transcript

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Speaker 6:
[01:33] Welcome to The Curiosity Shop, a show from The Vox Media Podcast Network.

Speaker 7:
[01:43] I'm Brene Brown.

Speaker 6:
[01:44] And I'm Adam Grant.

Speaker 7:
[01:45] We're glad you're here.

Speaker 6:
[01:46] Absolutely.

Speaker 7:
[01:47] What are we talking about today? We're going to talk, I'm going to tell you a really quick funny story. We're going to talk about shame.

Speaker 6:
[01:52] Oh, I've always wanted to talk about shame.

Speaker 7:
[01:54] Have you?

Speaker 6:
[01:54] Yeah, I have a ton of questions for you about it.

Speaker 7:
[01:57] Okay, this is a really funny story. When we were, when I was first doing the shame research, this was probably 20 something years ago, we were running a group in a domestic violent shelter, piloting a curriculum. And like the third group we ran, the self nominated leader came up and said, I've met with everyone in the group, we have a proposal. And I said, okay, great. And it's always good to know who the emerging leader is in a group situation. And she said, we don't like the word shame. And I was like, oh, that's going to be tough because it's a shame resilience group. And she said, we would like to moving forward, say, Shama instead. And so for the next nine weeks, when people would be sharing or when I'd be talking about it, or the co-facilitator who's actually the clinician, I was the researcher, you know, someone would say, listen, I was so that really put me into some really deep Shama. And so, yes.

Speaker 6:
[02:50] That's hilarious. So you take the shame out of shame by mispronouncing it.

Speaker 7:
[02:53] Yeah. You know why? Because just the word shame can elicit, it's got a contagion to it that's hard for people.

Speaker 6:
[03:01] So I can absolutely see that.

Speaker 7:
[03:03] Can you see that?

Speaker 6:
[03:04] I mean, frankly, I mean, did you see what happened in the Michigan football program last fall?

Speaker 7:
[03:10] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 6:
[03:11] Anybody, I grew up in Michigan, I went to grad school there, a lot of my family went there, I've been a diehard Wolverine fan forever, and it's hard not to escape the feeling of shame there. But we won a national championship, so I'm feeling a little better.

Speaker 7:
[03:23] You did win the NADDY, congratulations.

Speaker 6:
[03:24] Thank you.

Speaker 7:
[03:26] What a slugfest game against UConn.

Speaker 6:
[03:29] It was a little ugly.

Speaker 7:
[03:30] Yeah, it was a little ugly, but congratulations.

Speaker 6:
[03:32] Thank you.

Speaker 7:
[03:33] I will proudly say, go, is it this? Michigan, is this the sign?

Speaker 6:
[03:39] I've never done that.

Speaker 7:
[03:40] Oh, I'm big into the signs of the mascots. So we're going to talk about Chame.

Speaker 6:
[03:45] All right, I'm ready.

Speaker 7:
[03:46] Okay. So where do you want to start? You want to start with your basics?

Speaker 6:
[03:49] You're the shame expert.

Speaker 7:
[03:50] Yeah. I mean, yeah, so I always start like with the one, two, threes. One, we all have it. Two, no one wants to talk about it. And three, the less you talk about it, the more you have it. So I am thinking about doing, again, this was two decades ago, doing grand rounds at a hospital, a psychiatric department. And afterwards, the head of the psychiatric department came up and said, this is the first conversation I've been here for 30 years that we've ever had on shame. And it's the number one presenting issue we deal with. No one is talking about it. And at the exact same time, I was having my PhD students do a content analysis to see in all of the primary texts that are adopted across psychology, social work, counseling, how much are we talking about shame? And at that time, which again, would have been, it would have been 1998, we found one chapter and it was written by me in 70 texts. Yeah. This is one of those things that we have, we have become very slow to talk about because of the contagion of the word itself. So when we talk about diagnoses or we talk about issues, we can find some comfort in us and them. But there is no us and them in shame. To be alive, you know it. Everyone's got it. No one wants to talk about it. The less you talk about it, the more you have it. So I think that we were early. And there were people, Tangany and Daring, great researchers really doing excellent research and compiling research. There were some folks in addiction who were talking about shame because that's a really complicated relationship, addiction and shame. So the one, two, threes. I think the big thing to know about shame is you can't talk about it until you differentiate it from what we call the other self-conscious affects. So affect, fancy word for emotion. The other emotions that make us feel self-conscious are the reflection on self. So shame, guilt, humiliation and embarrassment.

