Breakout Topics- Shame Resilience
These ideas are so much better Shared!!
Shame Resilience
As I was researching topics for The Toolkit, I happened to come across the work of Brené Brown concerning Shame Resilience and later Vulnerability, both of which have been revolutionary components of my own journey seeking an authentic, non-toxic life. I originally shared content about shame and resilience through blog posts, which quickly became buried, so I’m sharing them below, on this “topic” page.
SHAME
I hope you all enjoyed the short series we just finished on Emotional Regulation. Over the next week, I will be exploring concepts concerning shame, the role shame plays in toxicity, and ways of dealing with shame, better known as shame resilience.
Although, shame is uncomfortable for us to experience, or really even think about, it can be very powerful to understand how shame operates and what it does within us. With a little training, and another tool in the kit, shame loses its power over us. By avoiding shame, and further by avoiding dealing with shame, we become victims to the feeling, and as we’ve just learned our feeling, or emotions, compel very specific behavior.
Look forward to diving into shame more as the week goes on. In the meantime, take a moment with your journal.
Are there any things that you’re ashamed of?
Are there current things that you’re ashamed of?
Do you carry lifetime shame?
What do you do when you experience feelings of shame?
How do you observe others behaving when you perceive that they are feeling shame?
Happy Healing!
Remember the Presidential Fitness Test?
Exploring Shame
Understanding Individual Shame
Before I dive into the revelations of Brené Brown’s Shame Resilience Theory, I need to admit that I’m struggling with it. Granted, I’m only beginning to scratch the surface of the scholarship concerning shame, (if you have any resources on shame, please consider sharing with me) but I think it’s important that you know that the studies I’ve found so far concerning shame are strangely and unnecessarily gendered. Brown’s early study only examined the role of shame in women. In fact, much of what I found so far is centered on women. I’m going to state the obvious. All people experience shame, and shame is individual and intersectional.
Brown teaches us that shame results in feelings of being trapped, isolated, and powerless. Shame arises when someone’s perception of expectations doesn’t align with their identity.
Brown found that in “women” certain shame triggers emerged. Brown identifies “appearance and body image, sexuality, family, motherhood, parenting, professional identity and work, mental and
physical health, aging, religion, speaking out, and surviving trauma,” as the most common shame triggers in “women,” and goes on to teach that shame has a strong relationship with “unwanted identities,” or the identities forced on us externally.
As a trans person I can personally attest that I experienced copious childhood shame for not being a good enough girl. I wasn’t feminine enough. When I was feminine it wasn’t up to contemporary standards. I was loud, outspoken, and felt in constant opposition to the label, “girl” they had placed on me. When I finally, found the nonbinary label, it was like coming up for air and being able to breathe for the first time in my life.
Granted, there are still people out there who probably expect me to be a girl, and are super shocked when I don’t behave like one, but the new label freed me from so much of the shame attached to the “girl” expectations.
Anecdotally, I know men who struggle with body image, parenting, physical health, sexuality, and many of the other triggers listed by Brown.
Unlike Brown, I know that there are more than two genders, and a several of Brown’s trigger categories are gendered social expectations. My mind is blown that Brown doesn’t include race or cultural heritage as a shame trigger, and I’m hoping to find more about these dimensions as I continue my research.
Here’s the take-away: Shame exists in the division between self-identification and social expectation, and we each experience shame differently depending on our uniquely positioned selves. Experiences of shame are individual and intersectional, involving all dimensions of our identities and selves.
The first step in understanding the role that shame is playing in your life is to reveal and examine your own shame triggers. Which expectations in your life cause you shame? Which portions of your identity do you feel at-odds with? Do you admit to yourself when you feel shame?
Take some time over the next week to examine moments of shame in your life, and pay attention to what triggers the shame. Maybe you feel shame on the phone with your mom, or at work. Maybe it hits you on the drive home, or while being social. Pay attention to moments when you don’t feel good enough, or when expectations seem impossible. How often do you experience shame? What other feelings do you experience along with shame? What behaviors do you perform before/during/after feeling shame?
This may be an uncomfortable introspection, but I promise it’s worth it.
Happy Healing!
Vulnerability
Understanding Vulnerability and Shame.
While researching yesterday I happened upon a TED Talk by Brené Brown explaining the important role that vulnerability plays in shame, connection, worthiness and so much more.
Please Enjoy
Jump to Recipe!
The Power of Vulnerability
Believe you are worthy!
The following poem is the result of being vulnerable enough to process my gender shame. I hope you enjoy.
Want to know why you can’t get through to your children?
Shame and Vulnerability
Shame and Vulnerability: The Most Important Relationship in Your Life.
Before I share the video that I’ve decided to share with you today, I have to admit that I was very torn about sharing this. In 20 minutes, you will learn about the birthplace of innovation, creation, joy, love, and so much more. Unfortunately, this video erases trans people.
