Episode #186

Embarrassment & CBT

Experiencing embarrassment, especially in public or social settings, can really knock your confidence. Some people experience embarrassment so acutely that they just can’t deal with an embarrassing situation.

How can you identify and combat hot thoughts in an embarrassing situations?

How can you handle the catastrophic thinking that can happen?

How can you use CBT tools to process an embarrassing situation in a healthier way?

Join me, Dr Julie Osborn, as we discuss how to deal with embarrassment using your CBT tools.

Click to listen now!

Full Episode Transcript

Hi, and welcome to My CBT Podcast. This is Dr. Julie. I'm a Doctor of Psychology and a licensed clinical social worker specializing in cognitive-behavioral therapy. I'm here to help you bring the power of CBT into your own life.

I have a great email that I want to share with you, and I will keep the person's name anonymous.

It started with,

“Dear Dr. Julie,

“It's been a couple of weeks since our last session, and I report a much improved response practice, which has alleviated so much unnecessary dysregulating. I'm experiencing the empowerment of balanced thoughts, which is a game changer. It's hard to convey how grateful I am, so I hope you can imagine my enthusiasm. Working with you provided discovery that has given me a new way of thinking and a new thought pattern that debunks the threat level of wrong thinking to almost nothing, and that is so freeing and empowering.

“The CBT SMART tools that you equipped me with make a huge difference, and I am now able to sift away incorrect assumptions, which is so peace-bringing. I sincerely appreciate and thank you for your guidance, which was compassionately thoughtful, professional, and logical. You helped me to consider and dissect my thought pattern, which would have continued to cause me anxiety and unrest. This new perspective is like a pair of prescription glasses that is helping me to see very clearly in a way I had not before. Thank you again.

“Your support is one of the best self-care acts I've ever experienced. Very grateful.”

So I really appreciate that a lot, and, um, just wanted to share that with you guys, that, you know, people do the work, they really get the results they're looking for, and it doesn't have to take too long. So again, I always appreciate you guys sending in emails and sharing with me how the podcast has helped, and I love to share with other listeners just to encourage people to keep working, using the tools, continue to practice, and know that, you know, it really will make a difference if you take care of yourself and again, do the homework and all those good things. You know, listening to the podcast obviously can be helpful.

Right. But practicing the tools that I teach you guys, that's really the meat of all of it. You know, I had years and years and years ago, I did a public speaking at a big— I think it was like for Boeing, which is an aerospace company here in the United States. And there are hundreds of people there. And I remember a lady way in the back raised her hand and she's like, I read all these books, but nothing changes.

I'm not sure what to do. And I thought for a minute and I said, why are you practicing the tools that are in the book? And she didn't have a response. It was like, this was so long ago. And I always remembered that moment because, you know, we can all read books and listen to podcasts and go to therapy even.

And if you're not doing the work, you're not gonna get the outcome you're looking for. Right. But it, it's worth, I know work sometimes sounds like negative, like I have to work, but you know, it's the process, right? It's practicing the tools. It's identifying your hot thoughts.

It's working through the thought record. Coming up, like my— what I just read to you there, just coming up with more balanced thoughts is the game changer. And as I've told you guys before, you know, CBT is the most researched therapy out there, and it shows that when you really change your thinking and you're thinking in a more balanced way, that you literally change the brain chemistry and how things are working up there. So if it's causing you problems now, we can get it fixed. You just have to really take the time, like say with the thought records, to sit down with pen and paper and write it out.

It makes such a difference. And people see that, you know, when I start working, they're like, well, I'm just doing it in my head. And I'm like, no, no, no, you don't know well enough yet to do it in your head. And you're gonna miss so many of the hot thoughts you have because you're just not, you can't remember all of them as they're going through your head and then say, okay, which one do I wanna work on? And when you use the exercises, say like with the Mind Over Mood Workbook, you know, in column 3 of the thought record, there's like, 7 or 8 questions.

You don't have to answer every one, but as you go through them, it's going to help you get to those more underlying thoughts, underlying hot thoughts, I should say. And oh, that's really what's going on. That's really what's going on. I help people with that all the time. So just wanted to reiterate based on the email that I received that, you know, doing the work is what makes the difference.

