Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge produced by Sounds True. My name is Tami Simon. I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the new Sounds True Foundation. The Sounds True Foundation is dedicated to creating a wiser and kinder world by making transformational education widely available. We want everyone to have access to transformational tools such as mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion, regardless of financial, social, or physical challenges. The Sounds True Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to providing these transformational tools to communities in need, including at-risk youth, prisoners, veterans, and those in developing countries. If you’d like to learn more or feel inspired to become a supporter, please visit soundstruefoundation.org.
You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guests are Sheila Rubin and Bret Lyon. Sheila and Bret are founders of the Center for Healing Shame and they’re co-creators of the Healing Shame Lyon-Rubin Method. Through their in-person and popular online trainings, they’ve taught hundreds of psychotherapists throughout the world how to more effectively identify and work with shame. They live together in Berkeley, California, and with Sounds True Bret and Sheila have created a new audio series designed for the general public on Healing Shame: How to Work with This Powerful, Mysterious Emotion and Transform It into an Ally.
This conversation doesn’t just help us understand and appreciate shame in a deeper way; it normalizes the experience of shame and it takes some of the extreme pain out of it. This is a healing conversation: Sheila Rubin and Bret Lyon on Insights at the Edge.
I want to begin by introducing the subtitle of your new audio series with Sounds True which is the title Healing Shame—and then the subtitle—How to Work with This Powerful, Mysterious Emotion and Turn It into an Ally. And I want to start there because I think a lot of people might think: “Look, shame is not an ally. Shame is a really big problem that I have. In fact, I’m ashamed of how much shame I have. I really don’t even understand how you could be framing it as having this potential as an ally.” Let’s start there—how can shame be an ally?
Sheila Rubin: I’m so excited to answer that question. I’ve been working with shame for a lifetime because I was shy, and I was a sensitive kid and just kind of was tuned into all of the different subtleties and interactions and then the shyness responses that I had inside. I feel like I have spent a lifetime working with my own shame, clients’ shame, Bret’s and my shame, and shame dynamic. I believe there is a developmental—actually, I have this amazing word that I write down: I think that there is an evolutionary purpose to shame. I actually think that people who are able to transform their relationship to shame, there is an evolutionary purpose that shame can actually teach us to have better boundaries, better connection with ourselves, more creativity, more life force; that deer-in-the-headlights feeling that a lot of people get when shame shocks them, that can be used as information and as transformation. I am so excited you asked that question. That’s the core of the audio series.
Bret Lyon: Yes, shame gives us information. And the problem with shame is that it’s too good. It’s so powerful that it kind of takes over and it makes us freeze. The action tendency of shame is to hide, freeze, disappear. And just a little bit of that can allow us to reassess. We can get some information we need to then change behavior, learn something we need to learn, behave slightly differently or think slightly differently, make an adjustment. It’s really designed to help us make adjustments. But it’s one of these deals like an anti-venom: a snake bites you and the venom can kill you; but the way they protect you is by giving you a very small dose of that venom. And shame kind of works the same way.
TS: Okay, we’re going to circle back around to this, about how shame can be an evolutionary force and has an evolutionary purpose. I want to circle back to that. But to begin, I want to make sure we’re all on the same page, even understanding what shame is. In your new audio series, you offer two definitions right at the beginning to help us all kind of get on the same page here. The first one I thought was pretty surprising, and the second one I think is a definition that maybe our listeners are familiar with. But let’s talk about both of them.
The first one is a definition that you offer from Gershen Kaufman, who’s a clinical psychologist and a pioneer in the study of shame; the definition is, shame is the breaking of the interpersonal bridge. When I heard this, I thought, “Really? I’ve never thought of shame that way.” Explain this more. How is shame the breaking of the interpersonal bridge?
SR: That is a profound definition, and it also has in it the antidote to shame. The interpersonal bridge is—I’m talking to Bret. We’re connecting. All of a sudden, I have a misunderstanding. He doesn’t get me. I don’t get him. And one or both of us fall into a state of shame or a state of pulling away.
It happens with kids and they’re looking at the parent or the teacher, and the person just won’t make eye contact with them, won’t play with them anymore. The kids bully them, or they just shun them, or they just turn away.
The interpersonal bridge is that element of connection where we are connected with another person and we know that we have some kind of connection with them and we’re expecting them to say, “Yes, I think that way too,” or “Yes, that’s happening for me too.” When they walk away in disapproval or just in attention, whether it’s intentional or unintentional, one or both people go into a state of shame.
The good thing about that definition is, by therapists and parents and people who are sensitive, to be able to understand, like the yoga teacher who said, “Wow, all the people that go into shame because they can’t do the x, y, and z lotus position, they’re going to into shame because they’re not 20-something anymore and they’re 60-something.” Then my friend said the yoga teacher put her hand on her back and said, “You don’t have to do all those extra positions. Those are for the 20-somethings. For you, just do—you’re working too hard.” She basically said that, put her hand on her back and she said, “You’re working too hard.” That [kindess], restoring through the eye contact, through the touch, just said, “I see you. You have a place here. You’re fine. There’s nothing wrong with you.” We restore that interpersonal bridge.
