Dr. Lia Roth Explains Why Shame Is Not the Enemy We Think It Is
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Tricia Brouk helps high-performing professionals transform into industry thought leaders through the power of authentic storytelling. With her experience as an award-winning director, producer, sought-after speaker, and mentor to countless thought-leaders, Tricia has put thousands of speakers onto big stages globally.
Being able to support speakers in using their voices for impact is a privilege and I had the pleasure of sitting down with Dr. Lia Roth to discuss why shame is not our enemy.
Born in Argentina and based in St. Louis, Dr. Lia A. Roth is a psychoanalyst, keynote speaker, and bestselling author whose groundbreaking work on shame and betrayal has changed how we love, lead, and belong. She’s written more than ten books, including the bestseller Get In or Get Out, But Don’t Stay in the Freakn’ Middle, and the Routledge-published Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Gaze, Body Image, Shame, Judgment and Maternal Function. Her research has been shared on academic stages across three continents. Dr. Roth is known for passion and sharp insight, without the drama.
Dr. Roth, you say shame is not our enemy. That is a pretty bold statement. Where did you come to this?
When I say shame is not the enemy, I mean it is a signal at the edge of growth. Most people, though, use the word shame referring to something else, a concern about inadequacy. For me, shame is early. Primary shame begins in the mother, baby dyad, in those brief regulating moments with a “good enough” mother. That is our first experience of belonging, and shame shows up along its way.
We grow up believing the world is divided. Safe or dangerous, inside or outside, belonging or outcast. We build what I call a comfort zone. A psychological field where we know how we are seen. Inside it, we move with some certainty. We know what to expect. Even if we don’t like it, we can prepare for it. But growth doesn’t happen there.
The moment we step toward the unknown, a new role, a new relationship, a new level of visibility shame shows up. Not because there is something inherently wrong with us. But because we are crossing a boundary, and that requires something else from us. Beyond that boundary there is a new logic. It requires capacity for holding frustration, delaying gratification, and for adaptation. New effort. New coordination between who we were and who we are becoming.
Most people interpret that sensation as proof they shouldn’t move forward. I interpret it as preparation. Sartre said shame is self-awareness. I agree, but not as exposure or humiliation. I see shame as a sort of alarm system. Shame is not the enemy. It is the nervous system announcing you are about to expand.
You also talk about how shame is the most underdiagnosed condition
When I say shame is underdiagnosed, I also mean we constantly misname it.
Shame has to do with belonging as survival, not connection as preference. If we matter to anyone, odds are we’ll make it. So we perform the roles given to us. We become the child- grown-adult ticking the to-do list of who we’re supposed to be, even when it doesn’t feel like us.
Or we refuse to play at all. Then we see avoidant structures. They are built on a deep expectation of not being received. The person doesn’t avoid because they are fragile. They avoid because they anticipate exclusion.
That’s why I ask every patient about friendships, and whether they wish they had more. Hypersensitivity to criticism, fear of negative evaluation, social inhibition are symptoms of avoidant personality disorder. The person often longs for connection. They want friends. They want intimacy. But they hold back. Not because they don’t care, but because they expect rejection. So, they enact their fear and keep distance, while engaged in their fantasy.
This is what I mean by underdiagnosed. These patients show up in clinical settings, but shame is rarely named as the organizing logic. We treat the anxiety, the depression, the withdrawal, and, yet we don’t always ask the deeper question. Did this person learn that belonging must be earned? Do they believe autonomy risks expulsion?
Once we understand shame, and primary shame, we can see that the root of many struggles is not the humiliation of inadequacy. It’s the fear of falling out of the field that lets us exist. By the way, this is what I’m writing about in my next book, Not Anymore. Because when we take on a script, perform a role, and stay inside the comfort zone of what we can anticipate, we become vulnerable to betrayal. One day you wake up and realize you don’t actually know who is next to you, the person you built so much of your sense of self around. That’s why shame and betrayal are relatives. I wrote about this in my previous book, the bestseller Get In or Get Out, But Don’t Stay in the Freakn’ Middle.
How do we so often confuse shame with criticism based on our feelings of inadequacy?
Most people think shame is what we feel when someone criticizes us. When we are judged or feel exposed in our weakness, defect, or forbidden desires. But let’s slow it down, like a cinematic scene. Imagine you’ve been invited to a rooftop party in New York. Hours before the gathering, you start anticipating. Who will be there. What the conversations will be like. You idealize the Other. And you start preparing. You need the right hairstyle, the right shoes. Remember last time? Clothes spread across the floor while you pump up the good vibes and hide whatever feels uncertain. Then you arrive.
At the door you feel a cold rush running through your spine. As Sartre would say, you become self aware. And for a soft electric instant, you feel the eagerness of hope. The hope of being received and welcomed. When you step into the room, you do not walk in neutral. You sense the field immediately. You scan faces. You read tone. In seconds, you build an image of how this is supposed to go. Once again, you adjust how you look, what you say, how you appear, in order to belong. And if that image cracks, you stumble. The qualities you placed “out there” come rushing back as criticism. I was too much. I am not enough. That collision feels unbearable.
We call that shame, but that feeling is not shame. That is the collapse of idealization inside a relational field. We organized our performance for belonging around a fantasy, and now it returns as a pinprick, the return of projection. Shame? Shame was that soft second at the door. The bodily alert at the edge between the comfort zone and the unknown.
What is your personal story of shame and why did you start studying shame?
I started studying shame after skin cancer.
There was a tiny dot above my mouth. After Mohs surgery, it became a 50-stitch scar. Suddenly, my whole life took a stance. I felt marked. As if I were carrying a stigma. As if I might quietly drop off the map.
