I have been thinking about shame lately.
Not embarrassment. Not guilt. Not even the familiar I really wish I hadn’t said that feeling that shows up approximately four minutes after leaving a social interaction.
I mean shame as something deeper.
The kind that doesn’t say:
I did something wrong.
It says:
Something about me is wrong.
And the more I think about shame in neurodivergent people, the less convinced I am that we can understand it by looking only inside the person experiencing it.
Because shame is deeply personal.
But it is not necessarily individually created.
Shame happens between us.
We often talk about shame as though it is an unfortunate belief someone developed about themselves.
Somewhere along the way, you started believing you were lazy. Difficult. Too sensitive. Too much. Not enough.
Now we need to help you replace that belief with a healthier one.
There is truth in that.
But relational theories of chronic shame offer a much bigger picture.
Shame doesn’t simply develop because we reach an incorrect conclusion about ourselves. Our sense of self develops in relationship with other people. We learn something about who we are by watching what happens when we bring ourselves into the room.
And for neurodivergent people, that feedback can begin incredibly early.
You interrupt.
You aren’t paying attention.
Stop moving.
Look at me when I’m talking to you.
You’re being dramatic.
Why are you making this so difficult?
You need to try harder.
You’re so smart. I don’t understand why you can’t just do this.
You know better.
That last one interests me.
Because sometimes we did know better.
We just couldn’t reliably turn knowing into doing.
Sometimes we didn’t know.
Sometimes everyone else seemed to have received a copy of the rules and we were trying to reconstruct them from context clues.
And sometimes the thing being corrected wasn’t actually wrong at all.
It was simply inconvenient, unfamiliar, culturally unacceptable, developmentally unexpected, or uncomfortable for someone else.
But a child doesn’t have language for all of that.
A child has relationships.
So they learn from the response.
Oh.
I’m doing it wrong again.
Before shame, there may have been something else.
Before the shame, there was often something much more alive.
Excitement.
Curiosity.
Movement.
Intensity.
Interest.
Connection.
A need.
You talked too long about something you loved.
Someone’s eyes glazed over.
You moved your body because moving helped you listen.
Someone told you to sit still.
You asked another question because the directions genuinely didn’t make sense.
Someone sighed.
You cried because something felt enormous.
Someone told you it wasn’t a big deal.
You wanted reassurance.
You were called needy.
The original experience wasn’t shame.
The shame came afterward.
It happened somewhere in the space between your experience and someone else’s response to it.
This is one of the things shame theory helps us understand. Shame is not only a conscious judgment that we are bad. It is intimately connected to interruption — to moments when interest, enjoyment, connection, expression, or aliveness suddenly collide with something that tells us to stop.
Over enough repetitions, you don’t necessarily need the other person anymore.
You learn to watch yourself for them.
Was I talking too much?
Am I being annoying?
Was that weird?
Did I make this uncomfortable?
Should I stop moving?
Should I say less?
Should I apologize?
Should I pretend I understood?
Eventually, masking can become more than learning how to navigate a neurotypical world.
It can become surveillance.
And the person being watched is you.
But whose rules are we talking about?
This is where conversations about neurodivergent shame become incomplete if they stop at neurodivergence.
Because the social rules we are learning are not neutral.
They were built inside cultures and institutions that already have ideas about what a person should look like, sound like, produce, tolerate, understand and control.
There are expectations about eye contact.
Volume.
Movement.
Productivity.
Emotional expression.
Independence.
Authority.
Professionalism.
Intelligence.
Politeness.
Self-control.
And those expectations are not applied equally.
Race matters.
Gender matters.
Class matters.
Disability matters.
Culture matters.
Language matters.
Who is speaking matters.
A behavior interpreted as quirky in one person may be interpreted as threatening in another.
Directness can become confidence or disrespect.
Emotional intensity can become passion or instability.
Difficulty following an institutional expectation can be understood as disability, defiance, laziness or danger depending partly on whose body is having the difficulty.
This matters because shame doesn’t develop outside of power.
Some of what we call internal was external first.
In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon examines what happens psychologically when a person lives inside a racial and colonial order that has already assigned meaning to them.