And again, I always tell everybody it doesn't take long. You know, I have people all the time, how many sessions do I need to, you know, come to? And I said, it really is all up to you. The more you work on it, the better you're, you know, the quicker you're gonna get better. So, you know, it's in your hands like most things, right?

We have control over our choices, our actions, and our choices reflect, you know, how we feel about ourselves, what's important to us, how we want our lives to be. And if you're using my mantra by making decisions based on what's best for you, not how you feel, you will do the work cuz you know that that's what's best for you. And not like, oh, I don't feel like doing it right now. I'll do it later. You know, and then you never get to it.

So, If you're really putting it off and procrastinating, you know, there's a thought record right there. Why am I procrastinating doing thought records? Sometimes people say, you know, as I'm working on this Mind Over Mood book, I'm getting more depressed and more anxious. And I said, that's— I understand that that happens a lot because it gets to your issues really quickly. And again, is why it's not a long-term therapy.

If we get to your issues quickly, we can work through them and bam, you can feel better, right? So it's okay to take a break. You don't have to overwhelm yourself. It's not something to do 10 hours a day, of course, But you know, our mental health is with us 24/7, right? So working on it a little bit every day is definitely reasonable because we have feelings all day long and things are going on.

So again, the more I work on it, it's going to become more of a habit. You know, my brain is just a thought record. I say that I always have negative moods like everybody else, but I'm into my thoughts much quicker than I used to be so I can challenge those thoughts quickly and get moving on. So Just wanted to kind of review about, you know, if you feel stuck, if you're just getting started, even if you've relapsed, you know, just get back to doing what worked before. Just get back to doing what worked before.

I do have a podcast on relapse prevention if you want to listen to that, because I recently had an email about that as well. And I said, you know, go back to the tools that work, because a lot of times, you know, we kind of, as we're feeling better, we tend to do less. Practice with the tools, and then all of a sudden something happens, and then we're like, oh my God, oh my God, I'm feeling bad again. And it's like, no, let's pause and breathe. Am I really doing the work?

Am I really using the tools? Let me get back to that. And then it'll kind of all come back to you, and you can get back in the rhythm. It's all good. It's all good.

So today I wanted to do my podcast about the feeling of embarrassment. So recently, um, I thought of doing this cuz I was at a graduation party, lots of people there. And, uh, they were coming in the house and in the backyard and there was, you know, glass sliding door. And, um, one of the guests bashed his head into the glass door cuz he didn't see it. He thought he was just walking through.

It was so bad. They said, I didn't see this, but they said you could see an imprint of his face like on the glass. And everybody was like, oh my God, what was that? I thought something fell. And, um, he, he was okay.

Put a little ice on his head. But my point was everybody was just like, oh my God, oh my God, how embarrassing, how embarrassing, right? There must have been like 50 people there and all that stuff. So one of my kids was there and a couple of my kids were there and one of 'em was like, oh, that happened to me one time, long time ago. And I just left the party, right?

Because she felt so embarrassed that she wanted to leave and I find working with people, like, getting embarrassed or being embarrassed, feeling embarrassed is like the worst feeling that they feel. They just can't even barely deal with it. So it's very common. It can be a very painful emotion, and CBT works great with it because we know that feeling embarrassed is a feeling, right? So that's driven by how you're thinking, how you're interpreting the situation.

More than what actually happened. You know, all of us felt bad for this guy that bashed into the, you know, window. We didn't think less of him. We didn't think he was stupid. We were like, oh my God, you know, we'd start talking like, how many of you have done that?

I've gone through a screen before that I didn't see. Like, it happens, right? We don't think less of him, but the person going through that may be thinking that. So using your CBT, we can understand feeling embarrassed, It might be created by thoughts like, you know, I look stupid. Everyone noticed.

They're judging me. I shouldn't have done that. Now they're going to think less of me, right? These are all your automatic thoughts. These are all your ha thoughts versus like, oh my God, my head's killing me.

I hope I'm okay. You know, now it's like everybody's looking and I just want to get out of here. Which is, you know, so now you're thinking that and now, and then you're feeling, so you're thinking these things, you're feeling embarrassed, and then your behavior is to avoid and to leave. And maybe the physical reactions, maybe your heart's beating a little fast, maybe you're sweating a little bit, you know, based on the environment that you're in. So there's your whole CBT, right?