Speaker 6:
[06:11] That tracks.

Speaker 7:
[06:12] That tracks.

Speaker 6:
[06:12] So far so good.

Speaker 7:
[06:13] Yeah. So big difference in the ones we use interchangeably, shame and guilt. Shame, the best way I explain it, shame is I am bad and guilt is I did something bad. Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. And so I always like this because I came up teaching this in graduate school for social workers. I always like to say you get your paper back, you got a crappy grade. And the way we measure shame or guilt proneness in a person is really by their self-talk. So you get your paper back and you have a D, which is hard to conceptualize. I'm like, I'm not liking this. You have a D for dude, do better. And your self-talk is, God, I'm so stupid. I'm so stupid. I'm such an idiot. Shame. You get your paper back, you get a D. Your self-talk is, God, it was really stupid to go out Thursday night and not study for this test.

Speaker 6:
[07:14] Guilt.

Speaker 7:
[07:14] Guilt. Focus on behavior versus you. And guilt is adaptive. Would you agree? I mean, guilt is holding something you've done up against your own values and experiencing, I guess, what we would call cognitive dissonance, that psychological discomfort, that I did something or failed to do something aligned with my values.

Speaker 6:
[07:39] Yeah. Or that that hurt someone else.

Speaker 7:
[07:41] Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[07:42] Or, and I think, you know, it's interesting. I think a lot of people push back on the idea that guilt is useful because they've been on one too many guilt trips.

Speaker 7:
[07:52] Right.

Speaker 6:
[07:52] But I think the evidence is incredibly strong. We know that in romantic relationships, guilt is a driver of repair. You want to right your wrongs. You probably know Becky Schaumberg's research on leadership, showing that leaders who are prone to guilt are actually more responsible leaders because they worry about letting others down and they try to do the right thing. And I think it's a much more functional emotion than most people realize.

Speaker 7:
[08:19] Okay, so let's pause here. And I want to talk about adaptive guilt versus I'm taking on shit that doesn't belong to me.

Speaker 6:
[08:33] Yes, please do.

Speaker 7:
[08:35] Which can be gendered.

Speaker 6:
[08:36] Yep.

Speaker 7:
[08:37] You know, like, I am responsible for everything and everyone, and I feel guilt that doesn't belong to me. And so I think we have to make the distinction on guilt as defined by taking self-responsibility for your choices and how they impact other people. I think that's adaptive.

Speaker 6:
[09:03] Yeah, I think so, too. Can we add one more layer on to that? Which is, I think there's a difference between, I look at my behavior and I recognize that it doesn't measure up to my standards or other people's standards versus somebody else is imposing guilt on me and trying to make me feel bad and manipulate me into then doing their bidding.

Speaker 7:
[09:22] Oh, my God. That's huge. Yeah, that's huge. I think in the most, in the purest form of guilt being adaptive, it's self-reflective, it's self-evaluative, you know, I think, and this is a gender issue. I mean, I think women, you know, women carry a lot of things and I think are, because we pick a lot of things up off the ground and because a lot of stuff is shoved our way. Yeah, both. In equal measure. Yeah. And it's, and the reason we pick things up off of the ground, I'm gonna have to say is also socialization. Okay, so we have shame and guilt. I did something bad. I am bad. And you have to remember that shame is the feeling and belief that we are flawed to the extent that we are not worthy of love and belonging and connection. This is very survival based stuff, which is why people have a hard time talking about it. So the other two, this is where my work has dramatically changed. So we have new evidence and everything I said before about humiliation was wrong. It's different now.

