The Wisdom in your Shame

Reinventing your relationship to shame

There’s a self-consciousness that I feel writing a piece on shame for my newsletter for leaders. I feel anticipation, bracing for the the question: What does shame have to do with leadership?

In my experience, a lot.

The wrestle with shame is one that all leaders have. It’s a wildly important conversation to have, and one that not enough of us are having.

The most common reaction I see to shame is to stuff it deep down inside ourselves, where it proceeds to eat you alive from the inside out. The most powerful shifts I’ve had around shame have been when I’ve shared my shame with those I trust, bringing it out into the light where it can be seen and dissolve.

It’s been a wild ride that’s taken me from “Oh my god, shame is bad, horrible, I should pretend it doesn’t exist and run away from it at every opportunity” to “Shame is okay. It’s an emotion. One that sometimes we inflict on ourselves and one that sometimes has something to offer us.”

Honestly, I only recently had an experience that helped me rewire my experience to shame. It was with my wife. We had a conflict, and I experienced her as blaming me for something.

Up to that point, my reaction to feeling shame (intentional choice of words — reaction over response) was to get defensive, blame her for blaming me, and make myself a victim with the belief that she inflicted shame on me.

The first step in rewiring your relationship with shame is to realize and own that nobody else can inflict shame on you. It either arises naturally, or you inflict it on yourself.

In that moment, I had an awakening — she couldn’t inflict shame on me. The shame was simply there. It was arising, perhaps from my inner critic, but also perhaps as intelligence¹.

This capacity to hold shame so consciously was novel. I have a history of making shame bad. From the way I felt it hot potatoed² onto me by others to the way I viciously inflict it on myself through my inner critic, I made shame a sign that something was wrong. Shame meant something bad has happened that I need to change to make the shame go away.

Yet in this moment I sat in my shame. I felt it and wondered: what did it have to tell me?

“You thought you were so enlightened and awake and aware, but you are most definitely part of the dance that’s generating this drama. You are not who you thought or think you are. There is more for you to own and learn here.”

The second step in rewiring your relationship with shame is to realize that shame is an intelligence, that it has wisdom for you.

In that moment, the shame transmuted — heartbreak, tenderness. It’s energy broke me through a story I had about myself, of being beyond reproach, of being “above” these sorts of things, of doing things “right”, and brought me straight into reality — there was so much for me to face, to own, to learn and grow from. All sitting in the uncomfortable and often terrifying energy of shame.

In my training with the Conscious Leadership Group, I learned that all emotions are intelligent. Every one of them has a message for you — about the truth of your experience, about what you want to change in the world, about what you want to change in yourself. Joy is an invitation to celebrate. Sadness is an invitation to grieve and let go. Anger is an invitation to change something, stand for something, set a boundary. Fear is an invitation to pay attention and learn. Sexual-creative energy is an invitation to create.

As I’ve unfolded on my own development journey, I’ve realized that feeling feelings, all of the way through, is the key to the lock that is embodied transformation. Emotions are the body’s engine for change. They’re the difference between intellectually seeing change and truly being and living change. Feeling your feelings takes the wisdom that lives in your brain and injects it every cell of your body, into the very fiber of your being.

Despite this awareness, I held shame as separate.

Shame is an exception! It’s a bad emotion. If it arises I need to make it go away, not feel it!

After this experience, I remembered Jim Dethmer sharing a perspective on shame. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but what I took away was: some people believe that shame isn’t always a toxic emotion. In some cases shame might actually be a healthy response, an energy that’s meant to counter our natural tendency toward grandiosity and making ourselves out to be more than we are.

I don’t know if that’s exactly what he said. But it maps well to my experience. What my shame had to say was: You’re not who you thought you were. You thought you were above this. Turns out you’re not. And that’s okay.

That’s okay.

I’m reminded of a quote from Boyd Varty’s The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life:

Suddenly, I feel an old friend who has walked with me for years arise. Each one of us has these friends; mine is called self-doubt. I have leaned rather than to resist him, to invite him in, welcoming him as a teacher of humility. Together, we continue. The first track, and then the next first track.

This was the breakthrough for me. That shame is absolutely okay. That when I let my shame be okay, it’s message can come through. It’s truth is welcome here. It’s only when I make my shame a problem that the message, and therefore me (and the world) is a problem.

The third step in rewiring your relationship to shame is to welcome shame. To let it be totally okay. To feel it all of the way through, and ask for it’s message.

So I welcome you, Shame, as a teacher of humility. I appreciate your wisdom and look forward to your next visit where you’ll invite me to slow down and be with reality instead of my stories.

For you reading — would you dare to welcome your shame and hear what it has to say?

1. Working with shame can be less-than-straightforward. Many of us have big inner critics. We have a knee-jerk reaction where we shame ourselves for anything not going right. If you haven’t identified and started working with your inner critic, I wouldn’t jump into looking for the intelligence in shame. Instead, I’d look first to deconstruct stories of perfectionism and learn to work with your inner critic - to understand it, love it, and end the war with it. If you’re self-inflicting shame, feeling the shame risks trapping you in a cognitive-emotive loop, where the emotion intensifies your story (I should’ve done better), intensifying the emotion, in a non-stop loop. I suggest learning to navigate out of that before really going to feel your shame. I noticed for me that the shame in this story was absent any “should”, perfectionism, or story about myself or the other. That was what helped me break through my stories and back into reality.

2. Joe Hudson coined a term called the Shame Hot Potato. It’s when someone feels shame, and in their unwillingness to feel it, takes an action that tries to make someone else feel that shame so they don’t have to. This is frequently what’s going on when teams start playing the blame game. Everyone is feeling shame, and no one wants to, so they pass it around in a game of suffering hot potato.