Your thoughts create your moods, which affects your behaviors and your physical reactions. And then your environment may be playing a factor. And, you know, this environment is, you know, it's not like, oh, he was just with his friends. He's with lots of people he doesn't know, which might have made him feel even more embarrassed. So I thought, you know, this is a good one because this mood is so strong for people that they will avoid even trying things or even going and doing something because maybe I will embarrass myself.

Right? Maybe I'll embarrass myself, so I'm not even going to try. So this mood can really control your choices, which is nothing we, you know, again, we don't want to make any decisions based on how we feel. And this is a great example of that. So let's go through some steps that can help you if you go through this, if you're thinking of doing something you're scared to, if you can think back to like, oh yeah, how embarrassed I was when this or that happened.

So you want to be specific about what actually happened. Like if you think about a video recording in your head, right? So maybe an example, if you're working, maybe you stumbled over your words during a meeting, right? That's your example. That's your situation.

And then your thought, you know, is I humiliated myself, right? So what am I afraid that this means about me? Right? That's the next step, you know, to get more hot thoughts down. What am I afraid this means about me?

So, um, or what does this say about me, my life, my future? Right? So some common beliefs about feeling embarrassed, right, is that if I make mistakes, I'll be rejected. That's a hot thought. Another one is people will remember this forever.

That's a super hot thought, I call. I call those super hot. Confident people don't do this. Hot thought. And I looked weak.

So they're all hot thoughts, right? So no wonder somebody would feel super strong, you know, regarding being embarrassed and then like, oh my God, I just can't even show up to that meeting again. I'm gonna have to quit my job. I mean, this is the kind of thoughts people, you know, this is where it goes, right? So catastrophic, catastrophic thinking.

So you really want to spot your cognitive distortions, right? So what are some of the cognitive distortions? I'll give you some examples as well, because when you're feeling embarrassed, you often do mind reading, right? So I feel like an idiot, so they think I'm an idiot, right? You're assuming what other people think.

The spotlight effect, which is a huge one here, is everyone noticed. So when people feel anxious, they tend to think that they're in the spotlight. Everyone's looking at them. Everyone's noticing everything they're doing, right? That's part of that anxiety.

So I have to be perfect, and now if I'm not, it's going to be completely embarrassing. Everyone noticed. They're going to be thinking about this forever. They're going to go home and tell their family. They're going to be talking about it for weeks, right?

Which the truth is, think about when you see somebody do something that could be embarrassing, you know, you look at it for a few minutes and then you move on. Right? And we all get self-absorbed into what we were talking about. Even the party that I was at, you know, maybe 5 minutes we're all like, "Oh, I hope he's okay. Oh, that's so embarrassing." And then we talked about our stories and then, you know, we were on to something else and we didn't even bring it up the rest of the night.

But when you're the person, you think the spotlight is on you. So that's a huge cognitive distortion. As I mentioned already, having catastrophic thoughts. So your thought might be that this will ruin my reputation. Right?

We're talking about the office situation that I mentioned. Um, all-or-nothing thinking. If I'm not smooth, then I'm a failure. And overgeneralizing. I always mess up.

So if you use the word always or never, it's going to be cognitive distortion, right? So just to go over some of them again is mind reading, spotlight effect, catastrophic thinking, all-or-nothing thinking, and overgeneralizing. So if you can label these, this can help reduce how intense you feel embarrassed, right? If you're like, okay, I'm just doing— I'm mind reading, you know, I'm thinking all or nothing, I'm overgeneralizing. Like, okay, let me slow down, let me calm down, let me identify my hot thoughts because I'm having all of these cognitive distortions.

And I have a podcast on that you can listen to about identifying your cognitive distortions because there's 10 of them. But right here, just for one mood, we got 5, right? We probably could do more as well. Um, but that's another step in CBT to identify what are my cognitive distortions related to this situation right now. And then like always, we wanna challenge your hot thoughts, right?

This is how we can start to reframe things. So some questions you could ask yourself about if you're feeling embarrassed, right, is what evidence do I have that they judged me harshly? What evidence do I have that they didn't judge me harshly, right? We wanna look at evidence that supports the hot thought, evidence that does not support the hot thought. There's another great question.

