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

by Brené Brown

Most of us who have not struggled with infertility have had a friend or family member who has. And most of us have had the experience of having someone tell us, “We’re trying to get pregnant; I’m having fertility issues.” And then what? This is when it happens. We get nervous and uncomfortable and say things

last, but certainly not least, I don’t like anything that’s brutal, including honesty. Honesty is the best policy, but honesty that’s motivated by shame, anger, fear or hurt is not “honesty.” It’s shame, anger, fear or hurt disguised as honesty. Just because something is accurate or factual doesn’t mean it can’t be used in a destructive manner. The shame web is often baited with honesty. It gives the shamer an easy comeback—“Well, I’m just telling

As you’ve read through each of these chapters, you’ve started building an understanding of shame and shame resilience. Some of you are following along, doing the exercises with your own issues, and others are reading and soaking it all in. Either way, you are learning to speak shame by simply reading and thinking.

There may be no more powerful relationship than the one that exists between fear and shame. These two emotions often work together to create the perfect emotional storm—shame leads to fear and fear leads to shame. They work together so furiously that it’s often hard to tell where one stops and the other begins.

PERFECTIONISM IS THE VOICE OF THE OPPRESSOR. Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird (1994) Shame and Perfectionism I think I’ve seen the movie Flashdance at least twenty times. In the 1980s, I wanted to be just like Jennifer Beals’s character, Alex. She was the tough construction worker by day and talented, ambitious dancer by night. Of course, my favorite part of the movie is the dance scene in which Alex auditions for the hoity-toity ballet school. I’m too embarrassed to tell you how many sweatshirts I ruined and how many leg warmers I bought. Of course, I wasn’t alone. Nothing took the mystique out of my secret Flashdance fantasy like showing up to meet friends for dinner and realizing that all six of us had permed hair, headbands and ripped sweatshirts. We all wanted to be Alex in Flashdance. She was perfect—ripped clothing looked sexy; welding looked exciting; ballet looked cool and break dancing looked easy. But alas, the perfection was only an illusion. I was disappointed to learn that the film director used four different people to create that audition

In some families, these expectations are spoken loud and clear. In other families, they are more latent. But regardless of how they are articulated at home, girls and women have these messages reinforced on a daily basis by what we see on television, the books we read, the toys we are

When I first identified the shame categories, appearance stood alone and was meant to capture all parts of how we look—including body image. But as I continued to collect data, I realized that the specific topic of body image has more than earned its place on the list of shame categories.

Our body image is how we think and feel about our bodies. It is the mental picture we have of our physical bodies. Unfortunately, our pictures, thoughts and feelings may have little to do with our actual appearance. It is our image of what our bodies are, often held up to our image of what they should be.

Last there is the postpregnant-mother body. When women spoke to me about their postbaby body-image struggles, I heard more than experiences of shame. I heard grief,

loss, anger and fear. In addition to the weight gain, hemorrhoids and stretch marks, women struggle with the very real and permanent changes that

When it comes to parenting and body image, I find that parents fall along a continuum. On one side of the continuum, there are parents who are keenly aware that they are the most influential role models in their children’s lives. They work diligently to model positive body image behaviors (self-acceptance, acceptance of others, no emphasis placed on the unattainable or ideal, focusing on health rather than weight, deconstructing media messages, etc.).

was not surprised to hear painful story after painful story about caregiving—especially stories about the struggle to take care of a sick partner or an aging family member. The most difficult experiences centered on taking care of sick or aging parents.

this? We’re not monsters and we feel like this because we are human beings trying to manage a major life event with very little of the support and resources typically offered to people in crisis.

First, and most importantly, we don’t have the same relationship with our parents or partner as we do with our children. We don’t have to bite through our lips not to cry when we are bathing our children. But that’s exactly what I did the first time I bathed my grandmother. And I wasn’t even her primary caregiver. My mom was shouldering the burden of taking care of her and her sister at the same time.

