Learn Not to Be a Self-Inflicted Victim of Embarrassment
A Personal Perspective: Embarrassment stems from unrealistic expectations.
Posted May 29, 2026 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods
Several decades ago, I was horribly embarrassed. I lived on an apricot ranch near the university. I brought in much-needed income by working in the apricot drying shed in the summer.
One morning, in excitement, I shared with a co-worker that I’d found out I was pregnant. After our lunch break, she approached me with something pretty in her palm and said, “This is to celebrate your pregnancy .” Thinking it was a pretty rock, I took it out of her hand without delicacy. Suddenly, it started oozing fluid on my fingers. She looked at me in horror and yelled, “What are you doing? That’s a chrysalis!”
A chrysalis is the hard skin covering a caterpillar as it metamorphoses into a butterfly. If it becomes detached from the silk spun by the caterpillar, but is handled gently, it can be reattached and still become a butterfly. This one would not. I’d seen to that. I was horribly embarrassed and spent the rest of the day in painful self-recrimination. I was convinced that my co-worker was telling others what I’d done. This only intensified my embarrassment and self-blame.
But what crime had I committed? I’d accidentally mistaken a chrysalis for a rock. For years, whenever I recalled that incident, I’d suffer embarrassment all over again.
What is embarrassment?
In general, embarrassment is an emotional response to an innocent mistake. Some of us are especially embarrassment-prone because we’ve been conditioned to set unrealistically high standards for ourselves and then judge ourselves harshly when we can’t possibly meet them.
Many of us have been taught to evaluate ourselves based on how we assume (often erroneously) other people are evaluating us.
The good news is that these concerns are learned, conditioned behaviors that can be changed. The Buddha, for his part, said that nothing is as soft and pliant as the mind. Now, 2,500 years later, neuroscientists are finding this to be true. So, even if we’ve been conditioned to be our own harshest critics—making us embarrassment-prone—we can unlearn that behavior.
It’s eye-opening to consider some of the unrealistic expectations we hold ourselves to—the “shoulds” we set up that then become the breeding ground for embarrassment: I should never spill a drink; I should never lose my footing; I should never misunderstand another person’s behavior (the latter being my “chrysalis crime”).
For most of my life, I was embarrassed by this type of innocent behavior that is common to all humans. If, at the time of the “chrysalis incident,” I’d had compassion for myself instead of judging myself harshly, I would have said to my co-worker something like “I’m terribly sorry. I thought it was a rock. I wish I’d have seen what it really was.” Then the momentary discomfort would have passed without lingering in my mind for decades.
How I finally shed that decades-old embarrassment
The change occurred after I became chronically ill 25 years ago. At first, I was embarrassed that I wasn’t recovering from what appeared to be an acute viral infection. Other people get sick and recover. What was wrong with me? There’s that first factor: holding myself to an impossible standard (impossible in the sense that I couldn’t control whether my body recovered from a viral infection).
Then came the second factor: I was evaluating myself based on what I was afraid others were thinking about me. I was embarrassed by the thought that they might think I was a malingerer, and so I’d try to hide from others how sick I was.
Then I had an experience that changed me. In front of my house, a neighbor started complaining about a contractor she’d hired. After about 15 minutes, I began to feel as if I were going to keel over if I didn’t sit down, but there wasn’t even a wall to lean against.
This was the usual signal for negative self-judgment to arise, followed quickly by embarrassment. Instead, there was a turning in my mind, and self-compassion arose. I heard myself saying, “I’m sorry but I can’t stand up for long periods, so I need to sit down,’" and I sat right down on the cement sidewalk! I continued our chat even though she towered above me. I wasn’t embarrassed because I recognized that I was taking care of myself.
Afterward, I thought about what I’d done—me who’d get embarrassed if I tripped on a crack in the sidewalk had been perfectly willing to sit right down on one! I reflected on what would happen if I let go of what I assumed other people were thinking about me (which is often an incorrect perception anyway).
To do this, I asked myself whether others do the same things I’d been judging myself harshly for all my life. Do they spill drinks? Yes. Trip on sidewalks? Yes. Misunderstand others sometimes? Yes. Do they engage in unconventional behavior to protect their health? Yes!
Then I purposefully called the “chrysalis incident” to mind. Might other people have mistaken that chrysalis for a rock? Yes. Might the very co-worker who gave it to me have made that mistake? Sure.
For the first time, I saw that, regardless of whether I made a good faith mistake (as I did with the chrysalis), and regardless of whether I acted unconventionally (as I had when I sat on the sidewalk), embarrassment served no useful purpose. It didn’t ease my suffering, and it didn’t ease that of others. This is my litmus test for evaluating thoughts and actions—do they ease or intensify suffering for myself and others?
After so many years, it was such a relief to finally be free from embarrassment over that chrysalis. Now, instead of embarrassment arising when I think of that day, I feel compassion for the excited young woman I was, who did nothing but make an innocent mistake as she stood there ready to receive a gift to celebrate her pregnancy.
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Toni Bernhard, J.D., is a former law professor at the University of California, Davis. She's the author of How to Be Sick , How to Wake Up , and How to Live Well with Chronic Pain and Illness .
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.