If someone else did this, would I judge them the same way? You'd probably be like, no, just like us, we felt really bad. And I thought, oh my God, that's gonna be so painful. Tomorrow's probably gonna have a big lump on his head. And I felt bad knowing he probably felt embarrassed, but there was no judgment, right?

Another great question is, will this matter in 1 week, 1 month, 1 year? No, nobody's gonna remember. And you might even forget about it, right? When we were all talking about, has this ever happened to you in our little group, you know, we had to think about like, has that happened? Like, I'm not sure.

Oh yeah, I remember that happened in the past. Like, it's not in the forefront of our minds, right? Cuz we move on and everybody moves on and not everybody's thinking about what you did. Another question you could ask is, you know, what's a more realistic explanation of why I'm feeling so embarrassed, right? Or what happened regarding the situation or how I'm looking at this.

So you wanna ask yourself those questions, right? Some other ones to add is, you know, what does this mean about me, my future, my life? Nothing. It means nothing. It's a moment in time and I'm gonna move on.

Right? If it's in this work situation, you know, you can maybe do some problem solving. If I felt uncomfortable, I'm gonna go sit down, talk to my manager, you know, get some reassurance, see what they thought. How could I maybe even do better if I need to, you know, next time? Like, there's lots of, you know, positive actions you can take to feel better and learn if it's in a work situation.

But if it's just something that happens, you trip outside at a mall and you fall in front of people, you know, You know, it's a moment in time, and that using the thought record to help you move on so you're not ruminating and, you know, feeling really stuck. So let me give you another example regarding the thought record. So if your automatic thought is that everyone thinks I'm incompetent, right, a balanced thought might be that, you know, I stumbled, but that happens. Most people are focused on themselves, and one awkward moment doesn't define me. That's a great balanced thought.

So this balanced thought is based on all the evidence you came up with, right? So that's what we call an alternative balanced thought. What's an alternative way of looking at this based on the evidence, right? An alternative way to the Ha thought. And then the other type of balanced thought is, um, is a balanced thought.

Sorry. So there's, um, the balanced thoughts and then alternative balanced thought. So balanced thought is just saying, yes, this is true, and this is also true. So once you get your evidence down to support your hot thought, right, and you get the evidence down that doesn't support the hot thought, we want to bring those together. And you can read it verbatim, whatever you wrote down, right?

You want to start with although or even though, so then you won't use the word but. So although I was really embarrassed that happened, I know like myself, other people are not gonna remember this after tonight. That would be a balanced thought. Although I wish this didn't happen and I did feel embarrassed, I know others aren't judging me for it. Everyone came up to me and was checking to see if I was okay.

So that's the balanced thought based on what you can put down. So there's different ones you can work on. And again, I'm using the thought record in the Mind Over Mood workbook that I use, and this will explain it even more if you're working through the book. But I just wanna give you some examples.

Something also you can do is what I call compassionate realism statement. So embarrassment improves fastest when you stop treating it like proof that you're defective, right? This is not evidence that you are defective because you feel embarrassed. The only reason you feel embarrassed is based on how you're thinking. But if you said to yourself, you know, That was awkward in that meeting, but awkward isn't dangerous.

I'm allowed to be human in public. I can survive people possibly thinking something negative of me. This is uncomfortable but not catastrophic. So you're just being, you know, some self-compassion, like, yeah, that was really uncomfortable. I didn't, you know, enjoy any of that, but it wasn't a catastrophic thing.

And you know, I'm human and things happen. Everybody screws up from time to time. Many people have, you know, say tripped in public or fell or something embarrassing happened and nothing terrible happened in the long run, right? So just having some self-compassion and just being kind to yourself is something else that you can do to help yourself move past being embarrassed because, you know, If you find this true for yourself, when I've talked to other people about embarrassing things that have happened to them, when they do share it, usually they're laughing at this point. It's been so long and they're like, oh yeah, I was so embarrassed, but oh my God, it was kind of funny.

Or I did look silly when I fell down, or, you know, whatever, or I slipped, or whatever it might have been. And, you know, if I could have just laughed at myself at the moment, it all would have made it all easier. But I got so in my head, right? And I started thinking all these negative things, like everyone's evil in the world and they're just laughing and pointing their fingers at me, right? That's like this, this image, or, you know, this, yeah, this image that you would have in your head.

