A Man's Guide To Ending Shame in Brief

All right, team, welcome back to the Mantalk show. I am Connor Beaton, and today we are going to be taking a deep dive into shame, into ending shame, into what it is, why it shows up, why it's so damn hard to get rid of some of the physiological pieces of shame that are very, very important in order to move through it. What does not help you reduce shame, which is actually important because there is a lot of garbage advice out on the Internet, some of it even coming from coaches or therapists, that actually can accentuate the shame that you're experiencing. And then we're talking, finally at the end, about how do you move through shame? And here's what I want you to know. Normally, I would say, if you just want the solution, skip ahead to the solution. But for this, it's actually imperative to know and understand some of the pieces I'm going to explain in terms of what shame is and. And why it's so hard to get rid of. So let's go. Let's get into this. So let's begin with, what is shame? Well, it's many, many things. But for most people, shame is cognitive story, a narrative or a belief system of not being good enough, of being broken, of something being foundationally or fundamentally wrong with them. So the narrative internally is there's something wrong with me. And there's a good saying that guilt says I did something wrong, whereas shame says I am wrong. So that's really what shame is. It is a belief system that there's something fundamentally wrong with you. And then there is a physiological response associated with that, which we are gonna dive deep into, because it is incredibly important to understand what's happening in the body when you are experiencing shame. So with that said, and I'm gonna expand on some of this as we go along, I wanna talk a little bit about why shame is so hard to get rid of. Because if you're watching this video, my guess is that you have probably at some point had a conversation with a therapist or a coach about your shame. Maybe you've looked up some of the content, maybe you've read a book, right? There's some great books out there. And yet the shame persists. So why is shame so hard to get rid of? Let's get into that piece. First and foremost, one of the biggest things that I haven't seen talked about very often when it comes to shame, that is absolutely imperative to understand is that shame is a survival response. Okay? Shame is a survival response. So just like if you watch an animal, you know, I Remember watching as a kid, my grandparents had all the National Geographic vhs, and this is gonna date me, but that's fine. They would have these VHSs, and I would watch them. And I remember watching one where this, like, not baby gorilla, but, like, you know, a younger male gorilla was poking and prodding and sort of provoking the silverback. And finally the silverback like, turned on him. And the baby gorilla, like the teenage gorilla, just, like, cowered in fear, looked away and kind of. And then the silverback, you know, turned and walked away. And so just like fight, flight, or freeze is a very needed survival response for an animal. Shame helps us to have a survival response in an environment. In an environment where maybe you are threatened, maybe you don't feel like you belong, maybe there's abuse, maybe there's violence, maybe there's hostility, maybe you feel or were deeply neglected, maybe there was a lot of criticism that was harsh, harsh and. Or you had a lot of emotional volatility that you grew up in, and you didn't know how to respond to that. So shame creates a survival response physiologically in the body that allows you or allowed you as a child to protect yourself, right? So as an example, say whenever you got something wrong or whenever you talked back against your dad, he would blow up, right? He would get super loud, he'd call you names, you know, maybe threaten some type of physical force. What the response will be for you as a child is some type of shame physically, right? Cowering, submissiveness, looking away, not really engaging in eye contact. And so physically, you'll have a shame response, right? There's something wrong with me. There must be something wrong with me that my caretaker is deploying this intense of a tactic to try and deal with me. And so it's a way in which that you can then survive. And what happens over time is that physiological response to your environment becomes a belief system about who you are. So shame is a survival response. We're going to dive more into that in a moment. Number two, shame is a very powerful body response. This part is often overlooked in a lot of the work that I have studied online, which I think is quite unfortunate because I've had a lot of male clients come to work with me that have had a tremendous amount of shame, whether it was because of past circumstances, abuse that they experienced growing up, growing up in a very critical environment, experiencing abandonment, or very real levels of neglect that will produce an internal level of shame that then will live in the body. And so whenever you start to bump up against any behavior or any decision that goes against that shame of there's something wrong with me, right? And maybe that's, you know, simply you initiating some type of sexual connection with your partner. Maybe it's you asking somebody out on a date, maybe, or, you know, asking for a phone number at the Whole Foods of the, you know, the. The cute woman that you, you know, you just start up a conversation with. Anytime that you go to bump up against that internal narrative of there's something wrong with me. I'm not good enough. You know, I'm. And I'm defective. I'm not smart enough, I'm not good looking enough. That physiological response will happen in the body and try to reinforce the belief system of the shame. So there's two parts that we have to work with and that you are often working against. One is the belief structure and the narrative of the shame. And then the other one is the physiological response of the shame. So the physical response in the body can be so powerful because it's meant to shut down your system. Right? When shame gets deployed, what happens is that your mind, your body begins to, like, literally close in. And it's meant to have you move into a space of submission, okay? Submission to whatever the perceived threat is, whatever the perceived change or shift of narrative is. So that's another one. And the next one is that it really constantly reinforces any trauma that you've experienced growing up. And so trauma and shame can really go hand in hand. Right? And that trauma that you experienced may have inserted the story, it's not safe for me to succeed, or I'm not capable of being successful, or I'm not capable of. Of having a healthy relationship or being close with somebody. It's not safe for me to be assertive or to have needs or to be happy. And so shame actually operates in tandem with that trauma to prevent you from actually connecting with the aim that you're trying to move towards, whether it's some type of success or speaking your boundaries or speaking your needs or just letting yourself be happy. So those are some of the pieces in terms of why shame is so hard to get rid of. And I'm just gonna go in depth into two pieces. One is the connection between shame and trauma. And the other one that I'm gonna talk about is shame as a source of safety. Because for many adults, the reason why they're still deploying shame is not because their adult, you know, wise, mature self is like, oh, this is a good strategy to get my needs met. Because you watching this probably know that it's not a good strategy. It's not getting you what you want. But the child that you once were had to deploy that strategy. So let me read you a quote that I absolutely love because I think this really ties it in, and it's the connection between shame and trauma. So this is Judith Herman from a book in 2006. And she said, when a relationship of dominance, when a relationship of dominance and subordination or submission is established, feelings of humiliation, of degradation and shame are central to the victim's experience. And this is the real kicker. Shame, like anxiety, functions as a signal of danger. In this case, interpersonal or social, right? So shame is this, like, alarm system. Just like if you experience anxiety, it's your body setting off the alarm system, right? Like somebody's entering into your house and setting off the smoke alarms in your house even though there's no fire. That's anxiety, right? You are having an experience of worry, of fear, maybe panic, even though everything's fine, right? You feel fundamentally unsafe even though you rationally know that you are safe and everything's okay. That's anxiousness. Shame does something very similar where it sets off an alarm specifically to move you into a subordinate, more submissive position, where confrontation, asserting your wants and needs, speaking what you want, even in the context of a safe relationship, even if you're dating somebody that's like, I want to know what you need. I want to know what you want. That still might feel like a threat because the shame living inside of you will tell you to cower, right? And so this is the connection between shame and trauma. And which brings me to number three, reframe the shame, okay? Reframe the shame. So it's not you, it's a symptom of the trauma, right? Or it's not you, it's a symptom of the hyper criticism that you experienced as a kid. It's not that you're broken. It's that you learn to protect yourself by using shame. It's not that there's something fundamentally wrong with you. It's that you learned something, a survival strategy, right? That doesn't serve you anymore.

