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

by Brené Brown

Here’s what Marki McMillan, one of the researchers, writes: “Laughter is the evidence that the chokehold of shame has been loosened. Knowing laughter is the moment we feel proof that our shame has been transformed. Like empathy, it strips shame to the bone, robs it of its power and forces it from the closet.” When we reach out to others and share our stories, we increase our power and potential to create change. For most of us, reaching out to others results in tremendous individual change, and inspires some still further to engage in collective change.

When we talk about ways to create change, I like to think of the six Ps—personal, pens, polls, participation, purchases and protests.

Personal: Even the most personal changes often have a powerful ripple effect through the lives of our families, friends and colleagues.

Change can take many forms—there is nothing more inherently political than breaking through social-community expectations so we can live our lives at our full potential and help others do the same. Practicing courage, compassion and connection in the face of shame is a political act.

Pens: Write a letter. Most organizational leaders and legislators will respond to letters, e-mails or faxes.

Polls: Vote. Find out how candidates feel about the issues that affect your life and vote.

Participation: Learn about the organizations that support your issues. Join them in the fight. Most organizations make it very easy to stay up to date on issues by e-mailing or faxing updates. They’ll also help you speak out by offering preformatted e-mails and faxes; you just enter your zip code, and send them right from the computer. It takes two minutes and they make sure it gets to the right person.

Purchases: The dollar is mightier than the sword; stop buying from people who don’t share your values. Marketing research shows that women are the decision makers in an estimated e...

Protests: A protest is not always a million people marching on the capital. Sometimes a protest is four or five people showing up at a school board meeting or in someone’s office. Regardless of size and scope, when we come together to ask for what we need, some people will label our actions as “protest.” If that stops us, we have to ask, “Who benefits by that?”

In The Dance of Intimacy, Harriet Lerner writes, “Although the connections are not always obvious, personal change is inseparable from social and political change.” I believe this is true. Reaching out to others allows us to identify and name what we share in common and creates the opportunity for both personal and social change.

This is the shame of the woman whose hand hides her smile because her teeth are so bad, not the grand self-hate that leads some to razors or pills or swan dives off beautiful bridges however tragic that is. This is the shame of seeing yourself, of being ashamed of where you live and what your father’s paycheck lets you eat and wear. This is the shame of the fat and the bald, the unbearable blush of acne, the shame of having no lunch money and pretending you’re not hungry. This is the shame of concealed sickness—diseases too expensive to afford that offer only their cold one-way ticket out. This is the shame of being ashamed, the self-disgust of the cheap wine drunk, the lassitude that makes junk accumulate, the shame that tells you there is another way to live but you are too dumb to find it. This is the real shame, the damned shame, the crying shame, the shame that’s criminal, the shame of knowing words like glory are not in your vocabulary though they litter the Bibles you’re still paying for. This is the shame of not knowing how to read and pretending you do. This is the shame that makes you afraid to leave your house, the shame of food stamps at the supermarket when the clerk shows impatience as you fumble with the change. This is the shame of dirty underwear, the shame of pretending your father works in an office as God intended all men to do. This is the shame of asking friends to let you off in front of the one nice house in the neighborhood and waiting in the shado...

In a culture of shame, we are constantly overwhelmed with feelings of fear, blame and disconnection. This creates an “us and them” world. 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.

The point of this list is not to rank or compare the issues. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think that gets us anywhere. It’s about understanding that we are all vulnerable to being judged and feeling shame about our experiences. And equally important, we are all vulnerable to judging and shaming others about their experiences.

We use the concept of otherness to insulate ourselves and to disconnect. This is why it is such a serious barrier to reaching out as a method of shame resilience. 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. The natural tendency to avoid or reduce this pain is often why we start to judge and insulate ourselves using otherness. We basically blame them for their experience. We unconsciously divide people into two camps: worthy of our support and unworthy. When someone is feeling shame over one of these otherness issues, we don’t feel that compelled to reach out. Likewise, when we are feeling shame because we are experiencing one of these stigmatized issues, it is difficult to reach out for support. It’s easier to believe we deserve our shame.

The concept of labeling people worthy or unworthy is not new. If you look at the history of charity and philanthropy, going as far back as written history, those needing help have always been separated into the deserving poor or the undeserving poor. This thinking has become part of our culture. You can see it in our public policy, our neighborhoods and in our families. It plays out on an individual level exactly like it plays out at the community level.

Sometimes we don’t turn away from people because their experiences are so stigmatized and socially unacceptable, but simply because they’re too scary.

If we’ve spent our lives continually insulating ourselves from the people who are suffering and surviving great losses, what happens when something happens to us? I think most of us turn on ourselves. What did I do to deserve this? Why me? This happened because I did something bad or wrong.

Once we’ve convinced ourselves that “things like this don’t happen to people like me,” then when it does happen it means we’ve done something terribly wrong. We’ve been kicked out of the group that kept us safe—that mythical group that always escapes tragedy.

