Reclaim You- More About Shame and Shame Resiliency
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On today's episode, Sarah and Casey are diving back into shame. They share some recent personal experiences with shame and how they've navigated through it. They emphasize the importance of recognizing shame not only cognitively, but also in the body, and connecting with others for empathy and support. They also discuss the relationship between shame and anxiety, answering a listener's question. The conversation highlights the concept of shame resiliency and the importance of addressing shame in a compassionate and understanding way.
Takeaways
Shame is an emotion, and in small healthy doses, can be helpful in certain situations, but it's important to recognize and address it. Toxic shame on the other hand is often destructive.
Connecting with others and receiving empathy and support can help in navigating through shame.
Slowing down and checking in with the body can be helpful in understanding and working through shame.
Shame resiliency involves recognizing personal vulnerability, understanding external factors, connecting with others, and discussing and deconstructing shame.
Shame and anxiety can be interconnected, and addressing one can help in addressing the other.
Working through shame is a process and progress can be made by taking small steps and being compassionate with oneself.
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[00:01] Sarah: Hi, there.
[00:01] Sarah: Welcome to reclaim you, a podcast published by the reclaim therapy team. Join us as we share stories, tools, and insights on how to reclaim you in the wake of trauma, disordered eating, and body shame. Grab your coffee, tea, or your favorite snack. And get cozy, because we're about to dive in.
[00:19] Sarah: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to reclaim you. Casey and I are here in a pretty. We're in rough shape today, y'all. Just gotta say it. I am sick. As you can probably tell by my voice, Casey has a migraine. We are. We're just. We're gonna do our best. We are gonna do our best to talk about shame today. Feeling the way that we feel really.
[00:49] Casey: Is a trying day. But you know what? We're going to do the best we can.
[00:53] Sarah: Yes. Because that's all we can do.
[00:56] Casey: That's all we can do. Sometimes that's enough.
[01:00] Sarah: Absolutely. Stepping outside of shame. Right. Just.
[01:07] Casey: Yeah, this could be a shame trigger for both of us.
[01:11] Sarah: It certainly can be.
[01:13] Casey: Right? Like, I'm showing up for this thing, and I'm not showing up 100%. And what does that mean? If I don't show up 100%, what's wrong with me?
[01:23] Sarah: Why can't I just get it together?
[01:28] Casey: So if we're both in shame spirals later, you know, we can come together and come around.
[01:33] Sarah: I was gonna say we'll support each other out of it. Yeah. Yeah. I was just telling Casey before we started, I took my own advice. I took a day off yesterday because I was feeling so awful. And shame around that shame around time off and not showing up for things that I had, like, scheduled and planned on that, historically, could have been quite debilitating for me, which is probably why I don't take a ton of time off, even when I'm relatively sick. So just to say, you know, working with shame, things can shift and start to feel better. Even though I was still uncomfortable taking the day off yesterday, one would have thought it would have been relaxing and restful. The wheels were churning, y'all. The wheels were turning.
[02:17] Casey: And sometimes we need those moments where we are at the brink, right. To push us a little bit, to let our bodies tell us, you know, you need to do something that's against what your brain and some of your nervous system has been telling you for a long time. I know that most of us in the field only take off when we're deathly ill. Yeah.
[02:40] Sarah: Or with, like, body aches and you literally can't get out of bed. That is, like, my line. That's my line in the sand. Like, I show up unless I can't get out of bed or lose my bed, it's only happening full of time.
[02:52] Casey: Exactly, exactly. And, you know, putting that together. Right. We talked last time about what shame is and what can trigger it. And I think being able to understand why that idea has come to be. Right. It's some of our own personal stuff, but it's also societal that we're expected to show up no matter what. Doesn't matter if you have feelings or family or illness or loss or whatever, it doesn't matter. You show up. And so going against that in any way, shape, or form, can feel right in the body. Wrong. Dystonic. In some way. Right. And so that discomfort causes us to have this dialogue of, oh, my God, like, why can't I do this? It finishes that discomfort in a way or makes sense of it. Right. So I think it's important to use our own examples. Right.
[03:50] Sarah: Yeah.
[03:50] Casey: To be able to understand it, but that sometimes when we say that therapy and healing is uncomfortable, like, this is a part of it, you stretch a little bit, and that though you were ill, like, it still feels uncomfortable, and that's okay.
[04:07] Sarah: Mm hmm. Totally. Yeah. Before we hit record, we were talking a lot about the cognitive aspect of shame and how easy it is to get caught up in the narrative. Right. What our brain is saying and, like, spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning and not, you know, slowing down, because this is uncomfortable for most people, myself included, for a long time, to check in and see what's happening inside and taking care of that rather than just getting caught up in the spiral, which.
