Hiding from Other People
From Dissertation to Essay
There are moments when a person does not primarily wish to be understood, comforted, or helped.
They want to disappear.
Not necessarily to die, but to escape being visible. To sink into the chair. To hide the face. To leave the room without anyone noticing. To be somewhere no one asks, no one looks, and no one expects an answer.
This is one of shame’s most fundamental movements.
When we feel shame, we do not merely avert our gaze. The whole body may try to withdraw. The head bows. The shoulders sink. The voice becomes weaker. The words stop. Some cover their faces with their hands. Others hide behind their hair, their clothing, or an appearance of indifference.
The person tries to make themselves smaller.
As though what is not seen cannot be judged.
The Body’s Desire to Disappear
Shame is a self-conscious emotion. We do not merely experience something painful. At the same time, we become aware of ourselves as the one experiencing it.
I do not only feel discomfort.
I watch myself feeling discomfort.
I imagine that the other person sees the same thing.
The urge to hide then arises. It is not only the event that must be kept from the gaze of others. The person may feel that the face, the body, or the voice itself reveals something that cannot bear to be seen.
In the interviews on which my doctoral dissertation was based, hiding was described both as a bodily act and as a way of being in the world. People might cover their faces, avoid eye contact, conceal their bodies in large clothing, or protect themselves behind objects when what was being told came too close. Helpers described how the need to hide often had to be respected in the beginning. Only later could the person be gently encouraged to show more of the face and remain in contact.
This bodily language must be approached with care.
Not everyone who looks down feels shame. Not all large clothing conceals a violated body. Not every silence contains a secret. The other person must not be turned into the object of an interpretation in which they do not recognise themselves.
Yet the body may say something that words are not yet able to express.
It may say:
This is too close.
I cannot bear to be seen while I tell this.
Let me remain here, but do not ask for all of me yet.
The Hiding Place as Protection
It is easy to describe hiding as a problem. The person who hides must come forward. The person who remains silent must begin to speak. The person who avoids eye contact must learn to meet the gaze.
But a hiding place may also be necessary.
Children hide when the world becomes dangerous. They crawl under the table, behind the door, or into a cupboard. They cover their heads with a blanket. The hidden space offers a sense of boundary when other boundaries have been violated.
Adults also need places where they are not available to the demands of others. We close the door, draw the curtains, turn off the phone, or seek solitude. This is not necessarily an escape from life. It may be a way of regaining oneself.
A person who has experienced sexual abuse or other violations may have a particular need to decide when the body, the face, and the story are to become visible. The right to hide may then be connected to the right to establish boundaries.
This is an important distinction.
The violation consisted precisely in another person taking liberties. Someone crossed the boundaries of the body, trust, or self-determination. If the helper later demands openness before the person is ready, the old experience may be repeated in a new form.
Even well-intentioned questions may intrude.
Even therapy may become impatient.
Even care may become an expectation that the other person should open up.
The aim must therefore not be to deprive the person of the hiding place. They must first experience that they themselves can decide when to come forward.
When Protection Becomes a Prison
What protects us in one situation may restrict us in another.
A child may learn that the safest course is to remain silent, avoid attention, and conceal their own needs. This strategy may be understandable in a dangerous or unpredictable world. It reduces the risk of further violations.
But the strategy may follow the child into adulthood.
The person may continue to make themselves small even after the danger has passed. They may avoid closeness, reject help, and withhold experiences that need language. They may live an apparently ordinary life while ensuring that no one comes close enough to truly know them.
The hiding place has then changed its character.
It is no longer merely a place one enters for protection. It becomes a place from which one cannot find the way out.
This rarely happens through a conscious decision. No one wakes one morning and decides never again to trust another human being. The withdrawal takes place gradually.
One refrains from telling one thing.
Then another.
One smiles when one really wants to cry.
One says that everything is fine.
One becomes skilled at answering questions without revealing anything.
Eventually, the distance between the visible life and the lived life may become so great that the person no longer knows how the two can be connected.
Disappearing in the Midst of Others
It is possible to hide without being alone.
Some conceal themselves by physically withdrawing from the community. Others remain in the middle of it and do what is expected. They go to work, meet friends, take responsibility, and participate in conversations. They may be friendly, helpful, and socially competent.
Yet there are parts of them that are never present.
They show what can be accepted and conceal what they fear will lead to rejection. In this way, a person may be visible and invisible at the same time.
This is not necessarily deception. It may be an established form of self-protection. The person has learned that belonging depends upon keeping certain parts outside.
