Some years ago Leonie Hibbert drew our attention to Robert Karen's essay Shame, originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1992. It is one of those pieces that has stayed with us, and it is worth saying briefly why — in our own words — rather than reproducing someone else's work.
Why shame is so often the hidden problem
In our practice, the people who come for in-depth psychotherapy rarely arrive saying “I feel ashamed.” They arrive with anxiety, with relationship difficulties, with a sense that the same painful patterns keep repeating. Underneath, very often, is shame: not guilt about something done, but a more pervasive belief that there is something wrong with who one is. Karen's essay is valuable because it takes that distinction seriously and traces how early experience lays it down.
Shame and the therapeutic relationship
What matters clinically is that shame is intensely relational. It is formed in relationship and, in our experience, it is only really worked through in relationship — in a steady, non-judgemental therapeutic frame where the experience can be felt, named and survived together rather than hidden again. This is slow, long-term work; it is not a six-session strategy. That is precisely why an essay written more than thirty years ago still describes what we see in the room today.
Read the original
Robert Karen's original essay Shame was published in The Atlantic Monthly (February 1992). We recommend reading it in full from the publisher rather than a copy: search The Atlantic's archive for “Robert Karen Shame 1992”.
If shame is something you recognise in your own life and you would like to explore it in therapy, please see our colleagues currently taking enquiries.