On Guilt vs. Shame

Welcome to What’s Helping Today, a newsletter about the everyday work of staying alive on earth, written by author and journalist Sandy Ernest Allen.

Hi everybody,

Sometimes I get the impression that not everyone on earth has read all of Brené Brown’s books??

(I’m joking. And I’m kinda not!!)

Anyway I’m going to write about Brené Brown in this one. I hope that those of you who enjoy her already will find it, I dunno, a fun refresher. Those who are unaware of her work will at least know a little afterwards, is my thinking:

Dr. Brené Brown is a researcher; she studies shame. Some years back a friend recommended I listen to her audiobook The Power of Vulnerability. It’s short, more a talk than a full-on book. I listened to it while driving around a state out west, where I was reporting for various pieces, including going to the home of the former nurse and shock survivor who’s centered in my Believer story.

I’ll never forget that drive, listening to Brené Brown discuss shame for the first time. Afterwards, I listened to all of her audiobooks, and she has many. I listened to them mostly while I was outside, working hard on establishing my then-new garden — endlessly weeding, endlessly hauling dirt. In brief, understanding shame as she explained it, it transformed my life.

I suggest you listen to and / or read Brené Brown’s work. There’s nothing like it and nobody like her. If you want another place to start, here’s her viral TED talk from years ago that kinda launched her to fame:

As she explains, humans are biologically wired for connection. We evolved understanding that to be disconnected from others was, oftentimes, to literally die. Shame is a powerful force therefore because it touches this connection-worthiness part inside us each. As she says: “Shame is easily understood as the fear of disconnection.”

Shame is that story we tell ourselves deep inside, that if everyone knew or saw some unworthy characteristic about us, some flaw, we would be abandoned. As Brown spells out: Shame is near-universal inside us. Also the less we talk about it, the stronger it becomes.

For me, Brené Brown is on a short list — along with therapists Esther Perel of Where Should We Begin? and Orna Guralnik of Couples Therapy — in terms of my present-day heroes who do what I do kinda, albeit in a much bigger way. Meaning, they are mental health experts (of a sort) with large audiences who are outspoken in a truthful manner about issues related to “mental health.” (And sure, I am implying there are a lot of other such popular voices in this space I don’t thusly respect, which is true. Suffice to say, our present discourse around “mental health” encourages a lot of professionals to stay quiet and / or uncurious about what’s really going on. Hence I greatly admire the brave few, such as them, who don’t follow the pack.)

Brené Brown isn’t a psychiatrist or therapist. She is an academic, a researcher who interviews lots and lots of people about topics like shame, vulnerability and belonging, who then studies that information closely and figures out what can be learned from it. In her books and on her podcasts — including ones she’s done with her younger twin sisters, one of whom is a therapist — she’s also applied a lot of what she understands about shame to our society as a whole. For example, she’s highlighted the role that shame plays in fueling reflexive adherence with patriarchy and with white supremacy.

According to Brown, “shame” is distinct from but often mistaken for “guilt.” It’s crucial we parse the distinction between the two, guilt vs. shame. Like if we remain aware of the distinction between what is and isn’t our own fault, then we can take better accountability for whatever may cause us guilt — as in something we have actually done wrong. So for example, if we made a mistake in the past, we can perhaps offer an apology. If we remain aware of what is and isn’t our actual responsibility, we can also better catch and let go of shame (which tends to be useless and counterproductive).

A lot of this present, Trumpian effort to send our society back in time — a fantasy of retrenchment into white cishetero patriarchal rule — is encouraged by rampant unchecked shame, in my estimation. The desire to somehow erase history for example, this panic to do with believing that white children cannot handle interaction with books that might mention a racist past or present, lest they feel bad. Perhaps it’s in better understanding that bad feeling — as in, the two entangled bad feelings we are talking about, i.e. guilt and shame — that we can maybe get out of this mess.

White people, especially white liberals like those I grew up around, we’ve often been conditioned to think acknowledging racism itself is impolite. Maybe we’ve smiled or nodded or stayed silent when someone’s said something racist in our presence, maybe we’ve done that countless times. Perhaps we’ve never practiced the (crucial) skill of speaking up when another white person says something racist, even a supposed joke, in our company.

Or, to give another example, some cis liberals find talk of transphobia itself impolite. They might wonder why someone like me feels like I must speak up all the time about such unpleasant stuff. But of course for a trans person like me, silence these days does feel like death. I can nonetheless still feel shame when I write about supposedly taboo topics like race or gender or mental health. I also know that that shame-feeling, however misguided, is just there to try to protect me. I know what my values actually are, as well, so I speak up anyway.

A white American like me, my family tree is no doubt full of horror and violence. Racism was all around me growing up, as was sexism and homophobia and fatphobia and ableism and so on. Though transphobia itself wasn’t yet so popular, no doubt thinking that trans people are a joke or gross — or that we aren’t real — this would have been an easy sell, back when I was a kid.

I have long worked to deprogram myself of all sorts of bad ideas I once held — internalized transphobia included (work trans people must often do). Brené Brown’s exploration of shame is a great way into a reckoning with all the various hatreds many of us carry, however unconsciously.

That’s it, an encouragement to check out Brené Brown’s stuff, if you haven’t before. Especially if me mentioning “shame” makes you feel yucky inside.

Especially then, you should check it out.

Re-linking a few other things (in particular for new subscribers, hello!):

This piece, in which I’m quoted, on the urgency of cis people getting upset about what’s happening to trans people right now. And this one, in which I’m also quoted, on how trans people are surviving despair.

My previous post sharing some advice to cis people who may feel bad about what’s happening to trans people but who don’t know what to do about it. And my post with advice for us all about how to survive such super shitty times. 

Sending you love,
Sandy 

p.s. An excellent evisceration of the NYTimes’ latest unconscionable transphobic nonsense. (I admit, even as someone who’s followed this whole saga too-closely for years, them publishing that graph this weekend truly pissed me off.)

p.p.s. What’s Helping Today: A new show I’m enjoying so far is Common Side Effects. It’s part Scavengers Reign, part Mike Judge (literally), but about big pharma. It’s visually stunning and hilarious and super smart.

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