When Shame Looks Like Defiance

Summary

Why do some pupils smile, deny what happened, blame someone else or become angry when they're challenged about their behaviour?

Sometimes, what looks like defiance or a lack of remorse may actually be a defence against shame.

In this episode of School Behaviour Secrets, you'll learn:

• The important difference between guilt and shame - and why it matters for behaviour
• Why shame doesn't always look like shame, and can sometimes appear as smiling, blame, denial or aggression
• How shame can contribute to a cycle of dysregulation and escalating behaviour
• Why understanding the need behind behaviour doesn't mean removing boundaries or accountability
• Four practical ways to respond that reduce shame and make it easier for pupils to take responsibility, repair relationships and move forward

If you support pupils who become defensive, angry or dysregulated when they're corrected, this episode will help you understand what might be causing it - and respond effectively.

Important links:

Get our FREE SEND Behaviour Handbook: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/send-handbook

Download other FREE behaviour resources for use in school: https://beaconschoolsupport.co.uk/resources

Show notes / transcription

Simon Currigan

Have you ever challenged a pupil about something they've obviously done wrong, only for them to look at you straight in the eye, smile, deny it happened, and then blame someone else? And then the more you challenge them, the more they dig in, they argue, they get angry and blame you, or they minimise what they did, or maybe even just walk out.

Well, it's easy to look at that behaviour and think, "That student just doesn't care, they've got no remorse." But what if, sometimes, the emotion causing that behaviour isn't a lack of remorse or callousness at all? What if it's shame? Because shame doesn't always look like we expect it to.

My name's Simon Currigan, and I've helped schools with SEMH and behaviour for, count them, 19 years. And in this episode, I'm going to explain the difference between guilt and shame, why shame can produce some surprising behaviours in the classroom that we don't expect, and four practical ways to respond without accidentally pouring petrol on the flames.

Hi there, my name's Simon Currigan, and welcome to this week's episode of School Behaviour Secrets. And as far as I'm concerned, every day is carvery day. I eat like King Henry VIII, honestly, put a plate in my hand, show me a counter with three meats on it, and suddenly I'm filling my face with roast potato stuffing, cauliflower cheese, and a Yorkshire pudding the size of a medieval helmet. And then I go back for more vegetables and gravy, obviously, because I'm very health-conscious. Got to get my five a day. Anyway, enough about my ongoing campaign to return Britain to Tudor levels of cardiovascular health, because today, in a completely unrelated topic, we're talking about shame. And specifically, how shame can sometimes cause behaviours that look like anger, or defensiveness, or arrogance, or being completely uncaring.

Often, when we picture a child feeling ashamed, we think of someone looking down at the floor, maybe going quiet, maybe looking embarrassed, or becoming tearful. But shame doesn't always look like that, because sometimes it can look like a smile, sometimes it can look like a smirk, it can look like blame or denial, or laughter, or anger, or aggression. And it's like this kind of mask that kids can wear that comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and that mask acts as a defence mechanism. And if we mistake what that defence looks like for the emotion driving it, we can respond in a way that accidentally increases their shame or makes the behaviour worse instead of moving things forward.

But before I go into that, before we go any further, if you're finding this podcast useful, please take just 10 seconds to follow or subscribe to School Behaviour Secrets, whatever podcast app you're using to listen to this show with. And if you're not using a podcast app, you're listening on the website, then what are you doing? Grab yourself Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Amazon Music or whatever program or app you use to listen to music with, and find us on there. And if you know a teacher, senator, or school leader who works with a pupil, you can go from DEF CON 5 to DEF CON 1. The moment they're challenged about their behaviour, please share this episode with them too. It genuinely helps more people discover the podcast, and hopefully it will help them look at behaviour from a slightly different, more productive angle.

