Shame is a hindrance to education~Jake Frackson

Shame is a hindrance to education~Jake Frackson

I’ve been thinking a lot about shame lately, in part because I have been reading Brené Brown’s latest book, and in part because I have begun to realize how shame sometimes holds me back from putting my best self forward.  Shame is all about feeling unworthy, perceiving the whole self as somehow inadequate, defective, or fundamentally flawed.

Brown’s title, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead (2012), is drawn from a Theodore Roosevelt speech delivered on April 13, 1910, “Citizenship in a Republic.” You may already know the famous bit, which I shorten here:

“The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short time and time again…who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

For those of you who don’t know her, Brené Brown has made a career of studying shame as a research professor at the university of Houston Graduate College of Social Work.  Her TED talk from June 2010 has generated 6,736,536 hits to date on YouTube alone, a number that could easily be twice that once all possible platforms have been considered, and led to what she called her own “vulnerability hangover”(translation: shame).  With that, she began to look at her research from a more personal perspective, flipping the question, “What leads to shame?” to “What leads to self-respect?”

In short, studying shame led her to look at vulnerability, and examining vulnerability led her to ask (I paraphrase here),”What do the people have in common who are willing to reveal their own imperfect selves, risking rejection, mockery, humiliation, embarrassment, disappointment, regret, or disgrace, yet persevere in ‘daring greatly?’ ”

The answer is clear from the title of her earlier work, The Gifts of Imperfection: Living with Courage, Compassion and Connection (2010).  Shame, she discovered, was actually about the fear of being disconnected from other people, and the ultimate rejection: being shunned. Like fear and anxiety, there may be an evolutionary component, keeping members of a social group in line, to ensure the survival of the whole group. Part of combating the shame voices is to recognize the need to calm down the limbic system.

So many people, my clients included, suffer from the fear of not being “enough”: smart enough, funny enough, rich enough, athletic enough, productive enough, in short, good enough.  I work with them to hear the source of the bad tapes, and find productive responses to the old canards.  Brené Brown calls this “shame resilience.”  Psychotherapist Gershen Kaufman calls it “returning shame to its origins” by “refocusing attention.”  Dr. Kristin Neff, another psychologist following Buddhist philosophy, sees it as building self-compassion, so that you can “stop beating yourself up and leave insecurity behind.”  Some coaches call it “reframing.”

I call all of this “building confidence.”

Confidence is the ability to see yourself clearly, to know that like every other human on the planet you have your own flaws, and still be able to connect truly by daring to open yourself up to the critics in the world, whether you are leading, parenting, loving, inventing or writing.  Confidence grows by doing, by trying things you didn’t initially think were possible, pushing yourself along your own growing edge, and not letting the shame thoughts get in the way of unleashing your best self into the world.

The flip side of shame is learning to feel worthy, defined as “having merit.”

Let me be clear: it is not about “dumping” all your insecurities and emotions on to someone or something else.  It is about balancing strength and vulnerability. Every time I write a newsletter, I hear my own gremlin worrying away in the background, and every time I write something personal about my life, I wonder how it will land with others.  My authentic voice is sometimes pretty timid, but I still dare to send it out into the world electronically.

As the darkness descends during this winter season in the northern hemisphere, let us remember to shine our own light. To illuminate the dark recesses of our self-doubt, shame, and cowardice in favor of living a whole life, one constructed from the confidence to be vulnerable.  We are each of us imperfectly good enough, just the way we are.

 

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