I can be with you, but not as my whole self.
I can belong as long as you do not know.
Shame therefore creates a paradox. The person longs for community, yet fears that the community will be lost if they become known. They seek closeness while simultaneously protecting themselves against it.
The other person comes near, but never completely near.
The Shame of Feeling Shame
Shame is not merely an emotion we conceal.
We may also feel ashamed that we feel shame.
This creates a new layer around the original experience. First, the person feels ashamed of the body, the event, the family, or the self. Then they feel ashamed that they have not moved on. They believe they should have become stronger, freer, and less affected by the past.
I should have put this behind me.
I should no longer react this way.
Other people have experienced worse things.
Why can I not simply pull myself together?
Shame thus becomes self-reinforcing. The emotion that already produced silence becomes something that must again be hidden.
In the dissertation, I discussed how shame is often socially denied. We live in societies where shame is present everywhere, yet is rarely named directly. We conceal not only what we are ashamed of; we also attempt to conceal the feeling of shame itself. As several theorists of shame have observed, we are ashamed of being ashamed.
The emotion then becomes difficult to recognise.
It may appear as anger, contempt, withdrawal, or coldness. The person may not say, “I feel ashamed.” They may say, “I do not care,” “I need no one,” or “There is something wrong with everyone else.”
Sometimes this is not a lie.
It is the emotion in disguise.
Social Silence
We often speak of silence as something an individual chooses.
Why did she not tell anyone?
Why did he not ask for help?
Why did they wait so long?
The questions may be understandable, but they easily place the entire responsibility upon the person who remained silent. They overlook the fact that silence is also created socially.
A person does not tell merely because they have words. They tell when there is someone who can listen.
They tell when they have reason to believe that their words will be taken seriously.
They tell when the risk of speaking appears smaller than the risk of continuing to remain silent.
Many have experienced that attempts to speak were dismissed, minimised, or explained away. Some were not believed. Others noticed that the listener became so distressed that they themselves had to comfort the person who was listening.
In this way, the person learns that silence protects not only themselves, but also those around them.
The family must not be divided.
The elderly father should be left in peace.
The mother cannot bear to know.
The children must be protected.
This is not the right time to raise it.
Shame then becomes more than an individual burden. It performs social work. It keeps stories outside the community and protects relationships, institutions, and self-images from uncomfortable truths.
The price is paid by the person who carries the silence.
The Paradox of Seeking Help
Seeking help means making oneself visible.
For the person who feels shame, this may be precisely what is most frightening.
One must enter a place that reveals that one cannot manage everything alone. One must give one’s name, explain why one has come, and perhaps speak of experiences one has spent many years concealing.
The need for help may therefore itself become a source of shame.
The person does not only think:
I need someone to talk to.
They may also think:
The fact that I need help proves how weak or damaged I am.
In the material from the dissertation, it was described how people could feel intense shame when they came to seek help. Entering the room meant risking being seen as they feared they truly were. It could take a long time before eye contact became possible, and before they were able to see themselves through another and less condemning gaze.
The accessibility of services therefore concerns more than opening hours, telephone numbers, and waiting lists. It also concerns how the threshold is experienced by the person standing outside.
Is this a place where I will be judged?
Must I have the correct story?
Must I reveal everything immediately?
Can I come here even when I do not know what to say?
Such questions determine whether the door is genuinely open.
Between Hiding and Being Exposed
There is a decisive difference between showing oneself and being exposed.
To show oneself is an action in which the person participates. They retain some control over the timing, the form, and the boundary. They speak because there is a beginning trust that the other person can receive what is told.
To be exposed is to lose control over how one’s story becomes visible. Others ask questions, name the experience, or pass the story on. The person once again becomes the object of other people’s actions.
Openness is therefore not always an unconditional good.
We live in a time when people are often expected to share. Personal experiences are told in the media, in books, and through social networks. Openness can break taboos and give others courage to speak. But it can also become a new norm: the person who does not tell may be portrayed as though they are still living in an unhealthy or inauthentic way.
Some experiences belong to the private space of the individual.
No one owes the public their story.
No one has to tell everything in order to be truthful.
No one becomes free simply by making the private visible.
What matters is not that everything should be brought into the light, but that the person gains greater freedom to choose what should remain hidden, what should be shared, with whom, and when.
The Cautious Helper
The person who encounters someone in hiding may easily become too active.
We want to make contact. We ask questions. We interpret the silence. We encourage the other person to look up, speak more clearly, or tell us more.
