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.

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.

When I started this research I wasn’t sure about the distinction I had seen drawn between good shame and bad shame. There is a small group of researchers, especially those working from an evolutionary or biological perspective, who believe that shame has both negative and positive consequences. The positive consequence of shame, they contend, is its ability to serve as a compass for moral behavior. They believe that shame keeps us in line. Seven years of testing the proposition that shame can’t be used to change people, combined with a lack of actual data supporting this claim, made me a little suspicious, but I was willing to let the research speak for itself. It didn’t take very long for me to reach the conclusion that there is nothing positive about shame. In any form, in any context and through any delivery system, shame is destructive. The idea that there are two types, healthy shame and toxic shame, did not bear out in any of my research.

When we start to explore the concept that all shame is bad and destructive, it really forces us to reevaluate how we use shame to parent, how we use shame to fight with partners and, on a community and societal level, how we use shame to punish. In a world that still falls back on “You should be ashamed of yourself,” “Shame on you” and “Have you no shame?” the time has come to explore the possibility that we are safer in a world where people aren’t mired in shame.

Anne Lamott. I once heard her describe laughter as a “bubbly, effervescent form of holiness.”

When we reach out to others and share our stories, we increase our power and potential to create change. For most of us, reaching out to others results in tremendous individual change, and inspires some still further to engage in collective change.

If we’ve spent our lives continually insulating ourselves from the people who are suffering and surviving great losses, what happens when something happens to us? I think most of us turn on ourselves. What did I do to deserve this? Why me? This happened because I did something bad or wrong.

Once we’ve convinced ourselves that “things like this don’t happen to people like me,” then when it does happen it means we’ve done something terribly wrong.

It’s hard. We don’t want to connect with people who are in pain, especially if we believe they deserve their pain or if their pain is too scary for us. We don’t want to reach out. It feels risky. Just by associating with them, we could either end up in the same “other” pile or be forced to acknowledge that bad things happen to people like

After a while, we trick ourselves into believing that forecasting perfection is nobler than working toward goals.

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.

One concept that emerged across the interviews is what I call the vulnerability hangover. The vulnerability hangover directly relates to our fear of vulnerability, and unfortunately, most of us have experienced it. We have all been in situations where we’re with a friend, colleague or family member and we feel that deep yearning to connect. Despite the fear, we feel that push or need to share something meaningful, and before you know it, we’ve let it all out. We’ve told them everything; shared our deepest vulnerabilities. The next hour, day or week that feeling of regret comes over us like a warm wave of nausea: “Oh, my God, why did I tell her that? What’s she going to think about my family? Who’s she going to tell?” That’s the vulnerability hangover.

The good thing about the vulnerability hangover is that it’s universal.

“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.”

Turning to rage and anger as a solution for shame only increases our sense of feeling flawed and unworthy of connection.

Shame and addiction feel so enmeshed in many ways that it’s difficult to understand where one starts and the other ends.

women who talked about feeling shame used the words church and religion more.

The women who talked about resilience used the terms faith, spirituality and beliefs more.

this quality of being who you are regardless of who you are with seems to be the very essence of authenticity—the result of being natural, sincere, spontaneous, open and genuine.

If we want to build shame resilience and cultivate our authenticity, we must learn how to become members of our own connection network. We must learn how to respond to ourselves with empathy and understanding.

It takes a lot of work to stay out of judgment about others—it takes even more work to stay out of self-judgment.

Our ability to be authentic and genuine often depends on our level of self-acceptance, our sense of belonging to ourselves and ...

One way that we can increase our self-empathy and the connection to ourselves is to explore and acknowledge our strengths as ...

Sometimes, when I’m feeling very critical of myself, I really question my authenticity.

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