Getting Discomfortable with Shame: Part 5

Start the Shame Series from the beginning: here

As I’ve said before, the goal here is not to avoid or eradicate the feeling of shame completely. That’s probably impossible and anyway potentially unhealthy. Instead, it’s about overcoming our fear and denial of shame, and rejecting the misguided dogma, hierarchy, and fixed mindset that piggyback along with it. We need to finally accept and embrace our shame so that we can get down to the business of truly connecting with one another. I’m not going to lie, the feeling of shame will never be pleasant. But we can learn what Brené Brown calls shame resilience so that when shame inevitably rears its ugly head we have the tools to manage this chronic condition in a healthy and expedient way, not allowing it to isolate or define us.

To do this, we first need to recognize shame. This may sound simplistic, but remember that your ego doesn’t even want to acknowledge shame’s existence. When I really look for it, I find that pretty much all of my negative emotions end up being linked to shame in one way or another. So the next time you are feeling shitty about yourself, or “not good enough”, or left out, or worried what people will think — ask yourself, could this be shame related? If the answer is yes (which it probably is), acknowledge that you are feeling shame but without judging yourself for feeling it. This is easier said than done. Shame is recursive. This means that most of us feel shame about our shame, which can create a terrible, self-perpetuating shame spiral. I often fall into the trap of saying, “Ugh, why am I feeling shame again? I’m supposed to be feeling guilt! Some self-styled shame expert I turned out to be.” But then I realize, “Oh right, I’m just shaming my shame again”.

So when you feel the burn of shame, the best thing to do is nothing. Shame will fire-up your limbic system, either triggering your fight or flight reflex, or sending you groveling for approval. Instead, just try to name it and accept it. I find it actually really helps to memorize what shame feels like physiologically. For me, anytime my heart starts racing, my face gets flushed, and it feels like I’m about to start crying in public, I know right away that I’m feeling shame. This awareness and acceptance is basically what the Buddhists call ‘mindfulness’: “Oh look, I’m feeling my instinctual reaction to social rejection again… and that’s okay.” It’s more than okay. Shame is an incredible opportunity to learn about yourself from the inside out. Brené Brown encourages us to get curious about our emotions. Try to figure out why you are feeling shame. What triggered it? As always, take notes! Incidentally, this kind of rational thinking will also activate your pre-frontal cortex, the logic center of your mind. This will help lift you out of your purely emotional lizard-brain reaction to shame so that you can start making rational decisions again. Any decision you make from a place of shame is bound to be outside of your values and integrity.

One good decision you can make is to call a friend and tell them your shame story. Brown teaches that shame thrives on “silence, secrecy, and judgment”, and so one of the most powerful antidotes is simply to talk about shame. Brown recommends sharing your story with a trusted friend. Someone who has the strength of character to react with — you guessed it — empathy. “I’ve been there. I’ve felt that. I empathize.” As discussed earlier, this kind of empathetic statement helps to neutralize shame by pure definition. When shame says you are different, bad, and alone, empathy says actually we are the same, we are okay, and we have each other.

But be careful who you entrust your shame stories with. Run-of-the-mill sympathy, pity, or even worse, judgment, will just throw gasoline on your shame fire. Most people, myself included, confuse empathy with sympathy, but according to Brené Brown they are very different. Sympathy is feeling badly for someone, but without actually owning that you’ve made the same kind of mistakes yourself. As a result, sympathy unintentionally feels slightly belittling and condescending. As if you are holding yourself just one step above that person on the fictional hierarchy of human value. Pity comes from even higher up on the hierarchy, and judgment is like spitting down on them from the penthouse. Though you may mean well, even trying to solve someone’s problem for them, or trying to cheer them up, or convince them that it’s “not that bad”, all just make them feel further beneath you. Which only adds to their shame. Empathy, on the other hand, is feeling badly with someone. Admitting that you’ve made the same kind of mistakes, more or less, such that you can share in their feelings from an equal standing. In this way, equality is an intrinsic factor of empathy. So the next time one of your friends opens up about their problems, think about how you can react with more empathy and therefore bolster that sense of equality between you.

