Denying Mistakes Leads to Shame

We all make mistakes. But when we deny them, shame takes their place.

Most of us know when we've made a mistake, anything from a word said too sharply, to a line crossed, to something bigger that’s hurt ourselves or someone else. They bring up feelings of guilt, shame, and worry.

The problem usually isn’t the mistake itself. It’s what we do next.

Psychologist Brené Brown draws a helpful distinction: guilt says “I did something bad,” while shame says “I am bad.” And when we deny our mistakes — even the small ones — we often swap guilt (which can move us forward) for shame (which keeps us stuck).

Sometimes we minimise it. Make a joke. Justify or excuse. Sometimes we double down. Get defensive. Change the subject in our minds.

But deep down, a part of us knows.

We know when we’ve bypassed something. We know we’re not really taking responsibility. And that quiet knowing, when unacknowledged, starts to turn into shame.

Then it gets harder to go back. Harder to admit we were wrong. So we defend even more, and the shame buries itself deeper.

This spiral doesn’t just happen in the moment. It’s often the latest chapter in a well-rehearsed pattern.

In therapy, we often see how clients begin by protecting the image of their parents. Not because they can’t sense the truth, but because they’ve spent so long defending it. As children, keeping our parents “good” was often necessary for survival. We couldn’t afford to see the truth. So we turned away from it and blamed ourselves instead.

That’s the tragedy of childhood shame: it often forms around other people’s failings. A child senses that something is wrong, a parent is unavailable, controlling, absent, or frightening — but they can’t afford to fully know it. So they blame themselves. They carry the shame for the situation, for the parent’s limitations, and for not having been able to earn the love or care they needed.

We didn’t cause the neglect or the hurt — but we took responsibility for it in silence. And so shame was born — not from what we did wrong, but from what we felt we had to carry alone.

When clients begin to name what they’ve always known somewhere deep down — that a parent was emotionally unavailable, controlling, frightening, neglectful — something powerful happens.

Shame begins to lift.

Because the mistake wasn’t theirs. But the shame still lived in them.

So what do we do with all of this?

We try to do something that sounds simple but isn’t: We own the mistakes, ours and theirs, with compassion. We wear them. We stop pretending they didn’t matter.

Because when we don’t, shame takes their place. And shame is more pervasive than guilt, more corrosive and harder to shift.

Some mistakes don’t harm anyone but ourselves. A bad decision made out of fear. A path not taken. A truth we ignored. These can be the hardest to admit, because there’s no one else to name it, no one else to forgive us.

But these private reckonings matter too. Owning them can open the door to freedom. Denying them, even quietly, keeps the shame locked in place.

Admitting mistakes doesn’t make us weak. It gives us access to something real: A kind of quiet self-respect. A release. A forward movement.

Mistakes are part of being human. And when we stop denying them, we make space for something new to begin.