ABSTRACT
A person will feel shameful when his actual self perceives to be falling short of his ideal self. Apart from what I have already learned about shame from Western psychological literature as well as from my own clinical practice, I undertook a two-year quantitative and qualitative study involving a group of Chinese women who live in the Eastern context and had experienced shame following their perinatal losses. Although many other studies have suggested the greater prevalence of shame among the Chinese relative to Western people, one key finding of my study is that this emotion is just as hidden and not readily admitted and expressed even in the East. This hiddenness is due to the fear of being found “less than” others as well as the shame of shame. Chinese shame is also rooted in the notion of shared face which prompted their unconscious tendency to hide their shame at the first instance. In fact, shame need not be admitted per se but words like being “inadequate”, “worthless”, “dirty” are indicative enough to betray the inner feelings of shame. The chapter ends with a proposal to help us uncover more effectively hidden shame in our psychometric assessments.