Speaker 6:
[10:29] Wow, that's a strong statement.

Speaker 7:
[10:31] Yeah, yeah, it is. And I'll tell you why. Well, early on and aligned with other researchers looking at humiliation, we believed that the mediating variable between what could make somebody feel guilt versus humiliation was simply the variable of deserving. So I'm going to give you an example that actually happened when we were doing the research and this was pretty shocking. We were in a classroom, I think it was fourth grade, and the teacher handed out, and they knew why we were there, and so we had consent from parents, consent from the school district, handed out the papers and had one left, and said, I've got one paper left, and it doesn't have a name on it. Anyone here want to guess whose paper this is that doesn't have a name on it? People got very quiet and the students got fearful and said, Susie, did you get back a paper? No, Susie does not get back a paper because Susie doesn't have a name on it. Susie, I'm going to put the name on it for you, S-T-U-P-I-D. So I want to, I want to, I know, I know, look on your face. I want to kind of pause us for a second, let us take a breath, and walk us through a couple things here. So we use that story as an example of several things. The first is the difference between shame and humiliation. So if Susie's self-talk is God, I'm so stupid. Why am I so stupid? Why don't I remember my name? Shame. If Susie's self-talk, this is how we used to talk about humiliation, was she's so mean, she's the worst teacher ever. I did not deserve that. That would be humiliation.

Speaker 6:
[12:11] Right.

Speaker 7:
[12:12] And we believed early on that humiliation was less dangerous than shame because there was a self-righteousness to it, and you would report.

Speaker 6:
[12:20] Right, I don't own it. It's their fault, not mine.

Speaker 7:
[12:22] I don't own it. Right. I don't own it. Also, as a caregiver or a parent, I'm much more likely to hear about humiliation than shame because with shame, there's nothing to report. I am stupid, I got called stupid. With humiliation, I'm not stupid, I got called stupid. And so it's really, and so that deserving piece was a huge part of how we thought about humiliation. But I want to go back and I have notes here because I want to talk through, and we'll come back to Susie in that example, because it's harsh. This is what's changed my mind about humiliation. It's a series of studies. Let's go start. Susan Harder and colleagues examined the media profiles of ten prominent school shooters between 1996 and 1999. Harder and her colleagues reported that in every case, the shooters described how they had been ridiculed, taunted, humiliated, and teased by peers. They were spurned by someone in whom they were romantically interested or put down in front of other students by a teacher or administrator. All events leading up to the shooting had a history of profound humiliation. Not enough to move me yet. Then the report prompted a series of studies by Jeff Ellison and Susan Harder that found links for peer rejection, humiliation, depression, and anger with both suicidal and homicidal tendencies. And this is really interesting because we've talked about bullying from the South by Southwest stage, right? Their study suggests that bullying alone does not lead to aggression. Instead, individuals who are bullied become violent specifically when feelings of humiliation accompany the bullying. Wow. So all of a sudden, in the research, humiliation is taking on a completely different color. Last, and this is a research I've followed for decades, Linda Hartling. She ties together a lot of the research from several areas to propose a model explaining how humiliation can lead to violence. She suggests that humiliation can trigger a series of reactions including social pain, decreased self-awareness, increased self-defeating behavior, decreased self-regulation that ultimately lead to violence. I want to share this quote from Hartling with you. Humiliation is not only the most under-appreciated force in international relations, it may be the missing link in the search for the root causes of political instability and violent conflict, perhaps the most toxic social dynamic of our age. Wow. So I think what was news to me when I read these, and I changed course in Atlas of a Heart and kind of said, let me introduce the rethink here.

Speaker 6:
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Speaker 7:
[15:12] You get behind that, don't you? Is bullying alone doesn't lead to violence, but the combination of bullying and profound humiliation?

