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

by Brené Brown

No level of shame resilience provides us with immunity.

the concept of unwanted identities. Over the course of the interviews, 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. What makes us vulnerable to shame in these areas are the “unwanted identities” associated with each of these topics.

that unwanted identities are characteristics that undermine our vision of our “ideal” selves. Sometimes we perceive others as assigning these unwanted identities to us, and other times, we pin them on ourselves.

So where do unwanted identities come from? The messages and stereotypes that are the most powerful are those that we learned from our families of origin.

Family messages die hard. And many times, they’re very insidious. The messages become part of the fabric of our families. Until we can recognize and understand why and how they influence our lives, we just keep living by them and passing them down to the next generation.

many people who struggle with shame around issues that stem from other places—namely cultural messages and stereotypes. This is especially true of women and men who are under forty. For many people in this age group, the media has become the primary storyteller in their lives.

Vulnerability is not weakness. Sometimes we are afraid that acknowledging that something exists is going to make it worse.

For most of us to successfully begin to recognize and understand our shame triggers, we first need to accept that acknowledging our vulnerabilities is an act of courage.

acknowledging our vulnerability is a true act of ordinary courage.

shame is about perception. Shame is how we see ourselves through other people’s eyes.

If we look at our unwanted identities, three questions that can help us start to uncover the sources are: 1. What do these perceptions mean to us? 2. Why are they so unwanted? 3. Where did the messages that fuel these identities come from?

When it comes to shame, understanding is a prerequisite for change. We can’t consciously make the decision to change our behavior until we are aware of what we are thinking and why we are thinking it.

When we identify these desired and unwanted identities, we give ourselves very little room to be human.

we tend not to recognize the small, quiet traumas that often trigger the same brain-survival reaction.

I believe it’s possible that many of our early shame experiences, especially with parents and caregivers, were stored in our brains as traumas. This is why we often have such painful bodily reactions when we feel criticized, ridiculed, rejected and shamed.

when we experience something in the present that triggers an old trauma memory, we reexperience the sense of the original trauma. So, rather than remembering the wound, we become the wound.

According to Dr. Hartling, in order to deal with shame, some of us move away by withdrawing, hiding, silencing ourselves and keeping secrets. Some of us move toward by seeking to appease and please. And, some of us move against by trying to gain power over others, being aggressive and using shame to fight shame.

We change in and through our relationships with others.

“Awareness is knowing something exists, critical awareness is knowing why it exists, how it works, how our society is impacted by it and who benefits from it.”

The concept of critical awareness is sometimes called critical consciousness or critical perspective. It’s the belief that we can increase personal power by understanding the link between our personal experiences and larger social systems.

First, what are the social-community expectations of appearance? From a societal level, appearance includes everything from hair, skin, makeup, weight, clothing, shoes and nails to attitude, confidence, age and wealth.

Why do appearance expectations exist? I would say they exist to keep us spending our valuable resources—money, time and energy—on trying to meet some ideal that is not achievable.

How does it work? I think the expectations are both obvious and subtle—they are everything we see and everything we don’t see.

Who benefits from the appearance expectations? • The $38 billion hair industry. • The $33 billion diet industry. • The $24 billion skincare industry. • The $18 billion makeup industry. • The $15 billion perfume industry. • The $13 billion cosmetic surgery industry.

The next step is learning how to use this information to reality-check our shame triggers. We do that by looking at our shame triggers and asking these six reality-check questions: • How realistic are my expectations? • Can I be all these things all of the time? • Do the expectations conflict with each other? • Am I describing who I want to be or who others want me to be? • If someone perceives me as having these unwanted identities, what will happen? • Can I control how others perceive me? How do I try?

Practicing critical awareness means linking our personal experiences to what we learn from the questions and answers. When we do this, we move toward resilience by learning how to: • Contextualize (I see the big picture); • Normalize (I’m not the only one); and • Demystify (I’ll share what I know with others).

When we fail to make the connections, we increase our shame by: • Individualizing (I am the only one); • Pathologizing (something is wrong with me); and • Reinforcing (I should be ashamed).

Understanding the big picture often requires us to investigate issues.

When we understand the context of an experience, we see the big picture.

Contextualizing is the key to making the shame connection.

Context helps us understand how social-community expectations, economics and politics are all woven together to produce one cohesive image. We can’t unravel the truth without recognizing the threads.

shame is also a social construct—it happens between people. Shame is how I feel when I see myself through someone else’s eyes. I have labeled shame a psychosocial-cultural construct.

They talked about finding the power to make changes by understanding the big picture and knowing they weren’t the only ones struggling:

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

When it comes to raising critical awareness and increasing our resilience to shame, the most powerful words we can hear are “You are not alone.”

On the opposite side of the continuum from normalizing is pathologizing. Pathologizing is classifying something as abnormal or deviant.

Critical awareness also requires us to question this notion of blaming the victim.

Rather than dismissing someone’s experience as perception, we might want to ask, “How can I help?” or “Is there some way I can support you?”

The last benefit of practicing critical awareness is demystifying. If we want to demystify something, we simply break it down and take the “mystery” out of it.

I firmly believe that if we have “mysterious powers”—if we know how something sacred works—we are obligated to share what we know. Knowledge is power and power is never diminished by sharing it—it is only increased.

The opposite of demystifying is reinforcing. Reinforcing is protecting the mystery of something so we can feel more important and secure. I think we’re most susceptible to reinforcing when we feel shame around an issue. But when we reinforce, we weave webs that not only entangle other women but eventually trap us.

When we don’t understand something and “not understanding” is a shame trigger, we are often too fearful to even ask for an explanation. I’ve named this “The Edamame Threat.”

Demystifying is a choice. If you know something and you have the opportunity to demystify it or reinforce it, you have the opportunity to move along on the shame resilience continuum. When we choose to reinforce, we should ask ourselves why we feel better keeping what we know a mystery.

In fact I believe that shame is one of the greatest barriers to learning. I’m afraid the social-community pressure to appear learned has become more important than actually learning.

Folks with credentials have three distinct advantages over the folks they are working with: (1) they have permission to “not know,” (2) they have permission to “not tell,” and (3) their objectivity is not questioned.

reaching out is the single most powerful act of resilience.

There are certainly real differences that separate us all in many ways, but in the end, we are more alike than we are different. We all need to feel valued, accepted and affirmed. When we feel worthless, rejected and unworthy of belonging, we feel shame.

Regardless of who we are, how we were raised or what we believe, all of us fight hidden, silent battles against not being good enough, not having enough and not belonging enough.

When we don’t reach out to others, we allow them to sit alone in their shame, feeding shame the secrecy and silence it craves.

We reach out to help others by reinforcing their connection network and our own. This increases our resilience by: • Sharing our story • Creating change When we don’t reach out, we fuel our shame and create isolation by: • Separating • Insulating