The Anatomy of Shame - Emotion Series #8

All we're doing here is we're actually freeing the blocking of emotions by feeling our body and creating love where there was abandonment.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host Joe Hudson. Hoo boy, what a week. I don't even want to get into it, but I'm just going to say, what a week.

It's been strange. I think it feels that way for a lot of— when people are listening, it might not be this way, but most of the people I talk to, it feels like there's kind of a certain amount of overwhelm. I don't know if it's because like we're all getting fully back into life after COVID or what it is, but there does seem to be like a lot of people are in overwhelm right now.

Yeah, definitely lots of things changing after COVID, but also sometimes there's just stuff in the air, whatever it is. Yeah, things happen and you find yourself in these little pressure cookers that the universe creates for us to learn from.

Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is great 'cause today we're talking about shame.

Shame.

Which is one of the things that we find ourselves in the midst of and when we find ourselves in sort of a pressure cooker situation in life, Last week we talked about shameless apologies, and I think it would be really good to get into really what exactly the shame part of that is. Like, what is it? What actually is shame? How does it show up? And how is it that it seeps its way into so many parts of our life, including the ways that we make apologies, but many other things as well?

Yeah, you know, I think there's so many ways of looking at shame. The way that I like to look at it is that it is nature's way of training us to be good citizens, right? It's not a perfect methodology, or good tribe members, or good family members, or something like that. And the way it works, for the most part, is that when you are ostracized from the group, you feel shame. So an example of this would be, let's say you're sitting with your aunts, your and you are flatulent, you fart, and all the aunts laugh, there's not going to be any shame. Like, you're a little kid, right? You're 5 years old. But if you're 5 years old and you fart and all your aunties are like, oh, shame on you, you know, have that kind of like, you shouldn't have done that attitude, then you're gonna feel shame. So shame is this mechanism that we have that teaches us on an emotional level how we should and shouldn't be. I haven't seen any research on this, but my personal experiences is that there's actually natural shame as well. Meaning, I think that there's like, all human beings are equipped with a certain way of acting and that their system's gonna feel shame if they don't act in that way generally.

Hmm.

So it seems like that's a natural thing that happens for folks. That can be overridden or destroyed in somebody, but it seems to be there. I remember when I was like 5 years old, I had this experience of— I was at this school fair and there was a raffle, and I was like at the raffle table. My parents were doing something else, and, and there was like this GI Joe figure, and he had a like amphibious unit, and I really wanted to play with it, so I took it off the table and started playing, and And this guy got really angry at me. "Oh, where's your mother?" And my mom came over and my mom's like, "He's 5. He doesn't know. He's just playing with whatever he wants to play with. Relax." And so I didn't get in trouble. This guy was yelling at me. But I remember that when my mom said that, I got this kick in my stomach of shame. It was just like this kick. And though she wasn't upset at me, he was upset at me. The shame didn't come when he was upset at me. The shame came at that moment when I knew I shouldn't have taken the thing off the table and my mom was defending me. And I remember that feeling. And I remember for like a year after that, every time I would think of that feeling, I'd get that kick in the stomach again. Like, it was like I have this very specific memory of it and not wanting to feel that. And looking back at it now, I realized that was the second thing that shame was doing, which shame just seems to stop all the emotions. It like stagnates emotion. So you don't get emotional fluidity. And so that's the other interesting thing that shame does is it just kind of stagnates the emotion, which means that you— shame is often something that people get stuck in for years and years and years and years and years, because it is a slowing effect on or a stopping effect of the emotional fluidity.

Yeah, you've mentioned before that you once wrote a list of all the things that hadn't changed in your life over 10 years, and every single one of them had shame around it. So like last night, as I was preparing for this episode, I wrote a list of all the different kinds of shame that I felt over the past year, shames that I avoided and I didn't take any action based on. And I looked at all the things that would've occurred in my life if I had actually just taken the actions that I had the shame around. And some examples were, you know, shame of missed opportunity, shame of feeling transactional, shame of being salesy, shame of not being able to take care of people, shame of drawing a messy boundary, and all these different things that it was just a little bit easier just not to do that. And I look back and I'm like, man, I would've had a really different year and it would've been like, it's really exciting to think about what might've happened had I just done all those things I was ashamed of. And also from where I'm sitting right now, it doesn't feel like there was actually any real danger in that shame other than just stepping outta my comfort zone.