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Speaker 6:
[16:40] Okay. Talk to me about what humiliation is. Because from that description, it sounds to me like just a combination of shame and embarrassment.

Speaker 7:
[16:49] Embarrassment, that's really interesting because we're talking about the four self-conscious affects. Shame, guilt, humiliation, embarrassment. Embarrassment, the hallmark of embarrassment is fleeting, often funny with time. But the real hallmark of embarrassment is when it happens to me, I don't feel alone. I know I'm not the first person to mispronounce someone's name or walk out of the bathroom with toilet paper on my shoe. So what I think is the definition of how I would think about humiliation based on these studies is internalized public shaming. So it's a combination of shame, because I can feel shame alone. I can try on an outfit and look in the mirror and then have a warm wash come over me and be like, the delta between what I thought I look like and what I think I actually look like is shaming. Or I can, for me, a real example of shame as a public person is when someone says something really hateful and personal about me. I don't feel shame about that. I feel shame when I think about someone I love reading it. Do you know what I mean? I hate that feeling. And then I feel I have that whole warm wash of small, want to disappear, am I lovable, that kind of thing. And I've got a lot of tools now to get through that. So I'm not very shame prone anymore. I mean, Jesus, two decades of research, you think.

Speaker 6:
[18:27] That should be the ultimate armor, right?

Speaker 7:
[18:28] That's the big door prize. But I think that humiliation has a public belittling piece to it that shame doesn't always have.

Speaker 6:
[18:38] Yeah. So that makes me think we're using the term wrong in sports then. We talk about teams being humiliated by other teams. Usually, that doesn't lead them to feel unworthy or unlovable, right? I think oftentimes they realize, OK, we were not up to the standard we wanted to be at. So they were humbled, but they weren't humiliated.

Speaker 7:
[18:59] I think it depends. OK, so this is so interesting. I think it depends on how the narrative the team tells itself. Certainly, I had been with teams post-trouncing in locker rooms, where the feeling was humiliation and the coach drove that home. They drove, the coach drove home, you are not worthy. You are not worthy of that field. You are not worthy of this jersey. You are not worthy of this franchise. So I, so it leads me to something else, and I want to not forget to go back to the Suzie. Shame, the one thing that's really hard about the self-conscious affect, shame, humiliation, embarrassment, and guilt, is that they're highly individualized. So I tell this example often. If I forgot your birthday or Allison's birthday, like, how dare you, how dare you, yeah, Adam's wife, today, I would probably have a glimmer of embarrassment or guilt and say, hey, happy belated birthday. I hope it was a great one and can't wait for what's going to unfold this year. If I forgot your birthday when Ellen, my oldest, was somewhere between zero and five, I would have gone straight into shame because I was trying to balance being a PhD student, getting a position as an ABD, a marriage, and everything I failed to do was a reminder of how half-ass I was. What is shaming for me can be humiliating for you, can be mildly embarrassing for someone else. It's highly, so when you say, what language do we use to describe the sports team in the locker room? It depends on their narrative.

Speaker 6:
[20:52] Right. That makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 7:
[20:54] Does that make sense?

Speaker 6:
[20:56] One follow-up question, because I want to talk about how to deal with shame. What do you do for Susie? I've often had a hard time relating to people's experiences of shame. I've lived a lot of guilt and embarrassment in my life. But shame is pretty foreign to me. I get it when kids feel it, because they don't know any better than to internalize. Often they haven't developed a sense of self, and so I did something wrong, and really quickly bleed into there's something wrong with me. What I've always been puzzled by is why don't people outgrow shame? As an adult, you should know, if you're not severely harming other people or doing anything unethical, you're probably not a terrible person. Why is that so rare for people to realize that? I know it sounds like a ridiculous question, but it's a genuine one for me.

