What happens to you when you make a mistake? Do you freeze up, feel sick, lash out, get hot and bothered, or are you able to shrug it off, learn from it and move on?

Truth is, we all, yes all, make mistakes. And even those of us who have secure attachments and haven’t experienced early year trauma can find this hard to handle sometimes. But what if you’ve been told you’re the mistake? What if you’ve been blamed for things that weren’t you, or you’ve learnt to believe that it’s not just a bad thing that you’ve done, but that you are bad?

Shame is a really common by-product of those who have experienced early year trauma. And the reactions it provokes, when understood, make perfect sense. They are often modes of protection — ways of trying to shift the attention away from ourselves and onto someone else. These reactions are sometimes referred to as the shield of shame.

There are a number of ways this can show itself. Take blame, for example: “It was his fault.” If it wasn’t me, then I can’t be responsible for it, which means I can’t be a bad person. Blame can also become projection — if I make someone else feel bad, perhaps they will start to think it is their fault. They might start to think they are the bad person instead.

Then there is minimising: “He wasn’t really hurt. It wasn’t that bad.” If what happened doesn’t seem like a big deal, then perhaps I don’t seem like a bad person either.

Denial can be another shield: “I never did anything.” If I didn’t do anything, how can I be bad?

And then there is rage: “You always blame me.” Perhaps this is the closest to actually accepting and feeling that they are bad, but the behaviour becomes so extreme that it pushes the caring adult further away. And, of course, that can then reinforce the very feelings of rejection and shame that were there in the first place.

All of these responses are desperately trying to take away the ownership and the sense of feeling bad from the individual. They are protective responses, even when they can look difficult, challenging or completely unreasonable from the outside.

This is why it can be so complicated to work with toxic shame. Any kind of correction or consequence can trigger a shame-based reaction. What might seem like a fairly ordinary conversation about something that has gone wrong can feel very different to someone who has learnt, deep down, that getting something wrong means they are wrong.

This is where timing, the use of PACE and natural consequences, with the caring adult close by, become so important. It isn’t about avoiding boundaries or pretending that mistakes don’t matter. It’s about helping someone experience the difference between “I did something wrong” and “I am wrong.”

Very few of us like making mistakes, but they are unavoidable. As adults, modelling a positive reaction when we make a mistake is also a good place to start. Being able to say, “Oops, I got that wrong. I’m sorry. I’ll try again,” gives children and young people something really important to see: making a mistake doesn’t have to mean everything falls apart.

Shame can sit underneath these responses, but there can also be other feelings — feeling like a failure, feeling stupid, or feeling that you’re just not good enough. Some of these might ring true, on a lesser scale, for some of us anyway.

Our reactions to mistakes are so important. What happens after a mistake can either reinforce shame or help someone learn that mistakes are something we can survive. We can take responsibility, repair what we can, learn from what happened and move on.

This is such a massive topic and I’ve barely scratched the surface, but hopefully it has at least stimulated some thoughts, or brought to the surface again, this complex and important challenge.

Because perhaps the question isn’t simply “How do we respond to mistakes?”

Perhaps it’s also “What have we learnt a mistake says about us?”

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You Made a Mistake. You Are Not a Mistake.

Making Room for our Senses