BL: I think it’s pretty easy to understand if you think about the ultimate in shaming and what shaming is for. The ultimate in shaming is exile from the tribe or shunning, shunning being where the tribe lets you stay but they pretend you’re not there. They just look like you’re not there. That is the ultimate breaking of the interpersonal bridge. Shame is a social emotion and it’s designed to keep us connected. That’s what it’s really for. When the connection breaks, we feel shame. It’s the basic nature of shame.
It can be this huge breakage, exile, or shunning, but it can be something very small where there’s just, as Sheila’s saying, there’s a misunderstanding, there’s a miscommunication, there’s something small that breaks that bridge. Then when the interpersonal bridge gets broken, then the intrapersonal bridge gets broken, and we start to split into the part of us that feels the shame and the part of us that starts to shame ourselves. We need to heal the interpersonal in order to heal the intrapersonal. That’s largely what our work is about.
TS: Just in taking in this definition, is it fair to say then that for any of us who had very difficult upbringings, very difficult early years, difficult relationships with our parents, that we are going to have a lot of shame we need to work through—
BL: Yes.
TS: —because those relationships were really difficult. Okay, so this is why I think whole topic is just so heavy and—yeah, I think it’s just so heavy.
BL: So heavy and so normal. See, our job is to “unheavy” the shame. In other words, there’s a connection between shame and trauma. Trauma is definitely heavy. But everybody has shame. Everybody. Even in a good raising there are breakings of that bridge, there are moments when people don’t understand each other, there are moments when the parent isn’t there for the child. In a lot of upbringings, the more difficult ones that maybe all of us have gone through, the parent isn’t there on a pretty regular basis, or is misrepresenting or is miscommunicating, or is causing trouble. So, there’s the shame thing that happens. Yes, and it is heavy. But it’s also—
TS: But when you say our job is to help “unheavy” it, how do you do that? How do you do that as trainers, as therapists? How can you do that right now with our podcast listeners as we keep going in this conversation?
SR: I’m so glad you asked that question. I didn’t want our work to show up for the public until there was a way that we could simultaneously counter the shame. My hands are doing this like a tai chi. It’s like we’re switching the energy from one hand to the other. We do that with humor. We do that with storytelling. We do that with kind of the playfulness that—Bret and I kid each other about our negative cycle, because every couple has a negative cycle. It involves shame, and it involves all these things.
We’re [trying] to entertain the listener, slow things down so that a person’s nervous system doesn’t go into fight or flight. Shame is the freeze of the inner system and that—of the nervous system—and that fight or flight that happens when somebody has a deer-in-the-headlights and they think there’s something wrong with them. We slow it down so that we say this is normal, [these are] the reactions to shame, this is normal what’s happening in their nervous system. If they’re thinking of childhood, there [are] reasons that they’re thinking of childhood. They probably got shamed a hundred times a day. Sometimes people got shamed a thousand times a day from mis-attunement and neglected childhood.
By telling little bits of our stories and then having guided visualizations and exercises and processes where people can pause and ground, pause and breathe, pause and be with themselves in a kind and counter-shaming way—so that it’s not just going into the shame. We circle around it. We gently join together to explore it very, very carefully.
BL: [Yes]. It’s about creating what we call optimal distance where you’re aware of the shame but you’re not in the shame. So, your question would be, somebody comes in and they’re in the shame. The first step is knowing you’re in shame, then being okay with being in shame; because the key, really, that you already said at the very beginning, is the shame about the shame.
People are ashamed of having shame. Once you realize that everybody has shame, it’s a totally normal survival emotion, it’s designed to protect us ultimately, then you can kind of say, “Okay, I’ve got shame, I’m in shame.” Then you start to find ways [in] which you may need help […] getting some distance from the shame.
Part of that job we talk about is finding resources. What is it that’s not shaming? What is it that you feel pride about? Or who is it in your life that helped you to feel better, that gave you something? The first exercise we always start out with in our workshop is a pride exercise. We actually pair up, and people say what they’re proud of to another person who listens. It’s kind of amazing how many people feel ashamed of being proud of something.
We start decoding, decoupling that. Let’s see if we can actually be proud, or if it’s just too much to be proud of something, let’s think about somebody who was good to us or somebody that we model after. It can even be a figure from history. I know for me, Abraham Lincoln is a huge figure, I have a big statue or a small statue of him on my shelf. Every so often I take a look at it and I think, “Okay, he went through a lot, he did a pretty good job.” So, you find the way to start balancing.
The other word I would use here is “pendulation,” which I’m sure is used a lot in your podcast, which is this: what shame does is it stops the pendulation. Our normal human process, our normal nervous system goes from one thing to another—“God, I feel so bad today. I woke up and I lost my job, and I don’t know what I’m going to do, and I wonder what’s for dinner.” And you come out of it. But shame really creates a problem coming out of it. What we try to do is give people tools to pendulate out of the shame into a different feeling, into a different emotion.
TS: And maybe just to connect some dots and make sure it’s really explicit for our listeners. You start with this pride exercise, because then within me I can pendulate between feeling proud of something that I’m really gosh darn good at, as well as when I go back to that place of when I was rejected, when I was weeks old or whatever (which is where my shame mind goes, which is just very early rejection experiences). But when you said the pride thing, I lifted up and I was like, “Oh, good, thank God we’re talking about that. I feel so much better. I feel such a sense of relief.”