Speaker 7:
[21:50] No, it sounds like a genuine question, and it sounds like an important question, and it's really important, because you're not the first or 500th person who's asked me that question, and I think it's really important because the antidote to shame is empathy. So when you don't understand shame, it can lead you to empathic failure with people who are in it sometimes, not because you lack empathy, but because you don't really think this makes you a terrible, unlovable person.

Speaker 6:
[22:18] That's exactly my response. It's actually worse. Like, well, that's just irrational. Like this specific thing you did or the choice you made, why is that casting a shadow on your whole sense of self and character?

Speaker 7:
[22:31] Yeah, I think that... I don't know that I really have a great answer for this. I mean, I think for a lot of us who were raised with a healthy dose of shame so that being good and being right and being all these things felt conditional for love, I think shame is a very hard thing to overcome. I think the other thing is one of the most common and profound expressions or functions of shame is perfectionism. Perfectionism, like when perfectionism is driving, shame is riding shotgun. Because perfectionism is the belief that if I can look perfect, do it perfect, work perfect and deliver perfectly, I can avoid or minimize shame, blame, humiliation.

Speaker 11:
[23:26] Right.

Speaker 7:
[23:28] And you know how many adults struggle with perfectionism.

Speaker 11:
[23:31] Yeah.

Speaker 7:
[23:31] Right. And so I think it comes to the idea that, and I would not say it's just parenting, I would say we're learning more and more that it's hardwiring. I think that's another thing I've radically shifted on. That for a long time, we would all say, those of us who studied self-conscious affect, parenting is the number one predictor variable of shame. I think it's definitely in a variable. I think kids can come hardwired for a sensitivity of self-criticism. What do you think?

Speaker 6:
[23:59] I mean, this has been probably my biggest revelation from reading developmental psychology and behavioral genetics in general is that, I think overall, we overestimate nurture effects and underestimate nature effects.

Speaker 7:
[24:10] A hundred percent.

Speaker 6:
[24:11] Which anyone who's had a second child immediately realizes. Parents of one child are really strong believers in nurture. Then all of a sudden, number two arrives and you think you did the exact same things, and they react really differently and all of a sudden you realize, there's a lot of pre-wiring that happens here.

Speaker 7:
[24:29] Yeah. I think about my own kids, what was it like to be raised by a shame researcher? I can tell you that Ellen's kindergarten teacher called me one day and said, wow, I completely get what you do. I said, why? She said, we had the Glitter Center today. I looked over at Ellen and I said, you are a mess. She sat straight up and she said, I may be making a mess, I am not a mess. Yeah.

Speaker 10:
[24:55] Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 7:
[24:56] I think that-

Speaker 6:
[24:58] That's fantastic.

Speaker 7:
[24:59] I think that ability, and I've experienced it in you, like in whatever the research term is for shit ton, you have a tremendous ability to separate behavior and put behavior on a table and dissect it without being emotionally or invested in that.

Speaker 10:
[25:28] Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[25:30] That's my job. That's what I do.

Speaker 7:
[25:32] Yeah. But I also think it's your job and my job and anyone that does what we do to understand that that's probably more rare than it is common.

Speaker 10:
[25:42] Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[25:43] And I struggle with people who don't do that instinctively.

Speaker 7:
[25:46] Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[25:47] This is a logical error. Please stop confusing the person for the action.

Speaker 7:
[25:52] And I think that's good leadership. And I think that can be really good leadership because a lot of times what I'll have to tell people is if we're doing a postmortem on something that went wrong, I have to say very distinctly, hey, we're looking for failures in systems, not failures, people as failures. We're looking for failures in systems. We're looking for failures in systems. We're looking for choices. And shame proneness is two things at the same time. Very tough to lead someone that's deep into shame proneness. Because when they go down, they don't get back up easily. Two, it is absolutely leveraged to get productivity out of people.

Speaker 6:
[26:35] Yeah.

Speaker 7:
[26:37] And we'll talk about that in a minute about how shame shows up at work. So, I think it's really important to understand the difference between shame, guilt, humiliation, embarrassment. I want to go back to the conversation where Suzy.