But shame does not tolerate intrusion well.
The cautious helper must be able to remain close without forcing entry. This requires a particular form of patience: a patience that is not passive, but keeps the space open.
I am here.
You do not have to tell me everything.
You may stop.
You may return.
I can bear that the words take time.
These are not merely kind expressions. They restore something the violation took away from the person: the right to decide over their own boundaries.
Sensitivity and tact are therefore not decorative additions to professional work. They are part of knowledge itself. The concluding discussion of the dissertation emphasises precisely that shame often works silently and remains concealed, and that the person who wishes to help must listen for the indirect voice of shame and meet it with care.
Practical wisdom appears here as the ability to understand when to ask and when to wait.
When to approach and when to give space.
When silence protects and when it has begun to destroy.
No method can determine this in advance.
It must be understood in the encounter.
The Courage to Come Forward
We often speak of courage as the ability to act visibly and forcefully.
But courage may also consist in raising one’s eyes for a few seconds.
Allowing the hands to fall from the face.
Speaking one sentence that has never before been said aloud.
Returning for the next conversation.
Believing that another human being may listen without contempt.
For the person who has lived in hiding for a long time, these may be significant acts.
They should not be romanticised. No one has a duty to become courageous in a particular way. But when the person begins to move out of the hiding place, the act must be understood as more than the transfer of information.
It is a risk.
The person places their own worth at stake in the encounter:
This is something I have hidden.
May I still remain here?
The helper’s answer is given not only in words. It is given in the face, the voice, the body, and in what happens afterwards. Does the contact remain the same? Does distance appear? Does the gaze change?
A conversation may therefore become a decisive existential moment. Not because everything is healed, but because an old expectation may fail to be confirmed.
I showed something of myself.
The other person did not leave.
From Hiding Place to Belonging
The aim is not a life in which nothing remains hidden.
A person without privacy is not necessarily a free person. We need inner rooms, secrets, silence, and boundaries. There are aspects of life that should not be made available to everyone.
The problem arises when hiding is no longer chosen, but imposed by the fear of rejection.
When the person cannot reveal themselves to anyone.
When they must edit their entire history in order to belong.
When closeness always stops before it becomes real.
Then shame has turned the hiding place into a way of life.
The way forward does not consist in tearing down the walls by force. It consists in creating relationships in which the door can be opened from within.
The dissertation describes a movement from exclusion, negative self-evaluation, and suppressed emotions toward inclusion, trust, and new experiences. When the person is met with respect and recognition, they may gradually dare to allow others to come closer. In this way, the negative spiral can be broken, not through forced visibility, but through dialogical encounters in which it becomes possible to belong without losing oneself.
This is the practical meaning of recognition.
It does not say:
Come forward, and then we shall decide whether you deserve a place.
It says:
There is a place for you even while you are still protecting yourself.
Becoming Visible Without Losing Oneself
Shame tells the person that there are only two possibilities.
Either they must remain hidden and preserve belonging.
Or they must reveal themselves and risk losing everything.
But perhaps there is a third possibility.
To become visible within a relationship where visibility does not lead to exposure.
To speak without being reduced to the story.
To be met without being taken over.
To belong without having to conceal one’s whole self.
This is the possibility that a good helping relationship must attempt to open.
Not by pulling the person into the light, but by making the light less threatening.
Not by demanding trust, but by acting in a way that may gradually make trust possible.
Not by removing every hiding place, but by ensuring that the person does not remain alone within it.
Hiding is an understandable human response when the world has been dangerous. The hiding place may protect the body, the story, and the final remnant of self-determination.
But the human being also needs to be seen.
Not by everyone.
Not all the time.
Not in every way.
They need to be seen by someone who will not use their visibility against them.
Perhaps the way out of shame begins precisely there: not in the demand to come forward, but in the experience that there is another human being from whom one no longer needs to hide.
Perhaps the way out of shame begins not in the demand to come forward,
but in the experience that there is another human being from whom one no longer needs to hide.
This essay was written in a conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT
This essay is part of the series “From Dissertation to Essay” and is based particularly on the dissertation’s discussions of hiding, the social denial and repression of shame, exclusion, alienation, and the struggle for recognition: Pettersen, K. T. (2009). An Exploration into the Concept and Phenomenon of Shame within the Context of Child Sexual Abuse: An Existential-Dialogical Perspective of Social Work within the Settings of a Norwegian Incest Centre. NTNU.
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