I Heart Me (13 page)

Answer the following questions:

• Do you live under the pressure of the expectations of others? Who specifically expects something of you? In what way?
  
• What would your life be like if you were free of these expectations?
  
• What could you communicate to others to free yourself of their expectations?
  
• Could you set anyone free from
  your
  expectations? What would that mean for them?
  
• What could you communicate to others to free them of your expectations?
  

Chapter 6

Shame

‘One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but it can never be taken away unless it is surrendered.'

M
ICHAEL
J. F
OX

‘[Shame] … the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.' Sound familiar? That definition comes from shame researcher Brene Brown.

Shame makes it difficult to be our authentic selves because we believe that our authentic selves are flawed. The assumption is that if we show our flawed selves we'll never be accepted. That hits right in the psyche, down in the place that's all about survival. Shame keeps us at
not
enough.

The thing is, shame is just a belief. It's not reality; it's just a belief
about
reality. We need to play a little mental gymnastics with shame to disentangle some thinking.

Shame is the belief that we're flawed – damaged, broken, not good enough, and therefore unworthy of love, happiness, connection or belonging.

Shame makes everything personal. It's in the ‘I am' that starts the sentence ‘I am
not
enough.' It's not that we've done something stupid or that our performance has been poor, or that we've made some bad decisions, it's that we define ourselves as a result of these.

• Instead of ‘I did something stupid', shame says, ‘I am stupid.'
  
• Instead of ‘I did something bad', shame says, ‘I am bad.'
  
• Instead of ‘My body is overweight/untoned/blemished/ ugly, etc.', shame says, ‘I am overweight/untoned/ blemished/ugly, etc.'
  
• Instead of ‘I don't earn enough money to give my family a comfortable life', shame says, ‘I am not good/ confident/intelligent enough to earn enough money to give my family a comfortable life.'
  
• Instead of ‘I have failed', shame says, ‘I am a failure.'
  

The thing is, we are not these things. They are simply circumstances and conditions going on in our life. That's it! There's a world of difference separating ‘I did', ‘I have' and ‘I was' from ‘I am'. Make this simple distinction and you can start to build some resilience to shame. I refer to this as ‘extracting the “I am”'.

Yes, you might have done the occasional stupid thing. Who hasn't? But that doesn't mean you
are
stupid. Yes, you might feel your body is overweight or blemished, especially when you compare yourself to images in the media, but that doesn't mean that there is something fundamentally wrong with you. It's just how your body feels to you right now in relation to the comparisons you've made. OK, it might be true that you've made a few unfortunate financial decisions (who hasn't?), or failed to act at times when you could have acted to improve your life, but that doesn't make you a failure. It just means that those are the ways in which you've behaved at those times.

We often confuse our behaviour with our identity and the result is shame, which makes it hard to feel worthy. It's easy to think we're a bad person for behaving in a certain way, but
we
are not our behaviour. We've merely
exhibited
certain behaviour – and there may be many reasons for it. Maybe we've experienced hurt or pain in our life, maybe this is all we know, maybe we never learned a different way of interacting with people in the world… Making the distinction between identity and behaviour allows us to accept ourselves while still changing how we are showing up in the world.

SELF-LOVE GYM:
Extracting the ‘I Am'

• Write down a list of what you feel ashamed of. The examples above might give you some ideas or it might be something more personal or private to you.
  
• Now rewrite each item on your list in the following five-part form:
  

1. ‘It's not that I am _______ [insert shamer].'
   
2. ‘The truth is that _______ [what you did or how you perceived yourself].'
   
3. ‘That doesn't mean that I am _______ [insert shamer].'
   
4. ‘In fact _______ [insert a positive].'
   
5. ‘I am _______ [insert the opposite].'
   

‘[1] It's not that I am stupid. [2] The truth is that I've just done a few things some people might call stupid. [3] That doesn't mean that I'm fundamentally stupid. [4] In fact, I've also made some intelligent choices in my life. [5] I am intelligent.'

‘[1] It's not that I am bad with money. [2] The truth is that I've just made a few decisions that turned out not to work as well as I'd hoped. Who hasn't? [3] That doesn't mean I can't manage money. [4] In fact, I've made some very good financial decisions in my life, even if they were small ones. [5] The truth is, I am good with money.'

