Shame (ESS)

The ESS — twenty-five statements developed by Andrews, Qian and Valentine in 2002, and one of the standard measures of internal shame. Used in research worldwide. Screening, not diagnosis.

Internal shame is the kind with no audience. It isn't what you think other people think of you. It's what you've concluded about yourself.

Four options each, about the past year. Answer for the year, not for this week.

How to read this. Twenty-five questions about shame over the past year. The small tick on the bar is the typical score — further right means above average, further left means below.

My Score

51 out of 100. Around the middle, just a hair under the typical score.

I expected higher, but I have spent a long time working through my own shame. It comes and goes. I think on good days, it's lower.

But why is this relevant?

It's relevant because I've noticed that the worse I feel about myself, the stronger the same-sex attraction gets. I've said as much before — the shame is what drives the attraction.

And it's not that I was born with this shame. It's more a function of the environment I grew up in. Not anyone's fault in particular. We don't get to choose the cards we're dealt. The trouble is that shame, once it sets in, is hard to root out. It becomes a self-reinforcing loop.

The ESS doesn't measure attraction. It measures the shame. How hard you are on yourself. And for me, the higher the shame, the higher the SSA.

Where to Go from Here

If any of this was useful, I write about this every week. Free.

Andrews, B., Qian, M., & Valentine, J. D. (2002). Predicting depressive symptoms with a new measure of shame: The Experience of Shame Scale. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 41(1), 29–42.