Recently I have been learning about shame.
Brene Brown has researched shame in great depth for over 12 years.
“I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging – something we’ve experienced, done, or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection…
…Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is, ‘I am bad.’ Guilt is, ‘I did something bad… Guilt: I’m sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I’m sorry. I am a mistake.”
~ Brene Brown
What I want to say about shame is this… please be very careful with your words.
Brene says, if you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in the Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can’t survive.
So, when you experience someone in a moment of shame, when the underlying message is “I am a bad person because…”, or “I don’t deserve to be loved because…” douse them with empathy.
We need to tell them the story of how we have been in their shoes, and how they aren’t the only one. We can’t judge, label or criticize and fuel the shame.
When someone we love is in a moment of shame, they already feel the consequences of their actions, our job is to remind them they are worthy of love anyway.
Everyone is worthy of love.
We simply need to be brave enough to love them.