[04:37] Casey: I think is coming to the surface more and more in terms of the way that the body is talked about in healing. But shame is such a soul thing that it can be really hard to uncover. I know. I don't know if this episode is turning into, like, personal memoir of Shane. I'm here for it.
[05:00] Sarah: I'm here for it.
[05:02] Casey: But I know that, like, when I feel that there's two modes that I go into, right. There's, like, the rock has dropped in my stomach, right. And it's just. Or it's like I'm frozen. And so I know that when that shows up frozen, well, there's nothing I'm gonna be able to do about that if I keep trying to go in here, right. So sometimes I, like, waddle over to my husband. I'm like, help.
[05:36] Sarah: I'm frozen.
[05:37] Casey: He gives me a hug. Like, there's nothing I can do. There's nothing I can really say. But even getting some form of comfort. Loosey gooseies that a bit. And then I can just vent maybe a little bit and then decide what I'm gonna do next. Or in the stomach. You know, sometimes you just have to sit with that.
[05:57] Sarah: Yeah.
[05:58] Casey: It's not about fixing it necessarily, but it's that your body is used to perceiving information and perceiving you not doing something correctly or right or aligned, and then you get that sensation, and your body can't cognitively understand that. It just sees and perceives, and then that is the response that you get. So do I love it? Hell, no.
[06:22] Sarah: I hate it.
[06:24] Casey: But I have to take my own advice sometimes because everybody listening, we don't always take our own advice, that's for sure. I don't know if we've done therapy myths on here yet, but we did.
[06:37] Sarah: Yep. We did.
[06:38] Casey: Okay, well, one of the therapy myths, we are not all put together. We don't have our **** together all the time. And let this be an example, right. That we sometimes take our own advice, but being a human is hard.
[06:54] Sarah: Totally. Totally. I was telling Casey, we talked a lot before we started recording, actually.
[06:59] Casey: We needed a. Beforehand.
[07:01] Sarah: We did. We were like, we gotta. We could get it moving, right. That I was up because I wasn't feeling well in the middle of the night, just like, coughing and coughing, and my brain started. Right. And really it was rooted in lots of shame. And, like, that I'm not good enough, that, you know, there's something wrong with me that I can't figure some certain things out. And it was, like, going and churning and churning and churning and churning. And I was in the churn for probably a solid 2 hours. And finally I was like, oh, my goodness, I need to, like, get my body to chill out. Like, I. This. This, like, staying, like, talking myself out of the churn of, like, how I know what I'm doing and how I'm fine. Right. It's not helping. It's not effective. Right. So I was like, how can I support myself in the here and now? Did what I had to do, eventually fell asleep. But it was all quite rooted in shame. And it can be really hard to kind of differentiate, like, what's what in the moment when things just feel so distressing.
[07:58] Casey: And I love that you mentioned that, because thinking about shame can be, as we've talked about in the previous episode, confused with guilt.
[08:10] Sarah: Yes.
[08:11] Casey: Right. And a lot of that thinking that guilt is helpful. Right. But shame sometimes can also be helpful, you know, ways that it can show up to tell us something, whether that's, you know, my behavior is not aligned with who I am anymore or this trauma wound is showing up and it's causing me to behave in a certain way, that blaming myself is the way that I've coped with that. And it's also the way that maybe I've protected myself from having to come to terms with it in the outside world. But, you know, I think we. We were chatting about shame, as we do as therapists, and, you know, I think it speaks to this bigger conversation that we'll probably have down the line here. But, you know, it's the idea that we. Everything has to be fixed. Right. You know, all mental health disorders have to be fixed, and all symptoms have to be fixed. And, you know, I think I've been a proponent on this cast of saying, like, absolutely not. Like, let's stop pathologizing. Let's stop trying to fix. There's nothing wrong with you. Right. But if things get severe enough and chronic enough that it's impacting your body, it's impacting your relationships in a way that your current self doesn't like. And that's when you address, address, not fix.
[09:44] Sarah: Mm hmm.
[09:45] Casey: You know, and I think that's a conversation that I continue to have with folks in the therapy space. This narrative. I mean, it's even rooted in shame. Right?
[09:57] Sarah: Yeah.
[09:58] Casey: I have to get better. I have. You have to help me fix this. Right. There's something wrong with me. I'm crazy. I'm this, I'm that. And identifying solely on certain parts of you that carry this shame instead of, hey, this is what I feel. So this is how I behave. And maybe it's protective, and you need what you had mentioned, Sarah, the pause to even be able to have some space around that. And sometimes you can't do that on your own. And, you know, it doesn't mean you have to be with a therapist, but a safe person, a safe community, a safe group, a safe environment for you to have the ability to pause because you might need to co regulate before you do that. Like I do with my husband. Right. I can't think clearly.