People began telling me stories. An aunt. A godmother. Someone who “had something like that” and was never quite seen the same way again. It was subtle, the social disappearance.
At the same time, I was working with my editor. I noticed she kept her hands under the table. One day I asked why. She told me that when she was in her 20s, a little kid said she had “witch looking hands.” She had been hiding them ever since.
That’s when it clicked.
It wasn’t about stitches. It wasn’t about skin. It was about the body as a site of belonging. About how quickly we internalize a message that something about us disqualifies us from being fully seen.
I realized I had a choice. I could hide away, or I could study the mechanism. I chose to study it. And that decision changed everything.
Can you share a little bit about your “Cracked Mirror” concept?
Cracked Mirror was the name of a research project I began with a simple prompt, have you ever been praised or criticized about your body, or any part of it? Three things strike me, first, all the experiences shared except for one were negative. I even tweaked the prompt, during the pilot section. Still.
Only one participant recalled winning an award at school for her “beautiful eyes” when she was five. It sounded positive. But as she reflected, she connected that moment to later experiences of feeling constrained as a woman in professional spaces.
The second thing was the depth and length. Most people shared decades of suffering. Something that happened during adolescent times, a message that was left in them. At times it was not even clear if the message was aimed at them, like the case of Dr. Dillon (not his real name) who took his shirt off at 14, and someone who was not looking at him, said, “I would be ashamed if I have a belly like that.” He rides his bicycle every day to keep trim.
The third thing was an unexpected finding, those that had their part surgically repaired continued to deal with that part of their body as if present. I called this the shadow body-part. Almost everyone described managing the criticized part of their body adjusting clothing, posture, hairstyle, making jokes such as This is no banana, this is my nose, as Jimmy Durante.
Goffman’s conceal, disclose and distract measures to avoid social rejection were evident. It isn’t limited to bodies. It extends to education, intelligence, from speech tempo to pronunciation, from vocabulary to perceived vulgarity. These traits are not just personal attributes we feel the need to address to fit in. They function as social hierarchy markers.
We are constantly signaling. A few months ago, I was at a coffee shop I frequent. The barista had a new tattoo, a small rainbow. He told me he wanted people to know it was “safe to talk.” Even that is a signal. An attempt to regulate the relational field before a word is even expressed. We display parts of ourselves. We edit others. We follow scripts for belonging. We invest upward, in authority figures who withhold love. We desire sideways, partners who remain partially unavailable. We perform relentlessly, hoping effort will convert into recognition. And we postpone autonomy, because stepping out means losing the relational field that regulates us. This is developmental inertia. Many times we grow older without fully growing up.
What can we do today to face our shame and why is this important?
You are looking for the shame vaccine?
Yes! Why not?
So important, because shame does not only make us feel bad, it makes us small. We keep quiet in rooms where we could grow, we become people pleasers, we take on a role. Today, what you can do is to practice relativism. Next time you feel like really bad, the “I am such an idiot” moment, breathe, ground yourself, and remember, it is not that bad. The vaccine? That is pretty much what I talk about in Not Anymore, the book I am working on. The vaccine is not a hack. It’s a stance with two key ingredients.
First, belonging is not about being accepted. It’s about showing up in a way that makes space for others too. True belonging is an offering. This is clear when you travel abroad and you see less individualistic societies are often more welcoming.
Second, autonomy. Belonging is a key element of our survival. Now, we are no longer babies in need of a mother. At this stage, survival is not physical and real. It is symbolic. The survival of our ego. If we matter to someone, if we are something to someone, we exist. In belonging, there is mirroring. This is so important that at times this dynamic is followed by guilt, and a need to repair. That’s us sending a gift, a card, an “I’m sorry.”
Most of us grow older, but we don’t automatically grow out of the need to be authorized by someone else. Some people deny dependency. They say, “I don’t need anyone.” They don’t ask. They don’t wait. They don’t show the need. But they still hesitate. They still scan faces. They still live on the question, “What are they thinking of me?”
Others take the rebel route. They do the opposite of what’s expected. They reject approval on purpose. But that’s still approval running the show, just in reverse. Whether we deny it, chase it, or fight it, we’re still orbiting the same center. The other person gets to decide if we are okay. We need to stop outsourcing that job.
Autonomy is not isolation, not cold independence, and definitely not about control. Autonomy is when you can be with yourself without falling apart. When you can reflect on yourself without needing someone else to stamp you as “good.” Craving connection without needing it to rescue your worth.
That is why, what most people call shame is a leash. It keeps brilliant people small. It keeps leaders performing instead of leading. It keeps love stuck in roles, Martyr and Magnet, Chaser and Avoider, Scorekeeper and Fixer. When autonomy grows, and you become the one who can smile first, open-hearted, offering belonging, shame loses its grip. And you don’t have to keep proving you deserve to exist. Next time you are at that soft second by the door, choose to show up as yourself.
Tricia Brouk, Founder of The Big Talk Academy
Tricia Brouk helps high-performing professionals transform into industry thought leaders through the power of authentic storytelling. With her experience as an award-winning director, producer, sought after speaker, and mentor to countless thought-leaders, Tricia has put thousands of speakers onto big stages globally. She produced TEDxLincolnSquare in New York City and is the founder of The Big Talk Academy. Tricia’s book, The Influential Voice: Saying What You Mean for Lasting Legacy, was a 1 New Release on Amazon in December 2020. Big Stages, the documentary featuring her work with speakers premiered at the Chelsea Film Festival in October of 2023 and her most recent love is the new publishing house she founded, The Big Talk Press.
