By Casey Mosbacher, SCS Intern
Through numerous conversations with Guests experiencing homelessness who seek support and services at The Compass Station, a common thread in their stories is shame. Experiencing homelessness puts these individuals in a box full of negative connotations and stigmas that make accessibility hard and genuine human connection harder. The majority of society turns a blind eye to the unhoused, as if not acknowledging them makes them not exist. Imagine being treated by everyone like you were not there, that you meant less and deserved less. That sense of hopelessness and shame piles up and changes the way people perceive themselves.
Guests of the Compass Station experience demeaning treatment on the daily, from being heckled to scoffed at, their areas for rest teeming with scorn and judgment. They feel the weight of assumptions: that they are lazy, dirty, drug dependent. Even when these assumptions are untrue, the social pressure to shrink, isolate, and make themselves smaller is immense, and it is embarrassing in a way that burrows deep.
At The Compass Station, we talk to guests of all situations at all points in their time experiencing homelessness. While no singular person is the same, people freshly unhoused have hope and drive to quickly get on their feet again, but as time goes on I can see it become more and more difficult for them to believe they have the capability to pull themselves out. In the same way, the chronically unhoused (1+ years) frequently use language insinuating that this is how it is, they become complacent in their situation.
This shame doesn’t just affect how others treat them, it seeps inward. Simple tasks most people take for granted become fraught: going to the grocery store, asking where the bathroom is, finding a place to rest. There is a constant small voice, scared of what others think, that grows louder every time it is reinforced.
And no one is a tougher critic than oneself, that’s something most people can relate to. But for those experiencing homelessness, that self-criticism is compounded by relentless external messaging that confirms their worst fears about themselves, hardening into false beliefs about who they are and what they deserve.
This is where self-isolation and self-doubt can spiral into something more debilitating: learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is a psychological condition where an individual, having experienced repeated and uncontrollable stressful situations, stops trying to change their circumstances even when opportunities for improvement exist. The stressors and negative environments chip away at any sense of capability. And beyond that… they don’t want to try, because they don’t want to fail trying.
Martin Seligman, who coined the term learned helplessness showed that if you expose dogs to traumatic experiences in the form of small electric shocks that they cannot escape from, they fail to escape future shocks when it is actually easily avoidable, in contrast to non-traumatised dogs who quickly learn how to dodge foreseeable pain. Seligman pushes that this same behavior is applicable to humans, experiencing numerous traumatic events can a person believe that they cannot escape them even if they can.
This is one of the reasons The Compass Station is a vital service for unhoused community members of the Central Beach area. Guests express gratitude for what many would consider small things: a place to sit, to set their bags down, to use the bathroom, to feel allowed to exist in the space. There are no people here wishing they weren’t present, no one treating them as an eyesore interrupting a beach walk or a shopping trip. Shared experience and goals promotes reliance and jumping over the hurdles in their situations. It is a place where the outside world’s judgment is held at bay, and something closer to normalcy becomes possible.
Being seen and treated as an individual, someone with experiences and hardships like any other person, is the antithesis of shame. One bad interaction can darken someone’s entire day. But the reverse is also true. By choosing to be kind and present with the people around us, even strangers, even people whose lives look different from our own, we make everyone’s days a little lighter.
References
Boone, A. (2022, May 6). The weight of shame: a common burden on the street. Street Spirit. https://thestreetspirit.org/2022/05/05/the-weight-of-shame-a-common-burden-on-the-street/
Budiarto, Y., & Helmi, A. F. (2021). Shame and self-esteem: A meta-analysis. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 17(2), 131–145. https://doi.org/10.5964/ejop.2115
Matulič-Domadzič, V., Munté-Pascual, A., De Vicente-Zueras, I., & León-Jiménez, S. (2020). “Life Starts for me again.” The Social Impact of Psychology on Programs for Homeless People: Solidarity Networks for the Effectiveness of Interventions. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 3069. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03069
MSEd, K. C. (2025, September 3). What causes learned helplessness? Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-learned-helplessness-2795326
Overmier, J. B., & Seligman, M. E. (1967). Effects of inescapable shock upon subsequent escape and avoidance responding. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, 63(1), 28–33. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0024166
University of California San Francisco. (2023, June 20). California Statewide study investigates causes and impacts of homelessness | UC San Francisco. California Statewide Study Investigates Causes and Impacts of Homelessness | UC San Francisco. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/06/425646/california-statewide-study-investigates-causes-and-impacts-homelessness