Power...

I am very much enjoying Dr. Brown's book on shame. Well, enjoying is not the best word to use. However, I feel, already, that it will be as helpful and as important to me as The Courage to Heal.

I posted a few quotes today, ones that spoke to me, although I confess that already I have much highlighted in the introduction and the first chapter.

I found this bit interesting because of learning the difference between shame and guilt from her talk.  

"Shame and self-esteem are very different issues. We feel shame. We think self-esteem. Our self-esteem is based on how we see ourselves—our strengths and limitations—over time. It is how and what we think of ourselves. Shame is an emotion. It's how we feel when we have certain experiences. When we are in shame, we don't see the big picture; we don't accurately think about our strengths and limitations. We just feel alone, exposed and deeply flawed."  I Thought It Was Just Me [but it isn't], p. xxii

This spoke to be because of the last point, describing so clearly that shame leaves us awash in feeling alone, exposed, and deeply flawed.  The power of those painful emotions are made clear later in the first chapter"

"When we experience shame, it is very difficult to maintain our power. First, when we feel shame, most of us are not conscious of what we're feeling and why we're feeling it. Shame often produces overwhelming and painful feelings of confusion, anger, judgment and/or the need to escape or hide from the situation. It's difficult to identify shame as the core issue when we're trying to manage all these very intense feelings....

"When we are experiencing shame we are often thrown into crisis mode. Most of the time we can barely handle all of the by-products of shame—the fear, blame and disconnection. In fact, there's new brain research that is helping us understand that shame can be so threatening that, rather than processing it in the neocortex—the advanced part of the brain that allows us to think, analyze and react—shame can signal our brains to go into our very primal 'fight, flight or freeze' mode.

"In this mode, the neocortex is bypassed and our access to advanced, rational, calm thinking and processing of emotion all but disappears. The primitive part of the brain springs into action and that's when we find ourselves becoming aggressive, wanting to run and hide or feeling paralyzed; sometimes without any clue as to why. The good news is that by practicing shame resilience, we can actually change this response...." (p. 27-28)

Gosh!  I read this and thought:  That's why I melted down in Dr. LaSalle's office!  I am still struggling to handle what happened that afternoon and am fearful of going back.  Fear.  Shame is all about fear!

Also in the first chapter, she explained the differences between shame, guilt, embarrassment, and humiliation.  I found that helpful because of her clear definitions.  I also liked how she pointed that that embarrassment is something that we inherently understand everyone faces and is fleeting.  The distinction she made about humiliation is that people believe they deserve their shame but not their humiliation.  That is important, especially in consideration of how harmful shame can be.  With children, they are more likely to speak of being humiliated, giving an opportunity for others to help them work through the experience and their feelings.  But not so with shame.    

Dr. Brown calls shame the Silent Epidemic.  This led to the most surprising information that I have learned thus far reading about her research on shame is that although "studies have found shame to be the most dominant emotion experienced by mental health clients, exceeding anger, fear, grief, and anxiety" the silence about shame is as bad in the mental health and medical fields as it is in society at large (pp. 3-4). In her travels conducting workshops on shame for professionals in mental health and medicine, she repeatedly received the feedback that it was their first exposure to shame research. It seems to me that the silence about shame is even worse than the silence about sexual abuse, which is saying a lot. Both may be painful and uncomfortable topics but both are conversations needful for millions and millions and millions of folk to heal, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Shame is a brutal and effective destroyer of souls, after all.

SIGH.

The quote above that speaks of power is in a section when Dr. Brown distinguishes between power-over and power.  Dr. Robin Smith, a psychologist, defines power-over as "I'll define who you are and then I'll make you believe that it's your own definition."  This is especially true with the media and body image.  Women tend to find discomfort in images of realistic women's bodies because they are too much like their own and nothing like the perfection drilled into our being.  The definition of beauty so ingrained in society that we find ourselves agreeing with it.

She also noted that people mistakenly think of power as finite, as if someone has power another cannot have it without taking away that power.  However, she uses the definition of power to take another step forward toward exploring shame resilience.  

The Mirriam-Webster Dictionary defines power as "the ability to act or produce an effect."  Real power is basically the ability to change something if you want to change it.  It's the ability to make change happen.  Real power is unlimited—we don't need to fight over it because there is plenty to go around.  And the great thing about real power is our ability to create it.  Real power doesn't force us to take it away from others—it's something we create and build with others.

When we talk about shame and powerlessness, we're really talking about three specific components of real power:  consciousness, choice and change.  In order to effectively make changes and address the problems in our lives, we need to first be conscious or aware of the problem.  Second, we need to be able to problem-solve and identify the choices we can make to address the problem.  Once we are aware of the problem and our options for dealing with it, we need to be able to facilitate change—we need to be able to act on those choices.

To me, telling me that I need to stop thinking something or change my thoughts has been rather despairing.  HOW? I want to scream!  It seems so impossible.  Equally confusing and frustrating is the admonishment to "Take back your power."  I NEVER HAD POWER I want to scream!  But this passage tells me that it is possible to build power by learning and then making choices based on what you have learned.  The little she has written about patterns of shame give me hope that I can learn to identify those patterns and to learn shame resilience.  I want, very much, to learn shame resilience ... and to build power.  

Of course, I will say that one of the things I like already, rather immensely, about her work is the repetition.  It is most helpful to me to have things spoken to me again and again.  I think the old me would be a bit impatient with how she is scaffolding the results of her research for the reader, for me.  

Yes.  I am liking the book!

I think, too, although it is much, much, much harder for me to do so, that I am enjoying actually studying something ... highlighting, underlining, taking notes, and coding them.  I love being a thinking person, to a small degree, once more.