Yeah, that's the interesting thing is like, let's say the shame of being salesy or transactional or something like that. That's something that a lot of people have learned. I work with some people in business and they're just like, "Of course I'm looking out for my interests. Of course I'm," and I respect other people who are doing that. And of course that person's selling 'cause that's their job. They have a business and of course they should be selling. And I would like them to see me as human and not be too forceful about it, but that's their job. And then I have other people who are just like, as soon as they think about marketing or sales, they're like, "Ooh, gross, and I don't want to do that," and there's shame around it. And a lot of that is just what you've been taught by your specific society, your specific tribe. And that's the amazing thing about it is that all these people in today's society, it's not like we all grew up in the same tribe generally, and there was the norms of that. Like micro civilization. It's like your neighbor could have a completely different set of shames than you have, which is just fascinating. Like, the opportunity is you get to really say, what are the social norms I want to live by and that I want the people around me to live by? You get to think about that as you're addressing your own shame, which is cool.

Yeah, I feel like a good metaphor for this is like an electric dog fence. You know, you have this— you have a road that has cars on it and dogs get hit by cars, and that's not good. So you put a fence around it, you want your dog to feel relatively free and you don't want to build a physical fence around your yard. So you put an electric fence in and then you train the dog by having it approach the fence and it gets the shock collar. And every time it gets a shock collar, it's like unexpected and it recognizes that something, something is wrong. And it goes into this, like, uh, there's like a nervous system shutdown and then it just doesn't do that thing anymore. And then after it's been trained, you can actually turn the fence off and it's just not going to go where that fence had been. And maybe it's not feeling shame about going there, but it's the same kind of nervous system response where we develop these habits of, oh yeah, I'm not gonna go there, I'm not gonna do that, that's gonna get me rejected. And then we just often don't question it and we just live in that electric fence that we've built for ourselves or that society or our parents, you know, kind of trained us on. And it's interesting that you mentioned now that, you know, everybody has a different electric fence and we have all these different micro societies interacting. So there's just so much tension around, Well, what, what are you in so much shame for? What's going on? Or, you should feel shame, you should be ashamed. And then we have this like whole thing where people use shame as a tool for social justice or to try to change behavior in society, which just doesn't work.

No, makes people rebel against it, especially if they don't agree. And the other thing that's really cool about your metaphor is that they— I don't know if you know this, but there's dogs that learn that if they just go through that fence really quickly, it's worth it. So, they just run really quickly and it shocks them, but it only shocks them for a little bit of a time because they're out of the zone because it only shocks you within the zone. And, that happens with people too as far as shame. So, let's say you have a natural habit like sex, meaning that it is in your nature to have sex. I mean, it's more than in your nature. You can almost say your nature is to have sex, right? Because if we didn't have sex, we wouldn't be here.

It's as much as it is to eat.

As much as it is to eat. So if you throw shame onto that urge, right, which most of society has done, or onto eating for that matter, or onto eating for that matter, then you start associating shame with— I mean, it's like things that wire together fire together. So every time sex happens, shame happens. There's actually something that happens where people get addicted to shame, I would say, where they're the the shame is the addiction. And so sex isn't as thrilling unless there's a little bit of shame with it, or eating isn't— or shopping isn't as thrilling if there isn't a little bit of shame with it. So there's actually— there's this weird thing that happens, which is a lot like the dog running through the fence. It's like, I want that thing, I want to be roaming, and I will take that shock, and it'll just kind of like add to the thrill of getting through and making it happen, which is totally fascinating to me. And And I think that's the other thing that happens as far as keeping bad habits in place. There's this great quote that says, "Shame is the locks that hold the chains of bad habits in place." And I think this is one of the big mechanisms for it is because we actually become addicted to the shame because we want the stuff that comes with it like sex or food or things or a bunch of stuff in our nature.

