I had planned to write about two books in this space but I couldn’t stop writing about Daring Greatly so that plan has given way.
Of the many helpful books I’ve read this last year Daring Greatly is second only to the The Parallel Process and I wish I had read both long ago, although likely I would not have been ready for the messages contained in them. Who, other than therapists, read such books unless compelled by a crisis? And few of us even then, really want to look too hard at ourselves and the roles we play in the problems that arise in our families, much less, change.
From where I sit now, I’m amazed that I believed my own psychic landscape (a minefield) was my problem entirely and shut off from having an effect on my child.
Hah.
Brown trained in social work, but moved toward academic research examining what led people to “connect” (or not) and the effect connection (or lack thereof) has on a person’s sense of well-being. Her results flabbergasted her. The people who are able to admit vulnerability best navigate the shoals of life. Not only that but they know when it is safe and appropriate to be vulnerable, who to trust and turn to for help, and how to go about opening up, finding the right moment and setting, for example.
Again and again Brown confesses that as a result of what she learned, she had to change her own life, not happily either, but kicking and screaming every step of the way. With evidence of a thousand (I’m guessing) interviews the evidence was there and irrefutable.
Grounded people, grounded families and businesses, allow vulnerability. Vulnerability is what allows connection. Connection is what gives people shame-resilience in the face of adversity.
Shame, which appears to be hard-wired in humans, is triggered in various ways. Brown puts forth the concept that in our culture and in our time, the concept of scarcity is one of the most powerful of these triggers.
What? In this culture where there are forty kinds of toilet paper to choose from?
Not that kind of scarcity.
She’s talking about scarcity shame: Never enough. That’s scarcity shame. Somebody else is doing better than me. That’s comparison shame. Why should I bother? That’s disengagement shame. Everyone, you, your partner, your children, your own parents, your friends, your colleagues . . . everyone struggles every day with these feelings of inadequacy. Our culture is relentless in awakening and exploiting shame. Shaming women about their cooking, housekeeping, mothering forms the core of the advertising industry.
Other forms of psychic scarcity. The scarcity of perfection. Of sufficient manliness. Scarcity of time. Scarcity of love. It’s a long and scary list.
Brown writes: “For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is: "I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” . . . she goes on, “Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something.” The same process in reverse happens at night, she says, as we go to bed we are more likely to scold ourselves for what we have left undone. She writes, “. . . the feeling of scarcity does thrive in shame-prone cultures that are deeply steeped in comparison and fractured by disengagement.”
Let’s stop right there. Can you honestly say you haven’t experienced the scarcity that Brown describes? Can you honestly say that you, if you are female, aren’t a little traumatized every time you see a picture of some woman with a perfect body and face? Even when I was a young woman and had (I realize now) a nice face, decent hair, and good figure, I didn’t think so. If you’re a man, can you honestly say that you have never in your life felt pressured to appear as tough and cool as Clint Eastwood?
Now, do you dare ask yourself what effect these feelings you have about yourself (and which are only the tip of a big iceberg) might have had on your children?
Remember what Krissy Pozatek says in The Parallel Process? Your children know everything. That means even if you have said all the right things to them, if you are feeling all these scarcity feelings about yourself, all you’ve done is confuse them. Because they know how you really feel about yourself.
The task, Brown warns, isn’t to try to make shame go away, shame is hard-wired into us as part of the mechanism by which humans learn to behave decently toward one another. Shame has a profound survival purpose and if you question that, think about this: humans who experience little or no shame are almost all sociopaths. Shame, in moderation, is one of the ways we keep our behavior in check.
Shame becomes a problem when avoiding the emotion takes over and dominates your life until everything you say or do is grimed over or ground down by the anxiety of being found out as inadequate. Brown makes the point that while we can’t get rid of shame we can learn to live with the emotion. She calls this shame-resilience and you achieve this resilience by learning first, how shame drives everyone, and the particular ways it drives you, and finally, by learning safe ways to open up about shame so that you can move through and not let it paralyze you.
