45 Public Encounters So Painfully Awkward They Still Haunt The People Who Saw Them

We’ve all had those moments when we lose our cool and immediately wish we could hit a rewind button. Maybe you snap at your partner after a long, stressful day, lose your patience with your kid, or say something you really didn’t mean during an argument. The mistake itself is one thing, but sometimes our brains take it several steps further. Instead of thinking, “Okay, I handled that badly,” we start spiraling into, “Wow, I’m a terrible person. I’m toxic. Why am I like this?” Suddenly, one bad moment feels like proof that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us. That heavy, painful feeling is what we call shame.

Shame is an intense emotional experience that can arise when we believe we have done something wrong, failed to live up to our own standards, or fallen short of what we think other people expect from us. It can make us want to retreat rather than face what happened, but avoiding the feeling isn't necessarily helpful in the long run. Psychotherapist Joseph Burgo, Ph.D., author of Shame: Free Yourself, Find Joy and Build True Self-Esteem, explained in Glamour that when something hurts, we naturally try to protect ourselves from it. Sometimes that response is useful, but avoiding shame completely can also prevent us from sitting with what happened and learning from it.

So what actually causes shame? According to Burgo, there are four broad experiences that can trigger it. One is unrequited love—the painful feeling that comes with loving someone who doesn't feel the same way, or realizing that a relationship you hoped for isn't going to happen. Another is unwanted exposure, which can happen when something deeply personal is revealed or when you suddenly find yourself exposed in a way you never intended. A third is disappointed expectations, when you work toward something important and don't achieve what you hoped to. The fourth is exclusion—that very human sting of realizing you've been left out or don't feel accepted by a particular group.

Of course, people don't all experience shame in exactly the same way. One person might become very quiet and withdraw, while another may become defensive or desperately try to explain themselves. It can also be helpful to remember that shame and embarrassment aren't quite the same thing, even though we often use the words interchangeably. Embarrassment is generally connected to feeling awkward or uncomfortably exposed, particularly when we think other people are paying attention to us. It can show up physically, too: we might blush, fidget, laugh nervously, avoid eye contact, or cringe at ourselves.

Psychology Today has also discussed different forms of embarrassment, including mistake-related embarrassment, which can happen when we make a blunder that doesn't fit with how we want other people to see us. Picture spilling a drink all over yourself in a crowded restaurant or confidently saying something completely wrong in front of a group of people. There is also compliment-related embarrassment, which is that familiar feeling of not knowing what to do when someone praises you. Instead of simply saying thank you, you may immediately start insisting that it wasn't a big deal and that anyone could have done it.

For a long time, researchers largely viewed embarrassment as a social emotion—something that happened when other people were present and we became worried about how they were judging us. The American Psychological Association has defined embarrassment in terms of feeling awkward or flustered in other people's company or because of their attention. Earlier research similarly emphasized the connection between embarrassment and concerns about our public image. In other words, the classic idea was that embarrassment happened because someone else saw us being awkward.