How I got over my many insecurities - part 1: being publicly shamed

My attempts at embarrassment exposure therapy

Produced by me and DALL·E 2

The compliment

I was feeling nervous. I glanced up and down the residential street outside my East London flat. The pavement  to my left was clear, but to my right, a woman with a push-chair was walking towards me. My heart rate jumped and I took a deep breath. Then a thought crossed my mind and I relaxed. “Not her” I told myself, “it should probably be a man”. I walked slowly towards the street corner. That’s when I saw him. A man in his 30s; he looked relaxed. He reminded me of myself. My heart rate jumped once more when I realised I was actually going to do it. I wanted to run away. I reminded myself that this was for my own good. This was an act of kindness to my future self. I took a deep breath and told the scared part of me that it was going to be okay, nothing bad can really happen. He was now within a couple of metres, so I did it….

“Excuse me” I said, awkwardly waving at him. “Could I have a compliment please?”.

“Sorry what?” he responded, understandably confused.

“I would like a compliment, could I have a compliment please” I repeated.

“Uuuuh… you have a great approach to life” he said with an awkward chuckle.

I thanked him and he walked off. I shuffled the short distance home, playing what had just happened over in my mind. I was relieved that it was over. Alongside the relief was the shame. Asking for a compliment from a stranger seemed like a really strange thing to do. That guy must have thought I was really odd. I took another deep breath, and tried to give the shame space.

The fear is mostly shame

That compliment was a couple of years ago. Around then, I had realised that fear of embarrassment was a significant cause of my negative emotions. I had been gathering data on things I was afraid of - and when I looked at this data, shame screamed at me from the spreadsheet. In a previous post about using forecasting to overcome my fears, I created a graph of all the things that caused me to feel fear. Here is the graph of my fears again, but this time I have highlighted the fears that relate to how I am perceived (i.e. shame) in orange:

It was in response to the realisation of the significance of shame in my emotional life, that I started doing embarrassing things in public.

Shame exposure therapy

I was essentially doing a form of exposure therapy. The idea being that by exposing yourself to the thing you are afraid of (in my case embarrassment), you come to realise that it’s not that scary.

My partner had similar fears, so we decided to do this together, and had made a long list of things we could do to embarrass ourselves (see below). The week I asked a man for a complement, my partner went for a walk round East London in a chicken onesie. The following week I spent a few minutes awkwardly dancing in front of a collection of picnickers in Victoria park. This was all awful and I hated it. 

We had brainstormed a long list of embarrassing things - here is a sample (the ones I eventually actually did are in bold)¹:

• Ask stranger for money, or ask if you can have a picture with them 

• Ask a stranger for a compliment

• Compliment a stranger

• Go to meetup and say something people will definitely reject or say something really stupid

• Invite a stranger to meditate/walk/talk with you

• Participate in a formal debate

• Go to poetry meetup and read your best poem

• Sing at meetup group

• Speak/sing at open-mic night

• Do stand up set

• Make a formal complaint about something

• Improv

• Give speech on the street

• Ask shop assistant if they sell extra small condoms

• Dance solo in the street

• Play instrument on street

• Wear weird clothes in public

• Ask for directions to Burger King in Burger King

• Go to a chicken shop, ask for details about their welfare conditions

• Create a blog and start publicly posting things about your insecurities 

These all felt scary a few years ago, but now I actually do a few of these (e.g. improv) for fun!

This helped me feel less insecure in some, but not all contexts

This exposure to shame genuinely did help. It gave me an opportunity to get used to the feeling of being embarrassed in a safe space where the consequences were clearly limited. And I do feel more relaxed in public now. I really seem to care a lot less about the opinion of random strangers. I can and do dance in public when I feel like it. I definitely don’t feel zero shame in these moments, but I feel less, and I am better at accepting the shame when it does arise. 

That said, I didn’t find that this shame-reduction fully carried over to other areas of my life. It definitely helped, but I still felt a lot of fear of embarrassment in social and professional settings, where the cost of doing something embarrassing felt much more real and hard to wave away as irrational. I’ll get to how I dealt with all that stuff in future posts!

1. I decided not to do any of the things that felt like hassling people at their work - although admittedly that might have been good exposure therapy for the more specific shame-y fear of being (seen as) a bad person).