What's the Deal with Shame?
Brene Brown, a shame researcher, says,
'Shame is that warm feeling that washes over us, making us feel small, flawed, and never good enough.'
Shame comes from the thought that there is something wrong with US, not just our behaviors.
I know for me, shame will surface when I feel I have done something way out of character for who I am and who I want to be, and it especially rears its head when someone else points it out to me because I feel inept with my ability to see it myself.
Or, it will sometimes come when I gain a new awareness about some past behavior that I'm embarrassed about because it does not represent my better self.
Yours may surface differently than mine, but learning to recognize that hot flood of wanting to hide is an important step.
One of the most damaging things about shame is that it keeps us stuck in a place of disempowerment.
When we feel shame we feel stuck, we start to spin thinking of all the ways we are not good enough, and we shut down our growth.
So, what to do with shame?
Brene Brown explains:
'If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in the petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive.'
So, when we feel shame, one of the first things we can do to move out of it is a good dose of empathy.
What does self-empathy look like? For me, it looks like a lot of grace for my humanity.
This is when I will say things to myself like,
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'Of course I didn't get it right, I'm still figuring it out.'
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'I didn't fully understand back then, but I know I was doing the best I could.'
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'Look at how far I've come. I'm so grateful for my journey.'
Offering ourselves grace, space to be a human, is incredibly empowering.
It's empowering because it creates a place of safety — a place where we don't have to know all of the answers, where we are allowed to make mistakes, where we are allowed to be a human who doesn't always show up the way we want to.
Learning to offer grace to yourself during a shame struggle is the best way to empower yourself to move out of being stuck and into moving forward.
And learning to separate out the poor behaviors from us - good people who are doing our best and who make mistakes - is a vital piece.
You are not a _______ person, what you did was _______.
