I Thought It Was Just Me: Women Reclaiming Power and Courage in a Culture of Shame

by Brené Brown

didn’t make it “OK” that I lied to Ellen’s teacher, but she did make me feel accepted and connected. When I’m in shame, I can’t be a good partner or a good teacher or a good mother or a good friend. If I had gone into that weekend feeling I was an unworthy mother and a liar who stole cookies from the mouths of babes, I wouldn’t have made

of my classes included a component on increasing empathy skills. This is true for most people pursuing graduate degrees in professions like psychology, social work, counseling and marriage and family therapy. In the growing body of empathy research, we are finding that successful leaders often demonstrate high levels of empathy; that empathy is related to academic and professional success; that it can reduce aggression and prejudice and increase altruism. Studies also show that it’s a vital component in successful marriages and effective organizations. The bottom line is that empathy is essential for building meaningful, trusting relationships, which is something we all want and need. Given its power to overcome shame and its key role in building many different types of connections, empathy is something we would all be wise to learn and to practice. Fortunately, empathy is something that can be learned. Teresa Wiseman, a nursing scholar in England, identifies four defining attributes of empathy. They are: (1) to be able to see the world as others see it; (2) to be nonjudgmental;

(3) to understand another person’s feelings; and (4) to communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings.

To communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings. For me, this last step can sometimes feel risky. I know that when I teach empathy skills to graduate students, this is often where they stumble (where we all stumble). Let’s imagine that Dawn misunderstood my feelings or didn’t fully get my perspective, and her response was more along the lines of “I know, it’s so frustrating. Steve could have remembered to bring those damn cookies to school. Why do we have to remember everything?”

Stories require voices to speak them and ears to hear them. Stories only foster connection when there is both someone to speak and someone to listen. In sharing my work on women and shame,

Courage gives us a voice and compassion gives us an ear. Without both, there is no opportunity for empathy and connection. Again, I’m not talking about bravery or heroics, I’m talking about ordinary courage—the courage to tell our story from the heart. It took courage to call Dawn and tell her about the cookies. Dawn had to practice compassion. She had to be willing to make room in her world for my painful experience. In the next two sections, we’ll explore these ideas of courage and compassion separately, but I first wanted to emphasize the importance of how they work together.

Reverend Jane Spahr, a Presbyterian minister and gay/lesbian rights activist, also attended the conference. Reverend Spahr told the stories of Saint George and Saint Martha to illustrate the different ways we think about courage. She explained that Saint George slew the dragon because the dragon was bad, but Saint Martha tamed and befriended the dragon.

But courage, especially the ordinary courage we need to speak out, is not simple or easily obtained. So often, we hear people say, “Just tell your story!” or “Speak your mind!” It’s much more complicated than that. Sometimes we face real threats and consequences when we speak our minds or tell our stories. In fact, as you start to learn about the

being ready to share. In her article on ordinary courage in girls’ and women’s lives, Annie Rogers writes, “One way to understand the etymology of courage is to consider its history as a series of losses. Over the course of five centuries, from 1051 to 1490, courage was cut off from its sources in time, in the heart, and in feelings. In other words, courage was slowly dissociated from what traditional Western culture considers feminine qualities, and came to mean ‘that quality of mind that shows itself in facing danger without fear or shrinking,’ a definition associated with the bravery and heroism of boys and men. The pattern of losses in the history of the word courage seems to reflect an increasing invisibility of girls’ and women’s courage in Western culture.” Without

If empathy is the skill or ability to tap into our own experiences in order to connect with an experience someone is relating to us, compassion is the willingness to be open to this process. To prepare for writing this book, I read everything I could find on compassion. I ultimately found a powerful fit between the stories I heard in the interviews and the work of American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. In her book The Places That Scare You, Chödrön writes, “When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience the fear of our pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance.”

