Sudden outbursts of shame caused by past actions

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I have exactly the same problem...

I thought I was the only one.

I get crippling amounts of those thoughts and can't put them to the back of my mind. I wish I could switch them off. I think it can be something to do with depression - inappropriate guilt.

This happens all the time to me. I could be remembering some faux pas from yesterday, or something kind of silly I did back in grade six. Then the shame and embarrassment are on me like a ton of bricks and only with considerable effort or distraction do they go away. I have hit myself a bit as a result, like other posters here have -- no serious damage, just frustration. Sometimes I talk or wave my hands about instead.

In my dx I think there was something about being easily embarrassed. I wonder if this is often observed in autistic people, and to what degree NTs do the same. (I mean, I know they feel shame and all...)

Observe the thought. Recognize that is only a thought. Recognize that you would not like to have those feelings of shame arise again. Go forward with the intention of being a better person. Once the lesson is learned and integrated, the brain is unlikely to keep raking it over.

Add me to the list. I have trouble "putting away" bad memories when I've unintentionally upset someone or somebody upset me, or a time that I did something stupid.

Don't feel bad about it, really!
It's just something that happens. I get them too, but I have made a conscious decision not to let them ruin my days anymore. I made a small ritual to put them away, and it worked. Here's how I did it : I made a small note-book list of things which have popped up and made me feel bad. Then, I carefully cut out each entry and said out loud what I had learned from that incident, and how it had made me a better person. Then I burned the paper, and told it that it never had to come back again because I had moved on. I did this for each bit of paper, and the unwanted shame went away! It wasn't immediate, but the memories faded down and I can now think about them when I WANT to, without the emotions. If you want to try it, I hope it helps!
If not, consider it an interesting exersise in self-therapy.

This kind of thing happens all the time with me about social situations where I said the wrong thing.

Usually it happens when I'm driving, and suddenly for no reason, a random memory of some embarrassing event pops into my head, and for the next several seconds, I'm reliving it. I feel the embarrassment of how I goofed up. Then I say some stress-releiving words and then I'm back in reality again. It is kinda scary when it happens especially when I'm driving.

This doesn't happen when I'm with someone, and I hope I never accidentally utter my stress-releiving words around other people, because that would be REALLY embarrassing.

The sad part is, these embarrassing events are dumb things that aren't special. LIke when I asked someone using the phrase "out of morbid curiosity...", and they took it to mean literally morbid, whereas I was using it as just part of the phrase.

Holy s**t. This happens to me too. I've had this happen to me all my life. It's horrible. I can't get to sleep at night because I keep cycling through everything that happened during my day, and cringing at all the awkward moments. I've tried self-harm, yoga, meditation, masturbation, trying to 'block it out', drugs, and more. Nothing seems to help me let go of the embarrassment and shame normally. I usually tell people the same scenario I feel embarrassed about over, and over and over again, and make them tell me that it's fine, that it's really no big deal, and that I should get over it.

It's really terrible, and I'm surprised that so many other people go through it. It was so bad during the beginning of university, to the point where I'd go home early from classes or just go to the bathroom to let out a cry because I would be fixated on something embarrassing I'd done months ago, which the people around me almost certainly had forgotten about, or simply do not care about anymore.

I too have this problem, and it gets very annoying. The flashbacks often happen when I least expect them or am not even thinking about anything even remotely related. It keeps me up at night sometimes.

I've never done anything about them, definitely not self harm. I just endure them until they cease.

(accidental double post).

Last edited by Poppycocteau on 21 Jul 2010, 10:55 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I do exactly the same thing . . . sometimes, in the street, I will suddenly remember something I did or said that I feel bad about, and I will involuntarily just stop walking and pull a face, or make a strange noise, and/or a hand gesture. Once I stopped and someone walked into the back of me.

And as for things that could happen, I drive myself mad with those

I don't have an outburst, but lately there's one thing that I did that keeps coming back to me, and it makes me feel slightly sick for a moment. I'll make a face if I'm alone. In some ways, I'm glad what happened happened, though. I learned from it. But that's the only thing I can think of that makes me feel similarly to what you're describing.

It had never occurred to me that other people did this. I will suddenly remember something I did, usually something trivial but that I feel embarrassed or ashamed about, and I won't shout, but I will say something out loud, some disjointed fragment of a sentence, not even having to do with what I just remembered, like if I was reading a book at the time I'll say out loud the last sentence I read. Lately I've started to shake my arm instead of blurting something out. I've done this my whole life.