The person does not enter the interaction as simply themselves.
The world has already created categories.
Already established hierarchies.
Already decided which language sounds educated, which bodies are dangerous, which ways of being are civilized, competent, beautiful, intelligent or worthy.
And eventually, a person can begin encountering themselves through those standards.
I keep thinking about that alongside neurodivergent masking.
Not because racialization and neurodivergent masking are equivalent.
They are not.
Flattening them into the same experience would erase the histories and structures that make racial oppression what it is.
But Fanon gives us language for something important about shame:
Power doesn’t have to remain outside of us to continue operating.
Eventually, we can learn to watch ourselves through its eyes.
Am I speaking correctly?
Am I behaving correctly?
Does my body look threatening?
Do I seem intelligent?
Am I professional enough?
Am I making them uncomfortable?
Am I too loud?
Too emotional?
Too direct?
Too strange?
Too Black?
Too disabled?
Too much?
And for people living at multiple marginalized intersections, these questions cannot necessarily be separated neatly.
A Black neurodivergent child isn’t Black for part of the school day and neurodivergent for another part.
The teacher interpreting their behavior is interpreting one child.
The nervous system receiving that interpretation belongs to one child.
And the child learning something about themselves from that interaction has only one self in which to put it.
That is why intersectionality matters when we talk about shame.
Because we cannot always identify which part of someone was being corrected.
Sometimes the message is simply:
The way you are existing in this room is wrong.
And then the person has to figure out what to change.
The body learns too.
This is where Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands adds another layer.
The title comes from something startlingly ordinary.
Menakem remembers rubbing his grandmother’s hands as a child. They were thick and calloused. Eventually, she explained why: she had picked cotton beginning when she was a young child.
History was in her hands.
Not metaphorically.
Her body had been physically shaped by what happened to it.
Menakem uses that embodied understanding to ask us to think about racialized trauma as something more than an intellectual problem. Racism operates through beliefs, policies, histories, institutions, and systems of power — but human beings encounter all of those things with bodies.
Bodies learn danger.
Bodies anticipate.
Bodies brace.
Bodies protect.
Sometimes bodies carry adaptations long after anyone consciously decided to have them.
That gives us another way to think about shame.
Because shame is not always a sentence running through our heads.
Sometimes it is the sudden heat in your face.
The drop in your stomach.
The urge to disappear.
The immediate need to explain yourself.
The apology that comes out before you’ve even decided whether you’ve done something wrong.
The body becoming smaller.
The voice changing.
The eyes dropping.
The nervous system recognizing something before the conscious mind has figured out what happened.
Something about this is dangerous.
And culture helps determine what our bodies have had to learn is dangerous.
For some people, being misunderstood has relatively small consequences.
For others, misunderstanding by a teacher, physician, employer, police officer, or other authority figure can carry enormous consequences.
That changes what vigilance means.
It changes what masking means.
It changes what just be yourself means.
And it changes how we should understand the nervous system that learned to constantly monitor the room.
Which makes unmasking more complicated than authenticity.
There is a version of neurodivergent liberation language that says:
Stop masking.
Take up space.
Be authentically yourself.
There is something beautiful in that invitation.
There is also privilege embedded in how easy it is to follow.
Because before asking someone to stop monitoring themselves, we should probably ask:
What taught them that monitoring was necessary?
Was it embarrassment?
Was it exclusion?
Was it punishment?
Was it racism?
Was it ableism?
Was it gendered expectations?
Was it economic survival?
Was it physical safety?
Was it several of those things at once?
The nervous system doesn’t care very much whether we have intellectually decided that a coping strategy is oppressive.
It cares about what happened the last time we didn’t use it.
And this may be one of the places where shame becomes particularly difficult to untangle.
Because something imposed from outside can eventually feel deeply personal.
The institution says:
This is the correct way to function.
The culture says:
This is the correct way to belong.
The relationship says:
This is the version of you that is easiest to love.
And eventually we don’t need anyone to say it anymore.
We say it ourselves.
Sit still.
Don’t be too much.
Don’t make this difficult.
Don’t let them see you struggling.
Get it right.
Make them comfortable.
Be easier.
