02/11/2025
It's strange how often pride and shame live in the same house. On the surface, they seem like opposites, one loud and self-assured, the other quiet and self-critical. But as the psychoanalyst Karen Horney once suggested, pride often begins as protection. She believed that women’s struggles were not rooted in envy of men (as per Sigmund Freud) but in the way society made them feel inferior. What Freud saw as an innate flaw, Karen Horney saw as a reaction to cultural pressure and emotional neglect. In her view, pride was often a defence, a way of holding ourselves together when the world made us feel small.
And that is the thing about pride. It can look like confidence, but sometimes it is just armour. When we have been hurt, dismissed, or made to feel less than, pride steps in to keep us safe. It says, ‘I don’t need anyone’ or ‘I’m fine’, even when we are not. But the same armour that protects us also keeps us from being seen. It keeps love, empathy, and connection at a distance.
That is where Brené Brown’s work picks up the thread. Brown, who has spent decades studying shame and vulnerability, describes shame as “the intensely painful feeling of believing we are unworthy of love and belonging.” When that belief takes hold, the ego often rushes in to compensate, using pride as a mask. We puff ourselves up to cover the parts of us that feel unworthy. It is a clever disguise, but it is exhausting. Because deep down, pride built on fear is never peace. It is performance.
Psychologist June Tangney helps us understand what is happening underneath that performance. She draws a simple but powerful distinction: guilt says, ‘I did something bad,’ while shame says, ‘I am bad.’ Shame attacks the self, while guilt focuses on behaviour. When shame takes root, pride can become its mirror image, a desperate attempt to swing the other way, to prove we are good enough, strong enough, untouchable. But both shame and ego-driven pride distort reality. One makes us smaller than we are; the other makes us larger than life. Neither lets us rest in truth.
Melanie Klein, another early psychoanalyst, believed that emotional growth depends on our ability to hold opposing feelings such as love and envy, pride and guilt, gratitude and resentment, without being torn apart by them. That is the real work: learning to live in the tension between confidence and humility, between self-respect and self-compassion. When we can hold both, pride stops being a mask and becomes something much gentler, a quiet acknowledgment of worth.
And that is where healing begins. It is not about getting rid of pride or erasing shame; it is about transforming both through ‘self-acceptance’. Not the kind that excuses everything, but the kind that says, ‘I can see my flaws and still know my value.’ This is the kind of pride that does not need to shout. It does not compare or compete. It just stands, grounded, human, and enough.
When pride grows out of authenticity instead of ego, it becomes a foundation rather than a wall. It is the steady self-respect that coexists with humility, the kind that says, ‘I know who I am, and I’m still learning.’ And as Brené Brown reminds us, authenticity is not a destination. It is a daily practice. It is the courage to let go of who we think we are supposed to be and embrace who we already are.
So the next time you feel yourself puffing up or shrinking down, pause and ask, ‘What am I protecting right now?’
Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is not to stand taller, but to soften. To let the armour slip, even just a little, and remember that we were never meant to be perfect, only real.
