A Man's Guide To: Ending Shame

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 coming from coaches or therapists, that actually can accentuate the shame that you're experiencing. And then we're gonna talk 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 that I'm going to explain in terms of what shame is 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 there's different varying degrees of shame, right? You might be somebody who's like, I experienced shame once in a while, and it's really not that bad. You might be somebody that's like, I actually have no idea when I feel shame. Like, I think once in a while when I've done something really wrong, then I'll feel Ashamed. And then you might be in the camp or the category of somebody who experiences, like, chronic shame. And that is usually the case for people who have a really dark or unhealthy or vicious inner. Inner dialogue. You know, if you're the type of person that's a ruthless perfectionist, if you are the type of person who has really high expectations of themselves but never feels like you achieve those expectations, maybe you judge yourself very harshly. Maybe you're very critical on yourself. And in your. In your inner dialogue, the way you speak to yourself is hypercritical or maybe even abusive, then it's very likely that you struggle with and suffer from chronic or really intense shame. And this is actually goes in tandem with one of the things that I've been talking about recently, which is how do you deal with the inner critic? Well, being able to move through your shame is a very important piece of it. 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 VHS 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, you know, looked away and kind of buckled down. 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. You know, shame helps us to have a survival response in an environment. In an environment where maybe you're 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, 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 to 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, you know, 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 started 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 broken, 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 experience 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 know, you know, 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. 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 the last piece that I'll say about that is that when you experience some type of trauma, what happens is that you experience something that is too big for you to handle in that moment. Especially if you experience trauma as a kid, as a teenager, as a young adult, quite often the result of that trauma, the reason why it can be so hard to heal through that, is that you experience something that was too big to handle, right? If you were abused physically or otherwise, that can be too big for you to even conceptually understand why that happened to you. And so naturally, that creates this psychological, physical positioning of, I was put in a subordinate or submissive position. I was dominated by something, or I was dominated by someone. And that's really what trauma is. There's something outside of your control, something that was circumstantial, something that you did not have a choice in, whether it was an accident that happened, that an accident that you witnessed, you know, something that you experienced from a parent or a caregiver, some type of bullying, et cetera. Right. I mean, the list can just go on and on. But when that traumatic event happens, the experience internally is coded as, I was overrun by something bigger than me. I was dominated by something bigger than me that I couldn't handle, that I didn't know how to deal with. And when that happens, that submissiveness, that subordination, that putting into a small position of being sort of overrun by something larger than you lives in your mind and body. And it's very common that people who have experienced that type of trauma, whether it's acute, meaning it has happened this one time, or it was an ongoing thing like, you know, abuse or abandonment or neglect, that will. That can live in that person's narrative and in their body. So really important to understand. Trauma and shame go hand in hand. And sometimes the. The healing through the trauma that you may have experienced is actually confronting and dealing with the shame head on. Which brings me to my next point.

That's gonna be a Dave Chappelle reference. I almost dropped it. Don't smoke crack. On my episode about shame. There's my comedic relief. Clearly, my impersonation is not very good, so we'll just leave that to the side. So shame as a source of safety. This is what I wanna talk about next. The real challenge with moving through shame is that it served a survival function for you at some point. If you're somebody that just experiences shame once in, you know, there are different ways to work with it. But if you're somebody that experiences shame on an ongoing basis and it feels like chronic and crippling sometimes, it's almost certain that that shame served as a survival mechanism at some point, likely very early on in your childhood. And because of that, your brain and your body don't want to let it go. Because how your brain and your body have found a way to create safety, the illusion of safety, but create safety where even if it's just an illusion, is by deploying shame as a means of, again, putting you into this more submissive, smaller orientation that hopefully will keep you safe, but likely is having a very net negative impact on your relationships, on your intimacy, on your career path, et cetera, and so in abusive and neglectful environments. Right? And even if you didn't experience abuse, maybe you were just left alone a lot. You know, you were left alone when you were upset, you were left alone when you wanted attention. You were just left alone a lot. And this is what I have seen in so many men where they're like, I wasn't abused. Like, I didn't experience any abuse. But when you drill down into it, what they did