“Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” ~Brain Brown
I used to call myself “Beetroot”. It was a label of flaw that my inner critic shouted at me every time I felt the heat rise in my cheeks. For years, I lived with erythrophobia, an intense and persistent fear of turning red that silently shattered my world from the inside.
Most people blush. A warm flush creeps up the neck before a first date or a public speech, and then it passes. For me, it was not so easy. Blush was not the problem. It meant I had it attached. Every time my face turned red, a merciless internal commentary kicked in: Everyone would see it. They are judging you. you are weak You are ridiculous. you are broken I spent years trying to outgrow that voice and I never quite managed it.
I want to share what that experience was really like, and more importantly, what ultimately transpired. Because if you’ve ever found yourself hiding from life to avoid a feeling, I think this might resonate with you.
Social death penalty
The first time I remember holding onto this fear was during an elementary school assembly. I unexpectedly won a prize. When I was called out in front of five hundred children, my face turned bright red and my legs trembled. I was not proud of the award. I was shocked. I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me whole.
The shame that followed was so overwhelming that I started skipping school whenever I thought I might get another prize. Finally, I decided it was safe to stop doing anything that guaranteed a reward. I chose invisibility over recognition, and I didn’t quite understand what I was trading. I was a child the only way to protect myself that she knew.
This pattern followed me into adulthood with a kind of quiet, relentless persistence. The job interview turned into an ordeal. Group meetings at work felt like minefields. I avoided new people, struggled to hold down a job, and eventually became so isolated that I had almost no close friends. The loneliness was real, and it was heavy.
I was trapped in a vicious cycle from which I could not find a way out. Fear of blushing created anxiety. That anxiety makes salivation more likely. Blushing confirmed my worst beliefs about myself. And so the wheel keeps turning. The harder I tried to stop, the faster it seemed to spin.
Why am I fighting so hard?
For a long time I did not understand why the fear gripped me so tightly. I just knew it did. I tried to hide my face during the conversation, avoiding eye contact at all costs. I spoke quickly to end the interaction before the blush came. I beat myself up after every social encounter, autopsied every moment I blushed. I researched remedies, read forums at two in the morning, and tried breathing techniques that helped for about thirty seconds.
What I finally realized, with the help of hypnotherapy and a lot of honest self-reflection, is that the blushing itself was never the main problem. The main problem was shame, and shame had a history long before the film entered the first assembly hall.
I grew up in a dysfunctional environment where I was often belittled. Mistakes are magnified. Emotions were mocked. Sensitivity is considered a liability. Without realizing it, I internalized those messages and created an inner critic who sounded an awful lot like the people who made me feel unlovable and worthless. When I blushed, the critic didn’t say, “Your cheeks are a little warm.” It said, “See? You’re just as pathetic as you’ve always been told.”
Blushing became a symbol for everything I believed was wrong with me. That’s a lot of weight for a physiological reaction that takes about three seconds and doesn’t hurt anyone.
Sensitivity to errors
The turning point didn’t come loud. It came quietly, in a moment of exhaustion when I had just finished fighting. I remember sitting alone after another social event and thinking, I can’t go on. Not blushing. War against it.
I started reading about the nervous system, about what actually happens physiologically when a person blushes. Facial blood vessels dilate in response to social or emotional stimuli. It’s unintentional. It is, in a strange way, a sign of a nervous system that is alert and responsive to the world around it. Highly sensitive people blush more easily. That sensitivity makes them empathetic, perceptive and deeply present with other people.
I found a story about a monk who blushed easily and went to his teacher full of shame. The teacher simply pointed to a maple tree that turned red in autumn and said that the maple does not become less red on purpose. Its nature is to flash in front of everyone’s eyes without apology. Something about that image cut right through me. I spent my entire adult life trying to keep my nature at bay, and all it did was make me miserable.
Just as a maple tree does not apologize for the bright red of its leaves, I did not need to apologize for my anatomy. I was not flawed. I was sensitive. And sensitivity, I’m beginning to realize, is not the same thing as vulnerability.
Choosing compassion over judgment
So I slowly and imperfectly made a choice to stop fighting. I began to treat blushes the way I might treat a nervous friend: with patience instead of contempt. When I felt the heat rising, instead of daring to panic, I tried to notice it. Here it is. That’s right. It will pass.
It sounds deceptively simple. It wasn’t. Years of conditioning don’t dissolve overnight. But the direction of effort has changed, and it matters greatly. I was no longer trying to eliminate a part of myself.
I discovered that when I was kind to myself, I became kind to others. I began to notice how many people in any given room were a little uncomfortable, a little self-conscious, a little worried about how they were coming across. Almost everyone fears rejection. Almost everyone just wants to belong. My shame, the thing I thought was shameful, was being honest about how much I cared about my nervous system.
Gradually the separation started. I stayed in the conversation for a while. I accepted invitations that I would have declined before. I let people see me shocked without immediately constructing an exit strategy. And the world, as it turned out, did not end. I noticed the less I worried about blushing, the less I blushed.
find peace
If you’re reading this and you’re struggling with a part of yourself that you’ve spent years trying to suppress or hide, let me be clear: you are not broken. Your sensitivity is not a design flaw. It is part of what makes you a perceptive, compassionate, fully alive person.
The mind that created so much shame is the same powerful mind that can be redirected toward healing. takes time It takes patience. Willing to sit with the discomfort instead of running from it. But it is possible.
When we stop seeing our sensitivity as a weakness, we open the door to authentic connection and a life where we no longer feel the need to hide. We stop performing a version of ourselves that has been carefully edited for other people’s comfort, and start showing up as we really are. That, in my experience, is where the real connection begins.
Beetroot is still here occasionally. But he no longer runs the show.
about Mark Stubbles
Mark Stubbles is a hypnotherapist, author and course creator who specializes in helping others overcome anxiety and trauma. After walking the path from social isolation to self-acceptance, she now guides others to overcome their fear of embarrassment and regain their confidence. You can find more of his work here markstubbles.com or exploring its comparison Hypnotherapy versus talk therapy for fear of blushing.
