I've always had an aversion to pictures. Yes, even though I had a growing TikTok channel for a while. I'm fine recording myself when I have something to say or teach, but when I'm out at dinner or walking around and someone wants to capture the moment with a photograph, I find myself feeling uneasy and hesitant. Maybe it's because of the sudden shift of expectations; whereas before I could exist in the moment without any cognitive energy being spent toward what I look like or how people perceive me, when someone wants to take a snapshot of how I appear, my mind starts to wonder: Are my clothes dirty? Is my hair messed up? Who will see this? In what capacity will they be seeing this? Will I have a harder time socially with them if they see a picture of me in this state? What state am I in, and how will others—who I may or may not know but may need to interact with in the future—perceive me?
Anyone with even a slight understanding of psychology will recognize the telltale markers of attachment wounds and control in my behavior. My inclination toward rumination about others' perceptions reflects my childhood experience—one dominated by a father who projected his own deep-seated shame onto his son. He justified staying in a codependent relationship with my mother by claiming it was "for the kids," when in reality, it ensured he would always have someone more vulnerable to care for, someone who needed more help than himself. This pattern of behavior serves to absolve oneself of the responsibility for self-reflection and understanding. When parents treat a child's natural mistakes and exploration as fundamentally wrong, they create a convenient external target for their own unresolved shame.
You might diagnose me as having some kind of hypervigilance toward how I am perceived, and I do have that. And I feel okay sharing that with you because it's actually something I've seen more often than not working in the technology sector over the last two decades. In fact, it's something that has taken over the way we connect with each other online.
What is modern social media, really, if not a collective gravitation toward our need to control how we're perceived? I've talked to enough people to know that my childhood is not unique; most of us can point to one or more adults in our lives growing up who tried controlling their environments by projecting their own childhood wounds onto the children around them. Shame, then, is a universal construct that we all have had the unfortunate privilege of feeling, in some way or another, projected onto us.
Advertising companies have long understood the utility of shame in generating sales. Shame is a motivating force principally because of its relationship to our childhood attachment wounds that are exacerbated through the process of socialization. Men are shamed into performing masculinity for each other; women are shamed into performing femininity for men. If you do not perform the in-group rituals and slogans, then you are not part of the group—and belonging is such a necessary aspect of human survival that a lack of belonging to any social group is one of the highest predictors of suicidal ideation.
Research by Mills et al. (2007) found that parents prone to shame tend to exercise heightened psychological control and rejection in their parenting. Children with parents like this are made to feel that their worth depends on living up to an artificially imposed standard—and that failures to do so will result in a devastating withdrawal of love and acceptance. This shame game of parents saying "here, take my shame so that I don't have to feel it" instills in those of us who survive childhood a sense that what we ought to achieve and use to define our self-worth is extrinsic, rather than intrinsic.
Social media seems to simultaneously trigger and soothe our deep-seated anxieties about being seen. In controlling how others perceive us online, our exposure to larger audiences exemplifies a broader pattern in how social media shapes our relationship with being seen. Platforms like TikTok, which have been specifically designed to capitalize on phenomena in addiction psychology, seduce our battered hearts with a contradiction disguised as a premise of utility: the ability to carefully curate our presentation while maintaining an illusion of authenticity.
UC Berkeley economics professor Steven Tadelis (2008) showed that when people's actions become more exposed to others, they not only change their own behavior but strategically anticipate others' reactions to being observed. On social media, with metrics that instantly quantify one's social approval, this effect is supercharged. Creators shape their content not based on authentic self-expression, but on a kind of preemptive shame, contorting themselves to avoid loss of status in front of the all-seeing algorithm.
What social media has done is take these deeply embedded, maladaptive behavioral patterns and scale them up to the level of societal infrastructure. The effects are most visible at the extremes, but the deeper impacts are more subtle and pervasive, evident in the creeping sense of inauthenticity and fear that pervades so much of our curated self-expression.
Today, physically alienated in our cities designed for cars rather than people, we turn to technologically-mediated community. Social media can serve as a kind of accessibility affordance for connection, but what happens when the basic human need for belonging collides with platforms designed not for fostering community, but for monetizing attention? How does a need to belong programmatically coincide with a latent cultivation of shame?
The result is a kind of algorithmic alienation—a system that simultaneously connects and disconnects, that offers belonging through features and interaction patterns that, ironically, deepen our isolation. Content gains traction by strategically tapping into deep-seated patterns of attachment and belonging that first took root in childhood. Once a piece of content strikes this emotional chord, it becomes amplified within the group, creating a self-reinforcing cycle.
To resist this corrosive atmosphere, we must cultivate not just different technologies but also different technology habits—like healthy detachment, and a commitment to our own inner voice. This means writing the truths that burn in us, sharing ourselves in all our unfiltered humanity, and grounding our actions in our deepest values rather than the fickle tribunal of performative public opinion.
There are no easy answers, only exploration and adaptation. Perhaps the most important question we can ask ourselves is how we might break inherited cycles of trauma when our very tools of communication are reinforcing them.
References
Li, W., Ng, F.F-Y., & Chiu, C-D. (2024). When parents are at fault: Development and validation of the parental guilt and shame proneness scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 106(5), 595-608.
Mills, R.S.L., Freeman, W.S., Clara, I.P., Elgar, F.J., Walling, B.R., & Mak, L. (2007). Parent proneness to shame and the use of psychological control. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 16(3), 359-374.
Tadelis, S. (2008). The power of shame and the rationality of trust. UC Berkeley Working Paper Series. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8cq792hr