experience was a tremendous amount of loneliness. They don't really have a lot of memories with any of their caregivers. They don't really have a good recollection of being protected or, you know, kept safe when they had nightmares or were hurt or, you know, things like that. And so when we experience that, shame helps to drive you into this submissive place, into this sort of safe place that says, okay, there must be something wrong with me, that mom and dad don't want to care for me. There must be something wrong wrong with me. Because again, kids are little bundles of ego. And so anything that happens in their external environment up to a certain age, probably like six or seven years old, maybe eight years old, depending on the kid, anything that happens outside of themselves is going to be coded internally as I did, that I caused that. Something about me made that happen. So if mom and dad scream and yell at each other, scream and yell at that child, that child will say, there's something wrong with me that's causing this. So that is part of how it will try and keep you safe. It'll try and, you know, you can be scanning your external environment to be like, okay, how do I stay safe? How do I survive in this hostile environment or in this volatile environment where I don't know what I'm going to get? It'll deploy shame. Your brain and your body will deploy shame to try and create that safety. So the next piece about the safety is that when you grew up in an environment, and this is super important, when you grow up in an environment where self expression, boundaries, a sense of self authority, are seen as unsafe, then you as a child will have deployed shame as a means to prevent yourself from that self expression. So I'm going to dive a little bit more deep into that example. Say that every single time you expressed that you needed something or that you wanted something from your parents, they became reactive or defensive. They'd guilt trip you, they'd criticize you, they'd become volatile or angry. What you will have learned as a child is my self expression is not safe. Now you as a kid are going to want to express yourself really badly, right? Every child wants that. But if you learn that that's not safe, then your body and your mind has to deploy something to prevent that mechanism of self expression that is a natural part of your being. And shame is that mechanism. It's that tool that will try and stuff down that expression, those boundaries, the sense of self authority. And so that part of you will be self seen as a threat. And it's very likely that in your adult life, in your relationships, your intimate relationships, your work environment, it's probably common that your sense of self expression, your sense of self authority has been diminished quite a bit. And every time you want to express yourself, that's where the shame comes in and actually pushes that self expression, pushes that sense of authority down. So those are some of the key pieces. Next we are going to talk about understanding the physiological aspects of shame, the somatic aspects of shame. So the physical response to shame is quite interesting because in many ways, if you experience a lot of shame, your brain and your body have kind of become biased towards anticipating some sort of threat, some sort of danger in the future. So much so that you automatically interpret danger, no matter how safe you are. So it's kind of like anxiety in that way. Except with anxiety, the alarm system in your body goes off and you kind of feel a sense of like panic, like, I should do something, there's something I gotta figure out, there's something that I gotta solve for. Whereas shame is a collapsing experience, you actually start to Shut down. And depending on the severity of your shame, especially if it's linked to trauma, this can be a really debilitating experience where you start to have what's called a dorsal vagal response. So that's a very fancy term. There's something called polyvagal theory, which was created by Stephen Porges. You may have heard of the book called the Body Keeps the Score. Essentially there is a nerve called the vagus nerve that runs the whole length of your spine into the base of your brain. And you have more output from your brain going down into the body than you have input. Sorry, you have more input coming up from the body into the brain. Almost got that backwards. You have more input. 80% of the nerve endings in your brain that are related to the vagus nerve, again, which is the highway, the central highway of the body and the autonomic nervous system. 80% of them are going for from the body up into the brain. So that just means that a tremendous amount of information comes up from the body into the brain. And only 20% are outputs from the brain down into the body. Now that's important because shame, when you have a very intense shame response, your body has a collapse response, Your body has a shutting down, closing off response. And there's, there's sort of three areas of the, of polyvagal theory with relation to the autonomic nervous system that are very important. Okay. Number one is when you feel safe. And this zone is, is the ventral vagal. Where the ventral vagal system is sort of functioning properly. Right. Where your body is not pumping out stress hormones, it's not pumping out cortisol. And adrenaline is not causing you to panic. Your body's in a sort of rest and digest place. You can use your voice, you can make eye contact, you can engage with people in a normal fashion. And that's where we optimally want to be now when we move into a danger response, when we feel a threat for something. Maybe you're worried about getting something wrong, you know, with your girlfriend or your wife. You're worried about her, her being upset or disappointed in something and your body starts to move into a danger zone. You're like, oh, have I done something wrong? Am I going to get something wrong? That can cause your nervous system to evoke a fear response. Fight, flight or freeze. And that's what most people will experience, right? Maybe your, your girlfriend's upset that you forgot to get something