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

by Brené Brown

During the interviews, an interesting pattern emerged around help seeking. It seems that many women struggle to ask for help or support. So often, we are the caregivers and helpers. We convince ourselves that we shouldn’t need help so we don’t ask for it. Then, we get angry or hurt because no one offers. We think, “Doesn’t he see me drowning?” or “Why won’t she do something?” This can quickly escalate into a blame-and-shame situation: We need help, but we don’t ask for it. We get angry because we don’t get it. We feel ashamed for even thinking someone would help us when we knew they wouldn’t.

When we choose growth over perfection, we immediately increase our shame resilience. Improvement is a far more realistic goal than perfection. Merely letting go of unattainable goals makes us less susceptible to shame.

When we believe “we must be this” we ignore who or what we actually are, our capacity and our limitations. We start from the image of perfection, and of course, from perfection there is nowhere to go but down.

When we set realistic objectives for meeting “growth goals,” we hold ourselves accountable for today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow rather than postponing accountability until six months down the road.

Women with what I would consider the highest levels of shame resilience around the perfection issues had very realistic goals and concrete, measurable strategies for meeting those goals.

One of the benefits of growth through goal setting is that it is not an all-or-nothing proposition—success or failure is not the only possible outcome.

When we set improvement goals and set measurable objectives to meet those goals, we can learn and grow from both missed and met objectives. If our goal is perfection, we will inevitably fail and that failure offers us nothing in terms of learning and change; it only makes us vulnerable to shame.

In contrast, women who spoke of ongoing shame struggles in these same areas perceived past mistakes and failed attempts at perfection as enduring and permanently altering their levels of connection and power. Like the women who demonstrated high levels of shame resilience, they were equally influenced by outside forces; however, in these cases, those forces were mostly members of their shame webs rather than their connection networks. When women spoke about the permanency of mistakes and the inability to move away from perfection and toward growth, at least eighty percent of them described this attribute as something they learned from their parents and/or families.

So, the first reason that going back is an important concept in shame resilience relates to our ability to move past mistakes and failures toward change and growth. The second reason is its influence on our efforts to build empathy through connection networks—not only do we need to be willing to go back and learn from our mistakes, we need people in our lives who are willing to do the same.

When parents instill expectations of perfection in their children, it is very difficult for children to exchange that goal for growth and improvement. This is especially true when parents use shame as a tool to enforce expectations. Women whose parents demonstrated their own commitment to going back by encouraging them to strive for growth rather than perfection felt great connection and empathy from their parents.

When parents acknowledge the pain felt by their children—really show empathy without explaining or defending—amazing healing can happen.

Conversely, women whose parents continued to enforce expectations of perfection into adulthood either continued to struggle with shame or had to work diligently to develop resilience in the face of their parents’ ongoing expectations.

One of the greatest barriers to going back is related to empathy. If our goal is perfection rather than growth, it is unlikely that we are willing to go back, because it requires a level of self-empathy—the ability to look at our own actions with understanding and compassion; to understand our experiences in the context in which they happened and to do all this without judgment. I call this ability to reflect on our own actions with empathy “grounding.”

When we choose growth over perfection, we choose empathy and connection.

Grounding gives us the stability we need to reach out and examine who we are and who we want to be. The more grounded we are, the less we feel compelled to defend our decisions and protect ourselves. We can look at ourselves with compassion rather than self-loathing. Grounding also prevents us from chasing acceptance and belonging by attempting to become whatever people need us to be.

In our culture, the fear and shame of being ordinary is very real. In fact, many of the older women I interviewed spoke about looking back on their lives and grieving for the extraordinary things that would never come to pass. We seem to measure the value of people’s contributions (and sometimes their entire lives) by their level of public recognition. In other words, worth is measured by fame and fortune. Our culture is quick to dismiss quiet, ordinary, hardworking men and women. In many instances, we equate ordinary with boring or, even more dangerous, ordinary has become synonymous with meaningless. One of the greatest cultural consequences of devaluing our own lives has been our tolerance for what people do to achieve their “extraordinary” status.

If we are going to recognize and accept what makes us human, including our imperfections and less-than-extraordinary lives, we must embrace our vulnerabilities. This is extremely difficult, because we are afraid to be vulnerable.

It is extremely painful to share a vulnerability or fear with someone, only to have them use it against us as an insult, as leverage in an argument or as a fodder for gossip.

When we begin to work on our shame resilience, the need to reach out and talk about our experiences can be a very strong force. So strong, in fact, that it sometimes leads us to purging with people with whom we have not developed the kind of relationship that can absorb that information.

When it comes to sharing information, it would be nice to believe that most of us have the ability to recognize the right people, the right times and the right ways to share. But alas, the reality is that most of us have turned to people we barely know and thrown up vulnerability all over them.

When it comes to sharing vulnerability, it’s wise to take time to test whether the other person is worthy of hearing our stories and to assess our own level of safety and comfort in sharing sensitive material. We want to trust that the other person isn’t going to deny and minimize our pain, or alternatively, overfocus on our problem in an unhelpful way. We don’t want to be put down, pitied, or gossiped about, nor do we want to have sensitive information used against us.”

We also fear vulnerability because it is often related to our expectations and the pain of disappointment.