And then we call that voice our own.
But maybe one of the questions shame asks us to consider is:
Was it always?
Then there is uncertainty.
This is where OCD keeps entering the picture for me.
Not because neurodivergence inevitably leads to OCD. It doesn’t.
And not because every repetitive thought, reassurance-seeking behavior, rumination, or need for predictability in a neurodivergent person should be labeled a compulsion.
It shouldn’t.
But there is an intersection here worth staying curious about.
OCD is deeply interested in uncertainty.
What if I got it wrong?
What if I hurt someone?
What if I misunderstood?
What if this thought means something about me?
What if I’m actually a bad person?
And compulsions can offer temporary relief from that uncertainty.
Check.
Review.
Research.
Confess.
Ask.
Replay.
Analyze.
Make absolutely sure.
Now place that inside a developmental history in which getting things wrong repeatedly resulted in correction, disconnection, punishment, or shame.
The uncertainty changes.
It isn’t only:
I don’t know.
It can become:
I don’t know, and experience has taught me that when I get it wrong, the problem may turn out to be me.
That feels important.
Imagine spending years misunderstanding invisible expectations.
You missed the social cue.
You forgot the assignment.
You didn’t realize someone was upset.
Your face didn’t look interested enough.
Your tone sounded wrong.
You couldn’t begin something everyone insisted was easy.
You interpreted something literally.
You reacted intensely to something everyone else seemed able to tolerate.
Over and over, other people appeared more certain about the meaning of your behavior than you were.
Eventually, maybe your own perception stops feeling sufficient.
Was I rude?
Is she mad?
Did I say too much?
Am I selfish?
Was that inappropriate?
Should I apologize?
But what if apologizing makes it worse?
Let me replay it one more time.
Now we are standing somewhere complicated.
There is masking here.
There may be hypervigilance.
There may be rumination.
There may be rejection sensitivity.
There may be trauma.
There may be OCD.
There may be several of them at once.
They are not interchangeable.
But they may sometimes gather around the same terrifying uncertainty:
I cannot entirely trust myself to know whether I am acceptable.
Shame makes uncertainty personal.
Some of the most painful uncertainty isn’t uncertainty about what happened.
It is uncertainty about who we are.
Am I good?
Am I selfish?
Am I safe?
Am I lovable?
Am I difficult?
Am I secretly the person everyone has been telling me I am?
This is where shame and obsessive doubt seem capable of becoming particularly cruel companions.
Shame has already whispered:
There may be something unacceptable about you.
Then obsessive doubt arrives and asks:
But what if there really is?
And suddenly certainty isn’t just comforting.
It feels necessary.
You aren’t only trying to determine what happened.
You are trying to establish your own acceptability.
And sometimes we recruit relationships into that process.
Are you mad at me?
Are we okay?
Did I do something wrong?
Was I annoying?
Do you still love me?
Tell me we’re okay.
For a moment, someone else gives us the answer.
Yes.
We’re okay.
Relief.
Until the uncertainty comes back.
Which makes relationships complicated.
Because relationships can be where shame was learned.
They can also be where shame begins to loosen.
But that doesn’t mean healing relationships provide endless reassurance.
I think they offer something harder and much more powerful.
They make uncertainty survivable.
A safe relationship doesn’t promise:
You will never misunderstand me.
It says:
We can misunderstand each other and repair.
It doesn’t promise:
You will never annoy me.
It says:
My occasional frustration does not make you fundamentally intolerable.
It doesn’t promise:
You will always get this right.
It says:
Getting something wrong does not cost you your humanity.
It doesn’t require perfect communication in order to maintain connection.
That is very different from reassurance.
Maybe one of the things secure relationships give us is the ability to stop proving that we deserve to remain in them.
Maybe shame demands certainty about our acceptability.
And safe relationship makes that certainty less necessary.
And maybe the opposite of shame isn’t confidence.
I don’t know that the endpoint here is self-esteem.
I don’t know that we need to replace I’m terrible with I’m amazing.
That can become another performance.
Ken Benau writes about what he calls pro-being pride — a form of pride rooted in delight in one’s own and another person’s unique aliveness.
I keep thinking about that.
