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

by Brené Brown

“the ability to perceive a situation from the other person’s perspective. To see, hear and feel the unique world of the other.”

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.

empathy is essential for building meaningful, trusting relationships, which is something we all want and need.

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 be able to see the world as others see it.

Sometimes the skill of trying to see the world as others see it is called “perspective taking.” I find the lens metaphor a very helpful way to understand perspective taking. We all see the world through multiple lenses. These lenses represent who we are and the perspectives from which we view the world. Some of the lenses are constantly changing and some have been with us from the day we were born. Conflict is easy to understand when we think about the lens metaphor.

In order to be empathic, we must be willing to recognize and acknowledge our own lens and attempt to see the situation that someone is experiencing through her lens.

If Dawn had recently had her own “mother-shame” experience, she might not have been able to put her lens down long enough to pick up mine. My cookie story might have hit too close to home. Over-identifying with someone’s experience can be as much a barrier to perspective taking as not identifying at all.

To be nonjudgmental.

One of the greatest challenges we will face on this path to developing empathy will be to overcome the habit of judging others. We all do it and most of us do it all the time.

It takes a great deal of conscious thinking or mindfulness to even bring the habit of judging into our awareness. Often, our need to judge others is deeply motivated by our need to evaluate our own abilities, beliefs and values. According

judging others allows us to appraise and compare our abilities, beliefs and values against the abilities, beliefs and values of others. This explains why we most often judge others around the issues that are important in our lives.

women constantly feel judged by other women when it comes to appearance and motherhood.

On the other hand, every man I interviewed talked about how other men are constantly sizing up each other’s levels of financial success, intellect and physical strength as measures of power.

Shame, fear and anxiety are all major incubators of judgment. When we are in our own shame about an issue or when we are feeling anxious, threatened or fearful about an issue, refraining from judgment can seem impossible.

The judgment of others leaves us feeling hurt and ashamed so we judge others as a way to make ourselves feel better.

You can’t fake nonjudgment. It’s in our eyes, our voices and our body language.

To understand another person’s feelings.

In order to do this, we must be in touch with our own feelings and emotions, and we need to be comfortable in the larger world of emotion and feelings. For many, this world is completely foreign—it’s a complex world of new language and thinking.

if we can’t recognize the subtle, but important, differences between disappointment and anger in ourselves, it’s virtu...

To communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings.

Courage gives us a voice and compassion gives us an ear. Without both, there is no opportunity for empathy and connection.

Without courage, we cannot tell our stories. When we don’t tell our stories, we miss the opportunity to experience empathy and move toward shame resilience.

The Places That Scare You, Chödrön writes, “When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience the fear of our pain.

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.”

we do the courageous work of opening to suffering. This can be the pain that comes when we put up barriers or the pain of opening our heart to our own sorrow or that of another being. We learn as much about doing this from our failures as we do from our successes.

Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.

Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.”

I filtered her story through my emotions. In other words, my own stuff just got in the way of my compassion.

There are times we will miss the opportunity to be empathic. Mental health professionals often call these “empathic failures.” There are also times when the people around us will not be able to give us what we need.

If, for example, we judge ourselves harshly and are incapable or unwilling to acknowledge our own emotions, we will struggle in our relationships with others.

When our need for empathy is met with sympathy, it can often send us deeper into shame—we feel even more alone and separated. Empathy is about connection; sympathy is about separation.

People seeking sympathy are not looking for empathy or evidence of shared experiences—they are searching for confirmation of their uniqueness.

It’s not unusual to feel resentful or dismissive when someone requests our sympathy.

Sometimes the best we can do with someone who is sympathy seeking is to fake a “Yeah, that’s really hard” or “Wow, sounds rough.” But on the inside we’re probably thinking, “Please . . . get over it,” or “Hey, that’s nothing,” or “Enough of the pity party.” Sometimes these requests for sympathy make us so angry and resentful that we can’t even muster a benign response.

“You’re right, I don’t know what that’s like. What is it like? Help me understand.”

When we compete to see whose situation is worse, whose oppression is the most real or whose “-ism” is the most serious, we lose sight of the fact that most of our struggles stem from the same place—powerlessness and disconnection.

“I had a miscarriage.” “At least you know you can get pregnant.” “I’ve been diagnosed with cancer.” “At least you caught it early.” “My sister is really struggling with her alcoholism.” “At least it’s not drugs.”

This “at least” response is primarily about our own discomfort. “At leasting” someone is equivalent to shutting her down.

Response C: “I’m really sorry—that can be a very lonely place. Is there anything I can do?” This response demonstrates empathy. It is not judgmental. It’s an attempt to reflect back how someone might be feeling. Even if she’s not feeling lonely, she has a chance to respond and she knows you are trying to understand her world.

The pressure “to get it right” or to “say the perfect thing” can be the biggest barrier to empathy and compassion.

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.

“Empathy is a gift of validation that, no matter how many times it is given, always returns us to our own truth. Empathy heals another at exactly the same time it is healing me.”

There is a small group of researchers, especially those working from an evolutionary or biological perspective, who believe that shame has both negative and positive consequences.

The positive consequence of shame, they contend, is its ability to serve as a compass for moral behavior. They believe that shame keeps us in line.

but there is now a growing body of evidence against that idea. One of the most comprehensive books on shame research is Shame and Guilt by June Price Tangney and Ronda L. Dearing.

The researchers found that when shame proneness increases, substance abuse problems increase.

Taking on guilt for things over which we had no control is false guilt. There are enough things in life for which we are responsible and therefore can experience ‘true’ guilt.”

refusing to take on an identity defined by one’s worst deeds is a healthy act of resistance.

“We cannot survive when our identity is defined by or limited to our worst behavior. Every human must be able to view the self as complex and multidimensional. When this fact is obscured, people will wrap themselves in layers of denial in order to survive. How can we apologize for something we are, rather than something we did?”