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

by Brené Brown

Many women have to “do it all” or their kids don’t eat.

Women with high levels of shame resilience use very different language from women who are struggling with shame in the same area.

women who demonstrated high levels of shame resilience spoke less about perfection and more about growth.

When we choose growth over perfection, we immediately increase our shame resilience. Improvement is a far more realistic goal than perfection. Merely letting go of unattainable goals makes us less susceptible to shame.

When our goal is growth and we say, “I’d like to improve this,” we start from where and who we are.

Shame corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change.

Building shame resilience requires realistic goal-setting.

Women with what I would consider the highest levels of shame resilience around the perfection issues had very realistic goals and concrete, measurable strategies for meeting those goals.

One of the benefits of growth through goal setting is that it is not an all-or-nothing proposition—success or failure is not the only possible outcome.

The ability to learn from our mistakes rather than seeing them as failed attempts at perfection is the essence of “going back.”

In contrast, women who spoke of ongoing shame struggles in these same areas perceived past mistakes and failed attempts at perfection as enduring and permanently altering their levels of connection and power.

not only do we need to be willing to go back and learn from our mistakes, we need people in our lives who are willing to do the same.

When parents instill expectations of perfection in their children, it is very difficult for children to exchange that goal for growth and improvement. This is especially true when parents use shame as a tool to enforce expectations.

When parents acknowledge the pain felt by their children—really show empathy without explaining or defending—amazing healing can happen.

But to really go back, it’s important that we start by first just acknowledging the pain we’ve caused and our desire to rebuild connection.

I call this ability to reflect on our own actions with empathy “grounding.”

in order to examine where we are, where we want to go and how we want to get there, we must have a level of self-acceptance about who we are. Grounding gives us the stability we need to reach out and examine who we are and who we want to be.

Our culture is quick to dismiss quiet, ordinary, hardworking men and women. In many instances, we equate ordinary with boring or, even more dangerous, ordinary has become synonymous with meaningless.

The vulnerability hangover directly relates to our fear of vulnerability, and unfortunately, most of us have experienced it.

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:

We set expectations based not only on how we fit in that picture, but also on what those around us are doing in that picture. And often, the failure we feel when these expectations do not come to pass results in shame.

I think that’s the trouble with expectations:

When we develop expectations in our minds that have our entire self-worth riding on their realization, we set ourselves up for shame. Using the life shuffle to acknowledge our vulnerabilities and fears is a powerful way to reality-check some of these expectations.

If you’re single and struggling with identity issues, finding a partner will magnify your issues. Again, the magnification may not show up until the shine of “new love” is over, but it will show up. Whatever problems you and your partner take into a marriage get magnified. The same thing applies to having children. Not only are the issues staying, they’re going to get more complicated and complex.

Change can happen and there’s always the potential for growth; however, a life event will not provide the change or growth we’re seeking.

Like guilt, accountability is most often motivated by the desire to repair and renew—it is holding someone responsible for his actions and the consequences of his actions. On the other hand, we often use blame to discharge overwhelming feelings of fear and shame:

The emotion that underlies our obsession with blaming and finding fault is anger. In our shame-and-blame culture, visible anger is everywhere.

Anger can be motivated by many different experiences and feelings—shame, humiliation, stress, anxiety, fear and grief are several of the most common triggers. The relationship between shame and anger is about using blame and anger to protect us from the pain caused by shame.

when we blame others we often experience self-righteous anger. Because anger is an emotion of potency and authority, being angry can help us regain a sense of control.

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

Anger is not a “bad” emotion. In fact, feeling anger and appropriately expressing anger are vital to relationship building. Lashing out at others when we are in shame is not about “feeling anger.” When we are doing this, we feel shame and mask it with anger.

Using anger and blame as protection from shame makes sense when you think about shame as “being exposed.”

This other side of shame is sometimes more difficult to identify and name—it’s the shame of invisibility.

The answer is simple, yet potentially shaming. We’re not there, because we don’t matter in that culture.

Invisibility is about disconnection and powerlessness. When we don’t see ourselves reflected back in our culture, we feel reduced to something so small and insignificant that we’re easily erased from the world of important things. Both the process of being reduced and the final product of that process—invisibility—can be incredibly shaming.

“A stereotype is an overgeneralized and rigid definition of group characteristics that is assigned to people based on their membership in a group.”

Stereotyping gives us a way to file people into predetermined categories that we understand and that make sense to us. It also gives us permission to blame people for their struggles so we are excused from our responsibility to practice compassion—“I

Positive or negative, stereotypes hurt people—individually and collectively. According to researchers, positive stereotypes produce sanitized and idealized images, while negative stereotypes produce demeaning and ridiculing portraits. Either way—we’ve reduced you to something we can fit in our mental drawer.

“whispered-labels.” I named it this because that’s how the participants described them—quiet whisperings behind their backs; pieces of their lives used to label who or what they are.

Stereotyping and labeling limit our ability to build connection. When we think we know someone because of her membership in a particular group, we build relationships on assumptions. We miss the opportunity to know others and to be known.

The second issue related to stereotyping is name-calling, and it is almost always driven by social-community stereotypes.

It is also easy to overlook the fact that name-calling is one of the most powerful ways to reinforce a stereotype. Using identities as insults demeans individuals and entire groups of people.

The stereotypes that are among the most difficult to unearth and discuss are the ones that we believe we are allowed to express because they are aimed at our own group.

When it comes to aging, participants explained that the power of aging stereotypes is far more painful than the actual aging process.

The stereotype fits so closely that we give ourselves permission to dismiss anything that deviates from that image.

Stereotyping is a form of blaming and reducing—two of the primary ingredients for creating shame. If we want to move from blame to connection and compassion, we must work to become mindful of how, when and why we stereotype.

social-community expectations and stereotypes around trauma force women to deal with two separate issues: surviving the event itself and surviving the shame we heap upon them when we use stereotypes to question their experiences and define who they are as survivors.

When women talk about the shame of being sexually abused or raped, they associate most of the shame with the pain of being defined by their trauma.

I think it is impossible to talk to women about shame and blame without hearing stories about the pain of not fitting in or of feeling excluded.

Most young children are truly authentic—what you see is definitely what you get. They have yet to learn how to hide, filter and manipulate their experiences to fit what others are expecting. Their motivations are out in the open and studying these motivations can sometimes help us better understand our own motivations—those that are hidden under layers of pretending and protection. The major connection I see is between gossiping and bullying—two painful forms of exclusion.