Yeah. So we just keep going back to that shame place, but then not actually getting the thing that we want because we're locked up in shame and it blocks our emotions. And emotions are a part of our experiencing that the actual thing. If we're not feeling the emotions, then we're not actually—

Right. So it's an empty ghost syndrome. It's like, oh, I got the thing that I wanted, but I didn't get to enjoy it completely because there's shame. And so it doesn't actually fully fulfill me. So I need to do it again and again and again and again.

This seems like it would be a maladaptive evolutionary thing to go into something where we feel shame and then all of our processing shuts down. That doesn't seem optimal. What's going on? What is going on with this?

It keeps us inside the fence, right? That's the thing is it keeps us inside of that line, which is what we need evolutionarily to exist as tribe, right? Like as a small group, as a village, as a nation to some degree. Like, we need to stay within that fence or we're just not going to work out as well. And so yes, it's not perfectly adapted, but it had a reason, and the reason to some degree is useful. I mean, people without shame, they're psychopaths, right? That's the name for them, is, is psychopaths, is people without shame. And they will like hurt people, and then society will completely fall apart. If we had a society of psychopaths, I don't think that the society would operate very well, right?

It sounds like one of the, one of the variables here is just that society is now changing so much more rapidly than it used to, you know, just with everything that relates to our nervous system is just that everything is changing faster than it ever used to change. So our every part of our nervous system needs to be able to update faster in order to maintain contact with what reality is now and not what it was 100,000 years ago.

And maybe, and maybe it's possible as well that like some of the ways that it's adapting aren't good for the long run either, right? So it's kind of— it's, it's a, you know, I have no idea what's going to happen societally speaking, but what I can say is that what's happening with the shame and people that I work with is that when they feel shame around something, they usually are stuck in that habit and they're usually stuck in that mode for an extended period of time. And to be able to address and lift the shame is fantastic. And the crazy thing about addressing and lifting that shame is that there's an intellectual basis to it and there's also an emotional basis to it. And you don't really get the lift without the emotional basis, meaning a lot of people know, okay, yes, I realize that the church told me sex was bad. I realize that, you know, my grandmother told me sex was bad, but I know sex isn't bad, yet I still feel shame. Wanting sex and I still recreate sex in a way that I get to feel shame instead of having sex in a way that would make me feel no shame, I continually choose to have sex in a way that gives me shame. That whole thing that happens has to be addressed with the emotions behind it. You can't just address it intellectually. It doesn't change anything for people.

Yeah. In fact, that can just increase the level of tension that you feel internally if you intellectually know that you, quote, "shouldn't feel this shame" and your body does feel the shame. And you don't know what to do about it, then you can actually just stress yourself out even more and just vibrate in place. Yes.

Yes.

Yeah. I've found myself in that a lot.

Yeah. I can describe everything that's wrong with me, but I haven't. But yeah, but nothing has changed. That's a real— that's like a little slice of pain and discomfort. Yeah, exactly.

One thing that I noticed, though, is so we're talking about, you know, being the dog that runs through the electric fence, which is like, you know, I'm going to get my freedom. You know, sometimes he'll run straight through the electric fence and get hit by a car.

Yes.

And that's like, that's one of the things that you just have to kind of, do you just have to accept that? It's like, okay, if I'm gonna move through the thing that my entire system thinks is going to hurt me or get me ostracized to find out if that's true, sometimes I am going to get ostracized and find out that it's true. And sometimes maybe I won't.

I don't think it's necessary. I think running through the fence just starts wiring stuff together. And, and so I don't think that's necessary. I think it's just far better to turn off the fence, so to speak. Meaning that like really address the shame underneath it and really investigate it both emotionally and intellectually and watch it fall apart and then take your action. One of the ways to do that is to really feel the want in the shame itself, meaning like really feel the desire to like, what is the sexual experience you do want? What is the eating experience that you do want? Right? Because usually the one that's wired with shame is not the one that you actually want. So it's also seen that there's nothing to be like— to really intellectually take apart the thing that people think that they should be ashamed of so that it can exist.

