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

by Brené Brown

You can’t fake nonjudgment. It’s in our eyes, our voices and our body language. Real empathy requires us to stay out of judgment and that’s very difficult if we are not self-aware. We must know and understand ourselves before we can know and understand someone else.

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.

To communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings.

empathy isn’t just about the words—it’s about fully engaging with someone and wanting to understand.

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.

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

courage is not just about slaying the dragon, but about being true to yourself and speaking your mind.

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. She went on to say, “This is one of our feminist myths that has been lost. Courage could mean to slay the dragon. But could it also mean to tame our fears?”

Sometimes compassion is listening to someone’s story and other times it’s sitting with her in her fear about not being ready to share.

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.

“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.”

When we hear and watch someone tell us the story behind her shame, can we lean into the discomfort of her pain?

Chödrön teaches that we must be honest and forgiving about when and how we shut down.

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. When this happens on occasion, most of our relationships can survive (and even thrive) if we work to repair the empathic failures. However, most relationships can’t withstand repeated failed attempts at empathy. This is especially true if we find ourselves constantly rationalizing and justifying why we can’t be empathic with someone or why someone is not offering us the empathy we need.

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.

“Connection serves two purposes: the development of social support networks and the creation of power through interaction. Involvement with others in similar situations provides individuals with a means for acquiring and providing mutual aid, with the opportunity to learn new skills through role modeling, with strategies for dealing with likely institutional reprisals, and with a potential power base for future action.”

When we develop and practice empathy, courage and compassion, we move from disconnection to connection. This creates the liberation we need to enjoy the things we value rather than be imprisoned by what others expect. When we are ready to start practicing empathy, we should start with our most important relationship—the one we have with our “self.”

we cannot practice empathy with others unless we can be empathic with ourselves.

Empathy and connection require us to know and accept ourselves before we can know and accept others.

Empathy seeking is driven by the need to know that we are not alone. We need to know that other people have experienced similar feelings and that our experiences don’t keep us from being accepted and affirmed. Empathy helps us move away from shame toward resilience.

Sympathy, on the other hand, can actually exacerbate shame.

In most cases, when we give sympathy we do not reach across to understand the world as others see it. We look at others from our world and feel sorry or sad for them. Inherent in sympathy is “I don’t understand your world, but from this view things look pretty bad.”

Empathy is about connection; sympathy is about separation.

When we find ourselves seeking sympathy, it is helpful to step back and think about what we are really feeling, what it is we’re seeking and what we really need. On the other hand, when we are asked to give sympathy, we have to decide if we want to simply give it and move on or really try to connect and develop empathy. If we want to develop connection and understanding, sometimes the best way to practice compassion is to say, “It sounds like you are in a hard place, tell me more about it,” or “You’re right, I don’t know what that’s like. What is it like? Help me understand.”

If we spend our resources attempting to outdo one another, competing for “last place,” or stepping on each other to climb out of shame, shame will always prevail. It will prevail because being told “That’s nothing” can make us feel like nothing.

Most of us will feed shame with our silence before we risk sharing something that we fear might not be as bad as someone else’s situation, or bad enough to warrant empathy.

The pressure “to get it right” or to “say the perfect thing” can be the biggest barrier to empathy and compassion. We start to experience anxiety about saying the right thing and before we know it, we’ve missed the opportunity to be empathic and compassionate. We diminish, change the subject or walk away.

The bottom line is this: If we want to build connection networks—networks that really help us move from shame to empathy—we 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.

“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.”

If we believe that shame is a constructive emotion, we might not be interested in being empathic.

feeling guilty is only adaptive if we are the ones who are actually responsible for a specific outcome, event or behavior.

“Feeling guilty for other people’s behaviors and actions is a ‘false’ guilt. 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.”

For people to look squarely at their harmful actions and to become genuinely accountable they must have a platform of self-worth to stand on. Only from the vantage point of higher ground can people who commit harm gain perspective. Only from there can they apologize.”

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?”

four elements that were shared by all the women who demonstrated high levels of shame resilience. They are: 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

our bodies often react to shame even before our conscious minds do. People always think it’s strange when I ask them where and how they physically feel shame. But for most of us, shame has a feeling—it’s physical as well as emotional. This is why I often refer to shame as a full-contact emotion.

If we can recognize our physical responses, sometimes we can limit the powerlessness that we feel when we are in shame.

The questions below are designed to help us focus on recognizing our physical reaction to shame. Spend some time thinking about these or answering them on paper. Some may fit for you and others might not. I physically feel shame in/on my It feels like I know I’m in shame when I feel If I could taste shame, it would taste like If I could smell shame, it would smell like If I could touch shame, it would feel like

we face shame every day—no matter how well we can recognize our triggers, avoiding shame is not possible.

“unwanted identity” is the quintessential elicitor of shame. They explain that unwanted identities are characteristics that undermine our vision of our “ideal” selves. Sometimes we perceive others as assigning these unwanted identities to us, and other times, we pin them on ourselves.

So where do unwanted identities come from? The messages and stereotypes that are the most powerful are those that we learned from our families of origin. The term family of origin refers to the family in which we were reared.

many of the “unwanted identities” that cause us to feel shame stem from messages we heard growing up and the stereotypes we were taught by our parents or immediate caregivers. Sometimes, teachers, clergy and other important adults in our lives may have helped shape our thinking; however, parents and caregivers are by far the most influential. I would venture to say that, when it comes to the twelve shame categories, every family has identities they value and, likewise, unwanted identities that are seen as shameful, unacceptable or unworthy.

Of course, families don’t operate in a vacuum. Like individuals, they are influenced by the culture and history.

In addition to the messages and stereotypes passed down through our families of origin, we also live in a world with partners, colleagues, friends and community members, where TV and magazines do nothing but set expectations and define what is and what is not acceptable. I don’t want to dismiss the important role that all of these factors play in our lives; however, in my research it was painfully clear that the shaming wounds inflicted in our first families often set the stage for many of our greatest shame struggles.

I’ve been asked many times if I think that shame can only be experienced in areas where we have been shamed by our parents or caregivers, but I don’t think this is the case. I do believe we are more vulnerable to shame triggers that developed from our families of origin; however, I interviewed many people who struggle with shame around issues that stem from other places—namely cultural messages and stereotypes. This is especially true of women and men who are under forty. For many people in this age group, the media has become the primary storyteller in their lives. Along with their families, TV is now setting the expectations and defining the unwanted identities.

recognizing and understanding our triggers is essentially the same as recognizing and understanding our vulnerabilities, and this is a source of strength. Vulnerability is not weakness.

When we feel shame about an experience, we often feel some overwhelming combination of confusion, fear and judgment. If it happens in an area where we know we’re vulnerable, we’re much more likely to come out of that confusion, fear and judgment with an instinct about what we’re feeling and what we need to do to find support.

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.

perceived vulnerability, meaning the ability to acknowledge that we’re at risk, greatly increases our chances of adhering to some kind of positive health regime.