[10:48] Sarah: Right.
[10:48] Casey: I need help. And it's okay to need that help.
[10:52] Sarah: Absolutely. It's making me think of, on Instagram, probably a couple of weeks ago, I shared that my son, his preschool teacher, every morning when he walks in the door, says, like, oh, Grayson, you're here. I'm going to look at you with my love eyes. And she gives him this, like, lovely face and, like, looks at him, right? And he looks back and. And we were. We started to do that, right? And it's just this, like, lovely way of just like, being with someone and attuning and co regulating all of those things to. And I'm going to record this for our membership portal, so check that out. I'll post somewhere when it's up. But being able to use even visualizations like that when maybe you don't have someone to co regulate with or to attune to you, that when the critical voice or the shame spiral is coming in hot and you're swept away, can you imagine someone or something, you know, looking at you with love and acceptance and empathy and compassion, right. Or just kind of like, holding you in a space that feels supportive, you know, you can do these things that you can imagine that can also just like, give you some space and give you a little bit of exhale. So, yeah, when you said that about. About Chris and how Chris can support you, I was. I was just thinking how you can also recreate that for yourself for folks who don't maybe have that attuned and secure relationship at their disposal.
[12:21] Casey: Yeah. I forgot to tell you how much I loved that on Instagram. Was so freaking sweet. And I just thought of my preschool teacher. Like, my mind immediately went to, you know, at that young age, how profound that kindness is when your parents are dropping you off for the first time and they feel totally guilty or maybe shame that they have to do this, right? And so those love eyes or that warm smile, or my mom always talks about, like, she dropped me off and cried for hours because I'm an old child and, you know, her baby. And I remember that she told me that the daycare woman with the softest face just said, I got her, I got her.
[13:07] Sarah: That's lovely.
[13:08] Casey: And, like, that is all you need, right, to take that edge off of what you were speaking to. I love that. And I think being able to realize that imagery and visualization is so impactful because our nervous system is activated by perception of senses, right? So going back to neurobiology, when we're smelling or seeing or visualizing and having that all encompassing experience that's touching the nervous system versus you trying to cognitively, with words, try and figure it out, it's not, it's not the same pathway, I guess we can describe it as. And so it's not getting to what it needs to get to. So, yes, imagery can kind of sound stupid and silly sometimes, like a little woo or something.
[14:00] Sarah: Right?
[14:00] Casey: Yeah, just.
[14:01] Sarah: But it's effective.
[14:03] Casey: What's the worst that could happen. Right. It doesn't. It doesn't work. Right. But I always tell my clients, try it. If it doesn't improve your life by 1%, I'm allowed to be wrong. Today. That's out the window, you know? But it makes me think of, you know, in resourcing and EMdr, we talk about our allied figures, and that can be something, you know, thinking about a nurturing person that you've had in your life, or if you could have a nurturing or protective person in your life, what would they be like? What would they say? How would they talk? What would they look like? I think of my grandmother in that way, and, like, her voice and the smell and, like, all these things that when you get really good at honing in on that and noticing how your body feels when you even think of it, just a little bit of. Little wedding.
[14:57] Sarah: Yeah. Little.
[14:58] Casey: Which. That's all you need sometimes.
[15:00] Sarah: Yeah. To give you this.
[15:02] Casey: Whoa.
[15:03] Sarah: Like, where was. I just got.
[15:05] Casey: Like, where did I go?
[15:07] Sarah: I went somewhere. Yeah.
[15:09] Casey: Like me every day. Where did I go? That was wild.
[15:15] Sarah: Here we are.
[15:19] Casey: Yeah. So those are really good tools when you don't have and or feel comfortable. Right. Because a lot of our shame can prevent us from reaching out right away. And I think that's a good step to kind of try before. So you can create some wiggle room to reach out to someone.
[15:36] Sarah: Yeah.
[15:36] Casey: Or find that community.
[15:37] Sarah: And let's just go back real quick to what you were saying earlier about shame and defining it, and just to recognize that shame is an emotion. Right. And there can be, like, you're saying, like, doses of healthy shame that are quite different than chronic toxic shame. Right. So, healthy shame is. Is like, I'm thinking about, you know, my son and learning to use gentle hands and things like that. It's like when he, like, takes a kid by the hair and pulls him to the ground. Right. Like, that doesn't usually go well, you know. Right. So, you know, learning that lesson. Not that, like, oh, my gosh, there's something wrong with you, and you're bad, but that behavior hurts other people. What can we do instead? Right. Like, maybe there's a little bit of shame there, but it's not, like, directed at the core of who he is. Right. Yes.