Right, so let's start with an example. Let's take Riley. Riley's in year nine, and he's sitting in class next to another pupil, and the teacher sees him deliberately knock the other boy's pencil case off the table. Now, this isn't subtle. There's no ambiguity. She sees him do it. Pens go everywhere. So the teacher says, "Riley, pick that up, please." And Riley looks at her and smiles. And she says, "Come on, Riley. You knocked it off the table. You pick it up." And then Riley says, "Wasn't me." Now, the teacher definitely saw him do it on purpose. So she keeps pushing back, and she says, "Riley, I literally just watched you knock that pencil case off the table."

And now Riley says, "Well, he did it to me first," and smiles again. The other pupil says he didn't, and he obviously didn't, and you didn't see him do it. And then, when you question him on that, Riley starts getting louder and starts saying things like, "Why are you always picking on me? This school isn't fair. You never say anything to him." And then the teacher holds the line again, because understandably she wants him to take responsibility for his actions, but that just causes Riley to get angrier. And eventually, he swears that the teacher pushes his chair back and walks out.

Now, if you're the adult in that situation, what does Riley's behaviour tell you? Probably something like this: at the surface level, he doesn't care. He's lying, he thinks it's funny, he's grandstanding, he refuses to take responsibility for his actions, he's being deliberately disrespectful. And look, any of those things could be true. I'm not saying every time a teenager smiles when you challenge them, you need to grab a psychological textbook and start digging into what happened in their early childhood. Sometimes a smirk is just a smirk. Sometimes a child denies something because they're hoping to get away with it. But there's another possibility we should also have in our heads, particularly if this is part of a repeated pattern of behaviour.

It's not a one-off. What if we're mistaking Riley's mask of smugness or indifference for the true emotion he's feeling on the inside? What if Riley isn't smiling because he feels good or powerful? What if he's smiling because underneath he feels threatened in some way, or being forced to confront something he doesn't want to think about at all? So to understand that, we need to separate two words that we often use kind of interchangeably, informally, but they actually mean different things. And those words are guilt and shame. The psychologist June Tangney has spent decades researching this, and she's co-author of the book Shame and Guilt, so she should know about this.

And she says that the simplest way of describing the difference is this: guilt means I've done something bad, whereas shame means I am bad. Guilt is about a negative judgment of a specific behaviour. So I shouldn't have said that to her. I shouldn't have hit him. I shouldn't have knocked his pencil case off the desk. It's all about something we've done. Shame takes that to the next level. It shifts the judgment from the behaviour to the whole person. So the child tells themselves, "I'm horrible. I'm stupid. I'm the naughty kid. I always mess things up. I don't deserve anyone's respect. There's something wrong with me." So shame becomes about your identity rather than your actions, and that difference matters because guilt and shame tend to pull our behaviour in different directions.

Tangney's research has found that when people feel guilt about a specific behaviour, then they're more likely to accept responsibility for their actions, empathise with the person they've hurt, and want to put things right. In a sense, guilt is actually a positive social emotion, a positive social behaviour, at least from the perspective of the group, because although it's a negative emotion, it helps members of the group acknowledge that they did something wrong and then try to make amends for them. It's kind of a social glue, in a way.

Tangney's research found that shame, on the other hand, is much more likely to be associated with defensiveness, hiding away, escape, denial, and blaming other people. So here's the simple distinction that I want you to remember: guilt leads us towards repairing something we've done wrong, whereas shame makes us want to escape from it and hide from it.

Now, I want to put an important health warning around this, because we live in an age where it's very easy to turn every normal, uncomfortable human emotion into something pathological. Shame by itself isn't a disorder. Feeling shame from time to time does not mean a child has some deep psychological problem that needs 12 professionals and a color-coded intervention plan to solve. Shame is a normal human experience.

If you've ever said something stupid in a meeting and immediately wished you could climb inside your own laptop and close the lid behind you, you have experienced that feeling. If you've ever waved back at someone in the street and then realised that they were waving at the person behind you, that's shame. If you've ever asked someone out in person and they've just looked at you and said, "No, I'm not interested," and you wanted the world to swallow you up, those can all result in shame. And if you haven't done that, any of those, congratulations, because apparently you're better at being a human being than I am.