Like, is that really true? Is that what you do? If somebody falls in public, do you go over and point your finger at them and just laugh and say, you're an idiot, you're a fool? Like, you know, people are running over, oh my God, are you okay? Can I help you?

Is there anything, you know, are you, are you hurt? Do you need some emergency treatment? Like, it's so opposite of what you think in the moment. You know, we can be so harsh and so critical on ourselves that we just need to take a moment and be like, okay, yeah, it's okay to feel embarrassed. I'm not saying not to feel embarrassed.

It's a feeling, right? We all have feelings. It's totally a normal feeling, but not to get stuck in that and come up with all of these hot thoughts that just make you feel so much worse. So that's where we want to use our tools, right? So what would be a behavioral experiment that you can use regarding feeling embarrassed?

Because it really sticks around when you really avoid things. It does. You don't move up from it. So you might want to speak up once, even if you're feeling shaky, right? So say with the situation with the meeting, this guy goes back into the next meeting and he's like, oh my God, I'm feeling kind of nervous.

But I'm just going to speak up to kind of get past that feeling of embarrassment and see that everything's okay. Another behavioral experiment would be don't over-explain or apologize excessively, right? So if, if it was a meeting situation and you wanted to explain or say, oh, I'm sorry, that didn't come out right, or I wasn't as prepared as I thought, or I don't have the answer you're looking for, just once You only have to apologize once. Don't overexplain because then you're going to get more of that spotlight behavior, right? Everybody will be looking at you and, and being like, why is he so nervous?

Why isn't he just explaining and moving on? It's not a big deal. And a lot of times we might mess up, say, in doing a speech or presenting something, and people don't even know we messed up because they don't have the information that we have, right? So that would be another hafaz, like, oh, everybody knows I messed up. Based on what?

Did anybody say anything to you? Did anybody laugh? Or did anybody say right then and there, like, that's not right, you don't have the right information? Like, lots of times people don't even catch those small mistakes that we might make. If you want to just again pause and breathe, pause and breathe, breathe and assess what's going on.

Also, another behavioral experiment would let the awkward moment exist without fixing it, right? Just let it Be there and then just move on. You know, don't make it bigger than it is. It's like having a paper cut. The more you focus on it, the more painful it actually is, right?

So just, you know, let it be like, okay, that was embarrassing. I'm just gonna keep moving on. I don't have to fix anything. And then you wanna observe what happens. So what happens when I have embarrassed myself or I said the wrong, because I said the wrong thing in a meeting or because something happened public or because like this kid bashed into the door.

Like what? Nothing happened, right? If anything, he got a lot of love and support from everybody, and then that was the end of that, right? If at a meeting somebody might say, hey, no problem. You know what?

I've done the same thing before. I know it can feel awkward, but it was no biggie, and you fixed what you said or corrected it or got the information we needed. So observe what happens. Normally you're gonna see that nothing terrible happens. Nothing even slightly terrible, nothing even bad happens.

Because it's important— I tell everybody that when you start making changes and you're feeling good, you know, ask yourself what is working, right? So when my clients come and say, oh yeah, I'm feeling good, I say, great, I love that. Can you tell me why you're feeling good? What's different than last week or the week before when you were feeling horrible or you were having panic attacks? Like What are you doing differently?

Because whatever is working, you want to continue doing that. But you got to take the time to think about it. Usually when we feel good, we don't think about what's working. We're just feeling good, right? I want to— why do I have to think about?

I'm just good. But when you're not feeling good, you're perseverating, you're ruminating. It's all you can think about, right? So that's not helping. So when you make your progress, you know, other than give, you know, give yourself a pat on the back, but I'll say, what am I doing differently that's working?

It's like when people work out. You know, if they're like, hey, you know what, doing that extra 5 pounds of weight, I can really see more definition. I'm going to keep doing that. We think about what works all the time in lots of different situations, right? Whatever I'm doing at work, you know, giving that extra report or following up with my boss once a week or setting up a meeting once a week to talk about my progress or, you know, whatever that might look like, that's working.