But here’s the thing I’m not clear about yet. It’s interesting because there’s a part of me that’s like, “Wow, Tami, how many people have you interviewed, and you still don’t really understand shame?” But what I notice in your work is that you are helping me understand shame at a much deeper level, and I want our listeners to come along with us and also have that deeper appreciation which is what how did shame help me. When I felt that early sense of rejection, I felt terrible. No little infant wants to be ignored, pushed aside—to use the strong word you said, feeling a sense of exile. How did shame emerge as something to help me? How is it helping me? I don’t get that.
BL: Yeah, that’s the tricky part. Every emotion is designed to help us. It’s all for survival. The problem is we’ve exiled shame as a culture. Yet shame is an important survival emotion. The reason for that is shame is designed—this is a tricky concept—shame is designed to bind with other emotions. The emotion, it actually binds with and lowers affect. It’s an emotion that really triggers the—it’s very similar to trauma. It triggers the parasympathetic system and there’s a shutdown of the body and the mind. So ultimate shaming is a freeze state. You feel frozen.
But that’s designed to bind with other emotions. The emotion I believe that it’s really designed to bind with is anger, because if we lash out at our parents, they can kill us or they can abandon us. Even if they wouldn’t do that, there is that possibility. The child instinctively knows that they can’t do that. It’s not okay to get angry at your parents. It’s not okay to see clearly at that point that they’re not giving you what you need and it’s their problem. “No, it’s my problem.”
The shame is really designed to kind of keep us under control. It’s designed to keep us out of trouble. That’s really what shame is for. Actually, it continues to be for that. A little bit of shame, which we call healthy shame, is actually incredibly important in society. We really wouldn’t want to live in a society without shame. We’ve had an experience over the last bunch of years of living in a society where people in very big positions of power have no appropriate shame, and we see what happens from that.
Shame keeps us in a boundary, in a structure that allows us to be part of a society, originally to be with our parents without getting exiled, even though it feels like exile. But it’s without lashing out. And it’s trying, it’s creating a boundary and creating a place to reassess and come up with a better way to do something.
TS: Okay. This notion of shame being a binding emotion it’s very interesting to me. I wonder if possibly there’s a metaphor you could use here. If emotions come and go and they have a fluid nature to them, shame is connecting, and it’s like a hitchhiker with another emotion, or how would you describe that?
BL: Oh beautiful. I love that. Yes, shame stops the flow. Emotions are designed, as you said, to move through. That’s what they’re there for. They’re designed to be expressed and move through. That’s true of every emotion, except shame.
The action tendency of shame is to hide, to vanish, to disappear. Shame is like a hitchhiker, it’s a nice idea, but it’s also like a virus given what’s going on today. It’s like a virus that grabs on and binds on to the other emotion and doesn’t let it complete. What you end up with is a shame–fear bind or a shame–grief bind which doesn’t allow you to finish with your grief, or a shame–anger bind which gets you blaming yourself for something that someone else did to you. It actually—hitchhiker is good; virus, it’s something that latches on and stops flow. Shame produces a state of freeze in the mind and body.
TS: Okay, there’s a lot here I want to talk about, but before I do, and before we get to our second definition as well.
BL: That’s right. We’re only on our first definition.
TS: In your work you said—we’re only on our first—but in your work you said that shame has been terribly neglected in our culture and even in the training of psychotherapists and helping professionals. And as the founders of the Center for Healing Shame, your work is to address that need. How is it that—to me, something odd, that if a therapist could be trained on anything, it would be, “Shame please,” like “Please, get really well trained in shame.” How have we missed this? How have I not heard other people talking about shame as a binding emotion? You’re the only place I’ve heard this.
SR: Yeah, let me take that one. I feel like I’ve spent my lifetime figuring out what was this little voice in my head that showed up when I learned meditation in my 20s, and what was this little voice in my head when I tried to go to a therapist and I just had this voice that there was something wrong with me. The therapist said, “There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s all these right things with you.”
Basically, that little voice that whispers and says there must be something wrong you, that is actually shame. Nobody learns how to work with it. Therapists learn how to work with it as an automatic thought. Cognitive behavior therapy, that’s an automatic thought. You work with it; you change the action and the emotion and all of this. All of the different ways the therapists are taught to work with emotions include shame. Most emotions therapists say if you just go into the feelings and feel your grief, or you go into the anger and feel the anger till you get to the end of the anger, and then you get really clear on what you need to do about it, that’s what you do with all of the emotions. The only problem, if you do that with shame, because the action tendency with shame is to freeze, like a deer in the headlights, to lose 30 or 40 intelligence points so a person can’t even think clearly and they think they’re not making any sense; that is the action tendency of shame.
In therapy session, if a therapist says, “Oh wow, go into that right there where you’re feeling right there. Yeah, that’s important. Let’s go into that.” And the person goes into the shame by themself and goes back to the trauma by themself. They go back into the shame and neglect all alone if the therapist doesn’t know, “Hey, I got to hold this person, I got to say I’m here with you, I got to say I know that there is a feeling of ‘there must be something wrong with you or otherwise why would this be happening in your life,’” if the therapist doesn’t hold them in the ways that we teach therapists to hold them. II did learn because I’m a trauma therapist. I learned going to graduate school how to do psycho trauma and trauma therapy to work with shame and different emotions, but most therapists have not heard of shame. It’s not taught, how to deal with it.