from the grocery store. It's just like a trivial thing. And your body goes into this fight, flight or Freeze response. You get a little tense, you know, you're like, do I need to get defensive? Maybe you feel a little bit of shame of like, oh, like, what's wrong with me? How come I forgot to do that? And then there's a much more intense response. And the intense response is what's called a dorsal vagal activation, which really means that your body goes into like a life threatening response where there's a very extreme defensive strategy of submission, okay, where you move into a place of feeling helpless, you move into a place of collapsing, of feeling ashamed, maybe of just going completely silent. You kind of feel immobile in your body and you, you start to just completely collapse. And that is oftentimes associated with some type of trauma or abuse or abandonment or neglect that you experience, experienced early on in life. Remember that place of submissiveness or submission that we experience. And so depending on where you fall on the spectrum of how dense, how intense your shame is, there's sort of different methods that you're going to need to deploy in order to move through that shame. There's some common ones that can be very helpful. And then if you are experiencing that more intense version of shame where it feels like debilitating, then there's a couple things that you can do to help actually move through that. First, let's talk about what does not reduce shame. Because there is a lot of garbage information out there and sometimes people are giving information to you about dealing with your shame that is actually accentuating the shame. So first and foremost, talking about your shameful beliefs and self hatred is more likely to intensify your shame than it is to reduce it. So if you're in a therapy session or you're working with a clinician or a coach or whatever, and you're trying to work through that shame, simply just talking about those beliefs is not going to help. In fact, it is more likely to intensify and make that shame more solidified and sometimes even more intense. Next is rational challenges. So when you just try and challenge that shame based thinking will rarely decrease its power. Right? So you'll have a shame based thought, oh, what the hell's wrong with me? Like something's wrong with me. You know, I forgot to do that thing or I got that wrong or I said the wrong thing. And then you'll just try and rationally debate that shame. That is almost never going to work. It's why, you know, things like cognitive behavioral therapy where you're trying to just reframe that thought of shame, can sometimes be very Very limiting. It's why a lot of people that try and do, like, cbt, cbt their way out of shame will find that it often still lives inside of them and can be quite intense. Next is attempts to attribute the shame to the perpetrator rarely work in the way that we want. So, for example, if you know you're in your marriage or your relationship and your partner guilts you or they criticize you in some way and you feel shame internally and you try and blame them for that shame, like, well, if you just didn't criticize me as much, or if they just didn't talk to me like that, then I wouldn't feel this way. That very rarely works to actually minimize the shame in any way, shape or form. Next, let's just talk about how do you actually reduce shame? Let's close this out with the really valuable of information of, like, what do you actually do? And I've got 10 things here, and I know that might sound like a lot, but some of them are things that you are going to need to practice. Some of them are things that you can implement very, very quickly. Some of them are things that you're going to need to do over time. The first thing I want to say is that if you watch this video and what you got from it was, I have intense, chronic shame because of some trauma that I experienced or my environment growing up was so hostile that it wasn't okay for me to express myself or set boundaries or have any type of inner authority, then you probably do want to work with a practitioner, a clinician, a coach that really knows and understands how to help you move through that shame. Because not everybody does. Not all clinicians, not all therapists, not all coaches are made the same. And some people do not know how to functionally move you through shame. So if you have an intense type of shame and you're like, I don't know if I can actually get through this on my own accord, then I would look for somebody that knows how to work with shame and ask them very specific questions like, how can you help me move through some of the physical responses of my shame? Or do you know how to help me get out of the, you know, trauma response that evokes my shame. You can ask some of those questions with people, but you also want to notice if some of these things I'm about to list are deployed in supporting you. So, number one, use curiosity to challenge the patterns of shame. So curiosity stimulates the activity in what's called the medial prefrontal cortex. And this is the center of your prefrontal cortex, the center of your brain for observing the ego or self awareness, right? So when you are wanting to analyze a behavior, when you're wanting to better understand a pattern, you have to deploy a sense of curiosity, because curiosity creates a little bit of separation between you and what's happening. And without that separation, there's no chance of being able to like, move through that shame. Jung said, what we cannot separate from, we cannot heal, right? What you cannot separate from, you cannot heal. And so curiosity creates this little bit of space where there's separation between us and our actions, or us and the thought of shame. And so when we're curious, you can, when you're curious, you can start to notice the patterns, right? You can start to look at, oh, I noticed that each time I talk about, you know, wanting more or each time that I go to express myself, I feel this, you know, level of maybe I shouldn't say anything or I feel this constriction in my body. I feel this collapsing, starting to