You can’t be perfect every moment of your life, and there will be moments in your life that are embarrassing, awkward, or downright humiliating. Learning to deal with these inevitable low points in life, and moving-on from them, is an important life skill that can benefit your mental health.
The importance of Overcoming Embarrassing Moments
Getting-over the embarrassing moments of life, and not letting them negative affect you, is so very important. Just one humiliating moment can ruin your life, but only if you let it. This is important for adults to know, and for children and teens to learn, in order to navigate the complexities of life healthily.
Lingering effects from a seriously embarrassing moment can lead to feelings of shame in a person. If unchecked, feelings of shame are incredibly toxic and can lead to depression, poor life choices, and substance abuse.
What is “Shame?”
Shame is defined as: “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior.” Feelings of shame can live-on long after the incident that causes shame is over.
There are generally two types of people: those who easily overcome their mistakes, and those who do not easily overcome them. Those who are not good at coping with embarrassment and shame can let the toxic feelings multiply and increase in strength.
Letting Go of Toxic Shame
Some people are able to easily “shake off” embarrassment and move on, while others need to learn coping mechanisms and healthy ways of dealing with their own negative feelings. For those that need help, therapy for feelings of shame can teach you the vital skills that are needed for coping with embarrassment and humiliation.
While meditation, Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), breathing, and self analyzation are all positive ways to deal with feelings of embarrassment and shame, there are some very negative ways of dealing with negative feelings.
Avoid Negative Behaviors That Worsen Shame
Compounding shame is a real threat, that comes when someone’s negative behavior starts to “spiral out of control.” Making bad decisions on top of the existing shame can lead to compounding feelings of shame.
Attempting to self-medicate with drugs and alcohol is one of the worst decisions you can make, but is the go-to decision for many who deal with shame and embarrassment. Many teens and young adults –who don’t know how to positively deal with feelings of shame — feel like alcohol and drugs will help them to forget about the shameful incidents. Adolescents often try to use drugs and alcohol to “turn off” their feelings, or mask their feelings — wanting to feel “numb” rather than feel any of the painful feelings and emotions.
Abusing drugs and alcohol will only worsen your problems — no matter what the problem you have. When it comes to shame, alcohol and drugs will worsen that shame, and will only “numb” you for a short time before returning you back to reality where the shame is still waiting for you to deal with it.
How to Get Over Embarrassment
Ok, so we know that not getting over embarrassment will cause even more problems in our lives, so how to we actually get over it? The process of overcoming shame and embarrassment will be unique to each individual, but therapists can help you to learn the basic coping skills that lead to overcoming shame and embarrassment.
Step 1: Acknowledge the Incident — Don’t let your mind fantasize about what you should have done or said in an incident, and don’t let your mind talk you into remembering the incident in a fictional way. Instead, acknowledge the incident for exactly how it happened. Tell yourself, ” this happened and I cannot change the past, but I can change the present and the future.”
Step 2: Learn from the Incident — Even the worst possible situations can still offer 1 benefit — the benefit of learning from the incident. Think about what you can do differently if this situation presents itself again in the future. Ponder how you can change yourself to protect yourself from attacks and being a victim of an embarrassing situation. Be the winner in the incident by taking the one prize to be had in embarrassment: be the one who learned and bettered themselves from the incident.
Step 3: Put The Incident In The Past, Where It Belongs — nothing you can do, say, or feel will change the past, so don’t let your mind wander off into thinking that you can. Put the incident in the past, move-on, and only allow feelings of positivity about overcoming and moving-on from the incident. Don’t allow the memories of that incident to bring up negative feelings. Counter both the negative feelings and the memories with positive ones.
Step 4: Don’t Avoid The People, Places, and Situations Where the Embarrassment Occurred — it will be your natural reaction to want to avoid the people, places and things connected to the embarrassing moment(s) that cause feelings of shame. While this is a natural defense mechanism (like PTSD), it does not always offer long-term benefit; it is really just a fight or flight reaction. Instead, embrace the positive people, places and things, while remaining cautious around the possible negative stimuli. You cannot completely avoid embarrassing situations in life, and trying to do so will only lead you to miss out on a lot of life.
Step 5: Acknowledge Your Success — If you have successfully overcome shameful and embarrassing situations, be sure to readily acknowledge it, both to yourself and to others. This step not only helps you to prepare for the next challenge to come, but you can help others by showing how you overcame your challenge.
Overcoming Dangerous Social Situations and Online Bullying
It should be said that purposefully trying to embarrass, shame, humiliate, or bully an person is NOT OKAY! You should never try and put someone into an awkward situation to “watch them squirm.” This seems to have been forgotten in recent years with online bullying and shaming running rampant.
Many of the risks online go far beyond being simply embarrassing, and extend to harassment, extortion, blackmailing, and other serious, criminal acts. These threats go far beyond simple embarrassment, and should be seriously considered with both legal and law enforcement professionals AND mental health professionals.
It should be understood that our advice on overcoming embarrassing situations focuses more on little incidents of awkwardness and isolated case of light embarrassment. We do not put up with bullying or cruel behaviors, and neither should you. If your experience with shame and embarrassment extends beyond a simple incident, then it no longer qualifies as an “embarrassment,” and would be categorized as an attack.
Therapy for Shame and Embarrassment
If you are suffering from feelings of shame and embarrassment, and you cannot overcome these feelings yourself, we recommend consulting a therapist to help you unwind the negative feelings and ensure that the negative memories of the past do not interfere with a positive present.