After reflecting on this situation, I finally figured out that when she started talking to me about not having more children, I instantly heard grief in her voice and that scared me. In fact, it shut down my compassion. I could have handled anger or fear, or maybe even shame. But not grief. I was experiencing high levels of stress and anxiety about my book deadline. I was also in my own grief about the time that I would be away from my new baby as I headed back to work. I filtered her story through my emotions. In other words, my own stuff just got in the way of my compassion.

women, connection is about mutual support, shared experiences, acceptance and belonging. As you can see in the illustration on page 48, individuals and groups that may enforce the expectations that create shame in one area can turn out to be a valued source of connection building in another area. In relationships, we are given threads. We can use these threads to weave webs that trap others or to weave blankets of support. It’s our choice. For example, a colleague might be a tremendous source of connection around shame experiences that develop from professional situations, yet he or she might make comments or reinforce stereotypes that trigger shame in other areas, like motherhood or sexual orientation.

When we talk about empathy, we often confuse it with sympathy. Yet, during the interviews, women were very clear about the differences between sympathy and empathy. When they talked about their ability to overcome shame, they clearly pointed to empathy: sharing their feelings with someone who would understand and relate to what they were saying. Conversely, women used words like hate, despise and can’t stand to describe their feelings about sympathy seeking—looking for sympathy or being asked for sympathy. Empathy

Parents. If they could understand, I must be OK. It was one of those stories you begin telling with enthusiasm and a strong commitment to be genuine, but in the middle, when you sense it’s not going over very well, you skip the worst details and try to wrap it up as quickly as possible. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I certainly didn’t expect them to literally gasp and put their hands over their eyes (like looking at me might blind them). When I was done, they shook their heads in unison and looked at me with pity. She leaned toward me and said, “Oh, my God, that’s so horrible. I can’t imagine doing that. I’m

When I talk about sympathy seeking in workshops, the audience members usually start to look agitated and crusty. I learned early on how to diffuse the situation—I just have to ask, “How many of you know someone who sympathy-seeks and are thinking of that person as I describe this concept?” Without fail, hands shoot up across the room—the participants are anxious to talk about the person they’re envisioning and how irritating he or she

Another barrier to developing empathy is a phenomenon I call “Stacking the Deck.” In many ways this is related to sympathy-seeking behavior. Over and over, women described how devastated they were after they finally mustered up the courage to reach out to someone, then had their story trumped

Lorraine, a woman in her early twenties, talked about the shame she felt when she finally opened up with her college roommate about the fact that her teenaged brother was schizophrenic and had a history of violence before he was stabilized on his medications. “She had asked me about him several times. I finally told her about him and I started crying. I explained that I’m not ashamed of him, but I’m ashamed that my parents have him living in a treatment center. She didn’t say anything back to me.” When I asked her what happened next

We don’t know why Lorraine’s roommate was unable or unwilling to respond empathically. Perhaps she was fearful about the level of emotion she saw in Lorraine or maybe she just didn’t want to know. There are many reasons. Let’s look at a couple of other common responses as examples of how easy it is to skip right over empathy. “I feel like my marriage is falling apart right before my very eyes.”

Another way we avoid empathic connection is by convincing ourselves that we can’t really understand experiences that we haven’t actually had. Lorraine’s roommate might have thought, “I have no idea what it’s like to have a brother with a mental

cannot reserve empathy for the select few who have had experiences that mirror our own. We must learn how to move past the situations and events that people are describing in order to move toward the feelings and the emotions they’re experiencing. For example, one of the participants spoke

On missing the opportunity to be empathic, Jean Baker Miller and Irene Stiver (researchers and therapists from the Stone Center) write, “The phenomenon of empathy is basic to all our relationships. Either we deal with the feelings that are inevitably present in our interactions by turning to each other, or we turn away.