It helps, though, to think about this on a kind of continuum. The one is that continuum we've got guilt, which is, "I did something wrong." Then we have ordinary, transient shame that can come and go, "Oh God, everyone saw that, and I feel like such an idiot. I want to curl up and die." That feeling is uncomfortable, but for most of us, in the end, it passes.

Then at the other end, we have something more persistent, more internalised, more serious, what people sometimes call toxic shame. And just to be clear, toxic shame isn't a clinical diagnosis either. It's just a useful description for when someone's shame becomes embedded into how they see themselves. So they tell themselves the message, "I'm stupid, I'm unlikable, I'm the bad kid, I always ruin things, there's something wrong with me, there's something different about me that makes me worth less." And that doesn't go away.

So the issue isn't that a child experiences shame occasionally, we all do. The issue is when that shame becomes intense and persistent or so threatening that the child has to kind of defend themselves against it again and again, and they get caught in a cycle of negative feelings and behaviours that they find it hard to escape from.

And this is where things get interesting from a behaviour perspective, because when kids experience shame, it can look different ways, and it doesn't always look the way we expect it to look. Yes, sometimes pupil will sometimes put their head down. They'll avoid eye contact, or they'll go quiet or become tearful, the kind of things we'd expect, the kind of thing you'd expect an actor to portray as shame on the screen.

But sometimes kids do something else as well. Sometimes they'll just smile, or they'll smirk, or almost look smug. They might laugh or start joking around or grandstanding. They might tell you that, "I don't care." They might deny something that you literally just watched them do. They might blame someone else or argue about the tiny details about what you've just said, about what you saw them doing. They might boast about their actions. They might mock another pupil or mock you or rip up a piece of work after making a mistake. They might refuse to apologise. Or, on the other hand, they might walk out and become angry and aggressive.

When those behaviours are like part of a wider pattern, what the child's brain on the inside might be telling them in those situations is, "This feeling is incredibly uncomfortable. Get away from it. Act like it's not there. Create this shell, this wall, this defence to protect yourself from it."

And there's some fascinating research around this. Researchers looked at the relationship between shame, guilt, and aggression across four different samples, and they found something more nuanced, actually, than simply saying that shame causes aggression, because their research didn't support that simple direct relationship. Instead, what they found was there's an indirect pathway through something called the externalization of blame.

Now, in plain English, what happens is when the negative feelings about ourselves become too painful, one way of escaping that is to push the responsibility outwards. It's his fault. It's her fault. The teacher hates me. Everyone's picking on me. And in their research, that tendency to externalise blame or blame others helped explain the relationship between how prone someone is to shame and aggression.

Other research with young people aged between 9 and 16 also found shame contributed to increases in reactive aggression over time, while guilt, on the other hand, was associated with decreases in proactive aggression. So we need to be careful with the science here. Shame doesn't automatically make children aggressive, but for some pupils, shame, blame, and reactive aggression can all be tied up together.

Now, think back to Riley, who said, "Wasn't me. He did it first. You're always picking on me," and so on. You can now see how he's pushing the responsibility outwards. And as the adult then, it's easy to get pulled into an argument about that because the denial is just so ridiculous. We think, "I'm not letting you get away with this. I literally watched you just do that." So we apply more pressure.

And now maybe other pupils are watching in the classroom, so that adds pressure, and this makes Riley feel the shame even more, the spotlights on him, so his defences go up further. And in response to that, we apply more pressure again, because now we're getting more defiance from Riley. And suddenly, without intending to, what happens is Riley ends up in a shame spiral, going around and around until the argument between us is no longer dealing with the pencil case on the floor.

We're dealing with a dysregulated teenager storming out of the classroom with a voice in his head telling him, "You failed again. You don't deserve to be liked. You don't deserve to do well. You're a bad person. And get out of here before they notice." And this fits with the way I talk about dysregulation using the PAIN framework.