But don’t forget, the empathy you feel from others is still an external feeling. The way most of us attempt to deal with shame is by cultivating opposing external feelings. Usually, we try to ward off shame by “earning” respect or admiration from other people. We do this by achieving things, through career accomplishments, awards, and “success”. Or by acquiring things, like money, cars, houses, iPhones, attractive life partners, and children. Basically by attaining all the trappings of a “normal” life. While this is an effective short-term strategy (for those in the upper or middle socio-economic strata who can afford it), it still keeps you solidly under the umbrella of shame, playing right into the fictional hierarchy of human value. Because at any time, this external sense of “respect” could shatter if you, say, lose your job, your house, or your spouse. And even if you don’t lose those things, you are still setting yourself up for a midlife crisis. You will inevitably discover that the respect you gain from “attaining all the trappings of a normal life” isn’t all that authentically fulfilling. Respect from others, like empathy and shame itself, is external. And because we are not sociopaths, we will always be vulnerable to the external opinions of other people. And that’s okay. That’s life as a deeply social animal. But for that same reason, cultivating an internal sense of self-respect is incredibly powerful. Internal feelings have what psychologists call an “internal locus of control”. Basically, they are under our own command (though actually changing them is easier said than done).

According to psychologist James Gilligan, one of the most effective means of achieving self-respect is through education. I think this is true anytime we put effort into something that we truly value and see results. Especially if it is something that we have authentically chosen and not subconsciously fallen into just to impress everybody else. Achieving intentional goals through deliberate effort is how we learn to respect ourselves because we start to fully appreciate our own power, abilities, and incredible potential as human beings. This kind of experience can help bolster a growth mindset — the belief that it is at least possible to accomplish almost anything that we put a lot of learning, practice, and hard work into. But the trick is, once we come to respect ourselves in this way, it is of the utmost importance that we then accord that same respect to everybody else as well.

Instead of holding our newly elevated self-image above others, we need to use it to appreciate that in fact, everyone has that same potential, more or less. To quote philosopher Alan Watts, “The oak is not better than the acorn.” We are all equal and we all have the possibility to do incredible things (though not necessarily the same incredible things). So the more you personally accomplish, the more that should affirm what everyone else is capable of (given their particular aptitudes combined with enough learning, effort, support, and blind luck). But that doesn’t mean we need to achieve anything either. There is only one achievement that really matters, and that is existing in the first place (the odds of which are estimated to be 1 in 10^2,685,000). Remember that we can’t add to our “value” as human beings anyway. One of the biggest fallacies in our culture is the belief that we need to “earn” respect somehow. The truth is, we create respect by giving it, not by demanding it. And so, in a spirit of bolstering equality and combating shame culture, we all need to learn to give unwavering respect to our fellow man — no matter who they are, where they come from, what they’ve accomplished, how many Twitter followers they have, or what horrible mistakes they’ve made. As human beings, we all have the same value, worth, and potential as anyone else, and so we all deserve basic respect. And it’s not even that hard to give. As James Gilligan notes, “The German word for attention — Achtung — also means respect. And that makes sense: the way you truly respect someone is to pay attention to them…” Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh takes it even further, “The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention.”

There are other internal feelings you can cultivate to help counteract shame as well. For example, you can usually positively reframe shame using guilt, pride, or gratitude. If shame is triggered by a mistake you made, an action that does not align with your values, then you can use a growth mindset and guilt to safely distance yourself from it. Just enough to acknowledge it, make amends, learn from it, and let it go without being defined by it. However, it’s entirely possible to feel shame about an action that is aligned with your values if it is also sufficiently controversial with other people. Furthermore, it is possible to feel shame about an innate part of yourself that you cannot change if it is also culturally unpopular. You can even feel shame about something that happened to you in the past, often out of your control, if it is seen as abnormal. In all of these situations, however, I think you’ll find there is always something that you can actually be proud of or grateful for. I know some shame issues are related to potentially traumatic events and I don’t want to imply that you have to be proud of or grateful for something horrible that happened to you. But to deal with the shame of it, you need to acknowledge this tough situation. And while you’re not happy about it, you can always be proud of your ability to deal with it. Proud of your strength in the face of adversity. Or grateful for all that you have learned or how you’ve grown from this otherwise shitty experience. In these ways, you start to chip away at the cloak of “silence, secrecy, and judgment” that guards shame, in favour of the healthy openness, accountability, pride, and gratitude that supports authenticity.

