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

by Brené Brown

First, what are the social-community expectations of appearance? From a societal level, appearance includes everything from hair, skin, makeup, weight, clothing, shoes and nails to attitude, confidence, age and wealth. If you pile on community-specific expectations, you might have to add things like hair texture, hair length, skin color, face and body hair, teeth,

That’s a whole bunch of folks depending on us to see and believe messages that sell the social-community expectations of appearance. If we don’t believe we’re too fat, ugly and old, then they don’t sell their products. If they don’t sell their products, they don’t make their house payments. The pressure is on!

Jillian shared her answers to these reality check questions with me. (Jillian’s ideal identities are thin, sexy, confident, natural and young. Her unwanted identities are middle-aged, tired, fat and frumpy.) Here’s how she answered these questions: How realistic are my expectations? Not realistic at all. I am middle-aged and I’m tired a

The word context is derived from the Latin word contexere, meaning “to weave or twine together.” When we understand the context of an experience, we see the big picture. It goes back to the zoom lens. When we are in shame, we just see our own struggle. As we zoom out, we start to see others engaged in

If one or two or even a hundred women said they were ashamed of their bodies, that probably wouldn’t point to a larger social connection. But it wasn’t just a few women—it was more than ninety percent of the women I interviewed. If it was just Sondra who talked about the fear of experiencing shame when she voiced her opinion or spoke out on public or private issues, then “speaking out” wouldn’t be a shame category. It’s

the big picture, we don’t give up responsibility. We increase it. When we identify a personal struggle that is rooted in larger issues, we should take responsibility for both. Maybe it’s not just our job to make things better for ourselves; maybe we have a responsibility to make things better for our children, our friends or our community.

When we talk about putting issues into context in order to increase our critical awareness and increase our shame resilience, we need to realize that getting mired in blaming systems is as destructive as being mired in self-blame. When the most effective way to change a situation is to look at the big picture and we individualize the problem, there is little chance that we’re going to change it.

When it comes to raising critical awareness and increasing our resilience to shame, the most powerful words we can hear are “You are not alone.” When the research participants talked about critical awareness, the actual words “You have to find out you’re not alone” or “You need to know you’re not alone”

unless we understand our shame triggers and practice critical awareness, chances are we’re not ever going to reach out far enough or often enough for someone to have the opportunity to say, “Hey, you’re not alone.”

talked to many women who spoke about the shame of divorce. Some women spoke about their own divorces and other women spoke about their parents’ divorces. One thread running through many of the experiences was the economic consequence of divorce. For many women, divorce takes a serious financial toll in addition to the emotional toll.

Like most women, when I read these stories I feel some combination of sadness, fear and a need to protect myself from acknowledging that this could ever happen to me. When we do that, however, we reinforce the stereotypes of women

who struggle financially after divorce

Research also shows that the ability for women to financially recover after divorce has increased over the past few years. When we talk to women in my mother’s generation, it is easy to understand why many of them suffered great personal and financial losses when they divorced. They didn’t participate in the workforce as much as women do today. When they did work, it was often in traditional support or service jobs. If they had high-status jobs they were paid much less than men, and there were no child support laws.

Critical awareness also requires us to question this notion of blaming the victim. In particular, some pop psychologists preach that “There is no such thing as reality, just perception.” Not only is this inaccurate, it’s dangerous. Racism is real, domestic violence is real, homophobia is real. The economics of divorce are real.

The last benefit of practicing critical awareness is demystifying. If we want to demystify something, we simply break it down and take the “mystery” out of it. How many times do we see something unusual or interesting and, even if we are dying to know about it, feel too unworthy to ask what it is, how much it costs or how it works? If we start demystifying by asking the critical awareness questions, we often find

The word edamame means “beans on branches.” Edamame is a green vegetable soybean that is incorporated into many types of dishes and often eaten as a snack. It is pronounced “ed-a-mommy.”

During the interviews, many women associated shame with educators and helping professionals. As an educator, I was not at all surprised to hear shame identified as an issue in the classroom. In fact I believe that shame is one of the greatest barriers to learning. I’m afraid the social-community pressure to appear learned has become

the most serious threat to objectivity is the very belief that “pure objectivity” and “value neutrality” exist. I have greater trust in those who question objectivity and who believe that people, values and experiences influence our research and practice—they are the ones who make the greatest effort to present

Given the power of credentials, it is easy to understand why shame often results from interactions with the credentialed. To build connection and power in these situations, we need to practice our critical awareness skills. We need to determine who benefits from our fear and shame and decide how we can find support. Toward that end, we should not hesitate to get referrals from friends, and we must also accept that we have an absolute right to interview credentialed professionals about how they practice, before we expose our most personal information or vulnerabilities.