Because perhaps the opposite of chronic shame isn’t thinking exceptionally highly of yourself.
Maybe it is much quieter.
Maybe it is being interested without immediately checking whether you’re being too interested.
Moving without watching yourself move.
Needing without first building a legal defense for the need.
Getting excited without scanning the room to see whether you’ve crossed some invisible threshold.
Being confused without pretending you aren’t.
Being wrong without collapsing.
Being corrected without disappearing.
Being in conflict without immediately assuming the conflict reveals something terrible about you.
Being loved without constantly collecting evidence that the love is still there.
Maybe it is simply experiencing your own aliveness without treating it as a problem to solve.
But we cannot heal socially produced shame entirely inside individuals.
This may be the piece that matters most.
We can teach self-compassion.
We can teach nervous-system regulation.
We can provide accommodations.
We can challenge cognitive distortions.
We can help people understand their brains.
We can build skills.
All of those things matter.
But there is something strange about continually teaching marginalized people how to recover from shame while leaving the systems producing it largely uninterrogated.
If a child spends seven hours a day in an environment repeatedly communicating that the way their brain works is inconvenient, individual coping skills can only do so much.
If professionalism remains narrowly defined around particular styles of communication, productivity, appearance, language, emotional expression, and interaction, telling someone to embrace their neurodivergence doesn’t change the consequences they may experience for doing so.
If racism, ableism, sexism, class, and other structures of power shape whose behavior is considered problematic, then shame cannot be understood only through attachment histories and nervous systems.
Some shame belongs to families.
Some belongs to relationships.
Some belongs to institutions.
Some belongs to cultures.
Some belongs to histories that began long before the person carrying them was born.
Some has been passed between bodies and relationships for so long that locating its original owner may be impossible.
And yet the person experiencing it often carries all of it as:
There is something wrong with me.
That may be one of shame’s most effective tricks.
It takes something relational, cultural, historical, institutional, or systemic and makes it feel intensely private.
Maybe healing begins by returning the question.
Not:
What is wrong with me?
But:
What happened here?
What happened when I needed something?
What happened when I became excited?
What happened when I couldn’t perform the expected behavior?
What happened when I misunderstood?
What happened when I was intense?
What happened when I needed help?
What happened when I was different?
Who taught me what those moments meant?
Whose standards were they using?
And what did my body learn it needed to do to remain safe, connected, employable, acceptable, loved, or simply left alone?
Because understanding shame doesn’t mean deciding we have never hurt anyone or gotten anything wrong.
We have.
We will again.
The goal isn’t innocence.
The goal isn’t certainty.
The goal isn’t constructing a perfectly accepting world in which nobody ever experiences discomfort in response to us.
And the goal isn’t convincing ourselves that every adaptation we developed was unnecessary.
Some of them made tremendous sense.
Some may still make sense.
The question is whether they still need to run everything.
Maybe healing is learning that being imperfect, uncertain, inconvenient, misunderstood, or occasionally wrong does not require us to abandon ourselves.
And maybe this is why relationship matters so much.
Because shame says:
If they really see you, you may lose them.
A healing relationship doesn’t necessarily argue back.
It offers another experience.
You are seen.
There is misunderstanding.
There is difference.
There is frustration.
There are needs.
There are boundaries.
There is repair.
And you are still here.
I am still here.
We are still here.
Maybe, eventually, the nervous system learns something from that too.
Maybe we stop needing absolute certainty that we are acceptable because we have experienced something sturdier than certainty.
We have experienced what happens when we aren’t perfect —
and the relationship remains.
And slowly, perhaps, we begin to experience our own existence the same way.
This is part of why I keep returning to connection as its own foundation, separate from understanding your patterns or building the support that fits your brain.
Because if relationship is where this pathway was built, relationship is also where it can be rebuilt.
Not through a single conversation. Not through one person deciding to see you clearly. Through repetition. Through the slow, unglamorous experience of being misunderstood and staying anyway. Of getting it wrong and finding out the relationship doesn’t end there.
That is part of what I hope SOLA becomes.
Not a place where nobody ever gets it wrong. A place sturdy enough to survive it when they do.