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

by Brené Brown

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.