happen. And you start to get more awareness about the pattern that is actually emerging when your shame is present. That is imperative because for a lot of people, people, shame is such an automatic response that they're completely unaware of what's happening physically, the decisions and the choices that they make after they feel that way. There's just a very big lack of awareness. And in psychology, in mental health, it's nearly impossible to shift a behavior or a pattern or an experience that you are unaware of, right? Because it's just living in your unconscious. So deploy some, some curiosity and you can ask yourself some questions like, what am I normally experiencing physically when I feel ashamed, right? And try and write that down as much as possible. What usually triggers my shame? You know, are there certain experiences? Are there certain words? Are there? You know, is it when you let your girlfriend down or you disappoint her? Is it when you've forgotten to do something for your kids? Is it you know, when you forgot to pay a bill or you hit your snooze button 12 times in the morning? That one used to be one of mine, right? I'd say, the night before, I'm going to get up the next morning at 6:00 and then my alarm would go off and I'd hit it a dozen times and it'd be seven. And then I'd be pissed off at myself and I'd feel shame. So start to ask yourself, what are some of the trigger points for when I feel ashamed and Then at the very least, you'll have a little bit more awareness and then get some curiosity around the origin. So where. Where were some of the first times I felt that way? You know, when did I feel ashamed as a child? How did I have to use shame as a kid to protect myself? When did I feel dominated as a kid? That can be a really hard but very informative question to answer. Again, when did I feel dominated as a kid? Or when did I have to be submissive in order to order to feel safe Again, These questions can be really challenging to dig into. They can bring up a lot, especially if you've experienced any type of abuse or trauma. So if that starts to happen, do please find somebody to work with, depending on your circumstances. Okay? That's number one, use curiosity. Number two, mindfulness skills. Okay. Mindfulness skills can be very helpful, again, for creating that separation and beginning to diminish the intensity of the shame that you're experiencing in the moment. So you can just use phrases like, okay, I'm gonna be curious without judgment about what just happened, or I'm gonna notice what's going on internally right now. I'm gonna notice some of the thoughts that I'm having, or I'm gonna notice the reaction that I'm having as I talk about this failure. I'm gonna notice the reaction I'm having as I talk about, you know, not asking for what I wanted and needed in a relationship. And this can be a good way for you to begin to create some mindfulness around the circumstances that are happening when you feel ashamed. Because, again, the more aware you are of what's triggering it and what it feels like and the sensations, the more data and the information that you have to move through it. Okay, 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 a survival strategy, right, that doesn't serve you anymore. So this 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. More intensity 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 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. And as you start to practice that, what will happen is that the intensity of the shame that you experience will dissolve. Okay? Because the intensity of the shame that you experience is connected to your personhood and behavior being the same thing. When I do the wrong thing, I am wrong, right? I am the wrong thing. And so once we start to create some space between, okay, I made the wrong choice. It doesn't mean that I'm a bad person. Then there's room for I can be a good person who sometimes makes bad decisions. You know, that's what it means to be a human being. You can be a good person person. You can be an exceptional person and still make bad choices and decisions. That is true. So separate personhood from behavior. And again, that is a practice. You might want to use that in a journaling practice, right? Like, okay, here's three decisions that I made today that caused me to feel shame. I made that choice. It does not mean that I am a bad person. It means that I made a bad decision. What do I want to learn from this decision? What can that decision do? Teach me. Next is put the shame in the context of your development as a child. Now, this is a little bit more complex, and this might be something that you want to do with a clinician or a practitioner, but essentially you need to have some context for why did younger you deploy shame, right? What was happening in little you's environment, right? You as a boy, you as a teen, as a preteen, as a teenager. What was happening in your life, in your environment, in your family system, that you needed to deploy shame? Because oftentimes what happens is that as a child, we merge with that identity of I am wrong, there's something wrong with me. And that happens very early on in childhood. And so we need to be able to contextualize. You need to be able to come contextualize that you as a child really had no choice but to do that. Okay? And it's not to say that you're a victim now as an adult, but it might be to say that you were a victim as a child, right? If you experienced abuse or abandonment or a neglect or you experienced some type of circumstance that was too big for you to handle. You know, I've worked with a lot of men who, their mothers put them into the position of being a surrogate husband that can produce an intense amount of shame within a young boy's body that then stays with him until he is an adult. So put it in the context of why as a kid did I need to deploy shame in order to protect myself? And that can be a huge aha moment for some men. Really getting that part is like, oh, man, of course I had to do that. And then it can really help with the separation between personhood and behavior. Another way of putting that is.