So you do think about things all the time that are working for you and you want to continue. I don't think we do it so much when it comes to our mental health. So I want you to just take the time, especially when you push yourself and do a behavioral experiment, because those can be unnerving and scary and, you know, anxiety-provoking, right? Because we're putting ourselves out there a little bit. And after you do the experiment and say, you know, how did that go?

Wow, that went fine. No big thing happened. When I bring up to my boss like, oh, I'm sorry, I messed up in the meeting, he might even say, I'm not really sure what you're even talking about. Right? Like, how crazy is that?

And they're like, I don't know what you're talking about. I thought you did great. And you're like, oh my God, I've just been up all night and tormented myself because I thought I screwed up so big. So the behavioral experiment would be too is checking in with, you know, someone that you think, like, say your boss would've noticed that you didn't have in the meeting and have a conversation. Even if they did notice, it's probably a lot more minimal than you're making it out to be with all this catastrophic thinking.

You also wanna reduce your safety behaviors, right? So safety behaviors keep your embarrassment alive, and that's what we don't wanna do. So what are some safety behaviors connected to embarrassment? Might be replaying the event repeatedly. So that's what I was saying about maybe being up all night and just thinking and thinking about it, right?

Excessive apologizing is a safety behavior. Overexplaining yourself. Trying to be perfect next time, avoiding eye contact, and avoiding future situations. So these are all safe. This— I think this is keeping me safe by doing these things, but it really isn't keeping you safe.

It's just helping you avoid, which we don't want to do, right? We want to get past this and possibly learn from it. If it's a work situation or a relationship situation, um, and just being yourself and it'll be okay, right? So it's like, okay, I have all these safety behaviors. This is a lot.

I would suggest you just dropping one at a time. You know, I'm gonna stop excessively apologizing. That one seems a little easier than maybe the other stuff. You know, like I still wanna be perfect cuz if I'm perfect then I won't embarrass myself. That's the hot thought, right?

You know, so what, what's one that I'm willing to drop? And then once I get past that one, I'm gonna pick another one. So writing down what your safety behaviors are. So in Mind Over Mood, I'll just give you some direction. If you're using that workbook in Chapter 14, which is called Understanding Anxiety, there's a whole section there on understanding safety behaviors and you figuring out what yours are.

All of us tend to have some safety behaviors and it's good to understand them because it's really a false sense of safety because it's really momentarily and it makes us feel better in the moment, but it's not really keeping us safe because we're not growing, we're not learning, we're not changing how we're thinking and being able to just be present and enjoy our life. If we're always trying to be safe to avoid what could happen, right, then you're not living your life and you're being controlled by how you feel, which is what we're trying to avoid here. Also, you really wanna work on not ruminating, right? I have a very old podcast, you say, have to scroll back in my list here on ruminating, but ruminating only actually makes everything worse. And embarrassment loves ruminating.

It loves to mentally replay what happened. Loves it, loves it, loves it. So a little trick you can use is maybe set a rule for yourself, right? I'm not solving a problem, I'm just punishing myself. That's really your alternative thought, right?

So if your hot thought is, you know, I should— which is a cognitive distortion, right? You're scolding yourself. I should keep thinking about this to figure it out. I keep sure they keep thinking about this because I'm a failure, I'm no good, I need to punish myself by continuing to ruminate. Instead, to say, I'm not solving a problem, I'm only punishing myself.

That would be a new thought to use, right? Then you want to redirect yourself, right, by telling yourself, I already learned what I needed, and replaying is not improving anything. So if it was a relationship situation, a work situation, You know, if you needed to learn from, if you did make a mistake or said something wrong, next time I know how to handle it better. That's where, you know, I already learned what I needed. I can move on.

You could even schedule it, right? So I'm gonna think about this at 7:00 PM for 10 minutes, right? So that's the worry technique they call. I'm gonna worry about what's bothering me at a certain time. I give 10 minutes all day long, but the rest of the day I'm not gonna be thinking about this.

That can work sometimes knowing I'm gonna have my moment where I can just perseverate on this And usually when you keep doing that, after a while you're like, yeah, I don't really need to do this anymore. And most people don't even want to continue doing it by the time you get to 7:00 PM at night. Like, I got enough going on. I had other things happen today. I don't need to go back and think about this.