Often what happens in the middle of the therapy session, client goes into shame, therapist follows them into shame into therapy shame and they’re thinking, “Boy, I’m a really terrible therapist. I better take a lot of classes because I’m not a good enough therapist, or I better refer them on”; that is the countertransference that could come up. That countertransference where a therapist tries to feel in their own soma, in their own body that there is something wrong with them, and that’s simply the countertransference of what’s going on with the client.
When we work with therapists, I try to tell them, “If you go into shame, there’s a magic place inside you where your shame story starts to blend with the client’s shame story, and if you can hold yours tenderly over here, hold the client’s shame story over here, and have this place of working with both of those with optimal distance and all of the different places we teach, you can actually use your attention for shame to help the clients figure out what shamed them, and come out of it and heal it.”
BL: We work with therapists mostly, and we have a lot of senior therapists who come to us and they get it very quickly because they’ve worked everything else, and this is the piece that they’re still missing. These are people in their 60s and 70s who’ve been doing—and been good therapists for many, many years—but they have never tackled the shame piece. It actually originates, if you want to know the history, with Freud. Freud never wanted to deal with shame. He was basically highly shamed. That was his kind of Achilles’ heel. The whole way the Freudian system worked was if you disagreed with the master, you were kicked out of the practice, which is shaming. I mean it was designed as a shaming practice and shame was never dealt with.
When I went to start reading on shame, it’s really easy to become an expert because there’s—now it’s not so true, but 10 years ago, 12 years ago when I started this, there was nothing on shame. There [was] just one series of books that we’ve worked, from Gershen Kaufman and a few other people of that time that were working with it. But mostly people just avoided it. That’s partly—not only historically—but also therapists hadn’t begun to work with their own shame. Every emotion is catching, through empathy, but shame is the most catching. It really just grabs you.
When a client comes in with shame, the therapist gets kind of frozen and they either try to talk the client out of it, as Sheila described—I had the same kind of experience: “Oh no. You’re fine. You’re fine. What’s your problem? No problem”—or they go in there with the client and they both go down the rabbit hole together. It’s so important if you’re looking for a therapist that you find someone who has some kind of training in shame. Unfortunately, we’re the only people doing it, but there are others now—and people, they’re bringing it now into all the travel workshops. They’re all now adding a unit partly because of us. They’re all adding a unit on shame. So, there will be more and more therapists out there who know how to work with shame, but it’s a very neglected emotion.
TS: And then you’ve both used this phrase: “finding the optimal distance as we’re working with our shame.” I think I’d love to hear more about that. I think I understand the pendulation concept, meaning “I’m going to dip into it, oh my god, down the rabbit hole, oh, I’m going to come back out, thank goodness,” but what’s the optimal distance? I’m not quite clear about that.
SR: I’m so glad you asked that question. Optimal distance is a trauma therapy term that goes between, over distance where the client is completely flooded and in heap, crying and crying, crying, and under distance where a person is completely rational, is cut off from their feelings, has a list of things they want to work on but no connection to their feelings.
We created an optimal distance chart that goes the optimal distances from the shame—that’s the optimal distance between the cognitive realm where we can meet them and talk about shame but not go in it, the imaginal realm where we can go on a guided visualization or go into a deep imaginal process with them with the shame, or into a somatic process where they can feel in their bodies but not get overwhelmed, or join us in the interpersonal bridge where we share a little bit of our reactions to shame and we share that it’s human to be shamed, and we join them so they’re not having the therapist up here and the client down here, but we actually join them.
The optimal distance is kind of the magical place of knowing we can work with them clearly, carefully, with great tenderness and great care to take them in this journey in relation to their shame, in relation to the attachment with us—and where we can go together is with this optimal distance. It’s not like, “Okay, here we are. We’re going to work with it.” We teach from that chart and it’s just really—Bret, do you want to add more?
BL: Yeah, I did actually.
SR: About the optimal distance.
BL: Because the pendulation and the optimal distance are very connected. To make it very simple, Diana Fosha has a wonderful definition of basically optimal distance: that’s the ability to feel and to deal at the same time, so that you can have an emotion and you cannot be fully in it, you can function in the world. A lot of people kind of either are in one place, either over emotional or detached from their emotions; or, a lot of times you get what we call flipping, which is different from pendulation. Pendulation is a smooth movement back and forth. Flipping is, “I don’t feel anything. I don’t know what’s going on. Oh my god, I’m on a switchback, but I don’t feel a thing!” It happens slower than that.
But that pattern of flipping from no connection with your feelings to being lost in your feelings and then back and forth is not helpful. A smooth movement, where you are pendulating in a smooth way between feeling and dealing—the past and the present is the other way to think about it: you need to have access to your past, but you don’t want to get lost in your past. If you had a difficult childhood, then you need to have some awareness of that, because that’s actually influencing you in the present. It’s having an effect on you in the present. But you don’t want to get lost in it either.
Our job is to maintain specifically that optimal distance which isn’t always the same. I mean, it varies. Sometimes the client is more into feelings. Sometimes we are more into just discussing something with them. Generally, whichever way they’re going, we’re trying to balance it. If you get a client who’s very cognitive, you would be cognitive with them, but you’d also be trying to help them to get into their feelings. If you get a client who tends to get over emotional […] you give them some room for that, but you also try to keep them a little bit out of it so that they can talk to you and they can be with you in the present moment.
