Брене Браун - Daring Greatly

Speaking Shame.Are you talking about how you feel and asking for what you need when you feel shame?

Shame resilience is a strategy for protecting connection—our connection with ourselves and our connections with the people we care about. But resilience requires cognition, or thinking, and that’s where shame has a huge advantage. When shame descends, we almost always are hijacked by the limbic system. In other words, the prefrontal cortex, where we do all of our thinking and analyzing and strategizing, gives way to that primitive fight-or-flight part of our brain.

In his book Incognito, neuroscientist David Eagleman describes the brain as a “team of rivals.” He writes, “There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior.” He lays out the dominant two-party system of reason and emotion: “The rational system is the one that cares about analysis of things in the outside world, while the emotional system monitors the internal state and worries whether things are good or bad.” Eagleman makes the case that because both parties are battling to control one output—behavior—emotions can tip the balance of decision making. I would say that’s definitely true when the emotion is shame.

Our fight or flight strategies are effective for survival, not for reasoning or connection. And the pain of shame is enough to trigger that survival part of our brain that runs, hides, or comes out swinging. In fact, when I asked the research participants how they normally responded to shame before they started working on shame resilience, I heard many comments like these:

“When I feel shame, I’m like a crazy person. I do stuff and say stuff I would normally never do or say.”

“Sometimes I just wish I could make other people feel as bad as I do. I just want to lash out and scream at everyone.”

“I get desperate when I feel shame. Like I have nowhere to turn—no one to talk to.”

“When I feel ashamed, I check out mentally and emotionally. Even with my family.”

“Shame makes you feel estranged from the world. I hide.”

“One time I stopped to get gas and my credit card was declined. The guy gave me a really hard time. As I pulled out of the station, my three-year-old son started crying. I just started screaming, ‘Shut up … shut up … shut up!’ I was so ashamed about my card. I went nuts. Then I was ashamed that I yelled at my son.”

When it comes to understanding how we defend ourselves against shame, I turn to the wonderful research from the Stone Center at Wellesley. Dr. Linda Hartling, a former relational-cultural theorist at the Stone Center and now the director of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies, uses the late Karen Horney’s work on “moving toward, moving against, and moving away” to outline the strategies of disconnection we use to deal with shame.

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, by being aggressive, and by using shame to fight shame (like sending really mean e-mails). Most of us use all of these—at different times with different folks for different reasons. Yet all of these strategies move us away from connection—they are strategies for disconnecting from the pain of shame.

Here’s a story about one of my own shame experiences that brings life to all of these concepts. It’s not one of my best moments, but it’s a good example of why it’s important to cultivate and practice shame resilience if we don’t want to heap even more shame on top of a painful situation.

First, let me start with a little backstory. Turning down speaking invitations is a vulnerable process for me. Years of pleasing and perfecting have left me feeling less than comfortable with disappointing people—the “good girl” in me hates letting people down. The gremlins whisper, “They’ll think you’re ungrateful” and “Don’t be selfish.” I also struggle with the fear that if I say no everyone is going to stop asking. This is when the gremlins say, “You want more time to rest? Be careful what you wish for—this work that you love could all go away.”

My new commitment to setting boundaries comes from the twelve years I’ve spent studying Wholeheartedness and what it takes to make the journey from “What will people think?” to “I am enough.” The most connected and compassionate people of those I’ve interviewed set and respect boundaries. I don’t just want to research and travel all of the time talking about being Wholehearted; I want to live it. That means that I turn down about 80 percent of the speaking requests that I receive. I say yes when it works with my family calendar, my research commitments, and my life.

Well, last year I received an e-mail from a man who was really angry with me because I wasn’t able to speak at an event that he was hosting. I turned down the invitation because it conflicted with a family birthday. The e-mail was mean-spirited and jam-packed with personal attacks. My gremlins were having a field day!

Rather than replying, I decided to forward it to my husband along with a little note telling him exactly what I thought about this guy and his e-mail. I needed to discharge my shame and anger. Trust me, it was not “good girl” e-mail. I can neither confirm nor deny using the word horseshit. Twice.

I hit Reply instead of Forward.

The second my Mac laptop made the airplane swooshing sound that it makes when you hit the Send button, I screamed, “Come back! Please come back!” I was still staring at the screen, totally immobilized by shame layered on shame, when the man fired back a response along the lines of “Aha! I knew it! You are a horrible person. You’re not Wholehearted. You suck.”

The shame attack was already in full swing. My mouth was dry, time was slowing down, and I was seeing tunnel vision. I struggled to swallow as the gremlins started whispering: “You do suck!” “How could you be so stupid?” They always know exactly what to say. As soon as I could catch my breath, I started murmuring, “Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain …”

This strategy is the brainchild of Caroline, a woman whom I interviewed early in my research and then a couple of years later, after she had been practicing shame resilience. Caroline told me that whenever she felt shame, she’d immediately start repeating the word pain aloud. “Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain.” She told me, “I’m sure it sounds crazy, and I probably look like a nut, but for some reason it really works.”

Of course it works! It’s a brilliant way to get out of lizard-brain survival mode and pull that prefrontal cortex back online. After one or two minutes of “pain” chanting, I took a deep breath and tried to focus myself. I thought, “Okay. Shame attack. I’m okay. What’s next? I can do this.”

I recognized the physical symptoms which allowed me to reboot my thinking brain and remember the three ninja-warrior gremlin moves that are the most effective path to shame resilience for me. And fortunately I’ve been practicing these moves long enough to know that they are totally counterintuitive and I have to trust the process:

Practice courage and reach out! Yes, I want to hide, but the way to fight shame and to honor who we are is by sharing our experience with someone who has earned the right to hear it—someone who loves us, not despite our vulnerabilities, but because of them.

Talk to myself the way I would talk to someone I really love and whom I’m trying to comfort in the midst of a meltdown: You’re okay. You’re human—we all make mistakes. I’ve got your back. Normally during a shame attack we talk to ourselves in ways we would NEVER talk to people we love and respect.