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

by Brené Brown

knowing laughter as laughter that results from recognizing the universality of our shared experiences, both positive and negative.

Knowing laughter is acknowledging the absurdity of the expectations that form the shame web and recognizing the irony of believing that we, alone, are trapped and entangled in that web.

My favorite definition of laughter comes from the wonderful writer Anne Lamott. I once heard her describe laughter as a “bubbly, effervescent form of holiness.”

Believing that we truly do have the ability to create change in our lives may seem difficult, or even impossible, at first, but it is one of the most empowering steps along the path to developing resilience.

We need to find a method of change that moves and inspires us. Sometimes, as individuals, our efforts vary depending upon the issue.

When we talk about ways to create change, I like to think of the six Ps—personal, pens, polls, participation, purchases and protests.

Personal: Even the most personal changes often have a powerful ripple effect through the lives of our families, friends and colleagues.

Pens: Write a letter.

Polls: Vote.

Participation: Learn about the organizations that support your issues. Join them in the fight.

Purchases: The dollar is mightier than the sword; stop buying from people who don’t share your values. Marketing research shows that women are the decision makers in an estimated eighty-five percent of household buying decisions.

Protests:

Regardless of size and scope, when we come together to ask for what we need, some people will label our actions as “protest.” If that stops us, we have to ask, “Who benefits by that?”

We emotionally and physically insulate ourselves from “the other.”

The truth is . . . we are the others.

We use the concept of otherness to insulate ourselves and to disconnect. This is why it is such a serious barrier to reaching out as a method of shame resilience. Reaching out in either direction is tough—practicing courage is as difficult as practicing compassion. They both require us to lean into our discomfort.

Sharing our shame with someone is painful, and just sitting with someone who is sharing his or her shame story with us can be equally painful. The natural tendency to avoid or reduce this pain is often why we start to judge and insulate ourselves using otherness.

Fear is another reason we insulate.

Sometimes we don’t turn away from people because their experiences are so stigmatized and socially unacceptable, but simply because they’re too scary.

The second I spot someone “different” from me or a neighborhood far from mine, I feel a little less fearful.

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 us.

If we want to develop shame resilience, we must learn how to reach out. We must take what we know about courage, compassion and connection and put it into practice.

Who are the individuals and groups who form your connection network? • Who reaches out to you with empathy and support? • Who are the individuals and groups who form the shame web around these issues? • When you see people who are struggling with these issues, do you reach out with empathy or do you insulate yourself?

Shame is a type of pain that often defies definition.

We need to be able to identify and communicate what we are feeling and why we are feeling it.

Speaking shame requires us to develop names and terms to describe some of the most painful and abstract concepts that we, as humans, have to confront.

When we speak shame, we learn to speak our pain.

More than any other method, storytelling is how we communicate who we are, how we feel, what’s important to us and what we need from others.

The women who demonstrated high levels of shame resilience were able to express how they felt when they experienced shame and they could ask for the support they needed from others.

Speaking shame allows us to translate our experiences so we can learn from them—which are the goals of shame resilience. We can’t stop shame from happening, but we can learn to recognize it early enough to move through it constructively, rather than destructively.

I’ve come to realize that planning ways to get back at people usually means I’ve missed a shame trigger.

Lastly, I learned how to translate my experience in a way that allows me to recognize the ineffective patterns that keep me in shame—my shame screens.

Protecting ourselves by redirecting our feelings at another human target (displacing) is a common defense strategy when we feel shame.

Identifying shame as intentional or unintentional is very difficult. It assumes we know the motivation of the person who has made the comment or triggered the shame.

Working our way out of the shame web can be very difficult because, like most traps, it entangles you the more you struggle and fight. To free ourselves, we need to move slowly, deliberately and with a tremendous amount of awareness about what we are doing and why.

Unintentional shame often happens when people are trying to be helpful but end up either giving unsolicited advice, judging or shutting down the conversation out of their own discomfort.

Speaking shame allows us to tell others how we feel and to ask for what we need. These are the basic requirements of resilience and connection.

Just because something is accurate or factual doesn’t mean it can’t be used in a destructive manner.

shame leads to fear and fear leads to shame. They work together so furiously that it’s often hard to tell where one stops and the other begins.

When I first identified the shame categories, appearance stood alone and was meant to capture all parts of how we look—including body image.

body image is the driving force behind appearance shame. In fact, body image is the one issue that comes closest to being a “universal trigger,” with more than ninety percent of the participants experiencing shame about their bodies.

Our body image is how we think and feel about our bodies. It is the mental picture we have of our physical bodies. Unfortunately, our pictures, thoughts and feelings may have little to do with our actual appearance. It is our image of what our bodies are, often held up to our image of what they should be.

Shame creates shame. Parents have a tremendous amount of influence on their children’s body image development, and girls are still being shamed by their parents—primarily their mothers—about their weight.

Mother shame is about our identity as mothers or our identity as women who are not mothers. Parenting shame is focused on how we raise and interact with our children.

Society views womanhood and motherhood as inextricably bound; therefore, our value as women is often evaluated by where we are in relation to our roles as potential mothers.

Imperfection brings shame, and working too hard for perfection brings shame.

When we believe that success should be effortless, we simultaneously set ourselves up for shame and diminish the efforts of people who are working on their issues around perfectionism; we become part of our own shame web and other women’s shame webs.

We are also more willing to use shame, fear and judgment with people who threaten our pursuit of perfection.

In more extreme cases, our inability to expose imperfections can mean putting ourselves and/or the people we care about in real danger:

There are expectations that women can do it all—the superwoman syndrome.