As your resilience builds, you move beyond the fear of shame and start dipping your toes directly into the murky waters of shame itself. This is very uncomfortable, and where “embracing vulnerability” comes in handy yet again. In this case, I like to think of it as getting comfortable with discomfort, or getting discomfortable. It may seem counterintuitive but it’s an incredible skill to learn. I grew up believing that unpleasant emotions should be avoided at all costs. Like the instinctive reflex that pulls your hand off a hot stove, I thought you also needed to immediately run from, shut down, or numb painful emotions to avoid being hurt by them. But that’s not how normal emotions work. Your emotions aren’t trying to hurt you. Not even shame. Your emotions are trying to protect you (though often misguidedly). They are your brain’s best guess as to how you should react to certain stimulus in order to maximize your wellbeing. To run from a painful emotion is to confuse that emotion with the stimulus that caused it. Not only will you miss an important warning from your subconscious about that particular situation, experience, or thought, but trying to avoid an emotion will often extend its effect rather than diminish it. I think the best method for dealing with any emotion is always the “mindfulness” approach: name it, understand it, and accept it. Think X, Y, Z. “I’m feeling X [grief, fear, anxiety… you name it], because of Y [a happy feeling ended, I’m watching a scary movie, I’m running late] and [Z] that’s okay!”

What’s more, as Brené Brown so astutely points out, you can’t selectively numb emotions. This means the degree to which you actually succeed at avoiding a negative emotion is the same degree to which you inadvertently distance yourself from all of your other emotions as well, including positive feelings like love and joy. It’s a classic case of throwing the baby out with the emotionally dirty bathwater. So if you find yourself constantly engaging in unhealthy distraction, procrastination, or addictive behaviours — especially on your phone, the internet, video games, apps, movies, and old classics like drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, sugar, caffeine, or even work — this might be an attempt to avoid an uncomfortable emotion that you actually just need to face. “I’m feeling X, because of Y, and that’s okay (Z).” Remember that emotions only want to be heard. If you actually engage with your feelings, get comfortable with the discomfort of them, and get curious about why they are there and where they came from, you can usually demystify them, learn from them, and move past them. This is a bit of an oversimplification, of course. Emotions aren’t really adorable animated characters voiced by Amy Poehler. There are some instances where you can get trapped fixating on negative thoughts, emotions, or trauma, so exercise caution and, of course, talk to your therapist (you know, the one I told you to get like 13 essays ago).

Another thing that makes emotions so scary is that they often feel infinite. When I experience negative emotions like sadness, hopelessness, worthlessness, and so on, it always feels in the moment like that emotion is going to last nothing short of forever. It even feels retroactively true. As if I’ve always secretly been sad, hopeless, and worthless. This is emotional contamination, and it happens when I look into the future as well. I’m reminded of one of my favourite Onion headlines, “Feeling Bad Right Now Most Reliable Predictor Of Feeling Bad Forever”. It’s funny because it feels true. But it’s not. According to neuroanatomist and viral TED sensation Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, emotional reactions actually only last 90-seconds! She explains:

“Once triggered, the chemical released by my brain surges through my body and I have a physiological experience. Within 90 seconds from the initial trigger, the chemical component of my anger has completely dissipated from my blood and my automatic response is over. If, however, I remain angry after those 90 seconds have passed, then it is because I have chosen to let that circuit continue to run.”

When you’re feeling shame, anger, or worthlessness — or even happiness and joy — remind yourself that those feelings are just temporary. They’re like clouds passing through your psyche, as they say in every meditation class. This is where mindfulness connects with a growth mindset. In the same way that you are not defined by your mistakes, you are not defined by your emotions (in fact, Buddhists would argue that you aren’t even defined by your thoughts).

So to wade through shame, we can safely separate our selves from our emotions just enough to normalize feeling discomfortable and vulnerable. We don’t need to feel good all the time and mastering discomfort gives us incredible power. Think about everything you could accomplish if you didn’t fear feeling embarrassed, or exposed, or wrong, or weak, or afraid, or ashamed. That doesn’t mean that you won’t feel those things. You absolutely will. But you don’t need to be afraid of them when you recognize that they are just temporary and don’t define you. I could quote Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous “fear itself” speech, but I’d rather quote Brené Brown again, who says, and I quote, “Those who have the greatest capacity for discomfort rise the fastest”. It’s the closest you can get to a superpower (without becoming a sociopath).

By embracing discomfort, you can begin diving ever deeper into shame to unearth the ideologies that lie beneath — what are the dogmatic values driving your shame and where did they come from? In fits and starts, you will begin to uncover the many unconscious beliefs that have been ruling your life. Do you believe that people are not inherently worthy of love and respect, like I did? Are you trying to climb the fictional hierarchy of human value? Do you let other people determine your worth as a person? Are you a human Instagram post? Write down what you discover.

Read Part 6: The Fatal Flaw, here!