It's so sudden that I don't know what to suggest as to what can be done about it.

Think about this logically:

1. If thinking about it more is not going to do you any good for your happiness in the short run or long run, you've already "learned" from it so it can't help you learn much more, and thinking about it isn't going to gain you any kind of material advantage(health, pleasure, money).

AND

2. You want to be happy.

Therefore it is logical to stop thinking about it in order to maximize your happiness.

What I've found out is we're logical people, so apply logic to figuring out how to be happy and we'll do a much better job than NTs. I can not only do that I can apply logic to figure out when to use less/more in a situation(I call this "metalogic"), usually less, I ask myself whether trying to be too logical is wasting important time or is getting in the way of experiencing happiness and if it is I just make a decision and stop thinking about it because its the logical thing to do.

Understanding the evolutionary roots of emotions can help you understand their purpose and what kind of physical responses they enable and whether in the case of bad emotions there is any good in experiencing them. For example, stress is supposed to be a primer for the flight/fight response, basically readying yourself to be able to do a sudden physical action to the situation without thinking about it. Knowing this I can tell myself this in a situation and ask myself if I'm in a situation where that would be useful. If not I can turn the stress off or at least reduce it. Of course having such a wide associational horizon makes it hard to throw off the very remote possibilities that that could be that kind of situation but it does help reduce it sometimes entirely or almost entirely(to the point where if there is still some stress I'm not noticing it. Stress is as relative as everything else in the universe, we all have it to some degree 24/7 like every other emotion).

Our society says logic and emotion are completely separate. Balderdash. "Logic" is the result of chemical processes in the brain and so is emotion. There is no reason we can't use logic to regulate emotion, especially since we're so good at logic. When you use logic to convince yourself you don't need to feel a bad emotion or alternatively that you should or that is OK to feel a good emotion chemicals are moving in your brain as a result of that logic and at least in my case can sometimes change my emotions. Its still hard, it takes practice, but it works. I have become a lot happier, less rigid, more open to social experiences(I still misinterpret things but I've decided not to worry about it), and I'm experiencing a lot more in life just from using these methods.

It also reduces stress, anxiety, and compulsion. Logic can be used to think about what is "threatening" in a situation, whether if it happened it would be that big of a deal in the end, and whether it is even that likely to happen, and also the potential rewards of not worrying about it(pleasure and happiness, but also possible material gains from taking a risk).

There's only one thing I worry about with this that makes it hard to use this method, although I still use it well enough to help.

If I decide that logically I want to be happy, so just feel happy because I want to feel happy I'll lose my motivation to do anything and just sit around doing nothing but being "happy" because I feel like it. I'd essentially be addicted to my own dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins all produced by my own personal desire for happiness.

It's next to impossible to make this concern go away and I realize I had this concern before I was even able to articulate it i.e. it's in the subconscious, so I figured logically I got to take some time out of my day to just do what ever I feel will make me happy. Listening to music, wandering around down town, saying random things for fun, playing games, and fearlessly talking to people without caring about what happens.

Meditation is also helpful. I figure meditation is basically the same as just being happy out of a sole desire to be happy but at the same time because it relies on a ritual it gives the mind reassurance against slipping into "pure happiness addiction", because by tying the experience to the ritual we could become addicted to the ritual (which itself is pretty healthy and rarely becomes excessive) in order to produce happiness but falling into the ritual isn't as easy as simply "falling into pure happiness for no reason" because falling into the ritual takes more effort than if you allow yourself to just suddenly on impulse experience pure happiness for no reason.

I get these flashbacks all the time...

During my teenage years they were especially bad... talk about wanting to kill yourself because you let a cashier convince you to buy some shoepolish for your shoes that your mother pointed out to be absolutely unnecessary.
Luckily, after that event I realized that my perception of my own mistakes is a little... exeggerated, and I've been trying to correct my thoughts since then.
I got from wanting to kill myself and crying all night to crying a little to visibly wincing to grimacing, and that's where I'm now.
I usually try to distract myself with a book, or playing the flute, or surfing on the internet or... whatever. Just anything to keep my thought from what I presumably did "wrong".
And I try to point out to myself that I don't remember all the mistakes from others and don't mind the ones I remember, because it is only human... but somenhow that doesn't work with me.
Trouble is, that about every single mistake I ever made seems to be imprinted in my brain in bright, shameful colours, and is eager to get at me when I least expect it.