Speaker 6:
[26:47] Suzy. Yep.

Speaker 7:
[26:48] We debriefed with a teacher and said, help us understand what's happening.

Speaker 6:
[26:55] Talk about separating behavior from character, by the way.

Speaker 7:
[26:58] Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[26:58] I mean, my first impulse even as somebody who likes to do that and does it frequently, would have been to say, fire that teacher. Like no teacher who thinks it's okay to do that to a student should be employed in this profession.

Speaker 7:
[27:10] I agree.

Speaker 6:
[27:10] You should not be trusted with children.

Speaker 7:
[27:12] I agree. And I mean, we do have, we have two things about teachers and administrators and coaches that are important. Don't hear one without the other. One, 85% of all adults we've interviewed over two decades can remember something so shaming that happened at school. It forever changed how they thought of themselves as learners. Wow. Two, over 90% can remember a teacher, a coach or an administrator who absolutely helped them believe in themselves. So there is nothing we can draw from that except for the sheer power those folks have.

Speaker 6:
[27:44] Yeah, big time.

Speaker 7:
[27:45] And more people use it for good. But shame can be used as a classroom management tool for sure. Wow. So when we asked the teacher, tell me what you were thinking, tell me how you experienced Susie's response to what you said. And she said, she's so smart, she's such a good kid. She is not putting her name on papers. She's forgetting basic things. Do you know what happens to kids like her when they're held back in fourth grade? Do you know what chances she has of being successful? If she's held back in fourth grade, we cannot let her be held back in fourth grade.

Speaker 6:
[28:19] Wow. That teacher has a broken mental model of her job.

Speaker 7:
[28:22] Well, I don't know that she has a broken mental model. I think she has a real lack of options for skills building. I think she has not thought through, I think she believed, probably similar to how she was raised, an assumption we didn't get into it. If I torment enough, and a lot of parents and parents do this, if I torment enough, you'll change, as opposed to saying, I need to call an ARD, I need to get a specialist involved, I need to understand what's happening here. She cannot afford to be held back.

Speaker 6:
[29:02] Wow. But it's such a misdiagnosis of the problem, to think that, well, she doesn't care enough, and therefore, I'm going to mock her in front of the class, and now, all of a sudden, she's going to feel so much fear of being in that situation again, that she's going to be attentive to detail and careful.

Speaker 7:
[29:20] But you just described how marketing and advertising works across the country. You just described how social media works across the country. Like, this is how the world in many ways works. We will humiliate, shame, and mock you into believing you are not worthy of connection, and then we will sell you the beer or the sweater or the eyeshadow that makes you lovable. So, I don't know that her thinking, while the demonstration of it was one of the most painful things I have ever, and I wanted to, you know, run out and stop it, but you can't. We did give her some tools, and she did end up calling the ARD, which, is that a national term, ARD? And bringing together a bunch of folks from the school administrators, school counselors outside testing folks to figure out what was going on, I have to tell you that, like, shame is how a lot of pillars of capitalism are built in work, and certainly advertising and media.

Speaker 6:
[30:25] So interesting. I've never seen it through that lens at all.

Speaker 7:
[30:27] Yeah. I mean, if everyone, imagine what would happen in the diet, cosmetic, plastic surgery industries, if today, everyone woke up and looked in the mirror and said, I'm amazing. I'm worthy of love and belonging. I mean, industries would collapse within 24, 48 hours. It would be the airline post 9-11. Like, a lot of things work because we've commodified what will make us feel less ashamed. So you're an outlier.

Speaker 6:
[31:05] Good to know. Thank you for calling me that.

Speaker 7:
[31:07] In so many ways. All right.

Speaker 6:
[31:09] So what do we do about it? I would love to learn how to be more empathetic and help people out of shame, as a parent, as a colleague. But also, how do you help people deal with it internally too?