I’d like to start this chapter by sharing three letters I received from women who have been applying the concepts in this book to their own lives. The first woman, Leticia, e-mailed this experience to me:

One afternoon I was on the phone with my mother telling her about a guy who wanted a relationship with me, but in whom I was not really interested. My mother was still in favor of him and in explaining why, she said, “He likes you even though you aren’t skinny. It doesn’t matter to him that you are heavy—he still thinks you are pretty.” On the other end of the line my jaw dropped. A few years ago I’d undergone treatment for an eating disorder—I was seeing up to four doctors at a time for it. My mom is well aware of my medical history.

When I read these letters, the first thing that comes to mind is this: I didn’t invent the strategies in this book. It’s deeply meaningful to know that the ideas presented in this book are helping women, but these ideas belong to others besides just me.

The need for connection and the capacity to use these shame resilience strategies is within all of us. And as Barbara points out in her letter, sometimes we’re in the shame soup and need help and other times we are the ones who can throw the life preserver to the person who is drowning.

Regardless of who we are, how we were raised or what we believe, all of us fight hidden, silent battles against not being good enough, not having enough and not belonging enough.

Knowing laughter is not the use of humor as self-deprecation or deflection; it’s not the kind of painful laughter we sometimes hide behind. Knowing laughter is acknowledging the absurdity of the expectations that form the shame web and recognizing the irony of believing that we, alone, are trapped and entangled in that web. When I think of knowing laughter I think of the incredible volume of work written by Erma Bombeck and the poignant humor of Cathy, the comic strip written by Cathy Guisewite. Their creative work targeting motherhood and single life captures our vulnerabilities in a way that makes us laugh and feel normal.

Believing that we truly do have the ability to create change in our lives may seem difficult, or even impossible, at first, but it is one of the most empowering steps along the path to developing resilience. When we talk about individual and collective change, it’s important to realize that not all of us are going to engage in political action, advocacy or even small group efforts. Some of us may create change by changing the way we interact with people or changing our relationships. Others may raise critical awareness with friends and family members. We need to find a method of change

Even the most personal changes often have a powerful ripple effect through the lives of our families, friends and colleagues. Jillian, for example, started monitoring the shows her children watch and now limits her fashion magazine subscriptions. Sondra, the woman silenced by her husband’s remarks, has returned to debating politics and religion with her brother-in-law. She’s also passing down her parents’ wonderful legacy of “living out loud and proud” along with tools her daughters can use to effectively deal with the shaming that some people use to keep us quiet. Change can take many forms—there is nothing more inherently political than breaking through social-community expectations so we can live our

As we practice reaching out, we need to be very aware of the barriers that might get in the way. In the remainder of this chapter, we’re going to examine the two main issues that often prevent us from practicing courage and compassion. The best way to introduce these concepts is by telling the story of Jennifer and Tiffany. Their story beautifully illustrates these barriers to reaching out and why it’s worth the fight to overcome them.

One morning, almost six months later, Tiffany called Jennifer. She was crying so hard that her voice was barely audible. Jennifer ran to Tiffany’s house. The front door was open and Jennifer walked in. Tiffany was sitting on the kitchen floor, sobbing.

This is the shame of the woman whose hand hides her smile because her teeth are so bad, not the grand self-hate that leads some to razors or pills or swan dives off beautiful bridges however tragic that is. This is the shame of seeing yourself, of being ashamed of where you live and what your father’s paycheck lets you eat and wear. This is the shame of the fat and the bald, the unbearable blush of acne, the shame of having

In a culture of shame, we are constantly overwhelmed with feelings of fear, blame and disconnection. This creates an “us and them” world. There are people like us, and then there are “those other people.” And, we normally work very hard to insulate ourselves from “those people.” As children, there were the people that we were allowed to hang out with and then there were the other kids.

Most of us are one paycheck, one divorce, one drug-addicted kid, one mental health diagnosis, one serious illness, one sexual assault, one drinking binge, one night of unprotected sex, or one affair away from being “those people”—the ones we don’t trust, the ones we pity, the ones we don’t let our children play with, the ones bad things happen to, the ones we don’t want living next door. In fact, let me prove my point. If you or your family members have NEVER experienced any one of the following issues, you should just skip the remainder of this chapter:

fact, I interviewed a woman in her early sixties who told me that she often felt ashamed of her kids. Specifically, the most shame she felt was about her daughter. Her son-in-law caught the daughter having an affair and divorced her. This same woman had a son who spent several months in jail after getting his second DUI at college. She compared the two by saying, “Boys will be boys. I can live with that. But, having a trashy daughter is something I’ll never get over.”