One of the biggest areas of shame for women, after how we look, Brown has learned from her research, is how we parent. As mothers.
Once again, we can’t kid ourselves that our children can’t sense that we are also constantly engaged in this struggle. Likely it both worries them and, yes, can become part of their own tactics for manipulating us.
As I put in bold earlier, Brown’s research revealed to her that there is only one way to overcome shame: Being okay with vulnerability. Owning your flaws. Being enough just as you are. Not complacent, mind you, but open. The people who are the most grounded and the least driven by shame are also okay about not being perfect, not knowing everything, not being the best at anything, and being always willing to learn.
I've watched my daughter learn this over the last year. She has some problems, to be sure, and some differences, but she now realizes that none of them are insuperable barriers and some of them are hardly more than bumps, really, but she had become so hyper-sensitive that even the smallest glitch set her head spinning.
There is much more in Daring Greatly and the way Brown links all the pieces of her research findings together is breathtaking. An example would be the useful distinction Brown makes about shame "You're bad,” and guilt "You did something bad." The former when taken to heart can destroy a person's sense of self worth, while the latter generally spurs one on to better efforts! There is a world of difference between identifying as bad and admitting you were temporarily out of line. Guess which one feels fixable?
Brown lists and describes various shame triggers and explores the differences between what causes shame in men as opposed to women (fascinating!). In essence women feel shame when they find they can’t be all things to all people and men feel shame when they feel they have been exposed as weak.
OK so, let’s say you are one of our children, wracked by shame by what they believe to be hopeless inadequacies. The choices they have made can look a little less irrational when you understand how overwhelmed they are with shame. Self-isolating, pretending indifference, reacting with inappropriate anger, all of these are no more than clumsy ways of blocking out or avoiding facing shame. And yes, they are immature choices, but how can they be anything else? I don’t know about you, but I set a lot of my defenses into place between the age of nine and twelve as a coping mechanism (my parents were divorcing) and I’m still hanging on to a few of them, I'm afraid.
Obviously, by becoming vulnerable you don’t throw yourself at just anyone; for my daughter figuring this out this has been difficult. One of the main tasks in adolescence and young adulthood is to learn who is trustworthy as a friend and having realistic expectations of your friends. This means having boundaries and being conscious of reciprocity, respectfulness, timing, and appropriateness. No matter how badly you might want to be friends with some person or other, if they don’t reciprocate or aren’t respectful of your boundaries, the relationship is doomed. Friendships, both casual and intimate are not all that easy to manage and require care and maintenance to survive long-term. Daring Greatly does not go into great depth about this, but I expect to find Brown has written more on this topic.
Probably the biggest take-away for me is the fact, that as parents we tend to overlook the fact that there is a gap between our values (what we tell our children matters as parents) and what we actually model for our children. Growing up my daughter had a book about loving yourself whatever your shape is. Even if I never spoke aloud about my dissatisfaction with my shape, I know I never modeled that, not whole-heartedly. Yeah, I’m ashamed to admit that, but there it is.
Brown's message is that we won't and can't fix or change all our shame driven behaviors and responses, but we can become aware of what they are and admit to having them and through judicious vulnerability become shame-resilient. The exciting (and 'spooky action at a distance') piece is that the more you are able to do this in your own life, the more your child will be able to move forward in theirs. This has been my experience.
If you aren’t a reader you can find plenty of videos on the internet of Brené Brown talking about her research findings, ideas, experiences and conclusions. Brown also reads her books on audio. The videos, being shorter, tend to tackle one issue at a time, say, scarcity or vulnerability while in the book Brown goes into more depth about her discoveries and shows how the concepts and behaviors are connected.
Essays yet to come:
-Resistance is Futile — what happens AFTER wilderness therapy? (in process)
-A Day of Celebration — Graduation
-The Difference a Year Can Make (in process)
Reviews: It Didn’t Start With You, by Mark Wolynn, and more . . .
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