Bonnie Johnston remembers it all too well. She was a little girl shopping with her parents in a dime store. The last words she remembered her parents saying: “Don’t touch anything.”

So when Johnston, who lives in Lawrence, picked up a glass insert between some items, and the glass slipped out of her hands and shattered on the floor, she was very embarrassed.

“I was horrified,” she says. “I wouldn’t go back into that store until I was a teenager.”

Johnston isn’t alone in remembering embarrassing childhood memories. Whether it is a mishap, saying something regrettable or being reprimanded in public, some childhood memories seem to stick with people even as adults.

Long-term effects

Susanne Eyman, a Lawrence clinical psychologist, says embarrassing childhood memories can affect adults because such memories involve not only what people think of themselves, but what others think of them as well.

“Embarrassment is very real,” Eyman says. “The more vulnerable our self-esteem is in general, the more an embarrassing moment will stick with us for a long time.”

For Johnston, the memory at the dime store stayed with her because of the severity of the event.

“It was just so final,” Johnston says. “It was broken, and there was nothing I could do about it.”

Steve Ilardi, an associate professor of psychology at Kansas University, says that people often remember embarrassing moments because they could occur when people were trying to form their identity and make sense of their childhood.

“We all have these kinds of memories that serve as hooks on which we hang these important representations of ourselves,” Ilardi says. “And so the memory gains much more importance than the event itself.”

Eyman says that at times, embarrassing moments can have serious and long-lasting effects on children as they grow and mature into adults and that such moments can affect people’s behaviors or views of themselves.

“At certain times of our lives, our self-esteem is much more vulnerable than at other times,” Eyman says.

Then vs. now

Such is the case for Hannah Friend, a sophomore at Kansas University. Friend remembers being embarrassed in eighth grade, when her mother reprimanded her in front of her whole class because Friend wore a different outfit to a choir concert than her mother had picked out for her. But Friend says that the moment was humiliating because of her age at that time.

“Now, if that would happen, I wouldn’t be embarrassed,” she says. “But at the time, I was trying to impress people. And I wanted to be the cool kid.”

Kimberly Duensing, a Lawrence resident who teaches at Eudora Middle School, describes herself as a “goody two-shoes” when she was in grade school. She says she was mortified when one day during first grade she accidentally peed her pants during story time.

“The kids started laughing, and I was embarrassed to high heaven,” Duensing says. “My teacher called my mom, and she had to bring me a new set of clothes.”

Ilardi says that in some cases, such as Duensing’s, bad memories can stick because the memory contradicts how the person sees himself or herself.

“It’s not so much that the memory is ‘this is what I’m always like’ but rather ‘this represents a jarring departure from what I want to be like,'” Ilardi says.

For the better

But for Duensing, while her accident was something humiliating, she says the event helped her learn to take other embarrassing moments in stride.

“I look back at it as positive because it taught me to laugh at myself and not take myself too seriously,” Duensing says.