Shame, humiliation, guilt and embarrassment
Listen to this article Photo above: LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers had an embarrassing moment in
front of millions of viewers when he inadvertently flashed his genitals while
adjusting his shorts shortly before the start of Game Four of the NBA Finals. (YouTube)
Shame, Humiliation, Guilt and Embarrassment
In her book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Brene Brown, a shame and empathy researcher, talks about shame, humiliation, guilt and embarrassment. In a nutshell, shame means I am bad, guilt means I’ve done something bad, humiliation means something bad has happened to me and I deserved it, and embarrassment means something bad happened to me and I didn’t deserve it.
Do you see the common thread running through all of this; the word “bad”. This word is an evaluative word. We have spent our lives assigning evaluation to situations: good, bad or some variation in between. Marshall Rosenberg talks about observing rather than evaluation.
For example, if I discover that I’ve been walking around the mall with my skirt stuck in the back of my underwear; that is an observation. If I tell myself that people have been laughing at me about this, that’s a story; and if my belief is it’s a bad thing to be laughed at without that being your intention that’s an evaluation.
According to Dr. Brown if you tell yourself you are an idiot and always doing stupid things you will feel shame. If you tell yourself that it was just an accident and other people have done this too, you will feel embarrassment. But what if you don’t believe there is anything wrong with people seeing your underwear in the first place? You won’t feel either of these emotions.
What is common about the concepts that Brene Brown has been observing and researching is that they are constructs. In other words, there wouldn’t be shame, humiliation, guilt and embarrassment if we hadn’t decided that certain situations are bad. What’s more important about these concepts is they keep us from being whole. In other words, who would want to believe they are bad? I can’t be happy if I believe I’m bad. I will do everything I can to protect myself from that. That will include not taking responsibility for actions I may have done that have hurt others or myself.
Because we believe we are bad we have broken ourselves. We spend our lives trying to avoid that part of ourselves. How can we be happy? Marshall Rosenberg reminds us we did the best we could with the tools we had in the situation. It has absolutely nothing to do with who we are.
Brene Brown tells us that empathy is the antidote to shame. We can look back and gain understanding of why we made the choices we did, which anyone else in that same situation would have chosen to do, and we can give ourselves empathy. We can own that part of ourselves again. We can become whole.
Heather Schlessman, PhD is a Pediatric Nurse Practitioner who has spent her career either working with or teaching about families. She is also a mother who, like so many other parents, spent years muddling her way raising 3 wonderfully different children, one who happens to be experiencing a disability. Fortunately she has a life partner who muddled along with her. Spending most of her time trying to be perfect, as that would be the safest way to live, she became aware of a desire to be able to see people in a more compassionate way. Little did she know that the person she needed the most compassion for was herself. There is a saying that when you are ready to learn a teacher will appear, and so it was for Dr. Schlessman. She was introduced to the work of Dr. Marshall Rosenberg, the developer of Nonviolent Communication, and her world completely changed. She learned a way to have an intimate connection with herself and others, a way to truly contribute. Her passion now is to help others find their way to a more compassionate life. You can find more of Dr. Schlessman’s empathic expressions along with her husband’s, Rev. Mark Schlessman on their website.