly changed to a knowing glance, followed by annoyance, then a hint of vengeance. “Dani!!!” the director yelled. A teenaged girl, probably sixteen, rushed off the stage into the auditorium, grabbed her bag from a chair, and silenced her phone. The audience roared in laughter.
Judging by the speed of the director’s response, and Dani’s embarrassed expression, it seemed a similar series of events had transpired before. Dani returned to the stage and her place within the choir. The director continued addressing the crowd with comments about the next song.
Dani, however, had lost her composure. She looked mortified. Her face was red and splotchy, and she started crying. The choir continued the concert, and although Dani kept singing along with everyone else, tears poured down her face. For the remaining half hour of the performance, she never stopped weeping.
I felt for her. All of us humans want to belong to the group. Though we express it in different ways, at core, everyone wants love and acceptance from those around them. This longing to fit in and receive social approval is especially potent for teenagers, and I wondered what this moment would do to Dani as she became an adult. I could feel her humiliation and, underneath that, what I suspect was a deep sense of shame.
What Is Shame?
Shame occurs when someone feels unworthy. They believe themselves to be fundamentally flawed or broken, irrevocably inadequate, maybe even immoral. Shame attaches to someone’s character, not some specific thing they did.
When people feel shame, they anticipate judgment and rejection. And when they expect or experience judgment and rejection, the shame grows. The feeling can circulate through a whole group. It gets tossed around like a grenade about to go off. No one wants to hold it, so one person passes it to the next person, and the next, sometimes so quickly it’s hard to sense. In communities and organizations where bullying, ostracism, harassment, hazing, and other abuses are common, this cycle is at work.
Shame differs from guilt, which occurs when someone recognizes that one of their specific, changeable behaviors caused hurt or harm. Guilt can prompt useful changes, but shame is, by nature, about parts of the self that cannot be changed. It easily amplifies feelings of powerlessness, and when powerlessness takes hold, people and groups either give up or lash out.
When Dani cried for such a long time, I don’t think she was feeling guilty. If she was, she would have rather quickly been able to think to herself, OK, I messed up this time, and I also know how to do something different in the future. I know my choir will support me while I make this change. Next time, I’m going to double check that my phone is off. As a backup, maybe I’ll set myself a reminder before every performance. And I can ask my friends who sing next to me to remind me, too. With a plan to change a specific behavior, and the certainty that her community would help her make that change, Dani’s emotions would have settled.
But her emotions did not settle. They were persistent, likely because she could feel the precarity of her belonging. When a community supports people as they grow, without shaming them, the people in that community feel acceptance when they make mistakes that need to be corrected. Through their security in the group, they learn, change, and make amends. But in a community that shames its members, acceptance becomes conditional on the group’s approval. At any turn, a person might be shunned or kicked out.
When belonging becomes contingent in this way, communities and organizations live in perpetual fear and suspicion. Perfectionism amplifies, and workers must not acknowledge when something goes wrong. When the smallest infractions occur, the group starts looking for scapegoats: Better to kick someone else out than to be the one exiled. This logic runs rampant when shame is an organizing principle.
The consequences go far beyond the feelings of one person in a choir. In healthcare organizations, shame reduces the likelihood that doctors and nurses will disclose their mistakes, and that hiding increases the chances of future medical errors. When people in organizations are unwilling or unable to talk about mess ups, or the potential for errors and mistakes, severe outcomes can follow, including death and destruction. The Challenger Space Shuttle disaster of 1986 is one such example.
At heart, each of us knows that we will make a mistake at some point in our lives. Messing up is part of being human. So, when we find ourselves in communities that rely on shame, we must shut away parts of our humanness. Rather than turn toward each other, people in shame-based organizations hide when something goes wrong. The whole system becomes anxious that our connections with each other, ones that meet our basic human needs, could disappear at any moment. That loss of security is worth hours of tears. Dani gave the whole audience a gift by shedding them.
Shame and Trauma
As I write about in my second book—which I expect to be out later this year—traumatized people often experience shame. Shame is likely to follow when someone experiences relational violence, including emotional, verbal, sexual, or physical abuse.
Shame also lives in people who enact violence and abuse. As the psychiatrist James Gilligan says, “the basic psychological motive, or cause, of violent behavior is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame.” Rather than tend to their most wounded parts, people with unbearable shame externalize it. They lash out in emotional, verbal, or physically harmful ways. Said differently, violence creates shame, and shame creates violence.
For this reason, shame cannot create a less violent world. And yet, so many “justice” processes depend on it. When something goes wrong, groups work tirelessly to assign blame. They are quick to judge the goodness and badness of the people around them, and they often push people to leave their group. Of course, sometimes people do need to leave a group, a community, or a relationship so that everyone involved can heal. But that decision is different from the vicious, moral absolutism that splits innocence and guilt along easy lines. As if any of us are pure.
Shame cannot create a less violent world.
If we want a more just world, one where people grow and thrive, and where violence is rare, shame cannot be the tool we use to get there. Shame got Dani to turn off her phone. But it didn’t create a community where people feel inspired to connect well with themselves and to work alongside each other to adress the world’s most difficult, shared problems.
Prentice Hemphill, somatic expert and movement facilitator, puts it this way:
Don’t get me wrong: Shame is not inherently bad. I’m not interested in shaming shame. Sometimes, shame motivates people to improve themselves and repair social ties. But when shame circulates with intensity, and when organizations and workplaces have become “shame engines,” the world cannot make itself less violent. Reducing and preventing violence requires wisdom that can hold shame with tenderness and then let it go.
Practices for Disorganizing Shame
A growing body of research suggests that trauma-informed organizations and practices are most effective when they are also shame-sensitive: they acknowledge shame, understand its origins and impacts, and avoid using shame for control. Here are a few practices for reducing shame in relationships, communities, and workplaces.