‘[1] It's not that I am overweight. [2] The truth is that that's only how I've been looking at myself. In some nations, my size would be celebrated. The point is that weight is perception. [3] It doesn't mean that I'm flawed. [4] In fact, some people will find me beautiful. [5] From now on, I'm going to celebrate my beauty.'

• Read over your statements every day until you feel that the truth has lodged in your mind.
  
• Add new shamers to your list as they arise and work through them in the same way.
  

This is another exercise that helps to wire new beliefs into your brain. Even if you feel you've made a breakthrough after the first session, keep reading through your responses for a few more days. Write them all out each time if it helps you. Doing this tightens the weave of the (neural) net, making it stronger.

We can also use a little trick of neuroscience to become resilient to shame. The feeling of shame activates the fight-or-flight response in the brain. It's all about self-preservation. Resources then flow towards the stress areas of the brain. While that's happening, it can be difficult to be clear in our mind, to get some perspective, to be honest with others about what we're thinking or feeling… We might not even be able to be honest with ourselves.

The trick is to understand that this is happening. Once we know, we can gently coax our brain into behaving in a different way instead.

So, with this in mind, here are four steps to shame resilience:

For years my mum suffered panic attacks. She told me that it wasn't so much the actual panic attack that she was afraid of, it was the fear of it coming on, especially if she was in a public place. And it was the fear that often brought on the attack.

She once said that if she thought that everyone else in the shopping centre got panic attacks she probably wouldn't get them as much. She would relax, knowing that it was OK if one happened. In other words, the ability not to have a panic attack was in a thought!

Shame is similar in a way. Trying to resist shame can bring it on. Shame makes us feel inadequate. It seems very personal. But if we know that everyone else feels exactly the same way, it weakens the shame. That's the insight. Then the fight-or-flight response isn't activated in the brain. We relax a wee bit.

Shame is natural. It fact it's one of the most natural things about being human. Everybody feels it. Everybody! It's just that most people are afraid to admit it. They're afraid they won't be accepted.

This is the exercise in reasoning your way around shame that you learned a few moments ago. It's also an exercise in self-compassion, which we'll look at later. As you stop defining yourself
by your actions and appearance, you start understanding yourself better. Self-compassion is a natural result.

A key area of the brain for empathy and compassion is called the
insula
. It's halfway between the survival areas, which are active during stress and shame, and the prefrontal cortex, which is the area that controls concentration and helps us focus on thriving. Extracting the ‘I am', which fosters empathy and compassion, helps us move from survive to thrive.

This step can actually be quite a lot of fun. It's simply dancing the shame away.

I use a ‘victory dance' strategy for a lot of things and one of them is shame. It also helps shunt resources and energy away from the fight-or-flight survival areas of the brain and into empathy and higher-order thinking areas like the prefrontal cortex.

You can use this strategy in two ways:

1. Once you've finished the ‘Extract the “I Am”' exercise, you can burst into a little dance, a celebratory dance, a victory dance. Make it light-hearted and positive. Doing this helps attach a positive feeling to your new insights, shifting brain resources all the way to the prefrontal cortex.
   
2. When you're feeling ashamed about something and you don't feel mentally present enough to diffuse stress with insight or extract the ‘I am', just burst into a silly dance.
   And it really does have to be a
   silly
   dance! Keep it up until you either laugh or smile broadly. Believe me, if your dance is silly enough, that won't take long. And let me pass on a little piece of logistical advice to go along with it: make sure you're alone. Lock the door and close the curtains.
   

In my book
How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body
, I told the story of being caught in a full-on victory dance. It was very embarrassing, but, funnily enough, victory dancing actually got me over the shame. I suppose you want to hear about it now! Well, I used to walk the same route to my ‘office' (whichever coffee shop I set up my laptop in) every morning, leaving my house around 6.45 a.m. Around five minutes later I'd reach two connecting underpasses under a road junction. It was a safe bet that I could do a wee dance there. I rarely met anyone at that time in the morning. And I'd usually only dance for a few seconds anyway.