A randomized controlled investigation of a compassion-based intervention for shame

Shame is a painful negative emotion involving negative evaluation of the self. There has been significant debate as to whether shame is private or public in nature. Shame consists of both internally-sourced shame, which involves negative evaluation of oneself as inadequate or flawed, and externally-sourced shame, which involves the perception of negative evaluation by others. Self-compassion, which includes self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness, has emerged as a promising intervention for reducing shame. Given that shame has an internally sourced component, it is unsurprising that one of the most effective interventions for shame is to change patients’ self-view by increasing self-compassion. However, externally-sourced shame, which results from one’s perception of negative evaluation of the self by others, may not be alleviated by self-compassion, which focuses on one’s self-view. In this dissertation, we examined the impact of a novel intervention for internally-sourced and externally-sourced shame using self-compassion and compassion from others, singularly and in combination. While internally-sourced shame decreased from pre-intervention to follow-up, there was no difference in change in trait shame across the four conditions. We also tested the impact of our intervention on real-time state shame. While self-compassion led to decreased levels of shame at post-intervention, this effect did not persist at follow-up, and compassion from others had no impact on changes in state shame at either time point. Taken together, our findings suggest that repeated shame induction leads to decreases in shame over time, and also provides support for self-compassion as an intervention for shame.Psycholog