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Shining a light on shame - Daring Greatly review (part 1)

I've been reading Brene Brown's book Daring Greatly. Brown became a bit of a rockstar in academic circles when her research about shame, compassion, and vulnerability was launched into public view after her TED talk, "The Power of Vulnerability," garnered over 47 million views. This is the kind of celebrity that a lot of academics covet, but Brown explains her discomfort with the notoriety and uses it as the launching point for a larger discussion about shame.


Shame is, according to Brown, something we all experience. She defines it as, "the fear of disconnection--it's the fear that something we've done or failed to do, an ideal that we've not lived up to, or a goal that we've not accomplished makes us unworthy of connection" (p. 68-9). Brown's research has yielded twelve aspects of our lives that shame is most likely to emerge from: (1) appearance and body image, (2) money and work, (3) motherhood or fatherhood, (4) family, (5) parenting, (6) mental and physical health, (7) addiction, (8) sex, (9) aging, (10) religion, (11) surviving trauma, and (12) being stereotyped or labeled. So pretty much every aspect of our life, then? Wow, shame is pervasive.

I chose the section on shame to focus on for my review because, to be honest, it stopped me in my tracks. You see, something's been bugging me throughout the process of doing The Significance Project and I've struggled to figure out what it is. I have felt that there's something that I need to let go of, but I haven't been able to identify what. I think it's shame.


Let me back up and tell you a story. It's not an easy story to tell, because it's about the events leading up to my departure from academia and to my total crisis of confidence. In fact, I'd rather not tell the story, but Brene says I need to be vulnerable and I know I need to get it off my chest, so here we go. In the year or so prior to my departure from the university system I had the honor of serving as the Acting Director of a new college on our campus that was doing some incredible, innovative work. In fact, I believed in the work so strongly that I was committed to shifting my own portfolio there permanently (whether I was in the Director's role or not). While I sat in the Acting position, the learning curve was steep; I was new to leadership in a university setting and I had to learn a lot very quickly. As I had always done, I vociferously advocated for my team and the things we had identified as being the most important to focus on. I said what was on my mind, but I also did research to back up my claims about the quality of our processes and I was well prepared to demonstrate the impact of our work. I invested all of myself in this effort, and even though it was imperfect I was immensely proud of both myself and the people I worked with.


About six months into my tenure as Acting Director of the college, we received an imperative to pause our work on the key initiative we had been investing in. This was a surprise, but we managed to re-configure. Shortly after that, the university made some significant changes in strategic direction, so our mandate was altered in a way that was tangentially related to, but definitely different from, what we had been developing for almost two years. This was a harder pill to swallow, but we sorted out how to dismantle some things and alter others. Shortly after that, we got news that the college itself was being amalgamated with another unit, and would undergo major structural changes which included dissolving the Director's role.


What happened to my job in the context of all this change would require the telling of a very long tale. I'll attempt to shorten it by saying that it likely had nothing to do with me and everything to do with shifting politics and institutional priorities. But, in the end, I was no longer Acting Director, the work I had invested in for years was no longer a part of my portfolio, and my position was shifted back to a role that was not intrinsically interesting to me nor offered me any opportunity for professional growth. So, while it probably wasn't personal, it sure felt that way. I felt the most acute emotional pain I have ever experienced in a workplace environment. I felt devastated, absolutely gutted. I literally cried for weeks; without warning I'd break into heaving sobs and I'd have to leave the room. I also engaged in behavior that I'm not proud of - I shouted and swore, stomped and waved my arms emphatically. Not only was it not professional, but also completely out of character. This was well outside of the norm for me.


I'm telling this story because I've just re-visited it through the lens of Brene Brown's research on shame. She says that there's some related experiences that are often mistaken for shame, so I took a close look at those first. Humiliation is one of them; it's different from shame because "people believe they deserve their shame; they do not believe they deserve their humiliation" (p. 73). This fits with my experience. I wasn't always treated respectfully, and there may have been some times when I was taken advantage of. I definitely did not believe that I deserved to be on the receiving end of that. But when I look at it closely, humiliation doesn't fully explain my response to what happened. There is so much pain left over, still, even a year later.


It's shame. Brown claims that shame "is real pain" (p. 71), and I wholeheartedly agree. Because, when I'm truthful with myself, most of the pain stemming from this situation was focused my own internal self-deprecation. At the time it all went down, I routinely offered myself messages of blame, like - I can't believe I am so naive that I didn't see this coming. Like - I must be a horrible leader if I'm sidelined without a second thought. Like - all the work I've invested in for all this time has been a complete fail. Like - it was completely delusional to believe that I was good at this job. I felt intense shame. I felt like the work that I had put everything into, and thought I was doing well, was suddenly under a microscope and people didn't like what they saw. I thought it must have been me, I must have done something wrong, I must have screwed it all up somehow. Add to this the fact that I was berating myself for being weak (read - I've always been self assured and confident and strong - why am I falling apart?). Ahhhhhhh... it makes my chest tighten just writing this.


In hindsight I can see that all of that self-talk was nonsense, but the feeling of shame stemming from this event in my life still creeps in from time to time. It's fortunate that Brene Brown has not only validated my bonkers shame-driven behavior, but also offered some strategies for what she calls shame resilience. That's what this post is about, really. I've recognized the shame, identified some of its' triggers, and I've reality checked it (in hindsight, but whatever). In offering all of this to the internet I hope I'm also reaching out, which is what I'm supposed to do in order to deal with shame in a healthy way. As Brown says, I get to write the ending, so I might as well make it one that's shame-less. Or shameless? Okay, enough for now - over and out.




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