I have to remind myself, that the video is from 2013, and I must admit that my own scholarship at the time was binary and disgusting.
What you’re about to watch is TERFy and even a little sexist at that (because I feel it erases men’s experiences as well as being one dimensional). I invite you to watch this with a critical lens. Please feel free to share your reflections in the comments (or in an email to me at ProtyusAGendher@gmail.com). Know that these reflections are crucial to building the intersectional version of Shame Resilience that we all deserve.
Happy Healing!
Shame Resilience
Putting Shame in Its Place.
I sincerely hope that you took the time to watch the videos in the previous two posts about shame. Today we discuss what to DO about it.
- The capacity to feel shame is important. Those who lack capacity for shame have unquestionable egos, and tend to be incapable of accountability. So, shame is important to enable us to humble ourselves, question our perfection, and accept ourselves authentically.
- Shame produces feelings of being trapped, and isolated.
- Shame dismantles connection in relationships, and provokes a whole host of toxic behaviors.
- The detrimental effects of shame are dismantled by empathy and vulnerability.
- Vulnerability is the source of courage, strength, resilience, innovation, creativity, change, joy, love, and more.
- Shame thrives in silence and secrecy.
- Shame is amplified by a belief that you are not worthy of being loved, accepted, and of belonging. Shame is the feeling or belief that you are not good enough, or worthy.
- People who live wholehearted lives practice vulnerability in their lives as a coping skill.
- When we are vulnerable we give a platform for our shame, and the voicing of shame is essential to undermining its negative effects.
According to positivepsychology.com a four step process is recommended for Shame Resilience.
- Recognizing the personal vulnerability that led to the feelings of shame
- Recognizing the external factors that led to the feelings of shame
- Connecting with others to receive and offer empathy
- Discussing and deconstructing the feelings of shame themselves
While I have to admit that this process assumes that you have people around you who you feel safe being vulnerable with. I can think on several times in my life when I had no one like that in my life, and in which my vulnerability would be used to hurt me, or those around me. It’s easy to see why it would be so important to have that one friend, who gets you, and accepts you, even in your flaws. For those who don’t have at least one person to process shame with, therapy could be absolutely essential.
This may also be the reason that therapy is so effective. While I recommend seeking vulnerability in your relationships, there’s something essentially powerful about processing shame with someone who will NOT dish out social consequences.
This also explains the importance of group therapy, because shame requires silence and secrecy, and group therapy demonstrates to us that our experiences are shared, human, and that our imperfections are our beauty, rather than our fault.
It’s also ultimately important to create honesty within yourself to express your shame, safely, and accept that you are flawed, you are imperfect, and you are absolutely worthy. You are SO enough!
Happy Healing You Beautifully Flawed Human!
Are you dealing with an emotionally immature adult?
Courage and Shame
How Shame Resilience and Vulnerability Saved My Family.
Think for a moment about your ideas of courage, strength, and bravery.
Courage, is facing what scares us. Strength is the ability to do so. Bravery is possessing the strength to choose courage. There is nothing scarier than sharing our shame, and we’ve learned that the SHARING of shame is absolutely essential to Shame Resilience. This level of vulnerability requires us to be our most bravest, most courageous, and strongest selves. The rewards for doings so are inner peace, joy, creation, innovation, hope, love, connection, authenticity, and so much more.
I was not studying shame yet, a few months ago, when I was ready to leave my relationship. I’m choosing to be vulnerable here today because I have learned and gained so much since then.
We were edgy with each other, performing preprogrammed responses that felt empty. Our interactions, even though we craved each other, even though we longed for each other, even as we somehow mourned the sense of connection that we both knew we once had, had become a check-off list of “Did I say the thing?”, “Did I do the thing?” “Do they seem upset?” And with each of us feeling less and less like we were enough, or worthy, or valid.
I became irritable, slowly, over time, I became snippy, not just to my partner but also to my 5 year-old child who is just learning how to interpret and deal with life, and who needs me to model for them how. I was liking myself less and less, and going through the motions, to me, feels like suffocating. I would rather be alone.
I had hit this point, this feeling, this presence in myself, 3 times before, and each time I fought like crazy, and each time, I ended up alone.
So I threw a wrench in the mechanisms of our relationship. I admitted that I wasn’t happy with our family, or the culture of our home. My responsibility as a parent driving my courage as an imperative, something I’m more responsive to than my own needs.
All hell broke loose, and I knew that we were getting in our own way, (as was certainly the case in past relationships as well). I knew that we both knew better, and had been better, to ourselves and to each other. I knew that the person I knew my partner to be wanted this just as badly as I did, even if neither of us were sure how to come out of this.
Attempts to bring it up, to work on things, were met with defensiveness from both of us, and quickly deteriorated into toxic defense mechanisms that were beneath us both. What were we doing?