[16:32] Casey: Yeah.
[16:32] Sarah: Yeah.
[16:33] Casey: And that's, like, that little. I almost think of that space as being, like, between that guilt and that. That little bit of shame.
[16:42] Sarah: Yeah.
[16:43] Casey: And that's really hard to see sometimes, because we're either one way or the other. Right. I do this thing I'm a terrible person. I'm a piece of ****. I'm a bad bat, or I'm denying everything that's happened because it's dying on me. No, no, not me.
[17:01] Sarah: Yeah.
[17:01] Casey: And I think both of those are okay.
[17:04] Sarah: Yeah.
[17:05] Casey: You know, again, we're talking about, you know, situational versus, like, chronic over a long period of time. Right. If that's continuing to happen and you have this thought of, like, oh, I'm not feeling really great about myself. You know, then maybe it's kind of getting into the body, checking in with it, getting that little bit of space to say, okay, am I a piece of ****? Or, like you said, are my behaviors not aligning with who I am or what I want or how I want people to respond to me? And I don't know. I'm not aware of it at the time. Right. I'm clouded by trauma or attachment wounds or impulse or whatever. That. That's kind of that middle ground between shame and guilt. Shame is not usually obvious as guilt is. And so I think sometimes that helpful shame can drive us to, okay, that's a thing that I can change. Not that anything's wrong with you, but behavior can be modified and changed.
[18:15] Sarah: Absolutely. Like, you retain that sense of worthiness, right. That, like, sure, maybe you did something that isn't in alignment, right. That you wouldn't typically do, or maybe. Maybe you do. I don't know. But you're still hanging on to like, I am. I'm not a piece of ****. Like you said, I am still a good human in the world, and I'm trying my best, you know, or trying within my capacity today, whatever that is.
[18:38] Casey: And I think that. And I really hope that that brings home for people, because I remember going into therapy for the first time and starting to learn that middle ground. And I think that was how. I mean, that was over 15 years ago. So thinking 15 years of that understanding has helped me stay out of shame spirals, but also to take accountability for my behavior. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that is a big thing that happens when we're trauma survivors. We sometimes impulsively behave and have this denial of these things are happening or this avoidance. And so I think we do talk about it a lot with the people we work with that are experiencing and healing from trauma. Clip reminder.
[19:28] Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And we did get one question from our last podcast episode that I'll just read out, and I think we kind of spoke to it already a little bit. But maybe we can directly answer this person's question. How would you recommend working through shame and not having it control you. For example, my shame can make me constantly second guess myself, and then that can cause anxiety, which I then feel like I have to soothe. By the time I've soothed the anxiety, I have forgotten what the shame was about and what I originally wanted to do with that. And it would require me to work through the shame so it never gets addressed. So it feels like the shame is just never getting tended to in a way, because the anxiety is getting tended to.
[20:07] Casey: Mm hmm. Okay, so very good question.
[20:12] Sarah: Yeah, good question.
[20:13] Casey: I think it's really speaks to the pattern of human experience. Right. Like, you're recognizing that there's some shame there, but you're also recognizing that there is anxiety, maybe difficulty making decisions. And, you know, let's point out positives here, like, knowing that you need to soothe it in some way. Right. Knowing that it needs to be taken care of. I think that's really important. And what you're noticing, right, is when the anxiety goes away, you don't remember what you. What was happening. So in my mind, I'm perceiving that as, okay, maybe your anxiety response is really a body felt shame response.
[20:54] Sarah: Yeah.
[20:55] Casey: And so maybe they're not two different things. They're one in the same. And maybe you actually are handling the shame, you're paying attention to it, you want to cognate, maybe cognitively understand it. And here's the thing. It's like, you can try that as much as you want. That's just going to get you deeper, usually.
[21:15] Sarah: Yeah.
[21:16] Casey: So I think they both go together and maybe paying attention to that response when you have possibly triggering situations where you need to make a decision and going, okay, like, when I have to make a decision, I'm feeling all of this anxiety. Where am I feeling it? By getting to know what that is feeling like and just staying with it. Right. How does it feel when I make this decision? Or do I have that sensation with every decision? Maybe there are some decisions that. That doesn't come up for me and maybe starting to understand what that worry is behind it or what the fear is behind it. But overall, I think they're one and the same. And you actually are dealing with shame. It's just maybe not in the way that we're taught in society to, word, deal with the shame.
