And would you agree that you get this second moment of catharsis upon realising that you are not alone in feeling or behaving in that way, that your personal and private struggle is actually a universal experience, perhaps even a national one?

When it comes to being Irish, there are traits, let’s call them strengths and weaknesses, that have been anecdotally attributed to us. We are a nation of begrudgers: we are ‘shrinking violets’ who like to knock down the ‘tall poppies’ among us.

We are a country of talkers, but we actively avoid intimacy and become easily embarrassed by affection. We are an island of jokers.

As a whole, we collectively suffer from a deep sense of inferiority. We are uncomfortable with sexuality. We like to brush things under the carpet. We have a contempt for authority but also a desperate need to conform, having have lived so long in the fear of what others think of us.

We are a nation of do-gooders, who don’t just offer prayers in moments of tragedy but practical help too.

This St Patrick’s Day feels different. Firstly, it falls on a Saturday so it has snuck up on us after a full working week. It has been preceded by a once-in-a-generation snowstorm. It will be succeeded by a Good Friday where pubs will legally be open for the first time.

We have a Taoiseach whose mother’s name is Miriam and father’s name is Ashok, who also happens to be an openly gay man who met the US president and vice president this week.

Last week, our former president Mary McAleese described the Catholic Church as an “empire of misogyny”. Many of us are also summoning the courage to have gentle, but public conversations about that thing we have swept under the carpet for so long — abortion, as the referendum nears. In fact, this week, the national broadcaster started airing the personal experiences of women who have travelled to England for terminations.

It feels as though we are reaching some moment of national catharsis or reckoning where we cast off redundant parts of us to become the best that we can be: Trading secrecy for transparency, blame for accountability, judgement for compassion and inclusivity and most of all fear for courage.

However, before we move forward together, it pays to look back and see why we are as we are.

Anecdotes aside, various historians and psychiatrists have delved into our shared history looking at the trauma caused by the Great Famine and the effects an imperial power has had on us. They also looked at the role of the Catholic Church in the formation of a national psyche.

Renowned psychiatrist Garrett O’Connor talked about our “malignant shame”. He characterised it as “an emotional state characterised by a deep conviction of personal inferiority, suppression of feelings and an inability to trust others.”

The late doctor, who was married to actress Fionnuala Flanagan and was based in the US, where he was president and CEO of the Betty Ford clinic, travelled home in 2010 to deliver the Michael Littleton Memorial Lecture. This is where he spoke of our “malignant shame” and the role of trauma in its creation.

He referred to our Famine years and the rise of nationalism here in resistance to the British empire. He also talked about the Catholic Church’s role in trying to repress the rise of a militant nationalism.

“After 1850, the Church passed on the essentials of its survival plan to subsequent generations of Irish Catholics,” said Dr O’Connor. “Shame, guilt, terror, and celibate self-sacrifice were key elements of the Church’s campaign to deal with the critical problems of over-population, unemployed young males, and land shortages.

“Original sin, sexual repression and eternal damnation were incorporated into a grim theology of fear that led Irish Catholics to believe they had been born bad, were inclined toward evil and deserved punishment for their sins. This bleak spiritual philosophy would later become the foundation of 20th century Irish Catholicism.”

Dr O’Connor also spoke of how Catholicism accidentally became our default identity.

“In the latter part of the 1800s the ordinary people of Ireland clung to their religion as a badge of identity and as a weapon of defiance,” he said. “For many, Catholicism became a substitute nationality and nationalism became a form of secular religion.”

He also detailed the Irish Catholic character as having “humour, tenderness, courage, and loyalty co-exist[ing] with pessimism, envy, duplicity,and spite”.

He said our “strong urge to resist authority is tempered by a stronger need to appease it; a constant need for approval is frustrated by a fear of chronic fear of negative judgement; a deep devotion to suffering for its own sake is supported by a firm belief in tragedy as a virtue and an instinctive tendency to express contempt prior to investigation precludes the need for critical and objective evaluation of any investigation”.

However, most of all he focused on our love affair with shame, caused by trauma after trauma at the hands of powerful institutions to which we co-operatively bowed. The word shame is derived from the Saxon root ‘skem’, he said, meaning to hide. He described the emotion as the “conductor of the emotional orchestra in humans — powerful, elusive, and tricky”.

Dr O’Connor also explained the feeling of it coursing through our veins.

“Shame is a sudden deflation of self- esteem, an uncomfortable nanosecond of internal shock in which we are revealed to ourselves as being something less than what we would have wanted to believe,” said Dr O’Connor.

Cork-born philosopher Richard Kearney, who is professor of philosophy at Boston University, cited Dr O’Connor’s work when talking in the Abbey Theatre about trauma in 2014.

Prof Kearney talked a lot about “trans-generational trauma”, the idea that unless we deal with our past we will pass it on to our children and our children’s children.

However, shame, that inevitable child of a trauma that has gone ignored, isn’t that easy of an emotion to dissolve. However, we have made serious strides. Public conversations such as that about child sexual abuse by the Catholic Church, as led by Ms McAleese last week, move things along.

Others will argue that so too did events such as Riverdance, especially its inaugural performance at the 1994 Eurovision, when Irishness was no longer about being chaste and stiff and covered-up. Riverdance helped us find a sort of physical freedom through a modern twist of our national dance.

If we truly suffer from a malignant shame as Dr O’Connor argued and want to move forward together as a nation this St Patrick’s Day there are two things that shame cannot survive: Compassion and publicity.

Publicity meaning that we talk, talk openly and honestly, and compassion, in that we bring that understanding and empathy we so readily gift to others, firstly to ourselves.