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

by Brené Brown

If your husband was battering you and he was forced to apologize on the steps of City Hall in front of hundreds of people, would you like to be the woman he comes home to after his day of public shaming?

1. The ability to recognize and understand their shame triggers 2. High levels of critical awareness about their shame web 3. The willingness to reach out to others 4. The ability to speak shame

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.

Somewhat paradoxically, our bodies often react to shame even before our conscious minds do.

Recognizing shame is an important tool for regaining our power. For example, I know that I need to be alone for at least fifteen or twenty minutes when I’m experiencing shame. Now that I recognize the physical symptoms, I often use those as a cue to make a quick exit. Once I’m alone, I can feel my feelings in private. I can cry or take deep breaths.

shame is a highly individualized experience and there are no universal shame triggers.

Recognizing and understanding our triggers is not something that we instinctively know how to do. It’s a process.

the shaming wounds inflicted in our first families often set the stage for many of our greatest shame struggles.

“I’m not weak. I’m stronger than you can imagine. I’m just very vulnerable right now. If I were weak, I’d be dead.”

acknowledging our vulnerability is a true act of ordinary courage.

shame is about perception. Shame is how we see ourselves through other people’s eyes.

I want to be perceived as ______________, _________________, _____________________________, _______________________ and ______________________. I do NOT want to be perceived as __________________, ________________, _______________, __________________ or _______________.

We can’t consciously make the decision to change our behavior until we are aware of what we are thinking and why we are thinking it.

we tend not to recognize the small, quiet traumas that often trigger the same brain-survival reaction.

in order to deal with shame, some of us move away by withdrawing, hiding, silencing ourselves and keeping secrets. Some of us move toward by seeking to appease and please. And, some of us move against by trying to gain power over others, being aggressive and using shame to fight shame.

“Awareness is knowing something exists, critical awareness is knowing why it exists, how it works, how our society is impacted by it and who benefits from it.”

economic influences.

Practicing critical awareness means linking our personal experiences to what we learn from the questions and answers. When we do this, we move toward resilience by learning how to:

• Contextualize (I see the big picture); • Normalize (I’m not the only one); and • Demystify (I’ll share what I know with others). When we fail to make the connections, we increase our shame by: • Individualizing (I am the only one); • Pathologizing (something is wrong with me); and • Reinforcing (I should be ashamed).

The word context is derived from the Latin word contexere, meaning “to weave or twine together.”

When we strive to understand the context or 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.

If we understand how larger systems are contributing to our shame and we choose only to change ourselves, we become as negligent as the person who says, “I’m not changing myself, because the system is bad.” Context is not the enemy of personal responsibility. Individualism is the enemy of personal responsibility.

“You are not alone.”

Pathologizing is classifying something as abnormal or deviant.

Without critical awareness, we might believe that the social-community expectations are attainable. Individually, it is easy for us to believe that we are the only person who doesn’t meet the expectations; therefore, there is something abnormal or deviant about us. If we’re going to develop and practice critical awareness, we have to be able to normalize experiences to the point of knowing we’re not alone.

My parents divorced when I was ten. I’ve spent the last eight years listening to my mom tell me horrible stories about my father. She’s constantly saying, “If he loved you, he’d do more for you.” He left her in pretty bad shape, but he was also broke. If she had more money, she’d probably get off his back. I love my father. He’s a good, decent person and a good dad. She makes me feel ashamed to love him. Ironically, he’s the one that makes me feel better about my mom. He never says anything bad about her—he actually defends her sometimes. It’s so confusing.

Women who have not worked during their marriage face larger economic obstacles.

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 that the answers are kept secret for a reason.

Knowledge is power and power is never diminished by sharing it—it is only increased.

Demystifying is a choice. If you know something and you have the opportunity to demystify it or reinforce it, you have the opportunity to move along on the shame resilience continuum. When we choose to reinforce, we should ask ourselves why we feel better keeping what we know a mystery.

“Do Ask—Don’t Tell” policy. In all fields where credentials are issued, elusiveness is either formally taught or, at the very least, informally modeled. Most educators and helping professionals—therapists, physicians, social workers, clergy, etc.—have been trained to extract information from reluctant consumers while sharing as little as possible about their lives. The unspoken rule states the greater the credentials and status, the more you’re allowed to know about others and the less you have to reveal about yourself.

I kept my shame silent and in the dark, it grew exponentially. However, exposing it to the light of day causes it to lose its power and even shrink.

Relational-Cultural Theory: We heal through our connections with others.

Parents have no idea what bad information does to kids. When young kids ask me questions or even make references to bad information, I tell them everything they want to know. I try to save them the misery I experienced.

When we don’t reach out to others, we allow them to sit alone in their shame, feeding shame the secrecy and silence it craves. Just like we can’t use shame to change people, we can’t benefit from other people’s shame. We can, however, benefit from shared empathy. We don’t reach out to “fix” or “save” others. We reach out to help others by reinforcing their connection network and our own. This increases our resilience by: • Sharing our story • Creating change

When we don’t reach out, we fuel our shame and create isolation by: • Separating • Insulating

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.

The dollar is mightier than the sword; stop buying from people who don’t share your values.

There are people like us, and then there are “those other people.” And, we normally work very hard to insulate ourselves from “those people.”

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.

Reaching out in either direction is tough—practicing courage is as difficult as practicing compassion. They both require us to lean into our discomfort.

Sharing our shame with someone is painful, and just sitting with someone who is sharing his or her shame story with us can be equally painful.

My infertility makes me feel confused. I always assumed I was fertile. I’ve spent years avoiding pregnancy and now it seems ironic that I can’t conceive.

women’s shame experiences fall broadly into the twelve shame categories—appearance and body image, motherhood, family, parenting, money and work, mental and physical health, sex, aging, religion, being stereotyped and labeled, speaking out and surviving trauma.

women struggle with the very real and permanent changes that we often experience after pregnancy and delivery.

Parents have a tremendous amount of influence on their children’s body image development, and girls are still being shamed by their parents—primarily their mothers—about their weight.

Unfortunately, due to societal pressures and the media, most of these kids do not appear to develop strong shame resilience skills around body image.

doctor. The doctor explained that some women experience depression after having a baby and it could be based on my hormones. She said it could happen to me even if I’m normally a loving person. I got on medication, which that’s pretty bad itself, but it’s not as bad as feeling nothing toward your child. Within two months, I felt normal again. I just look back at that time and know that was the darkest place I’ve ever been.

kids: “If you aren’t comfortable enough to talk about condoms with someone, that means you don’t know them well enough to have sex.”

Recognizing Our Shame Triggers: I did not want to be perceived as incapable of balancing motherhood and work. I did not want to be perceived as needing help. I wanted to be perceived as one of those “laid-back, balance everything, don’t need help” working mothers. I’m still not sure about the origin of the messages that fueled that identity. I know some of them came from what I saw growing up in my family.