Or the shame saved you in some capacity. That reframe can be so powerful because what most men are doing is trying to kill off the shame. I hate this part. I wish it would just go away. I want it to die off. And that type of animosity is going to produce more intensity and in the shame, right? Any type of. I wish this part of me would just f off is going to Create more intensity. So we want to reframe it with the understanding that the shame that you are experiencing is either a survival mechanism, it helped keep you safe, It's a result of a trauma. And that can be incredibly, incredibly helpful because it reminds you that. That that shame kept you safe, right? It helped you in some way, or it has been helping you in some way, even if it's not serving you any longer in your life. Next, number four. Separate personhood from behavior. Okay. Separate personhood from behavior. You may have heard me talk about this before. It's a very important piece. But what you're doing is saying, I did something wrong. I did something bad. It doesn't mean I am wrong. It doesn't mean I am bad, right? That's. That's separating personhood from behavior. So if you screw up and you watch porn, right? Say you've been like, I'm not going to watch porn anymore. And then you. You slip up and you watch porn, okay, that was the wrong thing to do because you went against your word. It doesn't mean that you're broken, right? And you can. You actually have to start to practice saying that to yourself. Okay, I effed up, right? I screwed up. I watched porn again. Or I had the drink or I smoked the weed, or I texted that chick that I know I shouldn't text, or I like, you know, slid back into her DMs, or she came back over my house last night. All right, I screwed up again, right? Doesn't mean that I'm fundamentally broken. I just made a bad choice and decision. Part of the pathway out of shame is starting to see, how would I operate? How would I behave? What would I think? How would I feel? What decisions and choices would I make if I wasn't operating from the shame? And then you can slowly start to operate from that place. Okay, if I am a good person who sometimes makes bad decisions, well, then it's okay for me to make some decisions versus I'm so wrong, I can't make any decisions whatsoever. So find some alternatives. And this might be something that you do retroactively, right? You might have to look at things retroactively and say, okay, if I wasn't collapsing under shame, how would I have responded to that? What would I ideally liked to have done? And then maybe you circle back around. Maybe you circle back around and open up the conversation again and say, hey, listen, I totally checked out in that conversation, or I collapsed under my own BS and I want to try this again. Here's what I want you to know. Here's what I didn't say, okay, here's what I want to communicate, here's how I actually feel, et cetera. Right? So you, you pro. You find an alternative that is a pathway that you would take, how you would behave, what you would believe, what you would think, what you would say, what you would do if you weren't operating from shame. And then you try and operate from that place as frequently as humanly possible.

That is a pretty good list. The last thing that I'm going to say is starting to experience safety in expression, in boundaries and assertiveness. Safety in expression, boundaries and assertiveness. Now, this is something that you have to practice actually feeling in your body. Because at first, remember, shame is going to try and convince you to not express yourself, to not communicate what you want and need, that you'll never get it right anyway. That you shouldn't be assertive, that you shouldn't be direct, that you shouldn't ask for what you want. If you have questions, comment below. If you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to subscribe. Wherever you are tuning into this, whether it's YouTube or Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and if you have other deep dives, other man's guides too, that you want me to dive into, DM me on Instagram Man Talks. I would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you so much for tuning in. Man it forward. Share this episode with somebody that you know will enjoy it. And until next time, it's Connor Beaton signing off.