We don’t want to connect with people who are in pain, especially if we believe they deserve their pain or if their pain is too scary for us. We don’t want to reach out. It feels risky. Just by associating with them, we could either end up in the same “other” pile or be forced to acknowledge that bad things happen to people like us.

I think the most important thing she has told me about reaching out to others in crisis is this: “You do it because that’s the person you want to be. You do it because that could have been me and one day it could just as easily be you.”

If we want to develop shame resilience, we must learn how to reach out. We must take what we know about courage, compassion and connection and put it into practice.

It’s important to realize that, often, the person we can turn to regarding one issue is not the best person to talk to about other issues.

This is why it is important to think about specific issues when we try to identify the people with whom we can reach out. Sometimes these “reaching out” questions help when you look at them by shame categories: • Who are the individuals and groups who form your connection network? • Who reaches out to you with empathy and support? • Who are the individuals and groups who form the shame web around these issues? • When you see people who are struggling with these issues, do you reach out with empathy or do you insulate yourself?

We’ve all been shamed by someone. As I wrote in the Introduction, every one of us has been wounded by subtle, and sometimes downright mean, comments about the way we look, our work, our parenting, how we spend our money, our families or even the life experiences over which we had no control. Shaming comments can be direct, indirect, manipulative, intentional and even, I believe, unintentional. What they all share in common is how much they hurt and how they send us reeling and desperately searching for protection.

Protecting ourselves by redirecting our feelings at another human target (displacing) is a common defense strategy when we feel shame.

the motivations behind shame don’t buffer us from the pain. Unintentional shame is still painful.

Working our way out of the shame web can be very difficult because, like most traps, it entangles you the more you struggle and fight. To free ourselves, we need to move slowly, deliberately and with a tremendous amount of awareness about what we are doing and why.

It seems counterintuitive, but telling someone how we feel takes more courage and is often more powerful than verbally attacking them.

The same type of honest focus on feelings also works when it comes to addressing unintentional shame.

Unintentional shame often happens when people are trying to be helpful but end up either giving unsolicited advice, judging or shutting down the ...

I know this feels risky. I’m a social worker and a shame researcher and putting my emotional needs on the table still feels scary to me. We feel vulnerable and exposed. And, sometimes, sharing doesn’t work. It can overwhelm people and they can throw up their own shame screens and that will be painful.

When you learn to speak shame, it allows you to pick up on some of the subtle language of the shame web. This is language that is used to shame and language that is used to defend shaming when we’re trying to explain how we feel and what we need.

And 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.

When we talk about the crazy-making aspects of shame, including shame disguised as honesty, it’s important to understand that “crazy-making” runs the continuum from what I experienced with Phyllis to very serious forms of emotional abuse.

shame is a highly individualized experience. Each of us must examine our own triggers and the messages behind them and develop our own paths to resilience. But as we’ve seen throughout the book, there are also some universal patterns that run through our experiences.

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. In addition to the shame categories, we also share culture. In our culture today, the fear of disconnection feels very real. Most of us have to constantly work to feel grounded and stay connected.

The issues that I see affecting women the most are our fears of being imperfect, ordinary and uncool and vulnerable.

We don’t just want to be good at what we do, we want to be perfect—we want to edit together all the best clips of what we see to form our lives.

So, where does this idea of “editing for perfection” come from? The answer is right in front of us—it’s the shame web. If we look at all of the people in the shame web—family, partners, friends, self, colleagues, group members, etc.—most of us can identify the expectations these people have of us. This is especially true around some of the shame categories like appearance, motherhood, parenting, work and family. The primary reason the expectations around these issues are so influential is related to how quickly they are imposed on our lives. On the day that we are born, there are immediate expectations that we will be cute and attractive, we will grow up, get married, be successful, become mothers, have natural parenting skills and be loving members of sane and well-balanced families. Complicating matters, we have the media, which makes perfection appear attainable by inundating us with images that are, quite literally, edited for perfection.

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.

There just doesn’t appear to be any room for neutrality on this issue—you are either actively working to help your children develop a positive self-concept or, by default, you are sacrificing them to the media- and society-driven expectations.

People often make the mistake of comparing caregiving with parenting. On the face of it, this might make sense. But if we really examine the differences, we can see how absolutely different they are and how believing they are the same sets us up for shame.

The energy we need to take care of children is fueled by promise. Taking care of another adult is often steeped in fear and grief—especially if this person is at the end of his life or facing an unknown future. Fear and grief don’t fuel us—they usually drain us.

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.

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.

The research participants really exposed an interesting perfection paradox: Imperfection brings shame, and working too hard for perfection brings shame.

We need to reality-check our expectations. Just because we don’t sit down and channel the great American novel in one week doesn’t mean we won’t be good writers. And we need to remember that behind every “naturally gifted” person is normally a huge amount of work, dedication and commitment.

Of equal importance is the shame that stems from what we are willing to do to appear perfect or hide our imperfections. When perfection is the expectation and/or the goal, we are willing to put a lot on the line to maintain and protect our image.