So that's a way of like, okay, I'm gonna schedule it. So I really feel like I need to think about this. How can I do this? So it's not all day. I'm gonna schedule it in my day.

And then you get there and you're like, no, thank you. I really don't wanna do this. So a powerful CBT thought to practice would be that even if someone did judge me, I can tolerate it. That's powerful thinking, huh? I can tolerate even if someone did judge me.

Because you are going to be judged, and you judge other people, right? It just kind of makes the world go round. It's not the end of the world. Most of us don't know what people are judging us about because nobody's coming up to us and saying, I judge you, this is what I think about you. We don't do that to others.

We just assume others are judging us, and we allow that thought, right, to control our lives, which is like devastating. Like, you're making choices about hot thoughts, based on hot thoughts, thoughts that aren't even true. You're making life choices. Like, that's really significant, and you don't want to do that. That's why you want to say, you know, even if someone is judging me, I can tolerate it.

And I don't even know what anyone's thinking. I'm just assuming. I'm not, you know, people aren't spending that much time thinking about us. We're all consumed with our lives, which is okay. So we have a moment, we think about somebody else, and then we move on.

That one sentence can reduce embarrassment fast because it removes the fear of social punishment, right? Which I know sounds strong, but the social punishment is being judged or someone laughing at you, right? And maybe even, you know, Maybe it brings up memories, right? Images of, you know, maybe if you went, if you were bullied in school, you know, back, you know, kids might have laughed at you. You know, it might've been right there in your face, or if you slipped in the hallway and kids laughed and nobody came over to offer to help, like it could be, oh my God, I remember what that felt like.

I don't want to go through that again. You know, those are things to work through. Those are things to share if you're in therapy, to talk about. Bullying's a big deal and can leave lasting effects. And that might be another reason why embarrassment is so terrible.

If you had it, had difficult, you know, uh, years in school, be like, I ain't going through that again. That's how people would treat me. It's different when you're an adult, you know. There could be somebody obnoxious that might laugh, but in general it's not the same. But that could be bringing up— so, you know, think about, you know, why is being embarrassed so difficult for me?

Is it from past experiences, or is it just, you know, I have such a hard time tolerating being, you know, human and having those situations happen. I just assume everyone's going to think so poorly about me. You know, what, what is it? What are you telling yourself that makes you feel embarrassed? And what are you telling yourself to believe that you can't even tolerate it if it does happen?

You know, this is just one mood I'm talking about, you guys. There's, you know, thousands of moods, right? But it just shows you how significant Just this one mood of feeling embarrassed can affect your life, and you deserve better. You deserve to be happy, and you, and you can handle whatever happens in your life, and you can tolerate it even if you feel embarrassed. It kind of sucks, it's uncomfortable, but you get past it and you move on, and most of the time you don't feel this way.

So again, I shared lots of different tools today. And again, there's lots of other— there's, again, just to review, there's— I have a podcast called Are You Judging Me? Podcast about the cognitive distortions, the ABCs of CBT, walk you through a whole thought record. So other than this podcast, there's lots and lots of other ones to listen to. If some— if you're like, oh yeah, I really want to work on that, or this part is difficult for me, or, you know, whatever, you know, what are my other cognitive distortions, all those types things.

There's so much to learn because the more tools you have, the better equipped you'll be to deal with whatever comes your way. And I want you to feel equipped so you can go out into the world and live your best life and not let your feelings hold you back. So I hope this was helpful. Please share with anybody else that may benefit from it. You can find me on my website at mycognitivebehavioraltherapy.com.

If you haven't visited my website, my podcast is on there. But I also have videos, I have blogs, I have lots of different tools that you can, um, learn on there as well. You can also find me on Instagram under My CBT Podcast and on Facebook, on YouTube, and on TikTok. I'm under Dr. Julie Osborne. Please keep sharing your thoughts, your concerns, your questions.

I love hearing from you and getting your feedback. Please hit the subscribe button. To make sure you won't miss an episode. And if you can take the time to leave a review, I'd really appreciate it. It just helps more people, um, learn about my podcast.

More people that learn and use the CBT tools, better world we're gonna have as far as I'm concerned.

So have a great day and remember to make decisions based on what's best for you, not how you feel.