Good intentions don't erase harm. The speakers argue you must own the impact of your words, talk directly to the person hurt, and avoid the shame spiral that makes you defensive. Brené Brown's research shows shame activates the limbic system, making you label yourself as fundamentally wrong rather than acknowledging a specific mistake.
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And in the work I used to do as far as vocation, you know, what we, what we help people do, one part of it was helping recognize the difference between intent and impact. So. And I don't know what this is like for you and your, any potential family relationships or anything like that, but we discuss it in our home all the time. There's a difference between my intent and my impact. And I may not have intended to hurt someone, but the words I did or the actions I did actually did cause hurt. And sometimes there can be a tension between, well, how is the person perceiving you or how is the person receiving your words? And there does need to be some ownership on their part as well. And particularly in the case you just described, what we would teach is the person needs to come to you and there needs to be some type of conversation instead of going to other people to talk about it. But yeah, a lot of times we, particularly when it comes to race in our country, we like to say things like, well, I didn't mean it that way. And we don't listen to the hurt that we've actually caused, whether it was personal or whether it's a policy or anything like that. And we don't take the time to connect with the person and hear their experience and hear the pain that it's caused and hear the effect of that.
And I think that's missing a lot right now. Just in day to day interactions and corporate interactions. I know I have found myself walking on eggshells. We used to joke about the term politically correct. Right? What's the politically correct way to say things? But, but it's so much further than that now.
Yeah, yeah. In regards to conversations like this, around topics that are very polarizing for a lot of people, is embracing the concept of shame in my life. I know Brene Brown has done a lot of work in this social science space on the concept or the topic of shame. I've done some reading on it from a different perspective as well. A lot of times shame is just seen as only a bad thing and it can be extremely toxic. Where the idea is, I don't just, I don't just think, oh, I didn't do that right, Or I didn't do that. The voice inside becomes, I am wrong for being me instead of the voice being, that didn't go as I wanted it to or that didn't go perfectly and it's okay that I'm not perfect. It's okay that I mess that up.
I'm looking at an article from the Attune Philadelphia therapy group. And they say that shame is connected to the processes that occur within the limbic system, which is your emotional center of the brain. So when something shameful happens, it overrides any other emotion that's coming in there.
Yeah. And what I've seen in spaces where we're talking about race, culture, power, etc, and in the context of either our present day or history as a country, it's like one of the worst things, if not the worst thing, that a white person could ever be called is racist. And so we want to avoid that term at all costs because it conjures up images that we know are wrong, such as the KKK or things like that, where it's like, no, I am not one of those people. And so anytime that someone wants to address an issue with us, it triggers this shame response, and we immediately, our defenses go up and we're like, well, I'm not racist. It's like, wait a second, I. First of all, I didn't say you were. I didn't call you that. But I do want to address the thing that you just said. I do want to address the situation that you created, and I want to talk about it. I want to talk to you about your perspective. I want to talk to you about how I experienced it, how it made people feel, the damage that it caused.
