At the accident site, I feared the young driver had died, and though disconcerted by my inability to help him, other people stepped in and took over, absolving me from shame. On the other hand, Baxter’s experiences seem meant to shame her: she was fired when she could have been “down-sized” after the move; she was required to come into work but was divested of tasks; and her supervisor asked her to do work she had been publicly deemed incompetent to perform. Baxter demonstrated her shame by reading adverse judgment in her co-workers’ faces, by praying and seeking scripture that God would prevent her being shamed, and by avoiding her former workplace and co-workers. She was horrified that her 31 years of service and many promotions would be rewarded in this fashion. She was terrified that she would not be able to support her family. All this fear and shame constituted pain sufficient to enable dissociation and entrench her distress. Recently, neuroscientists have been able to distinguish more discretely the physiological activities of emotions associated with fear, such as anger and shame. Their findings suggest shame follows a discrete physiological arousal pattern (notably, a distinct cardiovascular path) resembling the stress-related experience of threat (Herrald & Tomaka, 2002), and is part of a constellation of emotions inducing social pain (Panksepp, 2005). The social nature of shame is borne out in four empirical studies by Smith, Webster, Parrott, and Eyre (2002) who define shame as:

“public exposure of a [moral] transgression or [nonmoral] incompetency,” more likely to occur in situations that elicit negative self-appraisals. (p. 157)