“I think shame is lethal,” she says. “I think shame is deadly. And I think we are swimming in it deep.”
Brown explains that feelings of shame can quietly marinate over a lifetime. “Here’s the bottom line with shame,” she says. “The less you talk about it, the more you got it. Shame needs three things to grow exponentially in our lives: secrecy, silence, and judgment.”
By keeping quiet, Brown says your shame will grow exponentially. “It will creep into every corner and crevice of your life,” she says.
The antidote, Brown says, is empathy. She explains that by talking about your shame with a friend who expresses empathy, the painful feeling cannot survive. “Shame depends on me buying into the belief that I’m alone,” she says.
Here’s the bottom line: “Shame cannot survive being spoken,” Brown says. “It cannot survive empathy.”
Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy–the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.
Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.
As a shame researcher, I know that the very best thing to do in the midst of a shame attack is totally counterintuitive: Practice courage and reach out!
The dark does not destroy the light; it defines it. It’s our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows.
If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.
Shame is the most powerful, master emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough.
Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed, and rare.
If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.
Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.
If we share our shame story with the wrong person, they can easily become one more piece of flying debris in an already dangerous storm.
Guilt is just as powerful, but its influence is positive, while shame is destructive. Shame erodes our courage and fuels disengagement.
I’m just going to say it: I’m pro-guilt. Guilt is good. Guilt helps us stay on track because it’s about our behavior. It occurs when we compare something we’ve done – or failed to do – with our personal values.
Vulnerability is about showing up and being seen. It’s tough to do that when we’re terrified about what people might see or think.
Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can’t ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment’s notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow – that’s vulnerability.
Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.
Through my research, I found that vulnerability is the glue that holds relationships together. It’s the magic sauce.
Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous.
Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning, and purpose in our lives.
I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.
You are imperfect, you are wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.
A lot of people want to know how we process and heal shame.
This is a MASSIVE topic and one short form article won’t give you all you need to know, but hopefully this one morsel of intel will intrigue you enough to go a little deeper… So here goes! When it comes to healing toxic shame, one concept you may *not* hear about much is the importance of working with the biological and primal emotion of disgust.
Yep. You heard me…disgust! But why? That has both a long and short answer. The short, or simple answer, has to do with the biology of shame. If we were toxically shamed via the many, many ways in which human parents dose out toxic shame to their little ones, we will manifest in our cells (our biology) a sense that we are literally, ‘bad meat’. [Those are Peter Levine’s words, not mine, btw.]
By ‘bad meat’ — this means we grow up thinking we are distasteful (disgusting) and worthless and not worthy or deserving of goodness…we literally have the wiring in our system that we are rotten. (For example, one common thing you might hear a parent who is shaming their child in a toxic way say: “You are a rotten child!”, or, “you’re spoiled rotten!”)
So, with enough time, that kind of language and energy seeps into our entire cellular physiology, our movements, our body postures, and yes, how our muscles (our meat) sense us living in the world. We literally believe, feel and express that we are rotten and bad and undeserving of anything good and whole.
To heal this toxic distaste, which many are struggling to heal, we have to build the capacity within (our nervous system and body systems) to feel this disgust and not let it consume us with harmful thoughts and MORE toxic shame. It can become a vicious cycle if we do not work at this nervous system/biological level.
When this kind of living (survival) goes rampant and it isn’t healed at this biological level, it becomes a huge part of what breeds (manifests) the many types of mental and chronic illnesses that are ever present in our society today.
To build our capacity to be with this level of sensation, the emotion of disgust, we need to start small first.
We have to get better at noticing general qualities of bodily sensations like our temperature, our thirst, our need to need, to stop eating, to feel the ‘easier’ emotions like sadness, joy, and most importantly anger and healthy aggression .. which can happen by becoming better at feeling daily frustrations and resistances and setting boundaries.
Get better at being with the body’s sensations and biological needs, and you start to build capacity to be with the tough qualities of disgust. REMEMBER: Sensations often hold the unconscious material of the body — if you get better at being with all the wacky sensations the body offers, you are well on the way to processing the big gun emotions like disgust and anger.
Let that sink in. Feel. Sense. Pause.
This may very well be new info as most talk we hear about healing shame these days boils down to embracing vulnerability, authenticity, and acceptance, which is nice in theory, but there is way more to it than that.
The biology is queen AND king here.
We have to listen to both sides to move through this deeply embedded stuff. Mantras and journaling are not enough.
YOU ARE GOOD
A meditation by Hilary McBride
You are good
You have always been good
Right from the beginning
I’m sorry that anyone told you otherwise
This breath
This head,
These hands
This love
Those feet
That smile
Your ears
This heart
This breath
This breath
This breath
Good, all good. So, so, so good.
You are loved
You are so loved
You are lovable
You have been working so hard
I don’t have to know how, to know that it’s true
You are precious
You are not a mistake, you are so on purpose
You are not broken
You never were
I’m sorry that you might have thought that
I’m sorry anyone might have made you think that
You are enough
You are so so enough
You do not have to earn your enough-ness
You do not have to grovel for value, for love, for goodness
You already have it
You already are it
You are loved
You are loved
You are love
You are love
You are love
