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

by Brené Brown

I define empathy as the skill or ability to tap into our own experiences in order to connect with an experience someone is relating to us.

When I’m in shame, I can’t be a good partner or a good teacher or a good mother or a good friend.

successful leaders often demonstrate high levels of empathy; that empathy is related to academic and professional success; that it can reduce aggression and prejudice and increase altruism.

Teresa Wiseman, a nursing scholar in England, identifies 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.

To be able to see the world as others see it. Sometimes the skill of trying to see the world as others see it is called “perspective taking.”

Over-identifying with someone’s experience can be as much a barrier to perspective taking as not identifying at all.

To be nonjudgmental. One of the greatest challenges we will face on this path to developing empathy will be to overcome the habit of judging others.

Often, our need to judge others is deeply motivated by our need to evaluate our own abilities, beliefs and values.

Shame, fear and anxiety are all major incubators of judgment. When we are in our own shame about an issue or when we are feeling anxious, threatened or fearful about an issue, refraining from judgment can seem impossible.

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

To understand another person’s feelings. In order to do this, we must be in touch with our own feelings and emotions, and we need to be comfortable in the larger world of emotion and feelings.

Emotions are often difficult to recognize and even harder to name.

To communicate your understanding of that person’s feelings.

Stories require voices to speak them and ears to hear them. Stories only foster connection when there is both someone to speak and someone to listen.

Courage gives us a voice and compassion gives us an ear.

Without both, there is no opportunity for empathy and connection.

When we tell our stories, we change the world.

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, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance.”

Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.

It takes a lot of courage to share your hurt with someone. It takes even more courage to do it twice—especially after they shut you down the first time.

There are times we will miss the opportunity to be empathic. Mental health professionals often call these “empathic failures.”

When we are ready to start practicing empathy, we should start with our most important relationship—the one we have with our “self.”

When we talk about empathy, we often confuse it with sympathy.

Empathy seeking is driven by the need to know that we are not alone.

Empathy helps us move away from shame toward resilience. Sympathy, on the other hand, can actually exacerbate shame.

Like all sympathy, it said, “I’m over here and you’re over there. I’m sorry for you and I’m sad for you. AND, while I’m sorry that happened to you, let’s be clear: I’m over here.” This is not compassion.

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.

People seeking sympathy are not looking for empathy or evidence of shared experiences—they are searching for confirmation of their uniqueness.

Sometimes the best we can do with someone who is sympathy seeking is to fake a “Yeah, that’s really hard” or “Wow, sounds rough.”

What separates sympathy and empathy is our motivation for sharing struggles. And, ironically, our motivation for sympathy seeking is often shame.

When we compete to see whose situation is worse, whose oppression is the most real or whose “-ism” is the most serious, we lose sight of the fact that most of our struggles stem from the same place—powerlessness and disconnection.

This “at least” response is primarily about our own discomfort. “At leasting” someone is equivalent to shutting her down.

One reason empathy and compassion are so powerful is the fact that they say to someone, “I can hear this. This is hard, but I can be in this space with you.”

I don’t believe we can fully understand racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism or any other form of oppression, unless we’ve experienced it. However, I do believe that we are all responsible for constantly developing our understanding of oppression and recognizing our part in perpetuating it. Empathy is a powerful place to start. So often I find that our feelings of unearned privilege kill empathy. By unearned privilege I mean the privileges afforded us simply because we are white or straight or members of certain groups. We get stuck in what I call privilege shame.

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.

In any form, in any context and through any delivery system, shame is destructive.

Guilt, on the other hand, was often a strong motivator for change.

feeling guilty is only adaptive if we are the ones who are actually responsible for a specific outcome, event or behavior.

Every human must be able to view the self as complex and multidimensional.

One of the greatest challenges to developing shame resilience is the way shame actually makes us less open to giving or receiving empathy.

When we are in shame, reaching out for empathy feels very dangerous and risky.

I found four elements that were shared by all the women who demonstrated high levels of shame resilience. They are: 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

If we’re going to build shame resilience, we have to start by recognizing and identifying shame.

Somewhat paradoxically, our bodies often react to shame even before our conscious minds do.

Recognizing shame is an important tool for regaining our power.

When we know how shame feels, we have an important resilience tool. Often, we feel shame before we think it. Recognizing our shame allows us to find the space we need to process the experience and gain some clarity before we act out or shut down.

shame is a highly individualized experience and there are no universal shame triggers.

I also learned that we face shame every day—no matter how well we can recognize our triggers, avoiding shame is not possible.

Women with high levels of shame resilience recognize shame and understand their shame triggers.