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

by Brené Brown

Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging.

Guilt and shame are both emotions of self-evaluation; however, that is where the similarities end. The majority of shame researchers agree that the difference between shame and guilt is best understood as the differences between “I am bad” (shame) and “I did something bad” (guilt). Shame is about who we are and guilt is about our behaviors.

Guilt is holding an action or behavior up against our ethics, values and beliefs. We evaluate that behavior (like cheating) and feel guilt when the behavior is inconsistent with who we want to be. Shame is focusing on who we are rather than what we’ve done. The danger of telling ourselves that we are bad, a cheat, and no good, is that we eventually start to believe it and own it. The person who believes she is “no good” is much more likely to continue to cheat and fulfill that label than the person who feels guilt.

Women most often experience shame as a web of layered, conflicting and competing social-community expectations. These expectations dictate: who we should be what we should be how we should be

Shame is about the fear of disconnection. When we are experiencing shame, we are steeped in the fear of being ridiculed, dimin ished or seen as flawed. We are afraid that we’ve exposed or revealed a part of us that jeopardizes our connection and our worthiness of acceptance.

shame is the most powerful when we enforce the expectation ourselves, or when it’s enforced by those closest to us (our partners, our fam-ily or friends).

Power-over is a dangerous form of power. Dr. Robin Smith, a psychologist and contributor to The Oprah Winfrey Show, described one of the most insidious forms of power-over as working like this: “I will define who you are and then I’ll make you believe that’s your own definition.” This chilling explanation of power-over captures what shame does to us. It forces us into gender straitjackets, then convinces us that we put them on ourselves and that we enjoy wearing them. Over the past year, I’ve seen a potent example of “power-over” at work. I speak to many groups about shame and body image. When Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty was launched a couple of years ago, I asked women how they felt about seeing “real” women in their panties and bras (versus super-thin models). I was not surprised to hear half the women say they didn’t like it. Many described their reaction this way: “I know it’s probably a great thing, but I had a very negative emotional reaction when I saw it.” Some women felt “embarrassed for the models” and others said, “It doesn’t inspire me to look better or lose weight.” Basically, what I heard two years ago is what I still hear from women today: “I know it’s empowering and wonderful, but my gut reaction is…You’re too fat and not perfect enough—put some clothes on.” It’s important to understand that most of the women who struggle with their emotional reaction to the Dove models look like the Dove models. This is “power-over” at work. Right in line with Dr. Smit...

Real power is basically the ability t o change something if you want to change it. It’s the ability to make change happen. Real power is unlimited—we don’t need to fight over it because there is plenty to go around. And the great thing about real power is our ability to create it. Real power doesn’t force us to take it away from others—it’s something we create and build with others.

Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging. Women often experience shame when they are entangled in a web of layered, conflicting and competing social-community expectations. Shame creates feelings of fear, blame and discon nection.

When our need for empathy is met with sympathy, it can often send us deeper into shame—we feel even more alone and separated. Empathy is about connection; sympathy is about separation.

When we compete to see whose situation is worse, whose oppression is the most real or whose “-ism” is the most serious, we lose sight of the fact that most of our struggles stem from the same place—powerlessness and disconnection.

don’t believe we can fully understand racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism or any other form of oppression, unless we’ve experienced it. However, I do believe that we are all responsible for constantly developing our understanding of oppression and recognizing our part in perpetuating it. Empathy is a powerful place to start.

As we learn more about the positive aspects of guilt, I believe it’s important to remember that feeling guilty is only adaptive if we are the ones who are actually responsible for a specific out come, event or behavior. Too often, in our society, women are blamed when they bear no responsibility, and socialized to take responsibility for things they shouldn’t.

In my interviews with both men and women, it was obvious that 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.

When we experience shame, our first layer of defense often occurs involuntarily. It goes back to our primal flight, fight and freeze responses. Dr. Shelley Uram, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, is currently the consulting psychiatrist at The Meadows, a trauma and addiction treatment facility. In her work, Dr. Uram ex-plains that most of us think of traumatic events as big events (like car wrecks and disasters). But Dr. Uram points out that we tend not to recognize the small, quiet traumas that often trigger the same brain-survival reaction. After studying Dr. Uram’s work, I believe it’s possible that many of our early shame experiences, especially with parents and caregivers, were stored in our brains as traumas. This is why we often have such painful bodily reactions when we feel criticized, ridiculed, rejected and shamed. Dr. Uram explains that 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.”

