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

by Brené Brown

“Acknowledging vulnerability is possible only if we feel we can reach out for support. To do so, we must feel some competence in our relationships.” The likelihood of our finding the insight and courage to acknowledge our personal vulnerabilities is dependent on our ability to share and talk about those vulnerabilities with someone we trust and with whom we feel safe.

For most of us to successfully begin to recognize and understand our shame triggers, we first need to accept that acknowledging our vulnerabilities is an act of 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 _______________. These are fairly simple statements; however, when you start to think about these questions in relation to the twelve shame categories, this can be a probing and powerful start to the process.

The next step is to try to uncover the source of these triggers.

If we look at our unwanted identities, three questions that can help us start to uncover the sources are: 1. What do these perceptions mean to us? 2. Why are they so unwanted? 3. Where did the messages that fuel these identities come from?

First, we are very hard on ourselves. When we identify these desired and unwanted identities, we give ourselves very little room to be human. Second, we cannot deny the power of the messages we heard growing up. Last, most of us judge others whom we perceive as having the traits we dislike in ourselves.

There’s a third set of questions that is very important to this exercise. Examine your list of unwanted identities and ask yourself, “If people reduce me to this list, what important and wonderful things will they miss about me?”

We convince ourselves that if we pretend they don’t exist, it’s somehow easier. It’s not. Our feelings, beliefs and actions are motivated by these triggers regardless of whether we write them down and acknowledge them or we pretend they don’t exist. Recognizing and understanding them is the only path to change.

the brain does not differentiate between overt or big trauma and covert or small, quiet trauma—it just registers the event as “a threat that we can’t control.”

most of the time when we recall a memory, we are conscious that we are in the present, recalling something from the past. However, when we experience something in the present that triggers an old trauma memory, we reexperience the sense of the original trauma.

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.

The next exercise is identifying our shame screens. As you think about each of the shame categories and the triggers associated with each category, try to think of a specific shame experience. How did you respond? Is that a pattern? How do you protect yourself in those situations?

“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.”

The concept of critical awareness is sometimes called critical consciousness or critical perspective. It’s the belief that we can increase personal power by understanding the link between our personal experiences and larger social systems. When we look at the 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—most of us have not been taught how to see the connection between our private lives and social, political and economic influences.

Shame works like the zoom lens on a camera. When we are feeling shame, the camera is zoomed in tight and all we see is our flawed selves, alone and struggling. We think to ourselves, “I’m th...

When we zoom out, we start to see a completely different picture. We see many people in the same struggle. Rather than thinking, “I’m the only one,” we start thinking, “I can’t believe it! You too? I’m normal? I thought it was just me!” Once we start to see the big picture, we are better able to reality...

Let’s start by looking at the issue of appearance and body image. I like to use this issue as an example because it is an almost universal shame trigger. To begin to understand the big picture we need to ask the following big-picture questions about appearance: • What are the social-community expectations around appearance? • Why do these expectations exist? • How do these expectations work? • How is our society influenced by these expectations? • Who benefits from these expectations?

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, looking “done-up,” not looking “done-up,” clothing and jewelry. Why do appearance expectations exist? I would say they exist to keep us spending our valuable resources—money, time and energy—on trying to meet some ideal that is not achievable.

How does it work? I think the expectations are both obvious and subtle—they are everything we see and everything we don’t see. If you read fashion magazines or watch TV, you know what you are “supposed to” look like and how you are “supposed to” dress and act. If you look hard enough, you also see everything that’s missing—the images of real people. If you combine what’s there and what’s missing, you quickly come to believe that if you don’t look a certain way, you become invisible; you don’t matter.

When we ask and answer these big-picture questions, we begin to develop critical awareness. The next step is learning how to use this information to reality-check our shame triggers. We do that by looking at our shame triggers and asking these six reality-check questions: • How realistic are my expectations? • Can I be all these things all of the time? • Do the expectations conflict with each other? • Am I describing who I want to be or who others want me to be? • If someone perceives me as having these unwanted identities, what will happen? • Can I control how others perceive me? How do I try?

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).

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 similar struggles. When we pull completely back, we start to see an even bigger picture—how political, economic and social forces shape our personal experiences. Contextualizing is the key to making the shame connection.

identifying the contexts in which we feel shame helps us build resilience.

Context helps us understand how social-community expectations, economics and politics are all woven together to produce one cohesive image. We can’t unravel the truth without recognizing the threads.

As the categories indicate, many of us actually fall prey to the same sources of shame, and we experience very similar reactions. However, due to the isolating and secretive nature of shame, we feel like it is only happening to us and that we must hide it at all costs. This, in turn, has led to our false belief that shame is a personal problem—even a psychological defect of some kind. It’s not.

Yes, shame can lead to personal problems and even play a role in mental illness, but shame is also a social construct—it happens between people. Shame is how I feel when I see myself through someone else’s eyes...

I think the most dangerous view is looking at shame strictly as a personal problem. When we do that, we seek only personal and highly individualized solutions, which leave the layers of competing and conflicting expectations that drive shame intact and unchanged.

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. 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.

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.

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.

Shame works only if we think we’re alone in it. If we think there’s someone else, a group of women, a city full of women, a country full of women, a world full of women, struggling with the same issue, the concept of shame becomes bankrupt.

On the opposite side of the continuum from normalizing is pathologizing. 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.

When you tell people their situation is only “perception” and they can change it, you shame them, belittle them and, in the case of domestic violence, you put them in extreme physical danger. Rather than dismissing someone’s experience as perception, we might want to ask, “How can I help?” or “Is there some way I can support you?”

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 that the answers are kept secret for a reason.

When individuals, groups or institutions want to exclude people or raise their status, they have a tendency to shroud themselves, their products or their ideas in mystery.

The opposite of demystifying is reinforcing. Reinforcing is protecting the mystery of something so we can feel more important and secure. I think we’re most susceptible to reinforcing when we feel shame around an issue. But when we reinforce, we weave webs that not only entangle other women but eventually trap us.

When we don’t understand something and “not understanding” is a shame trigger, we are often too fearful to even ask for an explanation. I’ve named this “The Edamame Threat.”

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.

Folks with credentials have three distinct advantages over the folks they are working with: (1) they have permission to “not know,” (2) they have permission to “not tell,” and (3) their objectivity is not questioned. When most people are asked a question or put on the spot for information, they feel tremendous pressure to come up with an answer—preferably the right one. If we can’t produce an answer or we supply the wrong information, we often feel judged. If we are credentialed, however, we automatically have the right not to know or the right not to answer.

Others, including me, are taught that pure objectivity does not exist and that people can’t ever completely put away their personal lenses. We are trained, instead, to understand the biases and power of our experiences so we understand how they might affect our interactions with clients. We believe this is the most ethical way to work with clients.

In my experience, 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 their opinions in the appropriate context.

When we interview doctors, therapists and other credentialed professionals, we can’t assume objectivity. We don’t have the right to infringe on their private lives, but we do have the right to understand their professional values, ethics and their motivation for working with u...

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

women’s sense of self and of worth is most often grounded in the ability to make and maintain relationships.”

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. When we find the courage to share our experiences and the compassion to hear others tell their stories, we force shame out of hiding and end the silence.

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

One of the benefits of sharing our story is experiencing “knowing laughter.” I define knowing laughter as laughter that results from recognizing the universality of our shared experiences, both positive and negative. It embodies the relief and connection we experience when we realize the power of sharing our shame.