TS: I like this, feeling and dealing at the same time. If one of our listeners is taking this all in, and they’re saying, “I’m aware of when I fall into shame. Thank you for the pendulation technique. That’s very helpful. I can think of something that I feel really good about or that I feel well-resourced by in my life. Maybe a positive relationship or something, and I can go to that. That’s helpful,” what else can they do? What else can they do in that moment where their shame is erupting in a situation? Maybe it’s even erupting as part of listening to this conversation, and just hearing us talk about it I know can be triggering for people.
SR: Yeah, well, one of the things that I suggest is just kind of like rubbing the hands for warmth, and then just putting one or both in the heart, and just breathing in and breathing out. And just being like really, really tender.
BL: [Yes]. And that is also getting your feet really on the floor, if you’re sitting in a chair, your butt is really in the chair. And the other possibility is walking. Something to get you into your body in the present. The job is to be—when you’re in shame, you’re pretty much going into the past. The job is to stay in the present. I’m not saying there isn’t shaming in the present. There certainly is. A lot of times a shame attack, sometimes a shame attack comes out of the blue. You wake up in the morning and you’re filled with shame, you don’t know why. But a lot of times something has happened in the present that’s shameful, that you’re feeling shame about, you’ve been shamed in some way. You’ve lost a job. You’ve broken up with someone. These are major, major things. Okay? They’re all true. But they get reinforced by the past.
Anything you can do to kind of get yourself breathing, get yourself grounded, or moving, one or the other, either one is helpful, and then from that place thinking of resources that you have. Of course, the other thing is utilizing your resources, very important, which means calling a friend.
Shame isolates us. It makes us feel alone. One of the biggest jobs that a therapist has working with someone in shame is getting through to them, just because they don’t really know you’re in the room with them. The first job is to make sure that you’re making a connection. So, for your listener who is going into shame, if that’s the case, then if there’s someone who loves you and you can reach out to, reach out to them. That’s really valuable.
A great thing for that, I was just going to say an animal. We have a cat that really, really helps, I got to say. I mean, this morning he came in, decided to lie down in the bed with me. It was just like the best moment of the day so far. So, if you have an animal, that helps too.
TS: OK, which brings us, actually, this notion of reaching out, to the second definition of shame that you introduce in your work that I think many of our listeners have probably heard of. This is from Brené Brown, the researcher, storyteller, best-selling author. Brené defines shame as the intensely painful experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. The intensely painful experience of believing we’re flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. In Brené’s work there’s a big emphasis in sharing our stories of shame and connecting with other people. What I’d love to understand more of is how you link the first definition that you offered, the breaking of the interpersonal bridge, with Brené Brown’s definition of feeling that we’re flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging?
BL: Yeah. Well, first of all, Brené Brown’s definition, incredibly valuable, chronologically it happens in reverse. There is a break of attunement. That break of attunement is incredibly painful. And the break of attunement can be quite severe—a parent yelling at a child or hitting a child, or it can be the parent just not paying attention to the kid when the kid needs attention. We have these breaks in attunement on a regular basis. That’s what Gershen Kaufman is talking about. Those are the breaking of the interpersonal bridge.
The experience of that is incredibly painful. And the only definition that the child can come up with, the only explanation the child can come up with, is, “It must be my fault. I’m unworthy. This is happening to me with this terrible feeling because I’m unworthy of love and belonging.” It’s impossible for the child to really get, “Well, there’s something wrong with my parents because they should be loving me now and they’re not.” I mean, children aren’t there yet. That primitive thinking, that child-like thinking carries through into adulthood.
The two definitions to me are completely tied. One stresses the feeling or experience of shame, and the other stresses the attachment quality of shame. What I love about Brené Brown’s definition of it, it’s so full, it’s so complete. What I love about the Kaufman definition is it’s so simple, and it gives you the solution right in the definition. Because if shame is the breaking of the interpersonal bridge, then the solution is restoring the interpersonal bridge. And that’s the job that a therapist—that’s what a therapist is designed to do. Sometimes it doesn’t have to be a therapist. They can be a good friend. It can be a bartender. I mean, somebody who can restore that bridge so that you feel connected again. To me the two definitions really work well together.
SR: I want to add a third definition which will explain those two, and that is […] we determine who we are through the eyes of those we love. He was talking about early child development, but that is all the way through our lifetime, we determine who we are through the eyes of those we love. If somebody is rolling their eyes at us or not listening to us, or looking at a cellphone or doing whatever it is they’re doing and we think that they don’t, whatever they think, we’re determining who we are through their eyes and we’re ending up either with they see us with pride or they see us with shame, because we’re balancing throughout a lifetime in the shame and pride continuum. So, that’s a really important piece, who are the eyes that we’re seeing ourselves through?
BL: Yeah, and very, very important to find tender eyes. The problem is we tend to redo our childhoods. So, it’s very important for us to find people who will look at us with love, to find, if the family can’t do that, then we create our own family. We create people in our lives who we can reach out to when we feel shame, who can restore that bridge.
TS: Now Bret and Sheila, how did the two of you become the shame experts training therapists and other professionals on working with shame with their clients? How did you decide this was going to be your shared career focus?
SR: Well, I don’t know who should take this first.
BL: Let me go—can I go first?
SR: You go first.
