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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brené Brown
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January 1 - January 21, 2025
“You cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviors.”
Yes and no
This “professional silence” is important to understand because there are studies that identify shame as the dominant emotion experienced by mental health clients, exceeding anger, fear, grief and anxiety.
I often refer to shame as a “full-contact” emotion. When we experience it or even listen to a friend’s story about a shaming experience, we often have a visceral and physical response. It’s emotionally overwhelming, but we also feel it in our bodies.
Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging.
Definition of shame
One reason shame is so powerful is its ability to make us feel alone.
When we hear stories about shame that don’t fit with our experiences, our first reaction is often to distance ourselves from the experiences—“My mother would never say that” or “I don’t get women who don’t enjoy sex” or “She’s so naïve—her husband’s a wacko.” The distancing turns very quickly into blame, judgment and separation. This fuels the shame epidemic.
We need to understand when and why we are the most likely to engage in shaming behaviors toward others, how we can develop our resilience to shame and how we can consciously make the effort not to shame others.
It might seem overly sensitive to stress the importance of using the appropriate term to describe an experience or emotion; however, it is much more than just semantics. “Speaking shame,” or being able to identify and label these emotions, is one of the four elements of shame resilience.
Like most of the studies on shame, my research strongly supports the argument that embarrassment, guilt, humiliation and shame are four different emotional responses.
Shame is distinct emotion
Embarrassment is, by definition, something that is fleeting, often eventually funny and very normal (e.g., tripping, misspeaking, etc.). Regardless of how embarrassing a situation might be, we know (or at least have heard) that it happens to other people and we know it will go away.
Guilt is probably the term most often confused with shame.
Guilt most confused w shame
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. If I feel guilty for cheating on a test, my self-talk might sound something like “I should not have done that. That was really stupid. Cheating is not something I believe in or want to do.” If I feel shame about cheating on a test, my self-talk is more
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Shame is focusing on who we are rather than what we’ve done.
When we experience shame we feel disconnected and desperate for belonging and recognition.
Recognizing we’ve made a mistake is far different than believing we are a mistake.
Donald Klein captures the differences between shame and humiliation when he writes, “People believe they deserve their shame; they do not believe they deserve their humiliation.”
Understanding the “how and why” of shame is critically important because there is far more to shame resilience than surviving a shaming moment.
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
But if we understand fear, blame and disconnection as intricately woven together to create shame, it becomes very clear why shame is so powerful, complex and difficult to overcome.
But, at their core, the expectations that fuel shame are specifically about what is expected of us as women. Shame is organized by gender.
Shame is organized by gender
we are biologically, emotionally, socially and cognitively wired for connection.
Internship
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.
We use blame to deal with our feelings of powerlessness.
Unfortunately, when most of us hear the word “power” we automatically jump to the concept of power-over—the idea that power is the ability to control people, take advantage of others or exert force over somebody or something.
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.
Ex of power over
shame can signal our brains to go into our very primal “fight, flight or freeze” mode.
Brain and shame
If feeling connected is feeling valued, accepted, worthy and affirmed, then feeling disconnected is feeling diminished, rejected, unworthy and reduced.
Connection definition
“We believe that the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation. This is not the same as being alone. It is a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of human connection and of being powerless to change the situation. In the extreme, psychological isolation can lead to a sense of hopelessness and desperation. People will do almost anything to escape this combination of condemned isolation and powerlessness.”
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
Again, by resilience, I mean that ability to recognize shame when we experience it, and move through it in a constructive way that allows us to maintain our authenticity and grow from our experiences.
Resilience definition
empathy is the strongest antidote for shame.
Do you remember the petri dishes from high school science lab—those little round dishes? If you put shame in a petri dish and cover it with judgment, silence and secrecy, it grows out of control until it consumes everything in sight—you have basically provided shame with the environment it needs to thrive. On the other hand, if you put shame in a petri dish and douse it with empathy, shame loses power and starts to fade. Empathy creates a hostile environment for shame—it can’t survive.
Petri dish analogy
When it comes to shame resilience, empathy is at the center.
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.
4 traits of empathy
We all see the world through multiple lenses. These lenses represent who we are and the perspectives from which we view the world. Some of the lenses are constantly changing and some have been with us from the day we were born.
Internship
In order to be empathic, we must be willing to recognize and acknowledge our own lens and attempt to see the situation that someone is experiencing through her lens.
I must work very hard not to see their stories through my lenses, but to listen as they describe what they see, feel and experience.
Dissertation
Those of us who were taught perspective-taking skills as children owe our parents a huge debt of gratitude.
You can’t fake nonjudgment. It’s in our eyes, our voices and our body language.
hope to accomplish two things: give voice to the voiceless and give ears to the earless. My first goal is to share the complex and important stories that women often keep to themselves because of shame. I want to share these voices because their stories are our stories. They deserve to be told. My second goal is to relay these stories in a way that allows us to hear them. Often, the problem isn’t with the voices, but rather with our ears. The voices are frequently there—singing, screaming, yearning to be heard—but we don’t hear them because fear and blame muffle the sounds.
Dissertation
Courage gives us a voice and compassion gives us an ear.
We’ll never know how our stories might change someone’s life—our children’s, our friends’, our parents’, our partner’s or maybe that of a stranger who hears the story down the line or reads it in a book.
Dissertation
Without courage, we cannot tell our stories. When we don’t tell our stories, we miss the opportunity to experience empathy and move toward shame resilience.
Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion,
When we develop and practice empathy, courage and compassion, we move from disconnection to connection. This creates the liberation we need to enjoy the things we value rather than be imprisoned by what others expect.
Facts
It is important to understand that we cannot practice empathy with others unless we can be empathic with ourselves.
Empathy helps us move away from shame toward resilience. Sympathy, on the other hand, can actually exacerbate shame.
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.
“You are telling us that no one can understand, yet you’re asking us to understand. What should we do? We want to connect, but you’re telling us it’s impossible.”
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.