While motherhood and parenting are certainly related, they emerged as two distinct shame areas. Mother shame is about our identity as mothers or our identity as women who are not mothers. Parenting shame is focused on how we raise and interact with our children. Mother shame is an overwhelming issue for women. Every single participant in a mother role identified mother shame as an issue. And, because motherhood is an identity that is so closely tied to being a woman, it became clear that you don’t have to be a mother for motherhood to be a shame issue. As we learned in the powerful guide on understanding infertility, women struggling with infertility talked passionately about the mother shame in their lives. So did women who have chosen to

have children. Society views womanhood and motherhood as inextricably bound; therefore, our value as women is often evaluated by where

we are in relation to our roles as potential mothers. In some communities, the expectation of motherhood has many layers, including norms of what’s too young, what’s too old and what gender babies should be (as if mothers controlled this). Once women hit “the age” set by their community, they begin to feel the need to defend themselves against expectations of motherhood. Women are constantly asked why they haven’t married or, if they’re married, why they haven’t had children. Even women who are married and have one child are often asked why they haven’t had a second child. Women who have four or five kids are expected to explain why they had so many. Mother shame seems to be a birthright for girls and women. On top of the societal expectation that motherhood defines womanhood, there are some very rigid expectations about what the good mother looks like. There are some very...

motherhood but also for all the areas in this category. We want perfection, but we don’t want to look like we’re working for it—we...

We want to be natural beauties, natural mothers, naturally good parents, and we want to belong to naturally fabulous families. Think about how much money has been made selling products that promise “the natural look.” And, when it comes to work, we love to hear “She makes it look so easy,” or “She’s a natural.” The research participants really

shame webs. How many times have we dismissed someone’s efforts because we have bought into the expectation that “family” or “motherhood” shouldn’t be that hard? Marriage, parenting, health, careers, motherhood—each of these requires a tremendous amount of work. And trying to balance the demands of these five areas might be the defining challenge of our lives.

To better understand how each of the four elements of shame resilience can help us overcome perfectionism, I’ll share another story about one of my personal struggles with perfectionism.

When I was pregnant with Ellen, several companies, including a computer manufacturer, had advertising campaigns that featured young mothers working from home. Invariably, the ads portrayed the mother,

thought about that image every day. I wanted to be just like the commercial. I would picture myself in a cool T-shirt and size-eight yoga pants (I’ve never been a size eight), with a loose pony-tail (I’ve had short hair for the past decade), a laptop, a cooperative baby smiling from the play mat, exciting work and loads of personal and professional validation. Suffice it to say that someone at that marketing agency did their homework—I’m sure I was the targeted demographic

two months old, my vision was realized. I was one of three researchers being considered for a community evaluation project. I had a phone interview with two community leaders scheduled for 1:00 P.M. I had everything scheduled down to the minute. Ellen nursed at noon and was sound asleep

five minutes into the interview, Ellen started crying. Not screaming, but crying. At 1:06 P.M. she stopped crying and started screaming. She screamed so loudly that both of the interviewers asked if everything was OK. I quickly replied, “Everything’s great—please continue.” As they explained

She was still crying and at this point milk was literally dripping off my shirt. I laid her on my bed long enough to get one arm out of the T-shirt, pulled my drenched bra down around my waist, pulled the nursing pillow around me and started feeding her. As soon as she was quiet, I came back to the call. I managed to make a few coherent statements before all hell broke loose. The stress of the situation was

penguin walk around the room. As gracefully as possible, I took myself out of the running for the position and thanked the interviewers for their time. I just sat there, holding Ellen and crying. I felt ashamed about my inability to pull off my vision of working-mother perfection. It was one thing to take myself out of the running for the research position, but it was even worse to look down at little, naked poop-smeared Ellen, and feel like I had let her down too. A few weeks

Now when my first-time-mom friends tell me how they are going to work at home with their newborns, I’m quick to share my story. They often respond by asking, “Can’t you just plan your work around the baby’s schedule?”

My mom didn’t work outside the home until I was in my late teens. She was the room parent, the Girl Scout leader, the swim-team mom, the carpool coordinator, etc. . . . That’s the picture I had in my head for me, but with work somehow added to the vision. I’d just do what she did, plus

work full time and finish graduate school.

There are expectations that women can do it all—the superwoman syndrome. Despite my best efforts and the lessons I’ve learned, I sometimes still think I can do it all, and all at the same time. I think the expectation exists as a result of women striving for equality in the workforce, yet not getting the support

For me, part of practicing critical awareness is constantly decoding messages. Sometimes when people make comments about our choices, it feels shaming and we don’t know why. Here are some of the conflicting underlying messages that fuel our shame

My shame web around these issues is primarily the media and myself. I constantly work on it, but I’m still vulnerable to magazines and movies. I have to be vigilant about practicing critical awareness and talking to my connection network about these topics. There are also friends and family members who can push buttons—especially about parenting and work.