“Aware ness 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.” I think they started to get it. The concept of critical awareness is sometimes called critical consciousness or critical perspective. It’s the belief that we can in-crease personal power by understanding the link between our per-sonal experiences and larger social systems. When we look at the shame categories—appearance and body image, motherhood, fam-ily, 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.

Among women over eighteen looking at themselves in the mirror, research indicates that at least eighty percent are unhappy with what they see. Many will not even be seeing an accurate re-flection. Most of us have heard that people with anorexia see themselves as larger than they really are, but some recent research indicates that this kind of distorted body image is by no means confined to those suffering from eating disorders—in some studies up to eighty percent of women overestimated their size. Increasing numbers of women with no weight problems or clinical psychological disorders look at themselves in the mirror and see ugliness and fat.

Women had nearly 10.7 million cosmetic procedures, ninety percent of the total. The number of cosmetic procedures for women has increased forty-nine percent since 2003.

Critical awareness also requires us to question this notion of blaming the victim. In particular, some pop psychologists preach that “There is no such thing as reality, just perception.” Not only is this inaccurate, it’s dangerous. Racism is real, domestic violence is real, homophobia is real. The economics of divorce are real. 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?” It might be accurate to say that we all see things differently, but the world trades in both reality and perception.

I firmly believe that if we have “mysterious powers”—if we know how something sa-cred works—we are obligated to share what we know. Knowledge is power and power is never diminished by sharing it—it is only in-creased.

One of the most important benefits of reaching out to others is learning that the experiences that make us feel the most alone are actually universal experiences.

In fact, body image is th e one issue that comes closest to being a “universal trigger,” with more than ninety percent of the participants experiencing shame about their bodies. Body shame is so powerful and often so deeply rooted in our psyches that it actually affects why and how we feel shame in many of the other categories, including sexuality, motherhood, parenting, health, aging and a woman’s ability to speak out with confidence.

When we begin to blame and hate our bodies for failing to live up to our expectations, we start splitting ourselves in parts and move away from our wholeness—our authentic selves.

When we believe that success should be effortless, we simultaneously set ourselves up for shame and diminish the efforts of peo-ple who are working on their issues around perfectionism; we become part of our own shame web and other women’s shame webs.

And we need to remember that behind every “naturally gifted” person is normally a huge amount of work, dedication and commitment.

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 think, “I want my parents to see me as the perfect daughter,” all we can do is fail. First, perfection is unattainable. Sec-ond, we can’t control how people perceive us. Lastly, there is no way that we can do every single thing that is expected of us or that we expect of ourselves.

Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.

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.

The ability to learn from our mistakes rather than seeing them as failed attempts at perfection is the essence of “going back.” Going back emerged as an extremely important concept in this research. Women with high levels of shame resilience in the areas of appearance, motherhood, parenting, work and family spoke passionately about the value of believing that it’s never too late to grow and change. They resisted being defined by mistakes and viewed “imperfection” as a necessary part of growth rather than a barrier. Furthermore, many of these same women emphasized the value of having members of their connection network who modeled “go-ing back” as a powerful strategy for growth and change. Women were especially influenced by their parents’ willingness to change and grow as parents.

I sometimes explain my shame research as a study on the power of connection and the dangers of disconnection. 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. We are often so influenced by what other people think and so overwhelmed with trying to be who other people need us to be, that we actually lose touch with our sense of self. We lose our grounding. We lose our authenticity. The reason this is so painful is because our authenticity is the very foundation from which all meaningful change occurs.

Social work educators Dean H. Hepworth, Ronald H. Rooney and Jane Lawson define authenticity as “the sharing of self by relating in a natural, sincere, spontaneous, open and genuine manner.” We cannot share ourselves with others when we see ourselves as flawed and unworthy of connection. It’s impossible to be “real” when we are ashamed of who we are or what we believe.