Yeah, I think this can lead to another interesting place, especially in, in self-development or self-exploration, where it's easy for us to identify the shames that we're like kind of ready to let go of and not identify the ones that are deeper. And so we might go on a mission where we're like, you know what, I feel a lot of shame about sex. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to, you know, deconstruct all of my sex shame and I'm going to go have all the sex that I want. And then they're not going to— maybe you might not notice that there's actually deeper shames in there that you're also recreating, like shames of abandonment or shames of, like, recklessness or just like all kinds of different things that you're still recreating in the way that you're going about exploring your newfound freedom in the one shame area that you're exploring. And that might take a couple of years of a process before you realize, oh wait, I actually was using, using this exploration of shame to run more further from other shames that I wasn't looking at.

You know, if you have a group of people around you, the best way to, to address the shame is to see that you're loved within the action. You can't do this by yourself, but it's a cool thing to do. It's like, if you're having shame around the way that you eat, for instance, how do you create a situation where you're loved for your— the way that you eat? How do you create a situation where you can be appreciated, where there's nothing that you have to hide, that you're not like sneaking into the corner and hiding? And so it's like, like when we do like A lot of our courses, one of the things that we do is create that container of love because a lot of what people are ashamed of, nobody else has a problem with. It's amazing. You'll hear somebody in one of our workshops and they'll be like, "Oh, I want to feel pleasure." And they won't even say what kind of pleasure that is. And they'll be like, "Oh, I feel ashamed to even want. I feel selfish. I feel ashamed for even wanting to feel pleasure." And I'll ask, "Hey, does anybody here have a problem with them feeling pleasure?" Who here wants this person to have a life that's full of pleasure? And it's, it's like that perpetually. It's like if I asked a room full of people and said, hey, who here has a problem with Brett wanting to make his business really successful and going out there and really selling his business so that it can be successful as long as it's in alignment with who he is? Anybody opposed to that? Nobody would say that they were opposed to that, right? And so to really see and feel that love is an amazing thing. And that changes shame because shame is often put in place because of, you know, a society telling us that we were bad or wrong or being ostracized.

Yeah, I guess I wonder here, one of the things that you said is it's, you know, it's maybe not about having— not running straight through the electric fence and finding out what happens, because that might be a little bit— that might be more likely just to recreate it. And so it's more about just inspecting it. You can create a group for yourself of people where you can, you can test it out, which, you know, there's, there's that saying that we're traumatized in relationship and we're healed in relationship, where especially for something like shame, which is such a social, social type programming, that for not just our intellect, but for our whole body, our whole nervous system to experience the unexpected, which is to be loved for the thing that we are ashamed of, is really what's kind of required to get down to that.

Yeah, if you're doing it with other people, that is the quickest way. But there's, there's lots of ways to address it within yourself. And you mentioned this a while ago, one of the ways to address it in yourself is to not recreate the behaviors. So what I notice is, like, say for instance, one of the things that we go through in some of the courses is people getting in touch with their anger and being able to move their anger, but not at anybody, not in a way that hurts anybody, but just like let that energy move and to learn how to love it In that process, they might get angry at somebody or they might break something so then they can go see anger isn't safe. They create the shame to reinforce the worldview or reinforce the identity. And that's one of the coolest things about shame is that it does create— it is kind of the outline of our identity often. A part of the outline of our identity is the things that we are ashamed of.

Yeah. And it can be subtle. There's just— when you have a couple layers of shame over a possible action you might take, it just doesn't occur to you that that action is even possible or that this version of you might even exist.

Right.

There's just— no, I'm just not that way. I've always been this way and not that way. I'm, you know, I'm not a salesy kind of person, somebody might say.

Right.

You know, I'm just not into sex.

Right. Yeah, exactly. But what I notice is that we have this natural desire to unfold, this natural desire to flourish, this natural desire to become more and more free. And we will, as one part unfolds, we will start running up against those things that we can't see. We start running up against the shames that are so deep in us that we're not aware of today.

Let's say somebody doesn't have a group around them. And they want to do some personal self-exploration on shame, I just described what I did yesterday and that was really helpful, which was just writing down as many subtle types of shame that I could find, uh, that, that I found were just subtly something that I just didn't want to, didn't want to feel, so I didn't take an action that would have led me in that direction. I went in some other direction, and then I, you know, find myself deeper and deeper into my comfort zone, and then some form of stagnation occurs. I'm curious, what, what are some practices that somebody could take individually to explore their shame and use some of the tools that we've talked about on this podcast to explore it?

