personal development on Embarassment

To be told we are wrong is sometimes an embarrassment, even a humiliation. We want to run and hide our heads in shame. But there are times when finding out we are wrong is sudden and immediate relief,...

The following story by professor and author A. J. Swoboda is a vivid example of how shame works in our lives, often causing us to hide and run away from the pain and embarrassment: One of the greate...

At eighteen, a self-assured Benjamin Franklin returned to Boston, the city he had fled just seven months earlier. Dressed in a fine new suit, with a watch on his wrist and a pocket full of coins, he p...

In South Florida several years ago, there was a skywriter who occasionally spelled out happy messages about God—things like “God loves you.” Often, on a clear morning, you could step out and see the p...

I was standing in line in a crowded public rest room engaged in one of my favorite hobbies, people watching, when I observed a brief interaction between a mother and daughter. Mother looked harried an...

Shame makes its way into our stories at an early age. So early, in fact, that we usually have no conscious memory of our initial encounters with it. This can take place as early as fifteen to eighteen...

Evading self-acknowledgment of our faults enables us to avoid painful moral emotions: guilt and remorse for harming others; shame for betraying your own ideals; self-contempt for not meeting even our ...

I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.

If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can't survive.

Pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.

Gracious God, we confess that we are often dissatisfied with our lives. We recognize the gap that exists between what we are and what we want to be. Lord, like the woman at the well, we know our failu...

Pity is one of the noblest emotions available to human beings; self-pity is possibly the most ignoble . . . . [It] is an incapacity, a crippling emotional disease that severely distorts our perception...

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

One who is afraid of asking questions is ashamed of learning.

O Holy One, we call to you and name you as eternal, ever-present, and boundless in love. Yet there are times, O God, when we fail to recognize you in the dailyness of our lives. Sometimes shame clench...

Perfectionism is not a way to avoid shame. Perfectionism is a form of shame.

We often become offensive to respectable types when we enter into other people’s suffering and brokenness, or divulge our own.

I have a lot to be humble about.

A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying… that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

Euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.

My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem, but they don’t really know me.

Repentance resulting from self-examination is a lifelong endeavor, occasionally surfacing in the public or private act of confession as an act of “courageous memory” in recalling one’s past.

The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

You want to cry aloud for your mistakes. But to tell the truth the world doesn't need any more of that sound.

Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there...

We cannot afford to forget any experience, not even the most painful.

Unable to value, unable to enjoy.

The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determinin...

We readily confess our little faults in order to suggest that we have no big ones.