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

by Brené Brown

Like the growing epidemic of violence, for many, shame has strangely become both a form of self-protection and a popular source of entertainment. Name calling and character assassinations have replaced national discussions about religion, politics and culture. We use shame as a tool to parent, teach and discipline our children. Television shows promising cutthroat alliances, backstabbing, hostile confrontations, exclusion and public humiliation consistently grab the top ratings. And at the same time we use shame to defend and entertain ourselves, we struggle to understand why the world feels so scary, why politics have turned into blood sport, why children are suffering higher levels of stress and anxiety, why popular culture appears to be sinking to all-time lows and why a growing number of us feel alone and disconnected.

We feel shame. We think self-esteem.

shame as the fear of disconnection—the fear of being perceived as flawed and unworthy of acceptance or belonging.

Shame keeps us from telling our own stories and prevents us from listening to others tell their stories. We silence our voices and keep our secrets out of the fear of disconnection. When we hear others talk about their shame, we often blame them as a way to protect ourselves from feeling uncomfortable. Hearing someone talk about a shaming experience can sometimes be as painful as actually experiencing it for ourselves.

The prerequisite for empathy is compassion. We can only respond empathically if we are willing to hear someone’s pain.

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.

real freedom is about setting others free.

“You cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviors.”

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.

shame is much more likely to be the source of destructive behaviors than it is to be the solution.

It’s when we feel shame or the fear of shame that we are more likely to engage in self-destructive behaviors, to attack or humiliate others or to stay quiet when we see someone who needs our help.

Recognizing we’ve made a mistake is far different than believing we are a mistake. Of course, you can shame someone into saying, “I’m sorry,” but it’s rarely authentic.

“People believe they deserve their shame; they do not believe they deserve their humiliation.”

Shame is about the fear of disconnection. When we are experiencing shame, we are steeped in the fear of being ridiculed, diminished 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.

of power-over—the idea that power is the ability to control people, take advantage of others or exert force over somebody or something. We think of power as finite—there’s only so much, so if I’m going to get some, I’m forced to take it away from you.

We don’t want to see ourselves reflected back to us in magazines because we’re not perfect, thin or beautiful enough to be valued. Ironically, the only way to free ourselves from power-over is to reclaim our real power—the power to create and live by our own definitions.

Real power is basically the ability to 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.

three specific components of real power: consciousness, choice and change.

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 disconnection.

Women with high levels of shame resilience were both givers and receivers of empathy.

four defining attributes of empathy. They are: (1) to be able to see the world as others see it; (2) to be nonjudgmental; (3) to understand another person’s feelings; and (4) to communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings.

what we see is one view of the world, not the view.

Shame, fear and anxiety are all major incubators of judgment.

There were the issues that hit closest to home—addiction, parenting and affairs. In other areas, women felt remorse about being so judgmental toward others, but when it came to these issues, women felt absolutely justified in their angry judgments.

Empathy seeking is driven by the need to know that we are not alone. We need to know that other people have experienced similar feelings and that our experiences don’t keep us from being accepted and affirmed. Empathy helps us move away from shame toward resilience. Sympathy, on the other hand, can actually exacerbate shame.

unearned privilege kill empathy.

When we are honest about our struggles, we are much less likely to get stuck in shame. This is critical because shame diminishes our capacity to practice empathy. Ultimately, feeling shame about privilege actually perpetuates racism, sexism, hetero-sexism, classism, ageism, etc.

“Empathy is a gift of validation that, no matter how many times it is given, always returns us to our own truth. Empathy heals another at exactly the same time it is healing me.”

shame actually makes us less open to giving or receiving empathy.

1. The ability to recognize and understand their shame triggers 2. High levels of critical awareness about their shame web 3. The willingness to reach out to others 4. The ability to speak shame

twelve categories emerged as areas in which women struggle the most with feelings of shame. These categories are 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.

unwanted identities are characteristics that undermine our vision of our “ideal” selves.

acknowledging our vulnerabilities is an act of courage.

Context is not the enemy of personal responsibility. Individualism is the enemy of personal responsibility.

“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.”

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...

I seldom use the word truth, because it’s a strong word with a lot of promises behind it. But in this instance, I’m going to use it because, out of all the things I’ve learned in the past decade, the one concept that I believe has the biggest potential for helping us overcome shame is this: We are “those people.” The truth is . . . we are the others. 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. In fact, let me prove my point. If you or your family members have NEVER experienced any one of the following issues, you should just skip the remainder of this chapter: • Addiction (alcohol, drug, food, sex, relationships, etc.) • Any mental health diagnosis (depression, anxiety, eating disorders, bipolar, attention-deficit, etc.) • Any stigmatized illness (sexually transmitted diseases, obesity, HIV/Aids, etc.) • Domestic violence (physical, emotional, verbal, etc.) • Sexual assault (rape, marital rape, date rape, etc.) • Child abuse (physical, sexual, incest, neglect, emotional, etc.) • Suicide • Violent death • Criminal activity or incarceration • Serious debt or bankruptcy • Abortion • Nonmainstream religious beliefs • Poverty (including ...

“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.”

There may be no more powerful relationship than the one that exists between fear and shame. These two emotions often work together to create the perfect emotional storm—shame leads to fear and fear leads to shame. They work together so furiously that it’s often hard to tell where one stops and the other begins. Shame, or our fear of disconnection, causes us to be afraid of many things. The issues that I see affecting women the most are our fears of being imperfect, ordinary and uncool and vulnerable. In the following sections we’ll explore these struggles and how the elements of shame resilience can help us practice courage and compassion in the face of fear.

It is difficult for me to capture in writing the emotion conveyed by participants when they explained what it meant to hear their parents say, “I’m sorry,” or “I understand how that made you feel.” When parents acknowledge the pain felt by their children—really show empathy without explaining or defending—amazing healing can happen.

But to really go back, it’s important that we start by first just acknowledging the pain we’ve caused and our desire to rebuild connection.

“You can’t parent perfectly; your only measure of success is your children’s ability to parent even better than you and your willingness to support them in that process.”

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.

“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.”

“I’d rather spend my time, energy and money working to redefine what it means to be old. Spending your resources trying to stay young is a tiresome and impossible battle. At least when you’re fighting against ageism, you can make a difference for more than just yourself.”

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.

We cannot change and grow when we are in shame and we can’t use shame to change ourselves or others.

The major propositions that explain how shame works are: • Shame is best defined as 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 fear, blame and disconnection. • The opposite of experiencing shame is experiencing empathy. • Empathy requires that we practice ordinary courage, compassion and connection. • We cannot become resistant to shame; however, we can develop shame resilience. Shame resilience is best conceptualized as a continuum, with shame anchoring one end and empathy anchoring the other end. • Our level of shame resilience is determined by our combined ability to recognize shame and our specific triggers, our level of critical awareness, our willingness to reach out to others and our ability to speak shame. In other words, our position on the shame resilience continuum is actually the sum of our positions on these other four continuums. • We must assess our shame resilience independently for each shame category. A high level of shame resilience in one area does not guarantee high shame resilience for all areas. • Women with higher levels of shame resilience recognize shame when they are experiencing it and recognize their shame triggers. Understanding our triggers allows us to better recognize shame and reach out for support. When we don’t know ...

“If you want to make a difference, the next time you see someone being cruel to another human being, take it personally. Take it personally because it is personal!”