Speaker 7:
[31:23] Okay. So shame resilience is really interesting. You remember Petri dishes?

Speaker 6:
[31:28] I do.

Speaker 7:
[31:28] Yeah. So if you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially into every corner and crevice of your life. Silence, secrecy, and judgment. If you douse it with each of those, it will grow into everywhere.

Speaker 6:
[31:43] Can we call it silence, secrecy, and scorn? I just wanted to obliterate. Move on.

Speaker 7:
[31:48] Oh, yeah. I was like, wait, I'm trying to think, is that the same? Judgment is really dangerous for shame.

Speaker 6:
[31:54] Yep.

Speaker 7:
[31:55] But I appreciate the alliteration call out. Okay. If you have shame in a Petri dish, the same amount, and you douse it with empathy, you have created a hostile environment for shame. Shame cannot survive empathy. Because what empathy does is empathy, first and foremost, helps us believe and see, I can be seen and I'm not alone. Shame doesn't do well when you wrap words around it. It doesn't want to be spoken. It wants to live inside, building, building, metastasizing. Empathy is the antidote. Let's start with, I think this is interesting, and I'll put a PDF up on the show notes. Let's talk about the three most common ways we deal with shame when we go into it. Have you ever gone into shame?

Speaker 6:
[32:53] I honestly don't know if I have.

Speaker 7:
[32:55] It'd be unusual.

Speaker 6:
[32:58] I can think of feeling intense guilt and embarrassment. I don't think I can come up with an example of a time I felt it, shame.

Speaker 7:
[33:06] I love it.

Speaker 6:
[33:07] Which is why I'm so useless when other people are feeling it.

Speaker 7:
[33:11] No.

Speaker 6:
[33:11] It's foreign to me.

Speaker 7:
[33:12] I mean, I don't, there are some affects that I don't have a ton of experience with that I think I can get close enough to and understand. So I don't think that the lift might be better, bigger to understand. So three ways we protect ourselves from shame, and these are called, I love this, strategies of disconnection and they're from the Stone Center at Wellesley. Again, Linda Hartling's work. One, when we're in shame, we move away. We withdraw, we hide. Two, we move toward, we people please. And three, we move against, we use shame to fight shame.

Speaker 6:
[33:51] Okay. So this is a version of fight, flight or fawn.

Speaker 7:
[33:54] It is absolutely, it is absolutely tied to our defense mechanisms, 100 percent. So I'll tell you a very quick story that I've used for, again, forever just to illustrate it. So very quick story. And I think it's interesting because a lot of my early stories were about navigating being like a new mom in academics where they're like that's cute conceptually, don't look like a mom, smell like a mom or act like a mom. Right? I mean, we're from the same tower. So I got invited by the Nobel Women's Initiative, all the living Nobel Peace Prize winners to go to, to be on their board and go to a meeting. Charlie was only six months old. I was really afraid about, I was afraid to go. Ellen, I know this is not a big deal for a lot of people, but she was having her first swim meet and Steve and I were swimmers.

Speaker 6:
[34:46] That's a big deal.

Speaker 7:
[34:46] That's a big deal for me. I couldn't decide what to do. I talked to Steve and it was a scary situation because Sharanabadi from Iran had just won the Nobel Prize and there was a lot of threatened violence against the summit. So I was like, oh my God, am I going to go? Am I going to miss Charlie? Am I going to miss the swim meet? Am I going to, is there going to be violence that we're going to have to, like there was a lot of things. And so Steve was like, you got to go. So I went. First day back in Houston, I'm in carpool. I see this woman walking up to me. And man, this woman is so dangerous. I mean, she's just a hard person for me in every context. She's the kind of person that after she talks to you, you're like, I feel slimed or shivved, one of the two. Yeah, so she walks up and I rolled down my window, and she got, I mean, this much. And I'm like, hey, we're in carpool line. She goes, where have you been? And I said, you know, and my thing that I say to myself, mantra, don't shrink, don't puff up, just be in your sacred ground. So I was like, oh, I was out of town for work. And she goes, who took care of those babies while you were gone? And I said, their father, Steve. And she said, oh my God, it must be so hard to let other people raise your kids when you're out of town working all the time. And so one of the things that's really helpful is people who have the highest levels of shame resilience, they can physically recognize shame because when you're in shame, you are not safe for human consumption. Do not talk, text, type, do not do anything. And so I know my shame, when I'm in shame and you're going to find this so interesting, time slows down. I get tunnel vision, my armpits tingle. It is the exact same we have found in the research for 20 years, trauma response.

