Episode 29: Breaking Through Shame

This week's episode is about shame.

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Shame is one of the main reasons people feel broken. So with this week’s episode, the Broken Podcast is jumping in for a deep dive in understanding shame. 

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We love how Brené Brown talks about shame. We also feel like it goes a little deeper and that there are other ways to look at shame. So this is our attempt to really understand shame and how it impacts all of us—as individuals and couples and friends and families and communities. 

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This week we begin with a general overview about shame. 

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Shame is an emotion. A feeling. It’s the painful reaction we experience when we feel like we’ve done something wrong, or worry that someone is mad at us, or fear like we don’t measure up, or feel as if we aren’t enough, or believe that something is wrong with us. 

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The origin of the word shame is “to hide, to cover”. 

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The feeling of shame is painful. It makes us want to hide and cover ourselves. The feeling is physical. Our cheeks get red. We feel hot. Our brains kind of shut down. We get embarrassed. We feel naked. We want to disappear or crawl in a hole or run and hide. 

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The experience of shame is so powerful that instead of rationally pausing, taking a breath, and evaluating whether our thought or belief— that we’ve messed up or that we’ve done something wrong or that we are a disappointment— is actually true, or checking it out with someone, we panic and jump to use defense mechanisms so we can pretend that we are fine so we can feel better. 

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We react by wanting to make everything look more perfect, or by pretending that everything is great, or by working harder, or by avoiding life and numbing with alcohol and Netflix, or by trying to be really good religious people, or by trying to control things, or by getting angry and blaming other people. 

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All of those things temporarily make the pain of shame go away, but it’s often only temporary relief, and sometimes, when we use defense mechanisms and react to shame, we end up adding more shame. 

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Example: maybe I feel like I’m supposed to be something because I think my parents expect that (a certain job or spouse or religion or belief or hobby), like if I feel like my parents want me to go to church, but I don’t want to go to church, then if I don’t go to church, I won’t want to tell them that I didn’t go. Because I will worry that they will be mad at me or disappointed in me. So if they call on Sunday afternoon and ask what I did that morning, I might feel shame when I see that they are calling. I might think, “crap. I better lie and say I went to church. Or maybe I should not answer.”

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Shame makes us feel like we are doing something wrong. Like we are something bad. Like if people really knew who we really were, we might get kicked out of the family. 

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When we feel shame and don’t talk about it, it makes us feel so alone and awful. 

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Everyone feels shame. It’s a normal emotion. Like sadness or joy or anger or hunger. It just happens. To everyone. 

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But shame the most painful and lonely emotion. It is so hard to talk about. Because we want to avoid it and pretend everything is fine. 

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There is another way. It doesn’t have to be like this. You do not have to feel like you are a terrible person. You can feel better. You can know that you are okay. 

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This is so important to learn about and to talk about. It’s confusing and complicated and scary. We all deal with this. All of us. 

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We hope you’ll join us for this shame dive. We hope you’ll listen and think and reflect and share and ask questions and join us. We are not the experts on this one. Learn with us.