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I GET IT. SHAME IS BAD. SO WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?
The answer is shame resilience. Note that shame resistance is not possible.
Shame resilience: the ability to practice authenticity when we experience shame, to move through the experience without sacrificing our values, and to come out on the other side of the shame experience with more courage, compassion, and connection than we had going into it. Shame resilience is about moving from shame to empathy—the real antidote to shame. 💖
A social wound needs a social balm, and empathy is that balm.
Four elements of shame resilience:
- Recognizing Shame and Understanding Its Triggers.
- Shame is biology and biography
- Practicing Critical Awareness.
- Can you reality-check the messages and expectations that are driving your shame?
- Reaching Out.
- We can’t experience empathy if we’re not connecting.
- 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.
When shame descends, we almost always are hijacked by the limbic system.
Our fight or flight strategies are effective for survival, not for reasoning or connection.
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.
Three moves that are the most effective path to shame resilience:
- Practice courage and reach out!
- 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
- Own the story! Don’t bury it and let it fester or define me. I often say this aloud: “If you own this story you get to write the ending. If you own this story you get to write the ending.”
💝 Empathy is connection; it’s a ladder out of the shame hole.
Empathy is connecting with the emotion that someone is experiencing, not the event or the circumstance.
In his book
Writing to Heal, Pennebaker writes, “Since the mid-1980s an increasing number of studies have focused on the value of expressive writing as a way to bring about healing. Emotional writing can also affect people’s sleep habits, work efficiency, and how they connect with others.”
