Brene has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. She’s the author of six #1 New York Times bestsellers and a research professor at the University of Houston, where she holds the Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair. She’s also got over 25 years of sobriety from her alcoholism. Here’s some further insights from the ‘About’ section of her website that I believe are quite consistent with the AA way of living:
“The bottom line: I believe that you have to walk through vulnerability to get to courage, therefore…embrace the suck. I try to be grateful every day, and my motto right now is “Courage over comfort.”” – Bruce M.
You get back a grade, you get a 60 out of 100. Is your self-talk, “I’m stupid,” or is your self-talk, “That was stupid not to study for the test”? That’s the distinction between guilt and shame. Why is that important beyond just lexicon and proper usage and emotional granularity? Because shame and guilt self-talk, that’s how we measure your proneness, that’s how we measure whether you have a tendency to identify as more shame-prone or guilt-prone. And the difference between proneness is everything. Shame-proneness is highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, bullying, eating disorders. It’s so…Shame-proneness and addiction are so enmeshed that we don’t even know which one came first.
When we’re trying to develop correlations in research, we try to look at, as a temporal variable, what came first. Shame and addiction are just so enmeshed. So, it makes a big difference, because then when you look at guilt-proneness, the ability to focus on behaviors, the ability to take on behaviors without eviscerating yourself and your personhood, guilt-proneness is inversely correlated with those outcomes, meaning, the more that we can separate “I’m a good person, and I made a really bad choice,” the more we can do that, the more the outcomes that we’re trying to avoid, like addiction, depression, anxiety, violence, the more those are mitigated.
And in fact, guilt-proneness seems to be a protective factor against some of the outcomes that we don’t want for ourselves, our kids, our family, our community. And the thing is that here’s where we get confused: We think that shaming is this great moral compass, that we can shame people into being better. But that’s not true. Because here’s a great example that comes up a lot when I’m talking to people about parenting. You have a kid who tells a lie, and you say…Here’s shame, you shame that child: “You’re a liar.” Shame corrodes the part of us that believes that we can be different. “If I’m a liar, if that’s who I am, how do I ever change? How do I ever make a different decision?” Versus, “You’re a good person, and you told a lie, and that behavior is not okay in this family.”
You can’t shame people into being better, and in fact, when we see people apologizing, making amends, changing their behavior, that is always around guilt. Guilt is… Guilt creates healthy psychological pain. “I have done something that is inconsistent or incongruent with my values or who I want to be.” So when we apologize for something we’ve done, make amends, change a behavior, guilt’s the driving force. We feel guilt when we hold something we’ve done or failed to do up against our values, they don’t match up, it’s uncomfortable, but it’s helpful. It’s a positive, socially adaptive experience.
Now, I will say, feeling guilt for things that we don’t have control over, or feeling guilt about things that we should not be owning: Not helpful. But really, true guilt, the psychological discomfort, like cognitive dissonance, motivates meaningful change. It’s as powerful as shame, but its influence is positive, while shame’s is destructive.
Short note, that when Ellen(her daughter) was a kindergartener, I got this great email from her kindergarten teacher that said, “Oh. Totally the daughter of a shame researcher. Today, she was in the Glitter Center. And I said, ‘Ellen, you’re so messy.’ And she sat straight up and said, ‘I may be making a mess, but I’m not messy.’” For me, the mom, I was a halfway like, “Go, Ellen” and halfway like, “Oh, shit.”
So Shame: “I am bad.” Guilt: “I did something bad.” Shame corrodes the belief that we can be better and do better, and it’s much more likely to be the cause of dangerous and destructive behaviors than the cure. It’s also inherently dehumanizing.
So I’m going to do another podcast at some point on shame resilience, fully moving through shame while maintaining your authenticity, coming out of a shame experience with more courage, more compassion, feeling more deeply connected, but for now, here’s one thing that will help you as you start to think about taking responsibility for regulating your own emotional experience of shame. One of the things that the research participants who had the highest shame resilience shared in common was they physically recognized when they were in shame. We all have physical symptoms of shame. And so, for me, when shame washes over me, I know exactly what happens: Time slows down, I get tunnel vision, my mouth gets dry, and my armpits tingle, and I know that’s weird.
But let me ask you this: If you think about the last time you experienced shame, close your eyes and really think about it, which is actually a very good exercise because you’re thinking about it, you’re brought back into that feeling. We want to remember the wound, not become the wound. We want to come back out and think about the last time you were in shame and what it feels like. It’s very much like the symptoms of trauma, so if I’m driving down 610, big freeway here in Houston, and it’s pouring down rain, and the 18-wheeler in front of me jackknifes, let me tell you exactly what my bodily response would be to that: Time would slow down, I’d go into tunnel vision, my mouth would get dry, and my armpits would tingle.
So, when we can recognize our physical symptoms of shame, our body responds way before our minds can get there, because again, hijacked by the limbic system, our bodies feel emotion first, that’s why we call them feelings. So, one of the things it will help you in this process is start to physically recognize when you’re in shame. I do the don’t text, talk, or type when I recognize those bodily symptoms. That’s also when I start saying to myself, “I’m here to get it right, not to be right. I’m here to get it right, not to be right.” Watch the transform and roll out, watch the transform and roll out. Those things are part of me labeling what’s happening, acknowledging what’s happening, so I can regulate and appropriately feel my way through what’s happening.
Shame is very egocentric, self-involved. It draws our focus inward. When we feel shame, our only concern about anybody else is to wonder if they’re judging us. Shame kills empathy, and empathy is the foundation of love and justice. So, empathy is other-focused, we call it an other-focused emotion. It draws our attention outward toward the other person’s experience. When we’re truly practicing empathy, our attention is fully focused on another person. We’re trying to understand their experience. We only have thoughts of self in order to draw on how our own experiences can help us understand what someone else is going through.So shame and empathy are incompatible. When we’re feeling shame, our inward focus overrides our ability to think about another person’s experience. We become less able to offer empathy. We’re incapable of processing information about other people unless that information specifically pertains to their view of us, which becomes really self-absorbed.
© 2020 Brené Brown Education and Research Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
Brown, B. (Host). (2020, July 1). Brené on Shame and Accountability [Audio podcast episode]. In Unlocking Us with Brené Brown. Cadence13. https://brenebrown.com/podcast/brene-on-shame-and-accountability/