BL: I usually go first on this one because I was the immediate initiator. What happened to me was, and it happened when Sheila broke up with me actually. This is many years ago and we’d been dating for about two years and Sheila said, basically, “I can’t do this anymore,” and she said, “It would be easier if you were just nasty all the time or just cold or just something, but you’re so—” I’m a sensitive guy, so “—you’re so nice and you’re so caring and compassionate. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, you turn cold, and you turn nasty, and you attack me in some form, and I feel not physically but emotionally punched in the stomach, and I can’t do this anymore.”
I had had two other important relationships in my life and with, somewhat, the same results. By the third time around, you start wanting to look at it. So, I went to a therapist who’s actually a very good therapist, still somebody I’m in contact with, and he said the typical therapist thing—“Doesn’t something happen to you before you get so angry?”—because I noticed that I would get angry kind of out of nowhere. Not to everybody. I have friends who’ve known me for 30 years, never seen me angry, never, but with my significant other I get angry. So, he said, “Well, isn’t there something that happens before you get angry?” And I said, “No.” And that was it. We dropped it.
At some point I was working with a client who wasn’t getting better and I somehow we came up with this is idea that maybe there was shame there. By the way, I recommend anybody who’s a therapist or a helper, if your client isn’t getting better, look for shame.
I started reading for the first time about shame. I started realizing that that’s what was under this anger. I had what I generally call, roughly—and it’s not exclusively—but male shame. Men tend to bypass or hide their shame and go to anger instead because shame is the most powerless of emotions and anger is the most powerful feeling emotion. And men are trained more than women are even not to feel shame.
Once I came to some understanding of that, then I proposed, and Sheila said, “Well, the only way I’ll get back together with you is if we go to couples therapy.” That’s what we did. Then I started to actually experience and feel my shame, and I started understanding why I have bypassed it all these years because it was incredibly painful. I’d never really felt it. I just went right to anger.
That became really important to me. I, at that point, independently decided that I needed to teach it. But I had a perspective of this male kind of shame, where you don’t even know you have it, but it’s just, it’s influencing all this anger. It’s coming out. There’s a lot of anger. And then Sheila, meanwhile, had followed a much longer path, if you want to talk about that.
SR: Sure. Thank you, honey. Yeah, we’re so different. I have kind of a female, lifelong figuring-out of how to be female in society, how to be a creative person in an interesting world, and a shy person on top of it. At some point I was working as the eating disorder specialist at a hospital, and I noticed that all of my clients when I were interviewing them, they all hate their stomachs. Okay, that made sense. But they also had this inner critic that was eating them alive.
I recognized that inner critic. Their inner critic was enormous. Mine was maybe much smaller than their inner critic, but I’m like, “Wait a minute. I understand what’s happening under their eating disorder because their inner critic is attacking them, and the eating disorder is what they’re doing to cope with this voracious inner critic who wants them to be perfect and change all these things in their life and all of that.”
As soon as I figured that out, I did the DBT and the CBT and the trauma therapy and somatic work, and I created this program that integrated the shame that was under the inner critic. I had to start asking them, “What is the inner critic saying to you? Where is that coming? Who shamed you in your growing up around your body or food, or whatever?” As I worked with their inner critic, I realized (and the shame under it) the people who had depression, the people who had PTSD, the people who had anxiety also working in the hospital also had shame underneath their psychiatric diagnosis. Slowly (this is years before I met Bret), slowly I figured out how to work with shame in the hospital and it was under depression and all of these different things.
By the time I met Bret, I had figured out how to work with the female shame in myself and my clients, and learned how to work with people in the hospital who had these diagnoses with, underneath and with shame, which is the master emotion. By the time I met Bret, he thought he made the whole thing up and he invited to me to teach this workshop on shame one time. He’s like, “I figured out how to work with this emotion, and I want you to assist me.” I did the first one with him and I’m like, “Bret, I really love what you’ve figured out about male shame, but there’s this whole other thing that I’ve worked with women who have eating disorders, the people who have addiction and people who have all different diagnoses in the hospital, as well as my private practice.”
All of that needs to go into how to work with shame because it’s going to take a male and it’s going to take a female and it’s going to take a much bigger holding to be able to teach the therapist, because it’s so invisible. We joined together for that one workshop which turned into two which turned into 10—which, I think it’s 10 years now that we’ve been teaching.
BL: It’s 12 years.
SR: Yes, a lot of years we’ve been teaching.
TS: I have a couple clarifying questions here, just to make sure my understanding is clear.
SR: Yes.
TS: When you talked about the inner critic and that underneath the inner critic is shame, can you help me understand that more? For people who are listening who have strong inner critics, or for people who are listening who are perhaps very perfectionistic, how is it that shame is operating and how they can get more self-knowledge about that?
SR: I really appreciate your question because that question allows me to pause and get curious. What happens when somebody has a voracious inner critic that’s attacking them alive—and part of figuring this out is to help the person slow down. What is under the inner critic? Is it a parent’s voice saying you’ll never succeed? Is it a spouse saying you don’t know what you’re talking about? What are some of the voices under the inner critic? Just slowing it down and gently writing out some writing exercises, doing some reading exercises, figuring out why the inner critic is there. Is it going to help them be better at work? Is it going to help them be a better parent? Is it going to help them be a better partner? What is that inner critic trying to help them do?
If there was embarrassment or stoutness or not feeling good enough or even humiliation, if any of those are keywords under the inner critic, then I get really curious and I say those are often on this whole continuum of shame. So, then I might say, “Maybe there’s some shame under your inner critic that helps it stay in place. And let’s explore that together.” And the key is together, to not have them running off and doing this by themself because it’s really tender.