If we reach far enough into our own experiences, most of us can relate to trying to keep one foot in one world and the other foot in another world. Most of us know what that feels like. When I open myself up to hearing beyond the struggles of balancing medical school and family life, I immediately think about trying to keep one foot in motherhood and one foot in a very male-defined academic world. When

anything that goes on at home. On some days I can stay balanced. On other days, I feel fearful that the worlds will drift so far apart that I’ll end up losing my footing in both. The worst feeling for me is that sense that I am the only person about to be split in half. I’m not an

So often I find that our feelings of unearned privilege kill empathy. By unearned privilege I mean the privileges afforded us simply because we are white or straight or members of certain groups. We get stuck in what I call privilege shame. This is very different from privilege guilt (or white guilt). It’s appropriate to feel guilt over forwarding a racist e-mail or telling a hurtful joke. Guilt can motivate change. Guilt helps us reconcile our choices with our values.

When we are honest about our struggles, we are much less likely to get stuck in shame. This is critical because shame diminishes our capacity to practice empathy. Ultimately, feeling shame about privilege actually perpetuates racism, sexism, hetero-sexism, classism, ageism, etc. I don’t have to know “exactly how you feel”—I just have to touch a part of my life that opens me up to hearing your experience. If I can touch that place, I stay out of judgment and I can reach out with empathy. This is where both personal and social healing can begin.

When I started this research I wasn’t sure about the distinction I had seen drawn between good shame and bad shame. There is a small group of researchers, especially those working from an evolutionary or biological perspective, who believe that shame has

It didn’t take very long for me to reach the conclusion that there is nothing positive about shame. In any form, in any context and through any delivery system, shame is destructive. The idea that there are two types, healthy shame and toxic shame, did not bear out in any of my research.

Whereas early moral goals centered on reducing potentially lethal aggression, clarifying social rank, and enhancing conformity to social norms, modern morality centers on the ability to acknowledge one’s wrongdoing, accept responsibility, and take reparative action. In this sense, guilt may be the moral emotion of the new millennium.”

their book. The first is Tangney and Dearing’s eight-year study of moral emotions in which they followed a group of almost four hundred children. Using a measurement instrument that presented potentially shaming or guilt-eliciting situations, they found that shame proneness in fifth-graders (that is, a susceptibility to shame) was a strong predictor of later school suspension, drug use (including amphetamines, depressants, hallucinogens and heroin) and suicide

When we start to explore the concept that all shame is bad and destructive, it really forces us to reevaluate how we use shame to parent, how we use shame to fight with partners and, on a community and societal level, how we use shame to punish. In a world that still falls back on “You should be ashamed of yourself,” “Shame on you” and “Have you no shame?” the time has come to explore the possibility that we are safer in a world where people aren’t mired in shame.

Developing shame resilience, this ability to move toward empathy in the face of shame, is not an easy process. If it were, shame would not be such a prevalent and destructive force in our lives. One of the greatest challenges to developing shame resilience is the way shame actually makes us less open to giving or receiving empathy. Shame protects itself by making it very difficult for us to access its antidote. When we are in shame, reaching out for empathy feels very dangerous and risky. And when we are in shame and someone reaches out to us, it is very difficult to dig deep and find anything beyond fear, anger and

Additionally, in the chapters describing the four elements of shame resilience, I’ve included some written exercises. I’ve used these exercises with thousands of women. Most find them to be an extremely helpful start to the process. You are welcome to follow along and keep your own journal with the exercises or you can just read them and think about them. If you go to my Web site (www.brenebrown.com), you can download the preformatted

If we’re going to build shame resilience, we have to start by recognizing and identifying shame. Because shame floods us with strong emotions like fear and blame, we often can’t recognize what’s happening until after we’ve already reacted in a way that moves us away from our authenticity and, in some cases, exacerbates our shame.

mother whose credit card was declined—she was overwhelmed with feelings of shame and took it out on her crying child. Most of us with children are not strangers to that phenomenon. It happens in a split second.

When we know how shame feels, we have an important resilience tool. Often, we feel shame before we think it. Recognizing our shame allows us to find the space we need to process the experience and gain some clarity before we act out or shut down. The next step in examining our experiences is to better understand our shame triggers.

When women with high shame resilience talked about their shame, they clearly knew what triggered it and why some issues were greater triggers than others.