1. Foster emotional safety.
When you listen to someone, pay attention to the feelings and values beneath their literal words. What emotions are they feeling? What values are guiding their expression? Noticing and responding to these aspects of what is being said is just as important as responding to the explicit contents. Sometimes, it’s more important. Feelings and values connect people, even when their feelings and values differ. By contrast, focusing only on someone’s literal words can lead to contests about who is right. That kind of pissing match boosts shame. So, when someone says to me, “I cannot stand to be in this space anymore! The people here are awful!” I could choose to agree with them, adding fuel to their judgment. Or I could disagree, setting up an argument about whose version of the truth is accurate. But if I instead start by tuning into the exasperation this person is feeling, and how much they value harmonious relationships, we can connect much better. I can let them know that I hear their frustration, and maybe I can share a time when I’ve felt similarly frustrated. I can also reflect to them about my own desire for harmonious relationships. We can do all that without determining if the people here are, indeed, awful. Shame takes a back seat.
2. Lead with curiosity.
To express curiosity is a leadership practice. I say that because curiosity interrupts shame and invites others to be vulnerable. Doing so transforms cycles of defensiveness, criticism, and fear. When you or the people around you are not curious, be curious about why.
Curiosity softens judgment. In a book called Discomfortable, A. J. Bond asserts,
Those breakthroughs, when the world’s possibilities expand, happen when people get curios.
If you’re looking for concrete ways to express curiosity, check out the April 2025 issue of CommuniKate on perception checking statements. You can find it here. It may be especially useful if you like clear structures for practicing new communication skills. Perception checking statements pause automatic reactions born from judgment and rejection. In so doing, they reduce the likelihood that we shame the people around us. In that April issue you’ll find step-by-step guidance for each of the three parts of a perception checking statement.
3. Affirm what’s going right.
People regularly give each other feedback on how they’re doing. Sometimes people tell their loved ones, friends, or family members how they’re experiencing a relationship. Teachers in schools give students comments and grades on their assignments. And in informal meetings or formal performance evaluations, coworkers and bosses let employees know how well they’re doing their job. In each of these settings, people reduce shame when they emphasize what’s going right more than they emphasize what’s going wrong. Identifying what isn’t working matters, but when the balance of feedback is affirmative, people create positive change.
Why? Organizer and activist, adrienne marie brown, notes that
This approach propels social movements and disrupts systems of oppression. If you’re interested in understanding more about how “the body learns on yes,” check out my February 2025 CommuniKate issue on consent-based organizing. It provides some beginning steps to help you experience yes as a powerful tool for organizing.
For the business minded among us who are also interested in the bottom line, this affirmative approach also enhances job performance. Even though traditional performance evaluations are a common practice, there’s little evidence that they improve employee work. On the contrary, research suggests that typical performance evaluations make employees’ performance worse! What does improve performance? When a community recognizes and values each member’s strengths and contributions. For this reason, social psychologist Gergen recommends that organizations prioritize valuation processes over evaluation processes.
Regardless of your role, you can affirm what’s going right in your relationships or your workplaces. Voice appreciation and gratitude when you can. Ask yourself and others what makes them proud of their group, community, or organization. Notice your own and others’ strengths, and learn to name them. Like taking online quizzes? The VIA Institute offers a free survey that can guide you to name your own strengths.
4. Ask about what you’ve missed, overlooked, or left out.
I first learned this skill when I was a beginning researcher conducting qualitative interviews. A mentor taught me to ask, at the end of each interview, “Are there any questions that I haven’t asked that you wish I had?” Often, research participants’ responses were the most informative of the entire conversation. Their feedback was so powerful that I eventually learned to start interviews with a version of that question—What would you like me to ask you? In a research setting, these questions are valuable because participants are experts in their own experiences and perspectives. They know what you’re missing.
In other settings, questions like these are also highly effective. If you’re leading or facilitating a group process, you might ask a version of this question near the end of a meeting. You could say, “What haven’t we considered yet?” or “What have we left out of this discussion?” These questions signal openness to varied perspectives and approaches. They affirm the importance of what has not yet been expressed, and they honor multiple ways of thinking through a problem. Sometimes, when shame circulates in a group, people will stop offering ideas that seem different. That shame shuts down creativity, innovation, and nuanced decision-making. Although questions like these are not a cure-all for the complexities of organizational shame, this tiny practice can lessen it just a bit.
These questions are useful in everyday relationships, too. Shame can make it hard to acknowledge what you don’t know. Asking, “Do you think I’ve missed something about what you’re saying?” or “Would you like to talk about anything else?” invites input and collaboration. Further, questions like these make it more OK for everyone involved to get something wrong or overlook something, and to repair those ruptures when they happen.
As with all practices, these four are not universal. They will work well for some contexts, personalities, identities, and cultures. Some situations will call for different approaches. Hopefully these practices give you ideas about how to move with your own wisdom.
Thank you!!
A huge and heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you who have read, talked up, or swapped messages about CommuniKate. As of last month’s issue, the newsletter now has more than 100 subscribers! I so appreciate your engagement and support. If you’d like to help me keep this work going, please continue to like, subscribe, share, and comment.
I’m also offering communication coaching and consulting to individuals and organizations. If you’d like to learn more about my approach to building thriving relationships for a more just world, please message me.
Next month, on June 2, I’ll be trying out something new for CommuniKate. This first summer issue will feature a playlist of communication-related songs, along with an essay connecting communication theories and research to the themes in the music. I’m still in the process of fine-tuning it, but I expect it’ll focus on the power of words. Until then, I’m wishing you all well!