The best way is the body. The body tells you when you're ashamed quicker than the mind ever will. And so there's a certain feeling that you get when you're ashamed in your body, and to be able to be aware of that and to see that happening, that's great. Your mind will often spin on shame. So if you notice that your mind is spinning, going over the same story over and over and over again, then you can see that there's shame in that, and then you can start finding the beliefs in that as well. So that's another way to do it, using your intellect to find it. The other way to deal with it is just start dealing with the shame that you can see, and then the other shames will present themselves, you know, like it— you solve one and then the next ones come. And what you'll start noticing is that a lot of the shames, they contradict themselves. So if you say to somebody who's like, um, "Um, yeah, I don't want to always be talking." And say, "Okay, cool. So are you good with like always being quiet?" They're like, "No." Okay. So what's going on there? What is it that you actually want? And what you'll notice is that that want isn't— it isn't solidified in their system. They're very clear on all the things that they're not allowed to want. They're very clear on all the things that they can't do, but they haven't actually found the solution that goes, "Okay, I can do this." And it's as simple as people, let's say smoking. If you're like, "Okay, so do you want to smoke?" They're like, "No." "Are you ashamed of smoking?" "Yes." "Okay. And do you want to never have a cigarette again in your whole life?" They're like, "No." It's like, "Oh, wow. What's going on there?" And so, really being able to feel through your wants is another great thing. To intellectually see how many double binds you're in with your own shames, where you're in no-win situations where there's no way that you have an out. And then to find your wants so that you can see what the right out is. Those are really good useful things. And the other thing is to feel the shame all the way through. So shame has a stagnation and the stagnation occurs because you don't want to feel it. You don't want to think about it. You push it aside. And if you stop pushing it aside and you say, okay, what is that thing and how do I love that? Because the shame is in a weird way is the absence of love, right? And so if you can love that thing that you're ashamed of, then you can move through it. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's almost even like an absence of awareness. It's like awareness tends to naturally draw itself away from where there's shame and it becomes just this like kind of barren wasteland in the body.

That's right.

And if you bring awareness back to it, It's as though shame is an emotion that blocks other emotions. It's like some emotional nemesis.

Yeah, it does. It stops that fluidity from happening because we just like— we don't— it feels so uncomfortable to us that we just push it and anything that comes with it aside, right? And so people who are ashamed of their sexuality, they can't feel that full desire. They can't feel that full wanting. And when they're having sex, they're not fully, deeply into the pleasure, right? It's like the sex is going to be much quicker and harder and they can't actually fully allow all the pleasure of that sexual experience into their system. And it's the same thing with somebody eating. If they have a lot of shame around their food, they're not able to just really taste it and savor it. That's not to say that people who don't taste all have shame around their food. That's not what I'm saying. Or that you can't have all sorts of sex and enjoy it. I'm just saying that the capacity to enjoy it goes away if you have shame.

It sounds like there's a lot of subtlety here just as there is with any emotion. If you look at an emotion, you're like, "Okay, I feel sadness." There could be more and more subtle levels of sadness. There may be more different subtle kinds of emotion that are something next to sadness, melancholy, nostalgia and the like. And the same can be true for shame. And I noticed that there's sort of a progression that happens when we start to do more emotional exploration, is that we start by just not being aware of the emotion, or we report it as that we feel good or we feel bad. And then we start to recognize the emotions, like, oh, I feel shame. And getting deeper, it might be, oh, I feel specifically the shame around money. But there's sometimes I don't feel ashamed about making money, but maybe it's I feel ashamed about making money if I don't feel like I'm really creating value or like that it came from some work ethic that was trained up in me. Or I don't feel like I'm— if I make the money, but I don't feel like, you know, I deserve it. Or, you know, there's all these different subtleties. But then also each of the subtleties you can get lost in, like, oh, I have this particular subtle form of shame. But then creating that label of that shame is still an intellectual barrier to actually experiencing and feeling in the body.