The point of this list is not to rank or compare the issues. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think that gets us anywhere. It’s about understanding that we are all vulnerable to being judged and feeling shame about our experiences. And equally important, we are all vulnerable to judging and shaming others about their experiences.

Let’s go back to the carpool story. Let’s say the woman who was slumped over her steering wheel had suffered a major heart attack and was hospitalized. How many casseroles do you think her family would have received? While she recovered, how many neighborhood moms would have offered to drive her children to and from school? Given the reality that she was passed out drunk in her car in the carpool line, how many casseroles do you think her family received? If she was admitted into a rehabilitation facility, what’s your guess on how many neighborhood moms offered to drive the kids or set up play dates while she was recovering? My guess is not many.

Fear is another reason we insulate. As my

husband, Steve, read through this “other list,” he shook his head and said, “Yep, these are the issues that we judge and blame people for.” Then he thought for a minute, and asked, “What about those issues that we don’t really blame people for, but scare us and send us running in the other direction?”

knew exactly what he meant. Sometimes...

If we’ve spent our lives continually insulating ourselves from the people who are suffering and surviving great losses, what happens when something happens to us? I think most of us turn on ourselves. What did I do to deserve this? Why me? This happened because I did something bad or wrong.

It’s hard. We don’t want to connect with people who are in pain, especially if we believe they deserve their pain or if their pain is too scary for us. We don’t want to reach out. It feels risky. Just by associating with them, we could either end up in the same “other” pile or be forced to acknowledge that bad things happen to people like us.

being embarrassed sometimes because my mother was the one taking the casserole to the person who everyone was talking about. Or she would invite the family who was swirling in horrible rumors to our house for dinner. I didn’t understand it then, but now I get

There is nothing more frustrating, and sometimes frightening, than feeling pain and not being able to describe or explain it to someone. It doesn’t matter if it’s physical pain or emotional pain. When we can’t find the right words to explain our painful experiences to others, we often feel alone and scared. Some of us may even feel anger or rage and act out. Eventually, many of us shut down and either live silently with the pain or, in cases where we can’t, accept someone else’s definition of what we are feeling simply out of the desperate need to find some remedy.

Most of us don’t naturally acquire the vocabulary we need to identify, describe and discuss the actual process of experiencing shame or increasing shame resilience. Shame

how do we describe the overwhelming physical and emotional responses that most of us experience when we are in shame? Barbara, whose letter you read in the last chapter, does it beautifully. She speaks shame. She

Of course, when we’re reeling and desperate, we rarely find effective methods for protecting ourselves. In fact, many of the coping skills we use to deal with shame only magnify our feelings of powerlessness and cause us to sink even deeper in shame (like shame screens).

Second, because I was a new mother, I had not developed the critical awareness skills I needed to know what a powerful shame trigger motherhood is for most mothers. I definitely individualized (This is about me) and pathologized (I’m crazy) this experience. Critical awareness about motherhood took time to learn and put into practice. Third, when I reached out to Dawn to tell her about the lunch conversation and she tried to support me, I should have listened. I hadn’t fully processed the fact that Dawn is big in my connection network around motherhood. I wish could have heard what she was saying, rather than shrugging off her concerns. Fourth, during our lunch, when I said that motherhood was sometimes tiring and Phyllis responded by saying, “Really, I’ve never regretted having my baby,” I might have used my speaking shame skills to say something like “Wow. How did you get from me being tired to regretting having children?” If the conversation continued to nosedive, I might have just said something like “We don’t seem to be able to understand each other, let’s change the subject.” And, of course, not pursued that friendship. Lastly, I learned how to translate my experience in a way that allows me to recognize the ineffective patterns that keep me in shame—my shame screens. This story is a great example of how the four elements

In the following section, we’ll talk about shame as intentional or unintentional. As I discuss it, I think it’s important to point out that the motivations behind shame don’t buffer us from the pain. Unintentional shame is still painful.

Identifying shame as intentional or unintentional is very difficult. It assumes we know the motivation of the person who has made the comment or triggered the shame. Sometimes the motivation is clear and sometimes it isn’t. In the examples below, the research participants believed the remarks were meant to hurt and be shaming, but each gave a different reason

In the following examples of unintended shame, the participants made comments like “I really don’t think s/he meant to shame me” or “I honestly don’t think they know better.” But again, it’s important to note that the participants

Working our way out of the shame web can be very difficult because, like most traps, it entangles you the more you struggle and fight. To free ourselves, we need to move slowly, deliberately and with a tremendous amount of awareness about what we are doing and why.