My boss has big dry-erase boards outside of his office. One’s the winners’ list and one board is for the losers.” She said for weeks she could barely function. She lost her confidence and started

missing work. Shame, anxiety and fear took over.

Does this mean that Sylvia is no longer vulnerable to feeling shame around failing or being cast as a loser? Absolutely not. No level of shame resilience provides us with immunity. What it means is that Sylvia will have much more awareness about what she’s feeling when it happens again. This process gives her better tools to step back and think about what happened and why it happened. Then she can start to work her way out of it—constructively.

medicine right now.” Family messages die hard. And many times, they’re very insidious. The messages become part of the fabric of our families. Until we can recognize and understand why and how they influence our lives, we

motherhood was a shame trigger for me. When we experience shame we often feel confused, fearful and judged. This makes it very difficult to access the awareness we need to evaluate our choices. We’re in a fog. That’s how shame makes us powerless. After

most of us to successfully begin to recognize and understand our shame triggers, we first need to accept that acknowledging our vulnerabilities is an act of courage. We must be mindful in our attempts not to see vulnerability as weakness. I’m very lucky when it comes to this difficult endeavor. My mother taught me a tremendous lesson about vulnerability and courage. In the late 1980s, my mom’s only sibling, my uncle Ronnie, was killed in a violent shooting. Just months

As these phrases indicate, shame is about perception. Shame is how we see ourselves through other people’s eyes. When I interviewed women about shame experiences, it was always about “how others see me” or “what others think.” And often, there is even a disconnect between who we want to be and how we want to be perceived. For example, one woman in her seventies told me, “I’m OK

We might stand in front of the mirror, naked, thinking, “Hmmm, not perfect, but OK.” But the moment we think of someone else seeing us—especially someone who is critical—we can just feel the warm wave of shame wash over us. Even if we are totally alone, we rush to cover up. Once we are covered, we fight to push the thought of “being exposed” out of our mind. That’s shame.

As you look at these assessments of their shame triggers (and maybe your own), I want to talk about the issues that always surface when I do this exercise at the workshops. First, we are very hard on ourselves. When we identify these desired and unwanted identities, we give ourselves very little room to be human.

Most everyone agrees upon the importance of actually writing down these exercises. I know, for me, it is more difficult to write these words out and stare at them on a piece of paper. I also know that it is more meaningful. I can get my head around them. I can be still and reflect. Sometimes we believe that acknowledging our triggers will make them worse. We convince ourselves that if we pretend they don’t exist, it’s somehow easier. It’s not. Our feelings, beliefs and actions are motivated by these triggers regardless of whether we write them down and acknowledge them or we pretend they don’t exist. Recognizing and understanding them is the only path to change.

After studying Dr. Uram’s work, I believe it’s possible that many of our early shame experiences, especially with parents and caregivers, were stored in our brains as traumas. This is why we often have such painful bodily reactions when we feel criticized, ridiculed, rejected and shamed. Dr. Uram explains that the brain does not differentiate between overt or big trauma and covert or small, quiet trauma—it just registers the event as “a threat that we can’t control.”

During a recent workshop, I was presenting these strategies of disconnection and they were lettered on my slide (a, b, c.). A woman raised her hand and asked, “Is there a d for all of the above?” We all laughed. I think most of us are d’s—most of us can

We can learn and become wiser about who we are and how we behave from reading a book, but we need to put these ideas into practice. We change in and through our relationships with others. Sometimes we can do that with friends and families, other

couple of years ago, I was giving a noontime lecture to a large group of medical students, residents and medical faculty. During these daily lectures, pharmaceutical companies or other sponsors often provide lunch to the attendees. About twenty minutes into my talk on shame and health, I started explaining the concept of critical awareness. Very quickly I noticed a swelling wave of lost faces. I looked out on the audience, almost all of whom were busy eating, and abruptly asked, “How’s the pizza?” Everyone stopped chewing, leaned forward in their chairs and stared back at me with blank expressions on their faces. I pointed to a long table of empty pizza boxes and said, “I’m