Shame sits in anxiety and emotions, one of the seven impacts that can increase a pupil's stress load. And that's the key topic of a book that I'm writing right now for Routledge. The second draft is with the editor, so I hope to have some more information soon about when the book's going to be released and how we're moving along with that. And I'll also have some extra goodies to go with the book. If you're a listener to the podcast, I'll make sure you're informed about how to get that information and all those extra resources.

But one important thing to remember here is stress stacks. Stresses stack one on top of the other. And we've also talked about that in a previous episode. So Riley might have walked into the classroom that day full of stress chemicals from things that have gone wrong somewhere else. Maybe he slept badly, maybe he had an argument at home, maybe the work's difficult, and he already feels stupid before he opens the textbook. And then suddenly, he's publicly caught doing something wrong, and everyone is looking at him. And that extra set of stressors might be the ones that tip him into dysregulation.

If that sounds familiar, or if it's the first time you're coming to it, actually, I recommend that you go back and listen to episode 274, where we look at stress stacking in detail. The episode was called "When Behaviour Appears to Come Out of Nowhere: Understanding Stress Stacking." And also, if you're new to this topic, I also recommend you go to episode 284, because in that episode, we looked at pupils who struggle but don't ask for help. And I gave that the title of "Why Some Pupils Never Ask for Help," because I lack imagination. You know, I'm 250 episodes in. My days of creating clever podcast titles are over, I think. But you know, calling it "Why Some Pupils Never Ask for Help" makes it easy to find.

An important thing here is understanding shame does not mean removing accountability. It doesn't mean Riley gets to knock other kids' stuff onto the floor, swear at his teacher, walk out, and then we all stand around scratching our chins, saying, "Well, bless him. He was experiencing shame." Well, someone else picks his mess up. Obviously not. Absolutely not. Riley still needs to take responsibility. He still needs to repair the harm that he's caused. There may still be a consequence required for his behaviour.

Understanding the need for the behaviour doesn't mean pretending the behaviour is acceptable, because without boundaries, all social groups just fall apart. But accountability and humiliation aren't the same thing. And in fact, I'd argue that if our goal is for Riley to honestly reflect on what he did, recognise the impact he had on someone else, and then put that right, then pushing him deeper into shame makes that conversation and process so much harder, not so much easier. And the research on guilt here is useful, because guilt keeps the focus on the thing that I did, which means there's something concrete I can do to change and make things better. Shame makes the problem me as an individual. It's about my identity. Changing your behaviour feels achievable. Changing your entire self because you believe you're fundamentally bad, well, that's hard.

So what do we actually do as the adult in the room? Well, I've got four practical strategies for you. And the first is remove the audience. Where you can, only have these conversations in private. Obviously, if someone is unsafe or another child is being hurt, you intervene immediately. I'm not suggesting you book a private meeting for next Tuesday while Riley launches a chair at you across the room. But lots of conversations about correcting behaviour and coaching behaviour don't need an audience, and they don't benefit from an audience.

If the behaviour can wait 30 seconds until you're standing beside the pupil quietly, or until the rest of the class are working, when their attention is focused elsewhere, that's the perfect time to deal with it. And when I say removing the audience, it doesn't necessarily mean removing Riley from the room or the class from the room. It's about where the audience's attention is directed, and whether the conversation with the student is kind of like carried out on stage, center stage, or off stage.

Secondly, use the process of connection before correction. And I don't, again, mean we need to spend 20 minutes building a deep therapeutic relationship or having a deep discussion about what he likes on his Calvary. I mean, he's clearly a beef, roast potato, and cabbage guy. You can just sense it. What I mean is we have to explicitly signal that the relationship between us isn't in danger before asking him to talk about something uncomfortable. Here, your tone matters, and your body language matters.