BL: I want to add one important thing which is we’ve talked about male shame and female shame. It’s a generality. There are women who have “male” shame; and I think the more accurate description—because you asked us how we came to this work and that’s how we use those words—but in terms of the work itself and what we’ve developed, these are reactions to shame. The inner critic is actually a reaction to shame. Shame is this deep feeling in the body that we are flawed and unworthy as Brené Brown puts it. It’s also that sense of isolation and the bridge being broken.
Now people can’t tolerate that for very long. So, they go off basically in four directions, and the two we’ve really talked about are attack self or attack other. What we’ve called female shame—and it’s not just females—is attacking self. That includes perfectionism and inner critic and stuff like that. And attacking other is basically, “It’s not my fault; it’s your fault. I don’t have a problem. You do,” which is a position that a lot of people take.
There are also possibilities of going through a state of denial or withdrawal. Denial is where you stay in the shaming situation but you pretend it’s not happening. “Yeah, my father hit me a lot, but that was good. It helped me grow up strong,” that kind of thing. Withdrawal is where you actually come out of the situation completely. I have a tendency both to attack other and to withdraw. If I really care about somebody, I will, if I’m not careful, slip into and attack other. That’s what I would do with Sheila. With a friend, I might just end the relationship, just get out of there if I feel I’ve been shamed.
TS: There’s a great quote that what you’re saying reminds me of, which is from your work, that “curiosity is the opposite of shame,” Sheila, when you were talking about helping people get curious. If we find ourselves either attacking ourselves through perfectionism or the inner critic, attacking others and blaming them, or denying it and saying, “Hey, I’m cool,” even though inside I know I’m not, or withdrawing and going under the blankets for a long time, we can get curious.
Now help me just a little bit more. I’m getting curious and I’m finding this optimal distance. How does healing take place? The actual series is called Healing Shame. How do I heal it?
SR: Oh, I really love your questions. That creativity is the opposite of shame. By backing up a little bit from the inner critic with curiosity and just journaling a little bit or dancing a little bit or moving a little bit or just kind of expanding it or exploring it just a little bit and getting curious, it takes out of the frozenness of the shame and the stuck-ness of the shame, and it opens up; the whole body can start moving, and breathing can happen, all good things. Then what can happen is this idea of healing shame.
Shame is not going to go away. We have it. It is wired in, and I believe it has an amazing survival purpose. It has an amazing developmental purpose. It doesn’t seem so at the [beginning]. But what it can help a person do over a lifetime is when we have a kind relationship with our shame is to talk to it in a kind way and say, “What did I learn about this situation? Did I learn maybe I need to make better boundaries? Maybe I need to go for first instead of second. Maybe I need to do something different based on what shame told me the last time or with the last relationship or with the last job or something.”
So, learning to talk to our shame, not have it be in toxic shame but actually be in healthy shame. Our concept of healthy shame is, wow, we can actually have shame work for us, allow us to have a big picture, and there’s a precision to that that has us not follow it, dragging along a lifetime full of shame which [is] really weighing a person down but instead transforming it into “What do I want to keep?” And there’s so many exercises in the Healing Shame six CD set that we did with you guys with Sounds True. It’s like that—they can do these exercises and transform the shame, and have the experience of transforming their shame, and they can play it again and again and again, because shame is powerful; the exercises are powerful. Do you have more Bret?
BL: No, that’s just great. That never happens, but it did at the moment.
TS: I have a follow-up question for you because you said something very interesting [that] I thought when you were talking about your own early aha’s about shame. One of your discoveries was that if a therapist is working with someone and they’re discovering your client isn’t getting better over many, many years, your suggestion—look for shame. Now if somebody in their own life is even like, “God, I’ve been at this growth thing for a long time. And quite honestly, I got to tell you. I’m not making the kind of progress I thought I could be making.” You might say the same thing—look for shame. So, help me understand why that’s where you would have somebody look?
BL: Wow. Let me speak specifically to a lot of your listeners because this is, there is something called a spiritual bypass, and that is where you—spirituality is a wonderful thing. I’m somewhat spiritual. I know a lot of people who get a lot of benefit out of being a lot more involved in the spiritual practices that I am. I do a lot of sweat lodges which is kind of my combination of somatic and spiritual. But the thing is that shame is deep inside and there’s a tendency to want and bypass it. Not deal with it. So, we can do a lot of things that are positive but not go into where the problem is.
I believe in a double path. I think it’s really important to work on your spirituality, work on your acceptance of life, work on beliefs. But it’s also really important to look at the past, see what happened to you, and normalize that. One of my biggest jobs when I work with clients is to say, “Look what you’ve been through. Look what you’ve been through. Look what happened to you. No wonder this is going on now.” I had a client recently where his father was quite a dangerous man. And he wasn’t realizing that being brought up by somebody who is a potential killer is going to affect you badly. So, his shame of not standing up to a man who might have killed him had to be worked with in that context. He was just carrying shame that he hadn’t stood up to the father. But there was really good reason for it.
Now this is extreme, but this is the case. There’s stuff in childhood that’s happened to us that we need to take a look at and get to a kind of “no wonder” place with—“No wonder I don’t feel so good about this.” If we’re always just working towards the future, and working towards spirituality, we may be missing this underlying thing that’s keeping us from getting there.
