Brene Brown on Shame

Thanks to a guy I recently reconnected with (we knew each other in high school), I watched a Ted Talk on Youtube that featured Brene Brown.

First things first - if you haven't watched a Ted Talk, you're missing out. It's basically a twenty minute talk by someone relatively famous or well-known in their field. I've watched talks from Jamie Tworkowski of To Write Love On Her Arms, Sam Harris, Daniel Goleman and others.

In the below talk, Brene Brown talks about shame. How it's different from guilt, and how men and women encounter and deal with shame in different ways:



Watch this clip and understand shame a little better. Here are a few quotes from it.

"Vulnerability is the birthplace of creativity, innovation and change."

"It is not the critic who counts. It is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better and how he falls and stumbles. The credit goes to the man in the arena - whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat. But when he's in the arena - at best, he wins; at worst, he loses. But when he fails, when he loses, he does so daring greatly."
(this is a loose paraphrase of a Teddy Roosevelt quote.)

"Shame talks out of two tapes in our head: 'You're never good enough" and "Who do you think you are?"

Difference between guilt and shame:

Guilt focuses on behavior, shame focuses on self
Guilt says "I did something bad", shame says "I am bad."
Guilt says "I made a mistake", shame says "I am a mistake."

Shame for men = the perception that one is weak.

"They'd rather me die on top of my white horse than to fall down."

"Empathy is the antidote to shame."

"If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment."

"The two most powerful words in dealing with shame: Me Too."

Me too is the mantra of a church I highly respect. Any relationship we have should always start with those two words: me too.