But I persisted, courageously. I dug deep into the tools that I’ve been working to build in therapy, and I asked my partner to do the same.
We both, painfully, decided to allow ourselves to be vulnerable with each other once again. It was not easy. It was not all-at-once. It was all powerful.
Gradually, our relationship transformed, and we were able to listen to each other, empathize with each other, and remember that we’re on the same team. I focused on onboarding our child to our team as well, and our relationship shifted from something adversarial, to something truly cooperative. In the place of punitive reactions, we now have training, education, and mentorship. My child has grown exponentially, and our family environment is intoxicating.
Through the courage to be vulnerable, we have found each other again. We have fought hard, not against each other, but for each other. We created a language, and a culture in our home, about our values, rights, and expectations. We’re only a month into the toolkit, but the change has been everything.
I encourage you to seek the courage to be vulnerable.
Happy Healing!
Tired of being Gaslit?
Vulnerability and Therapy
Why therapy is so essential in our healing and growth.
I’ve been focusing lately on Shame and Vulnerability. As we’ve learned, vulnerability is the birthplace of creativity, joy, innovation, love and indeed our own authenticity. Vulnerability allows us to heal, and grow, as well as helping us understand ourselves as imperfect yet worthy individuals.
It’s a pretty big deal.
At 41 years old, I can think back on times in my life when I had no one to share my vulnerable imperfection with. These are times when I stopped growing, and stopped healing. These are times when I experienced my surviving self, knowing that my thriving self was possible, and yet out of reach. (In fairness, my now-adult child has always welcomed my vulnerability without question, but because they are my child it would have been inappropriate to be fully vulnerable with them. Currently, we’re both enjoying renewed adult vulnerability between us… but that’s now, and this was then.)
I’ve found myself in repeated situations in which the adults around me left no space for my vulnerability, and in truth, would punish my children and I for it. I became “strong,” but what does that mean?
To the various adults in my life at these times, “Strong” meant that I showed no vulnerability whatsoever. Strong meant that I could take whatever they, and life, threw at me, without needing anyone.
How lonely.
What they don’t know, and never will, is that the “Strength” that they experienced from me was only one layer of the “strength” I developed. They didn’t see the tremendous amount of work being done on the inside to hold up that strength. In lieu of anyone else close enough to share my imperfection with, I became my own best friend.
I worked incredibly hard to know myself, and the truths that make me, especially the ugly truths. I worked to accept the mess of me. It was uncomfortable confronting the distance between who I really was, and who I was trying to be, and who other people thought me to be, all jumbled with the misdeeds of a very confused youth.
In the process, I began to really like my imperfect self, and simultaneously I started becoming someone I really like even more.
While I did not have a therapist for the vast majority of this development, I was lucky enough to be pursuing a psychology degree, and each class gave me tools for self examination and healing.
For most of my life, my vulnerability had to be guarded, hidden, and secret. Because of this, the progress was incredibly slow, and I was limited by only the tool that I could gather myself, without the benefit of practice. It was rough.
I must admit, that when my boyfriend suggested I start seeing a therapist, I was not very interested in sharing the vulnerability I had built within myself with another person. I specifically had reservations about finding a therapist that could really handle me. The few times in the past that I had tried to seek counseling, I was met with inexperience that was highly ineffective in helping me navigate what was truly a dark and dangerous healing experience. I couldn’t imagine being vulnerable with someone who’s only response was to echo “That sounds like it was really difficult.”
I’ve been in therapy 18 months now, and luckily both of the therapists I’ve seen during that time have been up to the task. Having a space in which I can be truly vulnerable without repercussion has enabled me to heal much faster. This process has given me real tools, and opportunities for practice. I’ve experienced acceptance from someone other than myself, and I was unaware of how lonely my vulnerable healing self had become.
As I’ve been studying vulnerability and shame, I am struck by my own memories of times when sharing my vulnerability wasn’t really available to me.
I was watching a snip of Brené Brown speaking with Oprah on YouTube, and even Brené admits that in a lifetime it’s special to have one or two friends that you can share your vulnerable, authentic self with.
This is coming from a successful, affluent, privileged person. It’s harder if you’re in poverty, experiencing constrained choices. It’s harder if you’re neurodivergent, and struggle connecting with or trusting other people. It’s harder if you have a history of trauma, and even worse if your life is still traumatizing you.
Today’s point is two-fold. If you don’t have connections with people you can trust, self-vulnerability is still essential and effective in healing. If you need external vulnerability, I highly recommend going to a skilled therapist. You deserve to be vulnerable, and to heal, even if the adults around you aren’t healthy people to share it with.
Therapists are much more accessible now, and far better trained than they have been in the past. Many accept sliding scale fees, and insurance.
If you have a friend, or a partner, who you actually share your vulnerable self with, I hope you know how special this connection is, and that you’re both better people for it.
Happy Healing
The Shame and Vulnerability Series Appeared in January, 2022.
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