How Shame is Holding You Hostage
The tension rises before you can identify its source. It simply appears, a constricted chest, swirling thoughts, that urgent compulsion to react to a feeling you haven't yet labeled.
So you turn to what never fails. The approach that quiets it, even briefly.
And then the shame follows. Right when you expect it.
You promise yourself it won't happen again. You might even confide in someone else, a partner, a friend, a therapist, hoping that saying it out loud will finally lay it to rest. For a brief period, it does. You feel unburdened. Purified. Like something has been resolved.
Then the anxiety resurfaces. And the pattern repeats itself.
If you've been caught in this cycle, you've likely asked yourself the same thing endlessly: why can't I just stop?
The Behavior Isn't the Problem—It's the Relief
Here's what most folks misunderstand about an addiction loop, including many who live it daily: they assume the addiction centers on the action. The habit. The thing they keep swearing to abandon.
It doesn't.
The addiction lies in what follows. The relief.
That's not merely a therapist's theory. In animal studies, scientists have discovered that relief itself sparks a release of reward chemicals in the brain, tapping into the same pathways as other incentives. Confessing isn't just easing your conscience. Self-punishment isn't just guilt speaking. Even the shame, despite its discomfort, serves a function; it signals that something requires fixing. And fixing it is where the genuine payoff lies.
That's why sheer willpower can't tackle this. You're not battling a behavior. You're battling a mechanism that's already discovered a sure-fire route to feeling better, and it doesn't care about how it gets there.
Shame Feels Awful—So Why Do We Seek It?
Here's what confuses people. If relief following shame yields a reward, doesn't that suggest shame itself is pleasurable on some level?
No. Researchers who've examined the brains of individuals undergoing shame have found a clear pattern: shame activates the region tied to distress and physical unease, not the pleasure center. It's the same area that responds to genuine pain.
So shame isn't enjoyable. It was never designed to be. What feels good is the aftermath, once the discomfort finally dissipates. As I have written before, shame isn't helping you, even when it feels like it is.
So why do people still chase it, sometimes deliberately, even when everything's fine?
In my practice, I often say there's stability in chaos. For some, that's not abstract—it's how their brain operates. If chaos is your baseline, calm doesn't register as relief. It feels foreign, maybe even threatening, simply because nothing has gone wrong yet.
I've witnessed this unfold in therapy repeatedly. Someone finally enjoys a peaceful stretch, everything's stable, nothing's amiss, and they end up doing precisely what they know will leave them feeling terrible afterward. Not because they craved misery. Because calm didn't equate to safety. It felt like waiting for the other shoe to drop. So they drop it themselves. Shame becomes the quickest route back to a state their body recognizes.
This isn't limited to shame, nor is it confined to emergencies. We all sometimes pick the familiar over the unproven, unfamiliar option. Indulging in comfort food or a cocktail after a rough day isn't a disorder. The distinction lies in the consequences. Comfort food is low-risk if you have other coping tools. A cocktail is low-risk unless your alarm response never fully relaxes and alcohol, or something else, is your only resource to quiet the noise.
Food, substances, sex, self-harm, dishonesty, theft, alcohol, even shame itself. On the surface, these appear as distinct issues. Beneath, they can be the same reach: the known over the unknown, because the known is what the body relies on. The behavior is almost secondary. It's whatever's most accessible.
The Underlying Mechanism
You might recall playing Mouse Trap as a child. You turn a crank, a ball rolls, it topples something, which hits another piece, and eventually, far down the line, a cage drops. The marble does nothing alone. It just sets off a sequence of events. The reward only emerges if every component in between does its job.
Shame operates identically. It triggers the sequence. It provides nothing by itself. It's discomfort, not pleasure. But if something completes the process like a confession, a penalty, or the behavior playing out fully, that completion is where the reward actually occurs. Not the shame. The resolution of it.
That's why stopping isn't straightforward. You're not consciously opting to feel ashamed. You're not deliberately craving the behavior, not truly. What's happening is a system constructed long ago, piece by piece, that now operates autonomously once the first marble falls. In a study tracking individuals recovering from methamphetamine use over time, researchers observed the same cycle: shame delayed the reduction in drug use, and ongoing use delayed the reduction in shame.
Relief Differs from Resolution
There's an element here that prolongs people's struggle unnecessarily.
The relief at the chain's end is genuine. It's not fabricated or imagined; your brain genuinely compensates you for it. But relief and resolution are distinct.
What gets resolved is the shame tied to the behavior. The confession removes the secret. The punishment settles the guilt. The disorder finds its familiar landing. All of that is real, and all of it functions, temporarily.
What remains untouched is whatever initiated the entire process. The anxiety that existed before the coping behavior arrived. The calm that felt unsettling. The body still operating on an alarm response that was never deactivated. None of that disappears. It lingers after the relief fades, which is typically brief, because it was never the target.
What I observe in my work is why. The system resets. Not due to failure. Because the genuine issue still awaits attention, and the chain you've developed excels at delivering relief from something else in its place.
You've Done Nothing Wrong
If you've reached this point and spotted yourself somewhere in this, here's what I need you to understand.
You've done nothing wrong. None of this indicates a lack of willpower, self-control, or the capacity to simply choose to quit. What it means is that at some juncture, your brain and body learned this pattern, and learned it effectively. Effectively enough that it still operates independently, even now, even when the original threat it was shielding you from is no longer present.
You're carrying a system built for a purpose, and it's still performing exactly what it was designed to do.
That system can be dismantled. Not through force, and not through shame, since shame is integral to its operation. It comes apart in therapy, with someone who can assist you in locating the true source beneath the chain—the thing that's been patiently waiting all along for someone to finally pause and examine it.
If this resonates with you, I'd be honored to help you through it.
Want new posts when they go up? Stay curious.
Griffin Oakley, MS, NCC, LMHC, LPC
Founder & Therapist, Curious Mind Counseling
📞 971-365-3642
About the Author
Griffin is a licensed telehealth therapist and the founder of Curious Mind Counseling, serving Oregon and Florida. His work focuses on complex trauma, attachment, and identity — this piece grew out of a pattern he kept seeing in trauma therapy sessions: clients punishing themselves for behaviors that were never really the problem.
References
Batchelder, A. W., Glynn, T. R., Moskowitz, J. T., Neilands, T. B., Dilworth, S., Rodriguez, S. L., & Carrico, A. W. (2022). The shame spiral of addiction: Negative self-conscious emotion and substance use. PLOS ONE, 17(3), e0265480. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265480
Piretti, L., Pappaianni, E., Garbin, C., Rumiati, R. I., Job, R., & Grecucci, A. (2023). The neural signatures of shame, embarrassment, and guilt: A voxel-based meta-analysis on functional neuroimaging studies. Brain Sciences, 13(4), 559. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci13040559
Xu, Y., Lin, Y., Yu, M., & Zhou, K. (2024). The nucleus accumbens in reward and aversion processing: Insights and implications. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 18, 1420028. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2024.1420028
