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

by Brené Brown

When we dig past the surface, we find that shame is often what drives us to hate our bodies, fear rejection, stop taking risks or hide the experiences and parts of our lives that we fear others might judge. This same dynamic applies to feeling attacked as a mother or feeling too stupid or uneducated to voice our opinions.

Shame forces us to put so much value on what other people think that we lose ourselves in the process of trying to meet everyone else’s expectations.

Shame and self-esteem are very different issues. We feel shame. We think self-esteem. Our self-esteem is based on how we see ourselves—our strengths and limitations—over time. It is how and what we think of ourselves. Shame is an emotion. It is how we feel when we have certain experiences. When we are in shame, we don’t see the big picture; we don’t accurately think about our strengths and limitations. We just feel alone, exposed and deeply flawed.

To understand how shame is influenced by culture, we need to think back to when we were children or young adults, and we first learned how important it is to be liked, to fit in, and to please others. The lessons were often taught by shame; sometimes overtly, other times covertly. Regardless of how they happened, we can all recall experiences of feeling rejected, diminished and ridiculed. Eventually, we learned to fear these feelings. We learned how to change our behaviors, thinking and feelings to avoid feeling shame. In the process, we changed who we were and, in many instances, who we are now.

Compassion is not a virtue—it is a commitment. It’s not something we have or don’t have—it’s something we choose to practice.

shame can be so threatening that, rather than processing it in the neocortex—the advanced part of the brain that allows us to think, analyze and react—shame can signal our brains to go into our very primal “fight, flight or freeze” mode.

empathy is best understood as a skill because being empathic, or having the capacity to show empathy, is not a quality that is innate or intuitive. We might be naturally sensitive to others, but there is more to empathy than sensitivity.

This is the vicious cycle. The judgment of others leaves us feeling hurt and ashamed so we judge others as a way to make ourselves feel better.

It is important to understand that we cannot practice empathy with others unless we can be empathic with ourselves.

acknowledging our vulnerability is a true act of ordinary courage.