That's men for you: What are you ashamed of? What are the little, icky shameful things that would make you cringe if they were dragged out in the open?
We start to feel shame at an early age. Most of us remember incidents from our childhood in which we felt shame. Looked at from the perspective of adulthood, they may mean nothing, but they meant a great deal at the time.
Perhaps we were showing off to impress the adults and realised we were being laughed at; perhaps we were given a telling-off in front of everyone else; perhaps a teacher made us stand in a corner with our face to the wall; these and hundreds of other incidents may have given us many early experiences of shame.
It doesn't end with childhood. Adult life is full of opportunities for shame with its rejections and failures and the innumerable ways we fall flat on our face.
Some of my outstanding memories of adult shame are of the time I had to apologise to a colleague in front of all the other colleagues for something I had said in anger; the time someone dragged me along to their company Christmas "do" which I was asked to leave because only staff were allowed; and another, more recent one which I'm not not telling you about.
And for men the times you can't perform in bed are incredibly shaming - and it happens to all men except to compulsive liars.
So shame, actually, is in us all. The important thing is what we do with it.
American psychiatrist Donald Nathanson has spent a lifetime studying shame. He says there are four ways in which we try to handle it. These are that we attack ourselves, attack others, withdraw or avoid.
Attacking yourself means being very deferential, letting other people put you down or abuse you or putting yourself down.
Attacking others means putting other people down, making hurtful jokes about them, bullying them, physically abusing them, showing your contempt for them.
Withdrawing means hiding from people, being very shy, being silent or invisible.
And avoidance means using drink or drugs to distract yourself, bragging or boasting to distract other people, using your big car, your flashy clothes to avoid feeling shame.
Do you recognise yourself in any of this?
Nathanson would say a shift has occurred in the way we handle shame. In the past, we were more likely to attack ourselves, to be deferential and to accept being put down, to be shy, to hide away. Now, he says, we are more likely to attack other people or to use drink and drugs or status symbols to help us avoid shame.
I think he's right. Look at the epidemic of adult bullying that's going on. Look at the random attacks on people on the streets of our towns and cities. We know all about the drink and drugs culture here, how it's growing, how we don't seem to be able to stay in our own heads but need desperately to get out of our minds.
Nathanson would say the problem is not shame but running away from shame. The answer is to face it and to look at it differently.
You couldn't get it up last night? Okay, so you're not the world's greatest lover, so what? You let your parents down? Okay, you didn't live up to their standards, but those were their standards - who says they have to be your standards? Who says you're a bad person because of that?
So, what you do with shame, according to Nathanson, is you accept the thing about your behaviour that's true, basically that you're not a perfect son, lover, worker, etc, realise that this does not make you a bad person, and get on with your life.
Give yourself a break. Accept that you are not perfect and that other people are not perfect. Accept that this does not make you bad and it does not make other people bad. And stop running.
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.