(This is part 2 of a series on equanimity. You can read part 1 here.)
A while ago, I asked all my group session clients the same question:
“How would you describe, in your own words, what you got out of these calls or workshops?”
One thing that almost everyone included was:
“It helped me heal my shame. Over the months, I could slowly feel more and more of my shame melt away. Which eventually affected my personal life too. For example, at work or when arriving in new groups.”
This is interesting to me, because shame is not even a topic we directly worked with in any of the sessions (so far).
But looking back, I could see exactly how and why this happened.
This reminded me just how misunderstood the topic of shame really is.
How Shame Works + Why Trying to Be Shameless Makes it Worse
As you may know, one of the more radical ideas of my work is that all emotions are flavors of love.
This statement sometimes confuses people when emotions are painful.
How can shame be love?
Well, shame cares so much about you that would it even change you, just to make you survive or be welcome in a group.
That doesn’t take away from the fact it can be extremely unpleasant and inhibiting. Still, blindly releasing your inhibitions and becoming shameless doesn’t fix it either (believe me, I’ve tried).
The reason for this is that shame and shamelessness, while appearing opposites, are actually the same energy.
Here’s how that works:
Both shame and shamelessness are adaptive strategies to create belonging.
Shame inhibits behaviors we believe would get us rejected from the group, even if it hurts to hide them.
Shamelessness asserts our freedom to be as we are, even if it impacts others or violates norms.
Both are expressions of a dysregulated nervous system.
Last week, I sent out an email “how to be kind and tough at the same time“, in which I introduced the concept of equanimity, you can read it here.
Today’s email is part 2 on a series about that topic.
You can see here how shame and shamelessness map on to the qualities we discussed last time.
Each of them is a behavioral expression of an internal quality we discussed:
Still, that doesn’t mean shame and shamelessness are bad. They are simply a dysregulated way of accessing restraint and agency.
Healthy shame can preserve group cohesion and relational harmony. It inhibits socially harmful behavior from individuals.
Healthy shamelessness can preserve integrity, authenticity and freedom. It stands up to harmful or exclusionary social norms.
That said, even healthy shame and shamelessness can take a toll over time.
Chronic shame may lead to withdrawal, or people-pleasing—sacrificing the self for acceptance.
Chronic shamelessness may lead to disregard and mild narcissism—sacrificing others for self-expression.
(Quick side note here: This is one of the functions of the carnival: A temporary release from the chronic social inhibitions that maintain social order.Something like “Politeness greases the wheels of society; the carnival keeps them from flying off.”)
There’s also a relational cost:
Shame preserves the appearance of connection, but often at the cost of aliveness or authenticity. (The connection isn’t real. It’s forced through illusion.)
Shamelessness preserves authenticity, but may sever connection and trust when lacking attunement to others.
It’s a common belief that shamelessness is better than feeling ashamed.
1) I don’t think that’s true. (The TV series “Shameless” illustrates what happens.)
2) There’s the illusion of liberation, but as I mentioned in “The Subtle Art of Giving a Conscious Fuck”, not giving a fuck is paradoxically a sign we’re giving quite a sizable fuck.
How Not to Heal Shame
Before getting to how to heal it, let’s start with 3 popular ways you might find on Instagram, and why I recommend against them:
1) Affirming “I’m Good Enough”
It may surprise you that I think this isn’t a good thing. But here’s the problem:
As I wrote in my book, “I’m good enough” is an illusion, it means nothing without a context. However, depending on the context, it might actually true that you are not good enough.
It’s a fact of life that I am not good enough to be in any football team. I don’t even know how to play.
Now, the tough pill to swallow might be that you are, in fact, not good enough when it comes to the thing you feel shame about (and maybe the shame is what caused that, but let’s not go there).
In that case, telling yourself you’re good enough would either create a false reality or set you up to experience future shame again.
However, when you heal shame the way I’m about to share, you’ll gain the ability to say “I’m not good enough” and instead of “I’m worthless”, it’ll mean: “Ah, here’s something about me I could improve. Do I want to or not?”
In fact, if I’m being candid, there’s a lot about myself I never improved because I was too busy insisting I was good enough.
2) Becoming “Better”
This seems to work on the surface.
For example, for many years, I thought I had gotten over my shame. But in reality, I had simply succeeded at making myself “perfect” enough not to feel it.
Then I went through a period of grief, and discovered that, when I didn’t behave up to my own high standards, all the shame came back.
This is because any attempt at self-improvement initiated by shame is a house built on that foundation.
Self-improvement in itself is useful, but there’s a huge difference between doing it out of self-denial and out of the loving desire to grow.
The problem is that both feel the same when you’re on top of your game, which is why I don’t recommend using it as an antidote to shame.
3) Becoming Proud of Yourself
Pride is inverted shame, in the sense that we find qualities we are not ashamed about and make it a horcrux for our self-esteem.
When the existence of the horcrux is questioned, the inversion spell weakens & unless we attack the questioner, we’ll notice the shame that fuels it.
Which brings us to…
Healing Shame Starts With Undamning It
Have you ever tried to change because you felt ashamed—only to end up stuck in the same pattern again?
The trouble is, labeling the cycle as bad adds another layer of shame—which only reinforces it.