Yeah. And if you can feel and experience it in the body, you don't have to name it. You don't have to understand very much of it. Like, if somebody was like, what's the quickest way for me to get through shame? It's like, every time you feel it, stop, invite it, love it, welcome it, welcome it back anytime it wants to come. And when it's ready, then you move. And then you keep moving until the next time you feel it. And if you just did that, you wouldn't have to understand anything. You would just more and more be in love with your life and each other. And there's this fear, like people think, "Oh, okay, but if I do that, then I'll be the psychopath and I won't be able to, you know, I'll start hurting people and I'll be only self-interested." That's the belief system. But what actually happens is that you become more and more in love with yourself and everybody else. If you really feel the love for all the things that you're ashamed of, and that love has a very strong moral compass, right? The more that you're in love with people, the less it— the, the more painful it is to do anything that would be knowingly hurting them in the long run. You might be happy to hurt them in the short run if it's for their greater good, but— or for their greater good.

But yeah, yeah, the very fact that you're even asking this of yourself, like, well, what if, what if I become a psychopath? Like, I don't, I don't know of any psychopaths who are like, well, what if I became a psychopath and I didn't care about people's feelings? Or Oh, how I'm hurting people. That's just not how a psychopath operates. So it's this moral compass is even there in the belief system that would hold you back from feeling your shame.

Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah, I hadn't thought about it that way. That's beautiful, right? Yeah. Another cool thing you can do is you can say, okay, so if you find yourself, you want something and you're ashamed of that thing that you want, you can just ask yourself this simple, like this really cool and very simple question, which is, If I thought that I was inherently good, how would I interpret that want? How would I see that want? So if it's like, oh, I want a billion dollars, okay, that's selfish, that's greedy, I should be ashamed of that, okay. And if you saw yourself as inherently good, what would you make of that want? Oh, I, I see that I want security. I see that I want to I see that I want to be seen as important. I see that I want to help people. I see that I want to not be— I want autonomy. And you could see what was behind the want. And so there's this— what happens in shame is that there has to be a belief system that you're not inherently good. And if you can get in touch with your inherent goodness, Right. And so what's, what's interesting is the idea that is, if I let go of my shame, I will be bad. But what's actually happening is when you let go of your shame, you get in touch with your inherent goodness. Yeah.

And I can also see what our notions of inherently good mean might also color this as well. It's like, you know what, I just want to, I just want to become the leader of the free world so that I can finally implement the surveillance and police state that will finally make everybody safe.

"Because that's just my inherent goodness coming out." Yeah, so what I'm suggesting is more of when you feel the shame, interpret it through the lens of you're inherently good. Not using "I'm inherently good" to justify, to run your shame down and push it down and justify your behavior that feels like shit inside of your system.

Right. And so how do you notice the difference between what you're doing there? If that's, if that's the case.

Yeah, it— your body doesn't like it. Like, there's no way that the person who's like, I want to control everything so that I feel safe, feels good in their body. Like, I've, I've seen those people. They're incredibly rigid, right? They're held all the time. Their shoulders are rocks, right? They're like— those people are not not in conflict in their body. They've cut themselves off from their body. Because if they felt their body, they would be screaming in pain.

Yeah, so part of the practice here is becoming more aware of the subtle unconscious tensions in our body and the conflict in our emotions. And that's, that's just part of this entire journey, uh, and shame is one dimension on which to make that exploration.

Yeah, so the way, like, if you go back to our original definition of shame, it's what society does to tell you that you're not behaving properly, and it controls, like, it's that mechanism, but it's also the blocking of emotions. And so what all we're doing here is we're actually freeing the blocking of emotions by feeling our body and creating love where there was abandonment. It's as simple as that. It's just counteracting it. Yeah.

So from that perspective, it's— there's a way that you could see shame as a way that we abandon ourselves. There's, there's some part of us, there's some natural instinct, there's some natural impulse to be fully who we are. And we abandon that part by withdrawing from it in shame.

Unless there's the natural shame, like I said, which is like, I think there is a natural shame if you're doing stuff that, you know, there, there's certain behaviors that as humans, if we do it, we're going to feel that shame, probably with or without a society. Hurting people we love on purpose for our own good, for our own short-term good, is going to feel crappy in people's bodies. Probably no matter whose body it is unless they are neurologically atypical.