As we become more fluent in speaking shame, the power and meaning behind words become more apparent. Women with high levels of shame resilience use very different language from women who are struggling with shame in the same area. For example, when I spoke to women about appearance, motherhood, parenting, work and family, women who demonstrated high levels of shame resilience spoke less about perfection and more about growth.

When our goal is growth and we say, “I’d like to improve this,” we start from where and who we are. “I’d like to work on my relationship with my parents” is a completely different goal from “I want my parents to see me as the perfect daughter.”

This goes back to the sentence that launched this entire journey for me: You cannot shame or belittle people into changing. This means we can’t use self-hate to lose weight, we can’t shame ourselves into becoming better parents and we can’t belittle ourselves or our families into becoming who we need them to be. Putting people on the “loser board” doesn’t work. Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.

When I asked women about “growth goals,” like “I want to be more patient,” I asked them how they saw that happening. Based on their answers, I saw a direct connection between their level of shame resilience and their ability to identify specific objectives related to their goals.

When I asked what she did to meet these goals, she very confidently started listing simple, measurable (they happen or they don’t), tangible objectives. She said: “I get sleep—I’m a better parent when I’m well rested. Even though it’s difficult, I keep my sons on schedules so they feel good. I read a lot of parenting books—when they’re good I use the advice, when they aren’t, I don’t. When I see another parent doing something well, I ask him or her about

Women with what I would consider the highest levels of shame resilience around the perfection issues had very realistic goals and concrete, measurable strategies for meeting those goals. One example was a woman who struggled with an eating disorder for more than ten years. She said that she overcame her eating disorder and the shame around being bulimic by setting realistic, written “health goals” for every week rather than universal “thinness goals.” She said she no longer wants to be perceived as “thin” but as “healthy,” and she works toward that by exercising for thirty minutes five times a week and eating at least three healthy meals per day. One

The ability to learn from our mistakes rather than seeing them as failed attempts at perfection is the essence of “going back.” Going back emerged as an extremely important concept in this research. Women with high levels of shame resilience in the areas of appearance, motherhood, parenting, work and family spoke passionately about the value of believing that it’s never too late to grow and change.

Furthermore, many of these same women emphasized the value of having members of their connection network who modeled “going back” as a powerful strategy for growth and change. Women were especially influenced by their parents’ willingness to change and grow as parents. In contrast, women who

When women spoke about the permanency of mistakes and the inability to move away from perfection and toward growth, at least eighty percent of them described this attribute as something they learned from their parents and/or families.

The second reason is its influence on our efforts to build empathy through connection networks—not only do we need to be willing to go back and learn from our mistakes, we need people in our lives who are willing to do the same.

insights that emerged from this study, none was more powerful to me than the influence parents have on their children. It didn’t matter if I was talking to an eighteen-year-old or a sixty-eight-year-old, women were greatly affected by their parents’ willingness to go back and continually try to improve their relationships with their children.

When parents instill expectations of perfection in their children, it is very difficult for children to exchange that goal for growth and improvement.

Women whose parents demonstrated their own commitment to going back by encouraging them to strive for growth rather than perfection felt great connection and empathy from their parents.

It is difficult for me to capture in writing the emotion conveyed by participants when they explained what it meant to hear their parents say, “I’m sorry,” or “I understand how that made you feel.” When parents acknowledge the pain felt by their children—really sh...

women whose parents continued to enforce expectations of perfection into adulthood either continued to struggle with shame or had to work diligently to develop resilience in ...

What if, after listening to her daughter explain how shaming that was for her, the mother had responded by saying, “I don’t want to shame you or hurt you. I’m sorry that I’ve done that. I want us to be close. I love you.”

This wouldn’t automatically repair their relationship, but what a powerful start toward healing. Yes, I’m sure at some point this mother would want to explain or defend her motivation by saying, “I’m just so worried about your health.” But to really go back, it’s important that we start by first just acknowledging the pain we’ve caused and our desire to rebuild connection.