I would shorten the time that you mentioned; I wouldn’t say years; I would say a year, a year and a half, something like that. If you’re not getting better in that length of time, look for what’s going on that needs to be normalized, that needs to be accepted. “Yeah, this really did happen, and it really affected me, and I’m scarred from it. I’m wounded from it.” Hemingway has a great quote: “Life scars all of us and we all become stronger—some of us become stronger—in the broken places.” There is a way in which shame can strengthen us, and in fact can help us overcome it. But we also need to mourn the wound. We need to accept and mourn the wound. That’s what I would say.
TS: What do you think, and we’re coming to an end here, but I just have a couple more questions for you. What do you think of the value of sharing our stories of shame just with other people? Just coming forward and having the courage to say, “I listened to this podcast with the founders for the Center for Healing Shame and started inquiring into this part. I just want to tell you. Here’s this thing I’m ashamed about. I just want to put it out there.” Saying it out loud, having it witnessed.
SR: That is incredible. Sometimes the person can respond with great love and tenderness and say, “Wow, I didn’t know about that you. Thank you so much for sharing that. Now I feel closer to you. That is incredible.” Sometimes when somebody finally shares the shame that they’ve been holding on to all these years, the person feels shame themself, blames them and shames them. So, it’s a tender sword. We have to wield the sword of consciousness of shame gently, gently, gently. Most of the time to share it with a trusted person is incredible, and it’s important to be aware that it might trigger the person without even meaning to. Just be open because shame is such a mysterious and misunderstood emotion that even in our best of sharing, sometimes somebody ends up getting overshared. So yes, share it, and be kind to yourself.
BL: Choose who you share it with. I think that’s really key. Yes, definitely share it. It’s the single most important thing you can do with something. Shame thrives on secrecy, and sharing it is the most important thing you can do. Try to be pretty careful about who you share it with. If you do make a mistake about who you share it with, realize, “Okay, I made a mistake, I shared it with the wrong person. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to find somebody better to share it with.” But yeah, I have sessions with wives who haven’t told their husbands things and husbands who haven’t told their wives, and that needs to be shared. Yeah.
SR: Often in the couples that I work with, I help them share what was really deep shame for one or the other a lifetime ago or even recently. I counter-shame it as they’re sharing with a partner so that the partner can have a tender heart to this and restore that interpersonal bridge that gets broken with shame [and] can get healed with love.
TS: Just finally, you created this six-session audio learning series, Healing Shame: How to Work with This Powerful, Mysterious Emotion and Turn It into an Ally, and you recorded this with the general public and you mentioned that you waited a long time until you felt ready to do this, that most of your work is with training psychotherapists and other helping professionals. What is your hope that people will get from this series as they listen through to the six-plus hours of teachings and exercises?
SR: We are hoping that we can counter-shame shame and that we can have shame be a friend to people so that they don’t have to push it away and hide it in the basement of their unconsciousness, but bring it into themselves, their relationships, their families, their work situations. Yes, I want to counter-shame shame. Bret, do you have more?
BL: That’s basically it. We want shame to be a suitable topic of conversation. We want people to be able to say, “Yes, when you said that to me, I felt shame,” rather than attacking themselves or attacking the person who said it. I think this would change a lot of things about the dialogue we’re going through on race right now, a dialogue on pretty much everything we’re going through. I think on a personal level it just would heal a lot of things. Yes, that’s the most important thing, would be to have people get in touch with and feel more comfortable with and begin to process their own shame, and then to begin to bring that as a cultural phenomenon.
Shame is horribly under-explored and under-looked at, and gets a very bad rap, including in therapy. So, we want to de-shame shame, make it a topic that can be dealt with and talked about and [begun-to-be-solved] lesson, and create a whole concept of what we’re calling healthy shame which is some version of, “I’m a limited human being, just like all limited human beings. I’m okay having flaws. Everybody has flaws. I can connect with other people because we’re all limited human beings.”
SR: Adam Blatner, when he learned about our work years ago, he’s an MD and a trauma therapist as well, he said that when he was growing up, people had to teach people how to floss their teeth, because in the olden days everybody’s teeth fell out and they all had dentures by the time they were 40. And he said, when he reads our work, he realizes this is like the tooth flossing in his early years, that they had to teach people. We’re teaching people how to do shame flossing so they can actually have a relationship with shame without bullying up themselves or their families or their places where they work. So that’s what we’re doing.
BL: Shame flossing, I love it. Wow.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Bret Lyon and Sheila Rubin. They’re the founders of the Center for Healing Shame. With Sounds True they’ve created a new audio learning series. It’s called Healing Shame: How to Work with This Powerful, Mysterious Emotion and Turn It into an Ally. Thank you for this conversation. I noticed I feel you’ve quite normalized shame in the midst of the slightly-more-than-an hour that we’ve spent together, feel a sense of real relaxation around it. Thank you both so much for your love, your intelligence, and all your good work. Thank you.
BL: Thank you. Thank you so much.
SR: You are so welcome.
TS: Thank you for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at soundstrue.com/podcast. If you’re interested, hit the Subscribe button in your podcast app. Also, if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review. I love getting your feedback, being in connection with you, and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program. Working together I believe we can create a kinder and wiser world. Soundstrue.com: waking up the world.