Yeah, I think part of what, what we've been talking about with exploring the shame and bringing attention and love to it is that it will distill into its more natural form. And it won't entirely go away. You're not— by, by doing self-exploration in any emotion, you're not going to be able to remove the experience of emotion just because you're working to deconstruct it. If it's really meant to be there, if there's really something in you that's bringing up anger, you're not gonna— you could suppress the anger, but you're not gonna convince your system to just fully release the sense of something being violated unless there's just a story to be seen through and that story was just vapor all along.

Yeah, so I would say that with all the emotions, including shame, if you're trying to get rid of it, then you're not welcoming it. So then you're not actually loving it. And it's like saying— it's like welcoming kids into the house just so that you can get the fuck rid of them. Like, they don't feel loved, right? So the idea is that you are actually welcoming the shame and you look forward to feeling it, and you invite it. It's not in any way to get rid of it. And as that happens, it becomes more of its natural expression rather than the expression that people used to control you when you were a kid to control you in society. And not to say that they're trying to control you because they were bad, you know, they were just passing on what they'd been learned, what they had learned. Yeah.

Yeah. And so this brings me to another question, which is how we relate to others when others are feeling shame. You know, when somebody comes up and they give us an apology with a bunch of shame, and we talked about in the last episode how that feels to receive. And so if let's, let's say somebody in our lives is repeating a shame loop, and, you know, maybe the actions that they're taking in that shame loop are hurting us. Maybe it's, maybe it's an employee who's, you know, not delivering or not being honest, or maybe it's a partner, or maybe it's a brother who's addicted to some drug, and there's this shame loop and you see somebody in it. What's, what's a way to be with them in that shame?

Yeah, there's kind of two things there. The first one is if I just see somebody in shame, so The way Tara and I have decided to raise our kids is that we don't shame them. We don't punish them and we don't shame them. And, what I've noticed in them is that they will shame themselves. We don't have to do anything. When they do something that is not in alignment with their moral compass, man, they will shame themselves. And, sometimes they'll even shame themselves when I'm like, "That's ridiculous. Please don't." And, I will literally say that to them. I'm like, "I see that you're ashamed and I want you to know there's nothing in me that wants you to be ashamed. You're welcome to be ashamed, and I can be with you while you're ashamed, but I just want you to know there's nothing in me that wants you to be ashamed. And get— just like, imagine hearing that from your parent, you know, right, in a moment of shame. Like, it makes me like misty inside to just think that I'm able to give that gift to my girls. So there's that. And so, and I think that's— if you just see somebody in shame, to be able to stand in love and say there's nothing to be ashamed of is great. With that said, and, and even when people do really have done some pretty bad things to me out of their own neuroses or whatever, and you get a lot of that as a coach, you know, I will say to them, hey, I don't want you to do that again, and I might even stop our relationship, and I don't want you to feel ashamed. And the reason I don't want them to feel ashamed is because that's just going to recreate the behavior. And if they can feel my love, then hopefully that behavior becomes less prevalent in their life. Now, if somebody is in a shame loop and they are doing something over and over again and it's creating that bad habit or it's locking that bad habit in place, then I think it's usually best to just draw boundaries. It's not to try to save them from it. It's to be clear and honest with them and say, "Hey, I don't want you to be ashamed." I don't want this kind of behavior in my life. And so when you're ready to not have this kind of behavior, you're always welcome here. If somebody's in a loop, that can be really devastating for their lives and for yours. I mean, that is drug addiction, that is, that is constantly stealing from somebody, and it's, it's that kind of behavior. And so for me, I, I just draw boundaries around it. I don't— it doesn't make sense, it doesn't help them for me to be codependent with them on it.

Yeah. One thing that you mentioned in the way that you relate to your daughters was you're like, I don't want you to feel shame. You're also welcome to feel the shame if you want to. And I think that's an important component here because otherwise people could be like coming from a place of trigger and frustration with somebody who's in a shame cycle around them, be like, stop feeling shame. And then that can just create a new—

whole new shame pattern.

A whole new shame pattern around the shame.

Yeah, I did that once or twice. Yeah, exactly. Their shame was so uncomfortable for me that I wanted them to stop it.

Which brings us back to apologies. Like, "Hey, I'm sorry that I have feelings around your shame and I'm trying to control you. I have shame." Exactly.