[22:06] Sarah: Yeah. Because shame is typically deeply embedded into our nervous systems. Right. Toxic shame. Just to differentiate. Toxic shame. That's deeply embedded. And so if you think of survival responses that we all just unconsciously play out, like fight, flight, freeze. And then if anxiety is coming right after, one could maybe hypothesize that you're right, that the anxiety could be a function of the shame and like falling into some sort of survival response pattern of behavior. So even looking at it through a parts perspective, like what can you get to know the anxiety? Can you slow down and be with it and get to know maybe its function, what it could be protecting you from all the things that you just said to maybe get to know what the roots could be a little bit more.
[22:55] Casey: But if you soothe that anxiety, thinking about your nervous system, and that when youre soothed, your prefrontal cortex comes back online, critical thinking, judgment, all those things that maybe you'll be able to connect back to what that shame is telling.
[23:11] Sarah: Yeah.
[23:11] Casey: And that's when you can do some of the cognitive understanding, not the work, just understanding, which can be helpful in how you prepare for certain situations and things like that. But to this person who wrote this, I think you're doing half of the work already.
[23:29] Sarah: Yeah.
[23:29] Casey: And maybe some of the shame coming up that you're not doing it right or perfectly. So, like, try not yourself that, you know, even a little step in the forward direction is perfect.
[23:42] Sarah: Yeah.
[23:42] Casey: Thanks for the question.
[23:44] Sarah: Yeah. And just to plug now, I think, you know, I don't think we touched on it last time, the idea of shame resiliency. Brene Brown talks a lot about it. And, you know, we'll take what, we'll take what we like from Brene. And part of that, I think, is shame resiliency, you know, that she talks about in her work. And I'm just going to read what shame resiliency is and how it works. So, shame resiliency is recognizing the personal vulnerability that led to the feelings of shame, recognizing the external factors that led to the feelings of shame, connecting with others to receive and offer empathy, and discussing and deconstructing the shameful feelings. So just knowing that shame grows and thrives in secrecy, silence and judgment. So these just feel important to name that as we're working with shame or acknowledging shame, that's not getting rid of the shame altogether, because shame is an emotion. But can we start to take some of the toxicity away by leaning into shame resilience and in some way that's providing a disconcerting experience to where the shame maybe came from and could maybe like equalize the playing field a little bit internally?
[24:57] Casey: Yeah, I mean, I think remembering that shame with everything else that we do as humans is gravitating towards resilience. Everything every single thing. And this is my personal opinion. Right. I have no evidence based research to base off of that. It's my own life experience and the work that I do. I just want to add caveat, but every single thing we do as humans is. Is driven by the need to be resilient. Even the things that don't seem like it, right. When we're thinking about, you know, suicidal ideation and those types of behaviors that you think are counterproductive, but at the same time, they have resiliency in mind. And I think shame is one of those things that we look at the words, right? I'm a piece of ****. I'm really into that. I don't know if that's coming from something in me. I don't know. I'm a piece of ****. And we think, oh, my God, that doesn't sound good. That sounds rough, that sounds aggressive, that sounds mean, and yes, yes. And self harm is destructive to the body, but it is a resiliency tool. Right. Shame is a self harming thought process and body sensation, but it's driven towards, how am I going to keep making it?
[26:21] Sarah: Yeah.
[26:22] Casey: And so I think remembering everything that we say, oh, man, I need to go to therapy for that. Is resiliency at its finest. And I hope that any therapist you go to preaches that, because I do. Every time I see somebody, you know, and the shame is showing up, and it's like, okay, but the shame has gotten you to this space today. So can we, you know, just appreciate it for what it was and maybe work on shifting that?
[26:50] Sarah: Is there anything else you want to add before we finish up?
[26:54] Casey: No, I think. To be continued.
[26:56] Sarah: Absolutely. If there are any questions that come up from this episode, please let us know. And we can always follow up on the next one in our little, you know, series on shame. Sarah, in case you talk shame, that should be something somewhere. We hope this was helpful. And thank you as always, Casey, for your wisdom and getting through this despite not feeling your best today.
[27:19] Casey: Thank you. We're troopers.
[27:21] Sarah: We are. We're doing resilient, folks. Sure are. Sure are. All right, everybody, we will be back next week for another episode. And until then, take good care.
[27:31] Sarah: Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Recreation. Reclaim you. Be sure to, like, comment and subscribe and check us out on YouTube. Reclaim you. If you're looking to start therapy for trauma, disordered eating or body image concerns, head over to our website at www.reclaimtherapy.org to learn more about us and our work. We'll be back next week with another episode. Until then, take good care of yourself.
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