Sometimes a simple sentence like, "Riley, look, you're okay. I'm not having a go at you. You know I like you, and that isn't going to change. We just need to sort out what just happened." Those kind of statements change the temperature of the conversation and whether the conversation is personal or not. The message you're actually giving is, "What you've done hasn't changed the way I see you. We're still okay. There's a problem here, but the problem isn't you. It isn't your identity as a human being, and problems can be fixed."

Third, we're going to separate the behaviour from the child. And this is where that guilt versus shame distinction becomes really practical. Keep your language focused on what the pupil did. "That comment wasn't kind. You hurt Josh's feelings. Knocking his things on the floor wasn't acceptable. It's time to put that right." Compare that with, "You again. You're so rude. You're always disruptive. How dare you speak to me like that?" The first set of statements focuses on Riley's behaviour. The second focuses on his identity.

We want to keep the child as close as possible to, "I did something bad," rather than pushing them towards, "I am a bad person," because from Riley's perspective, hopefully, if he's saying, "I did something bad, and I can do something about it, I can apologise, I can fix it, and make a different choice next time," then we're on the path to progress. And fourth, we need to create this route back into group acceptance. And this one is really important. Once a pupil's made a mistake, what is their path back into the relationship with the teacher or the other pupil, back into the classroom, back into being accepted by the social group?

Can Riley pick up the pencil case and apologise? Can he replace something he broke? Can he redo the task? Can he have another go at a conversation that went wrong? Can he come back into the lesson and start over? Because what we want is a pathway that goes from behaviour to acknowledging guilt and taking responsibility, putting it right, and then being reintegrated back into the group. What we want to avoid is the behaviour followed by public spotlight and exposure, followed by shame, defence, blame, and escalation.

And once the pupil has genuinely repaired what's happened, where possible, just leave it there. Don't keep dragging the incident around behind them for the rest of the week, like a load of rusty cans tied to a wedding car. They made a mistake, they took responsibility, they repaired it. It's done. And by the way, if you're supporting a pupil whose behaviour often seems confusing to you or disproportionate or just difficult to explain, I've got a free resource called the SEND Behaviour Handbook that can help.

It helps you look at the behaviour you see in class and start thinking about the SEND and SEMH needs that might be underneath driving it, including conditions like autism or ADHD or trauma or attachment or other areas of need. It's completely free and will put a link in the episode description so you can download it and have it to hand when you're thinking about the individual pupils that you work with and want to support.

So let's quickly recap. Guilt and shame aren't quite the same thing. Guilt focuses on behaviour. I did something bad. Shame focuses on identity. I am a bad person.

Ordinary shame that comes and goes is a normal part of being human. It's not nice, but we don't need to pathologise every child who feels embarrassed after making a mistake. But when shame grows into something that's intense, that's long-lasting, it's persistent or overwhelming, pupils might start to develop ways of defending themselves against it.

And those defences don't always look like we expect them to. Those defences can look like smiling or smirking or joking or denying or blaming, as well as anger or walking away or aggression. It looks different on different kids.

And finally, just because a child is experiencing long-term shame and we understand the reason for their behaviour, it doesn't mean we remove accountability or say that behaviour's okay. We just have to think more carefully about how we get them into an emotional state where that accountability is possible, so we can plan a more positive future path for them.

If you found this episode useful, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you're listening, and share it with one colleague who you think would find it useful too. And if you've got 30 seconds, leaving us a review really does help other teachers, SENCOs, and school leaders discover school behaviour secrets. Apparently, if enough people do that, the podcast algorithm looks favourably upon us.

And much like King Henry VIII, I've learned that when an all-powerful, unpredictable authority demands tribute, it's generally just safer to give it what it wants. And for our own standing, that algorithm has got a plate overflowing with beef, gravy, and Yorkshire pudding, projecting its status. Don't question my thinking on this.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you have a brilliant week. Why not have a carvery yourself? And I can't wait to see you on the next episode of School Behaviour Secrets.

(This automated transcript may not be 100% accurate.)