I Thought It Was Just Me

I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) helps you understand and better manage the complicated and painful feeling of shame.

We talk about our feelings all the time, yet we know quite little about them. When you say “I’m hungry,” do you know where that hunger comes from? What happens in your body when you feel it?

Now, hunger is an easy one, because it’s mostly physical, imagine how complex the situation becomes when you try to understand shame. In her initial research, Brené Brown interviewed over 300 people, after which she arrived at the following definition:

In that sense, shame usually arises in conjunction with other people, for example when we seek compassion by sharing one of our vulnerabilities and end up being rejected instead. However, this lack of empathy can also come from yourself.

In my case, I felt embarrassed for not being “a prolific writer” any more, but the only one who could forgive me was me. One of the most productive steps you can take to better understand shame is to think back to a few instances where you felt it and use those to define the feeling for yourself.

The point of defining what shame means to you isn’t having some arbitrary definition locked and loaded to spit out in a quiz show. It’s mostly a small step towards helping you notice when you feel ashamed. Seeing yourself from the outside in any present moment is the key to adjusting your reaction to the situation.

Brené calls this critical awareness. For example when she noticed her audience dose off during a talk she gave, she said she knew they only had a short lunch break and that the promised pizza was most peoples’ major incentive to be there in the first place. Thus, she prevented going into shame mode and kept her cool.

Critical awareness allows you to see why and how things happen, as they happen. You get a chance to pause and see the big picture before shame takes over and freezes your mind. If you use this pause to consider the context of where the feeling of shame came from and address it directly, you can dodge the bullet.

I spent a lot of time in the car with my dad this week. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the critical awareness to see shame about my broken promise as one of the causes of my discomfort. Therefore, another feeling tried to creep up a lot: anger. Anger is a tempting and easy cop-out when we’re ashamed. Blaming others feels relieving in the moment and creates the illusion of regaining control by taking charge, but we all know how this ends: you…