The separating the self from the symptom, right? That we are not the symptom that's presenting itself. We are not the desire to collapse. We are not the belief that there's something wrong with us. We are not those things. So those are some of the main tactics. Next, you want to practice treating shame as a belief, right? And sometimes believing that it was your fault was exactly what you had to do. Believing that it was your fault was sometimes what your abusers, if you had abusers, wanted you to experience in order to hide their secrets in order to keep them in this position of dominance and have you continue to be submissive. All right? So you need to reshape or treat shame as if it is just a belief. And it's a belief that helped to keep you safe. Okay, Next is understanding that there's merit in passing the blame to an abuser if you had one. Okay? Now an abuser is a big word. Maybe you didn't have an abuser, but the person who abandoned you, the person who criticized you relentlessly, the person who neglected you even though they knew exactly what you wanted and needed. So passing some of the blame onto those people, because what's very common is that guys that have an intense amount of shame have taken the blame all onto themselves. And I've seen this in social media so many different ways. Guys that have blamed themselves for their parents divorce as a six year old, you know, guys that have blamed themselves for the abuse that they experienced from a parent or a caregiver, right? It's like, well, they, they only did that because I was so rambunctious, right? They only beat the crap out of me. They only, you know.

I won't say some of the other stuff, but they only did those things to me because of how bad I was. No, they were the adult, you were the child. And so actually putting the blame where it should go and where it needs to go from a mature place will, will and can help offload a good amount of the shame because you won't be taking the blame all onto yourself. And you know, in most situations there's blame that needs to go around to multiple people. And people that experience a lot of shame, they don't do that. They don't, they don't look at their partner and say, hey, we haven't had sex in a few months and we're both responsible for that. They say, oh, we haven't had sex in a few months, There must be something wrong with me, right? Or, you know, we've been having arguments lately in our marriage. The person experiencing a lot of shame doesn't say, oh, we're both responsible for that arguments and those conflict they say, must be something wrong with me. And so we have to start to not point the finger, not pass judgment on other people. But we have to proportionately and maturely be able to say, I'm not the only one to blame in this situation. I'm not the only one responsible for what is happening. So that's another piece. And then there's two more that I want to give you. One is Finding an alternative. Okay, finding an alternative to what happened in the past. So what would have happened if you weren't ashamed? Or what would you have done if you weren't crippled by shame? Or what would you have done if you could express yourself, if it was safe to express yourself? So you have to start to come into contact with how would I operate if I wasn't sort of cowering or collapsing underneath the weight of the shame and starting to get a sense of what's the alternative path? Because for people that struggle with shame, there is no alternative path. They can't see that, especially if they're living with really intense shame. There's just one path and it's shame and it's self blame and self criticism and self collapse, Truly. And I don't mean to like, you know, sound like overbearing about it or. I'm certainly not saying that to shame you because that would be ridiculous. I'm saying that because 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, 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, 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 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 and 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, 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. And so you have to start to move against that physical experience and notice if you can find moments where you do express what you want and need and it's safe and you start to experience, experience what that's like physically in your body, to acclimate your body to what it actually feels like to self express and not be punished, to set a boundary and not have it, you know, thrown back in your face. And this is where having a men's group can be incredibly important and powerful because you can practice some of everything that I've talked about in this episode. You can put practice some of that in your men's group and say, hey, listen, I feel like I have really terrible shame and because of that I don't express myself, I don't set boundaries, I don't assert myself. And I want to practice some of those things here with you guys and have it be safe so that I can, I can acclimate to what that's like. I can actually let my body feel safe with self expression. So find a good men's group. Obviously with Man Talks, we have the alliance. We, we've got 700 guys from around the world in that group. It's a phenomenal space to do all of this work. So I would go join the waitlist today. We are gonna open back up in a month or two. I hope that you found value in this video. 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.