How to Tell Your Therapist Something Embarrassing

Embarrassment is a whole-body reaction. There's the reddening face, the inward cringing, the lurch in your stomach, the sense of dread. Once it passes, it’s normal to want to get away from it, to hide it from everyone. The problem is that, even when pushed to the back of your mind, unaddressed embarrassment has a way of destabilizing your sense of self and undermining your confidence.

As a therapist, I know talking about embarrassing things in session can be hard, but I want to encourage you to share openly. Because when a therapist helps you look embarrassment gently but squarely in the eye, you can begin to understand yourself more deeply. In fact, you may end up feeling more secure and confident than you did before the embarrassing episode occurred.

Embarrassment can trigger deeper emotions

In its most tolerable form, embarrassment is a brief pang that makes us feel self-conscious after a faux pas. It gets much harder to bear when you’ve thought, said, or done something that you believe others would judge harshly. This level of embarrassment often comes with guilt — an emotion designed to prevent you from repeating socially risky behavior — as well as one of the hardest emotions of all to process: shame.

There are countless things that might make you feel this way. Just a few examples:

Falling for a scam. Let's say you're excitedly looking for affordable tickets to a nearly sold-out concert of your friend group's favorite artist. One impulse led to another, and suddenly you find yourself the victim of a costly online ticketing scam. You feel embarrassed and angry, your inner critic takes over. You swear to yourself that no one will ever find out.

Struggling with daily tasks during a depressive episode. Perhaps you're in the throes of a severe depressive episode and haven't showered in days. Your therapist knows about your symptoms of sadness, fatigue, and hopelessness, but sharing hygiene struggles feels a bit too vulnerable.

Experiencing intrusive thoughts. You might be secretly battling persistent, intrusive thoughts that feel perverse and out of character. They might be sexual or even violent in nature, and are devastating to experience. It makes sense to feel the desperate need to hide them away.

Unfortunately, shame typically gets amplified when we continue hiding an experience. Social worker and researcher Brené Brown defines shame as "the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging — something we've experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection." For those of us who've been weighed down by shame, it can be like a wound that becomes infected and takes over our body.

Embarrassment and shame can stir up feelings of despair and thoughts like, "There's something wrong with me," or, "I can never do anything right." Such painful self-accusations tempt us to abandon ourselves through compartmentalization or fragmenting ourselves, while they continue to subconsciously tear us down.

Building trust and openness with your therapist

You don’t need to rush into telling your therapist something embarrassing, especially if you recently started therapy.

With each session, you are continuously creating a space where you can feel comfortable enough to open up. As you share more and more, you’ll trust that they will hold space without responding to or interrupting your vulnerable moments with judgment. Instead, they’re there to help you encounter your deeper self.

Even if you fully trust your therapist, you may want to avoid sharing something too soon if you know it will destabilize you too much. In that case, you can honor holding back as an act of self-knowledge and self-love. The exception is when you're in an active mental health crisis or in danger because of something hidden. If the latter is the case, please consider taking a leap of faith and starting the conversation.

How to start difficult conversations in therapy

Psychology research has shown that one of the most effective antidotes to shame is sharing painful stories with safe people. As neuroscientist and trauma therapist Curt Thompson said, "Healing shame requires our being vulnerable with other people… there is no other way, but shame will attempt to convince us otherwise."

If you’re in a session with your therapist and feel ready to share what’s making you feel embarrassed, guilty, or ashamed, there’s no right or wrong time to do it. You just need to start talking. Two low-pressure ways to do that:

Start with an analytical approach: "There was something I wasn't sure I wanted to bring up, but it feels like it's on the tip of my tongue. I've been wondering why I did a specific thing, and I wonder if it means anything."

Describe how the topic is impacting you emotionally: "There's something that's been bothering me. In fact, thinking about it makes me feel embarrassed, a little ashamed, and makes me cringe. I've been wanting to bring it up, but it's really hard to talk about."

By letting your therapist know the weight of what you're feeling, you are giving them the chance to hold a gentle, emotionally supportive frame that is regulating for you. Vulnerably describing your emotions also sets the stage for useful reflection, because it's not always about the events themselves; rather, what matters now is how you relate to them and how they're impacting your sense of self.

An attuned, relational therapist will take your cue to ground themselves, take a breath, and lean into active listening even more than before. This is different from how a friend might respond, as many people are not well-versed in listening to emotionally complex topics. But a well-trained therapist knows that sessions are for exploring your inner world without judgment. As they model this, you have a chance to internalize a more self-compassionate way of relating to yourself.

Embracing embarrassment as a catalyst for healing and growth

The truth is that sharing embarrassing topics is a courageous act of self-reclamation. It's the opposite action of self-abandonment, when we push away memories that are charged or even distract ourselves with coping mechanisms that make us feel worse.

Returning to those earlier examples, here's what working through them in therapy can look like:

The online scam. By sharing it in therapy, you might realize that an underlying anxious attachment to your friends, or social fawning (people-pleasing) is causing you to subconsciously equate not scoring tickets with disapproval and rejection. Talking about it with your therapist might uncover a new goal of practicing emotional boundaries, learning to honor your instincts, and grounding yourself when the same urge comes up again.

Difficulty showering. In sharing about difficulty showering, you can start to remember that Activities of Daily Living are measures of depression's severity that help your therapist understand how to support you better. This could lead to using behavioral activation techniques, practicing self-compassion, remembering that it's not your fault, and finding hope that things can get better.

Intrusive thoughts. Disclosing intrusive, shaming thoughts is much easier when you've already built strong rapport with your therapist; indeed, it certainly helps knowing that your therapist already has a full picture of the real you. But sharing helps to externalize the thoughts as well-researched symptoms related to OCD, not a mark on your character. You can benefit enormously from starting to address the suffering it's causing, and working together toward relief.

Holding back in therapy is a little like holding your breath

We know that filtering ourselves when something is at the forefront of our mind or on the tip of our tongue costs something, much like holding a breath when your body desperately needs to release it. Keeping things in the shadows can build pent-up energy and intensify the negative charge of things a part of us rejects. In reality, deeply embarrassing feelings often point toward the most important work.

Your experiences are all a part of your life story, and those that feel embarrassing or shaming hold valuable information that can be a jump-off point for healing and decreasing self-criticism. Even starting the conversation takes remarkable bravery, and is worth celebrating. Sometimes, we need to go through hard conversations and get to the other side in order to realize that they were worth it.