How My Shame Became My Strength

There are no shortage of reasons for women to feel shame in our over-exposed, image-obsessed world: We’re shamed for being too fat and too thin, for being too sexual or not sexually available enough. Women are shamed for choosing not to have children and the choices we make when we do. We’re penalized for being too aggressive in the workplace at the same time “lean in” culture suggests we’re not assertive enough.

Unsurprisingly, living in a modern epidemic of shame has taken a considerable toll on our mental health. Girls today are especially in crisis. A 2023 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study found that teenage girls are presenting unprecedented levels of depression and suicidality. Though the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic was a factor, the results echoed previous surveys and reports that began prior to the coronavirus pandemic. A 2020 study by the CDC, for example, reported that, between 2007 and 2018, the national suicide rate among youth aged 10 to 24 increased 54%. A separate 2020 CDC report found that high-school-aged girls, particularly Black girls and LGBTQ youth, had the highest increase in suicide attempts compared to other demographics. Of the more than 17,000 US high school students surveyed in the fall of 2021, more than half of the girls reported persistent hopelessness—double that of the boys. Most concerning, the surveys revealed that one in three seriously considered suicide, and one in ten attempted it. A 2021 study from the Archives of Suicide Research reveals that girls with comorbidity are at the greatest risk: Girls with ADHD, for example, are three to four times more likely to attempt suicide than girls without this diagnosis.

Read More: Teen Girls Are Facing a Mental Health Epidemic. We’re Doing Nothing About It

I have spent my writing career cataloging the ways shame is weaponized against girls and women to keep us from achieving our goals and knowing our worth— inspired, in part, by my own experience with the subject. In the 2010s, after the New York Post brought my past as a former stripper and sex worker to light, the Department of Education seized upon an old blog post I had written about my views on sex work to support their fabrication that I was unfit to teach kids. Their efforts had its intended effect: I felt ashamed, and I ultimately resigned.

I know from my story, as well as the experiences of the hundreds of other women I later interviewed on the subject, how unspoken shame can turn into unbearable feelings of loneliness, despair, and rage. Rage with nowhere to go gets directed at the self as depression, self- hatred, and self-destructive acts. Without intervention, girls and women who experience high levels of shame can suffer negative effects for the rest of their lives: cognitive defects, depression, dissociative symptoms, troubled sexual development, self-mutilation, abnormal stress-hormone responses, physical illness, psychiatric diagnosis—the list goes on. For the sake of our health, we need to reconcile ourselves with our shame and to do that, it helps to understand where all this shame comes from.

Freud described shame as an anxiety or an impending sense of harm. When a person feels shame, the brain reacts as if facing a physical danger. The prefrontal cortex activates and triggers a cascade of stress hormones, just as it would if we were facing a threat. And, in some sense, we are: shame—a fear of a rejection—threatens us on a primitive level, signaling that we have deviated from those around us and triggering our fear of abandonment.

Shame is then a natural part of individuation as well as a by-product of our cultural backgrounds and upbringings. When parents punish, friends pressure, doctors warn, or teachers reward, we get the message of who, what, and how we’re supposed to be. These messages are organized by gender—what is expected of us as girls and women, or as boys and men.

Like all girls, I learned the rules early, and for the most part I followed them: Be good. Be sweet. Be flirty, but not too flirty. Be sexy, but don’t be a slut. Don’t be fat, or too thin. Go to the gym, but don’t get “bulky.” Shave your body. Cover your blemishes. Cover your body, but don’t be a prude. Smile more. Be cool. Reflect men’s interests, but remain feminine. Be assertive, but don’t be a bitch. Speak up, lean in. Be demure. You’re not hungry, you’ll just have a salad. Deny your appetite. Suppress your needs. Deny yourself the sexual pleasure men take for granted. Make yourself just sexually available enough until motherhood when you become invisible. You were just a container all along.

Before this, we’re told that our body is a temple, a thing of value. A woman’s body, we’re taught, is a source of power and capital even as we’re warned we ought to never take advantage of that. To do so—that is, to trade sex for money—is literally a crime.

My choice to trade sex for cash was complicated. My decision to become public and the way I did it, naive. I did not anticipate that I’d become the victim of mass media humiliation that would ultimately cost me my career. I felt a lot of self-blame, and shame. I was made to feel anomalous, but I am not unique. It’s not just women with experiences in the sex trades: What were you wearing? Had you been drinking? What were you doing there that night? At some point, all women are asked to account for themselves, to justify our choices, and to take responsibility even for the injustices done to us.

I wrote myself out of the hell of secrecy and into the body of the woman I am today, and for that, I have no regrets. We all have stories—and telling those stories is reparative. Even as it makes me vulnerable to judgment, I talk about shame. I tell and retell my story. Each time, I see myself in a new, if not shameless, then shame-less light. This is how recovery begins: learning to feel every feeling, seize our power without fear, and share our true selves.

Sometimes healing from shame starts alone, in a journal. Sometimes it comes from finding a just-right friend. Sometimes it starts by leaving home and finding a larger, wider community—at college, in a new city, or with a new group or identity. Regardless, there is peace in knowing that we can heal, and I’m heartened to see more and more women and girls who are taking these necessary steps, especially in a climate where it has never felt more urgent. When we confront our shame—when we begin to understand it as an adaptive strategy that impacts us all—we help decondition ourselves and its ability weigh us down. It liberates us, and in doing so becomes a radical, feminist act, flipping the script on shame as a not a weapon, but as a source of strength.

I’m now a mom; my own daughter is four years old. I’m actively working to break the cycle with her and take shame out of my own personal parenting toolbox. As Kristin Gallant and Deena Margolin, co-creators of Big Little Feelings, have said, “Fear is a terrible teacher.” Shaming our children won’t help them do better next time—just as it didn’t help us when we were kids. Instead, it will trigger a trauma response that will erode their self-worth and make them more likely to shame themselves and others in turn.

Instead, I want to give my daughter the tools to move through shame in a world that I know will try to shame her at every opportunity. Tools like self-confidence, resourcefulness, and a strong sense of who she is and what she believes in.

I know I can’t protect her from shame entirely. That’s not realistic. Rather, I want to give her what it took me many long, painful years to learn: the ability to bounce back from shame when I feel it, and the resilience to come out stronger on the other side.

From SHAME ON YOU: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification by Melissa Petro, published by Putnam, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2024 by Melissa Petro.