Since shaming someone is the act of telling them that what they’re doing or feeling is not okay, any attempt to get rid of shame will compound it.
“I shouldn’t feel this” is a self-reinforcing loop. Counterintuitively, you can access & amplify confidence by embracing shame & welcoming having weaker spots. That’s the reverse loop.
A way out of this cycle is through self-forgiveness:
Acknowledging our mistakes and shortcomings. And accepting responsibility for them—while seeing our ignorance as innocence, and treating ourselves with compassion.
(The elephant in the room here of course, is that sometimes the shame we feel is not appropriate. That it wasn’t about us being maladjusted, but about being pushed to “adjust to something mal”. Still, self-forgiveness offers a way out of that:
Whether we’ll ever be able to forgive those who shamed us or not, it’s still good to forgive ourselves for internalizing that shame
To acknowledge this was a way for us to survive and stay sane. A form self-love that was so committed it was even willing to use self-hate to save you.)
The point is that the shame itself is just a feeling trying to get you to adapt. It has no specific meaning about whether anything you do is good or bad. And even though it feels unpleasant, it’s ultimately trying to help.
Until we recognize that, we fight shame with shame and the cycle repeats
So step 1 is greeting it with love instead, and embracing the feeling.
This doesn’t necessarily heal our shame, but it stops us from spiraling and creating greater amounts of it.
Shame is a mirror (inverted) image of love.When it is responded to by nothing but love, it can finally recognize its true shape:
That of an emotion which can guide us to calibrate our behavior to our environment, if we let it.
We can start seeing both shame and shamelessness as protective adaptions which are meant to nurture our relationships—even if sometimes they go a bit too far.
When we stop demonizing shame or shamelessness and give ourselves permission to feel both, that goes a long why in stopping those feelings from escalating into a compounding spiral.
Next step is developing the ability to access presence and agency when those feelings arise.
So we can make conscious, accountable choices:
How am I seeking belonging or love now?
At what cost—and to whom?
Relational Wounds Are Healed Relationally
The experience of shame, to me, can pretty much be described as “I feel unloved”.
This is interesting because “unloved” is not a real feeling, it’s a story.
And that story is usually internalized from a core memory, not always a conscious one.
Shame is essentially an emotion that helps us adjust to our social environment.
Most shame originated by someone scolding, punishing, ridiculing or rejecting us for our behavior at some point.
(By the way, none of these necessarily mean that we weren’t loved. Someone can scold you and love you at the same time. But I digress.)
This created a “relational wound” that causes us to feel the shame every time we do something similar (this can apply to something specific, like “singing”, a whole category of behaviors like “self-expression”, or in extreme cases, can even be a constant shame about being you).
Because of that, the wound is hard to heal on our own. We can’t really affirm, visualize or self-talk our way out of it.
(E.g. You may feel like a superhero in front of the bathroom mirror, but the moment a romantic interests sees you, your eyes dart away.)
The way to rewire the pattern is in relationship with others.
For example, I used to feel a lot of shame about the fact that, while I’m ahead in plenty of life skills compared to others, I’m way “behind” in the basics. So when others would watch me trying to use a fork and knife, or figure out how a to do things they knew since they were 5, I’d feel massive shame.
It wasn’t until maybe 1-2 years ago that I got over that. Because the only moments you can practice rewiring this response is exactly the moment you are most triggered.
And it’s just when we triggered that we go into dysregulation and lose agency (see the picture from earlier in this post).
So we can go to therapy, read about how all of this works, journal about it, etc. But eventually, the only way to heal it is to feel the shame come up, regulate our system into presence and access dignity.
…and this turned out to be the key to why so many people reported healing their shame after working with me, despite it not being a topic.
The Dojo Metaphor + The Antidote to Shame
As a kid, I did a lot of competitive judo. And one thing our sensei kept repeating to us was: “In the ring, you will only have access to 70% of your training.”
What he meant by that is: You have to practice religiously, because whatever level of mastery you get here, it doesn’t count when the stakes are real.
In Judo (and in meditation) a Dojo is a place you come to, to devote yourself to “learning the way” through immersive experience.
The place is sacred, and each member of the dojo is devoted to supporting themselves and the others to learn the way, so that when they walk out, they can go out and embody the way in their lives.
I haven’t done judo for over 15 years, yet the way of judo is still shaping my behavior and understanding of reality, because it became a part of me.
Naming my online connection school the “Connection Dojo” came from seeing that play out.
According to Brené Brown, who has spent over 2 decades academically researching the topic, the primary antidote to shame is empathy and human connection.
The reason so many people were able to incidentally heal their shame is because week after week, they would join a group space that was like a dojo for connection:
They knew that all the members inside it came there to devote themselves to connection and supporting each other in it.
It didn’t even matter that the space wasn’t explicitly a “safe space” (in fact, safe spaces are an illusion because the only way to make a space safe is to make it unsafe for anyone you see as jeopardizing its safety).
It’s about the fact that week after week, they would get together and practice “the way” of the antidote to shame (connection), until they embodied it in their personal lives too. Just like with martial arts or meditation.
This was my biggest eureka moment as a coach:
Discovering a large majority of people who think they need transformation just need a space where they can fully be themselves and be loved for it.
Once they have that, “healing” naturally occurs. And they go on to become such a space too.