Yeah. And I think the thing about shame is it's a bit of a paper dragon in the fact that— or paper tiger, I can't remember which one is the phrase, but there's the— it melts with love. And in a weird way, I would even say that shame is It's a version of love in the fact that it is care. So it's weird, we feel shame and we interpret that as, oh, there's something wrong with us, there's something bad, there's something that's unacceptable in us. And the only reason that we would think that is because we care to be good. We care for other people. Like, it is the thing that shows us that we love. It is an action of love. It is a It is a sign of our inherent goodness that we feel it. And when you see it that way instead of as the way— as like this horrific thing that you want to get rid of, it really can transform. And the way that it looks when it transforms is it, it just kind of becomes a natural guide rails about how you want to live your life. And if you, you know, if you do that, it's going to feel crappy, so you don't, you don't want to do that. And So it's just like that, but it's not based on what other people said. It's based on your love and how you want to be in the world, not based on some weird authority figure who needed to have, you know, people act a certain way so they could feel safe.

And in that sense, it feels like there's sort of a natural progression of things where when you're, when you're a child, it makes sense for your parents, your family, your tribe to install in you the understanding of what is or isn't accepted or what will or will not get you ousted. And then as you, as you develop and mature as an adult, you get to develop your own inner compass and like connect more and more to that, to that compass yourself and inspect that shame and test it out and see what really actually feels good. Now that you understand the world a little bit more, you've, you've lived in it sometime, and then that locus of that internal compass becomes yours and not something that you've just adopted from the outside.

Yeah, the only thing I change about that is that my experience with my daughters is that the moral compass is in them. You know, I wouldn't say right from the start, but it starts developing around 5, 6 years old, and there's this natural desire to be to be good, you know, if, if they haven't been traumatized, if they haven't been shamed, you know, like, right, if you just allow them to figure it out and listen to themselves, they learn this thing very naturally. It's a, you know, they want to love and be loved. Humans want to love and be loved. And you traumatize them, you beat them up, you tell them that they're bad, and they will believe it, and then they will stop getting— they will not be in touch with that. That desire to love and be loved, and they will start trying to make up with it for control or dominance or violence or whatever. Right.

So all those things just delay the onset, or perpetually, perhaps forever, delay the onset or stunt the onset of that, that internal compass. Compass. And it's natural for it to arise much earlier than we might expect if we're bought into the belief systems that shame is a, you know, shame is a tool for social justice, or shame is the way that we teach people how to operate in society.

Yeah.

Yeah. So one thing that what I've noticed also is that, and something we've talked about before, is that one way to relieve some shame in our system is to share it. If we've been in a codependent pattern with somebody, just be like, hey, you know, I know that I've been trying to control you and I realize I've actually just been avoiding my own shame. And just noting it and saying that can be a way for the whole thing to just start dissolving in us.

Absolutely. That's what AA is built on. 12-step programs are built on that premise, right? Yeah, absolutely. A lot of group work is built on the premise of like, oh, if I bring my shame out into the light and let people see it, especially if those people still love me and can still accept me, then the shame can vanish.

Yeah. So as we close this episode, my invitation here is that, uh, I'm going to add all the things that I wrote in my notebook last night that I'm ashamed of into our show notes. And I also invite anybody else To go to our website, artofaccomplishment.com/podcast. And there's a feedback form there. You could just say, hey, here's some shames. Use a fictitious name if you want, no name. We're not going to use names in the, in those show notes. And as they come in, I'll just add them to the list. And then you can go check out and see what all the different kinds of shames that people have had that they've sent in and see where some of them might show up in you and be like, wow, I hadn't even thought of that one. But yeah, that one's real for me.

That's cool. And also, when you're going through them and you go, "That's ridiculous that anybody would be ashamed of that. That's ridiculous anybody would be ashamed of that," know that there's somebody out there looking at your shame list thinking the same thing. They're like, "They shouldn't be ashamed of that. That's just human. That's just natural." Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Awesome.

What a pleasure. What a good idea. Thanks for coming up with that one, Brett. Yeah.

All right. Thank you, Joe. Thanks, everybody, for listening.

Yeah. Thank you.

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