When someone has the courage to share their hopes with us, we are given an important opportunity to practice compassion and connection. Think how powerful it might have been for Elizabeth to hear, “You had such courage to apply for that promotion and then to be honest about how much you wanted it. I’m so proud to be your daughter/friend/mother.”

When we develop expectations we paint a picture in our head of how things are going to be and how they’re going to look. Sometimes we go so far as to imagine what they’re going to feel like, taste like and smell like. We put a picture in our head that holds great value for us.

We set expectations based not only on how we fit in that picture, but also on what those around us are doing in that picture. And often, the failure we feel when these expectations do not come to pass results in shame.

Regardless of what we do, we can’t control how people are going to respond or react.

I think that’s the trouble with expectations: They’re often unrealistic and placed on the wrong people.

When we develop expectations in our minds that have our entire self-worth riding on their realization, we set ourselves up for shame.

But if we’re going to address expectations and the fear of vulnerability, we have to talk about how most women are socialized to believe that certain life events are lifesavers. No matter how bad things are, if we find a boyfriend things will be better. If we get married, they’ll be even better. If we have children, they’ll be so much better we won’t be able to stand it.

Change can happen and there’s always the potential for growth; however, a life event will not provide the change or growth we’re seeking.

In this way, the magnification principle serves as a catalyst for exposing the failed expectations tied to a major life event. When we have our self-worth riding on the realization of something that we can’t control, we put our self-worth in jeopardy.

Again, if we are going to recognize and accept what makes us human, including our imperfections and less-than-extraordinary lives, we must embrace our fears and vulnerabilities. Understanding our fear is part of the shame resilience process. It’s also an important piece in building the kind of relationships that we need to have full and connected lives.

Like guilt, accountability is most often motivated by the desire to repair and renew—it is holding someone responsible for his actions and the consequences of his actions.

On the other hand, we often use blame to discharge overwhelming feelings of fear and shame: “This is painful—who can I blame? I’ll blame you! You are bad and this is your fault.” Inherent in holding ourselves or others accountable for our behavior is expecting change or resolution. Like shame, blame shuts us down and is not an effective tool for change.

The emotion that underlies our obsession with blaming and finding fault is anger.

Anger can be motivated by many different experiences and feelings—shame, humiliation, stress, anxiety, fear and grief are several of the most common triggers. The relationship between shame and anger is about using blame and anger to protect us from the pain caused by shame.

Shame researchers June Tangney and Ronda Dearing explain that one strategy for protecting ourselves during a shaming experience is to “turn the tables” and shift blame outward. In their research, they found that when we blame others we often experience self-righteous anger. Because anger is an emotion of potency and authority, being angry can help us regain a sense of control. Regaining control is important because shame leaves us feeling worthless, paralyzed and ineffective.

If one of our primary shame screens is anger and blame, it is essential that we understand and acknowledge this coping strategy. Next, we need to find out how, when we recognize that we are in shame, to calm down and stay mindful.

Using anger and blame as protection from shame makes sense when you think about shame as “being exposed.” For many of us, shame is about exposure or the fear of exposure. This is why we work so hard to hide the flawed parts of ourselves that leave us open to being ridiculed or judged. Our fear of being put down keeps us from speaking out. Our need to look or act perfect keeps us at home, under the covers.

Invisibility is about disconnection and powerlessness. When we don’t see ourselves reflected back in our culture, we feel reduced to something so small and insignificant that we’re easily erased from the world of important things. Both the process of being reduced and the final product of that process—invisibility—can be incredibly shaming.

“A stereotype is an overgeneralized and rigid definition of group characteristics that is assigned to people based on their membership in a group.” Sometimes we feel OK about using stereotypes, because we’re not using them to be malicious or enforce prejudice; we’re just using them to give someone a quick picture:

Stereotyping gives us a way to file people into predetermined categories that we understand and that make sense to us. It also gives us permission to blame people for their struggles so we are excused from our responsibility to practice compassion—“I don’t need to sit with you in your pain—you brought it on yourself.”

Positive or negative, stereotypes hurt people—individually and collectively. According to researchers, positive stereotypes produce sanitized and idealized images, while negative stereotypes produce demeaning and ridiculing portraits. Either way—we’ve reduced you to something we can fit in our mental drawer.

Stereotyping is a form of blaming and reducing—two of the primary ingredients for creating shame.

When I spoke with women about surviving and healing from trauma, I learned that social-community expectations and stereotypes around trauma force women to deal with two separate issues: surviving the event itself and surviving the shame we heap upon them when we use stereotypes to question their experiences and define who they are as survivors.

The participants with high levels of shame resilience around blame relied heavily on their connection networks to understand and combat invisibility and stereotyping. While we might be erased, reduced or rejected based on a given group we belong to, those groups can also be tremendous sources of strength and support.

1. Who am I? 2. Who says? 3. Who benefits from these labels? 4. If these labels don’t benefit me, what must change and how?

The participants with high levels of shame resilience really emphasized the importance of change. Invisibility is insidious and stereotyping is a default way of thinking. If we don’t recognize or admit our parts in these processes, then we can’t change them.

Disconnection is both the source and consequence of shame, fear and blame. Insulating, judging others, blaming, raging, stereotyping, labeling—these are all forms of disconnection.

But there is another form of disconnection, one that is often more painful and confusing than all of these other forms: It is the feeling of being disconnected from ourselves.