Speaker 2:
[36:46] Wow.

Speaker 7:
[36:47] Like if I'm driving down the highway and it's raining and the pick up and the 18 wheeler jackknife is in front of me, time is going to slow down. I'm going to get tunnel vision, my armpits are going to tingle.

Speaker 2:
[36:56] Wow.

Speaker 7:
[36:57] I'm in flight or fight.

Speaker 2:
[36:58] Yeah.

Speaker 7:
[36:58] So I'm like, oh my God, don't talk, text, or type, don't talk, text, or type. And I said, like I went into a totally scripted moment. I said, oh, I've got to pull up for the line. Nice seeing you. So I raised my window back up and the car in front of me had not moved. So I literally went up three inches and then did not make eye contact with her while she stood right here. I was like, because what would moving away look like? It would mean grabbing my kid, getting home, hiding from carpool, hiding from the other moms at the school, just disappearing. What would moving toward look like? I would say, oh my God, I know it is so hard to let other people take care of my kids, and you're the best mom ever. What is the risk? Throwing up in your own mouth. Then you've got moving against, and this is where I go.

Speaker 6:
[37:48] Yeah. You want to-

Speaker 7:
[37:50] Where I literally would have said, have you seen your kids in school? You should let someone raise them. That's where I'm going.

Speaker 6:
[37:59] I want you to have said that.

Speaker 7:
[38:00] I know, but the problem is, none of those are me. All of them would cause downhill shit show. So what did I do? So here's Shame Resilience. I got Ellen, put her in the car, got home, got her started on her homework, got her a snack, went into my closet, closed the door, called my best friend, and started crying and said, why am I such a half-ass mom, half-ass scholar, half-ass wife, half-ass researcher? Why aren't you know? And she's like, you know, we just ended up laughing, which is normally often the case in those situations. But I reached out for connection. She responded with deep empathy and I was okay. But these shame shields, these kind of ways, patterned ways of, and they call them strategies for disconnection because you're disconnecting from the pain of shame.

Speaker 6:
[38:59] Right.

Speaker 7:
[39:00] Do you have a strategy?

Speaker 6:
[39:01] But in the process, you're disconnecting from your own values.

Speaker 7:
[39:04] That's it. No, that, okay, say that again.

Speaker 6:
[39:07] In the process, I mean, I don't want to say it word for word. I think what's happening is you're choosing to avoid shame, but you're also losing sight of your own principles.

Speaker 7:
[39:15] That's it. Because what if I would have been really shitty to her?

Speaker 6:
[39:19] You might have regretted it.

Speaker 7:
[39:20] I would have regretted it for sure.

Speaker 6:
[39:22] There is a part of me that wants to say, but just as a matter of justice, you should be able to say something like, I was always told that those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. I should.

Speaker 7:
[39:35] I don't think, help me with this. This is Adam Grant's getting ready to help us with shame.

Speaker 6:
[39:41] We'll find out.

Speaker 7:
[39:44] One of the things that we've learned is that when you go into shame, you come out of your prefrontal cortex and you get very limbic.

Speaker 6:
[39:52] Right.

Speaker 7:
[39:53] Coming up with smart, fun things to say usually happens a day later.

Speaker 6:
[39:57] Yeah. You get the George Costanza jerk store moment. Yes. That's what I should have said.

Speaker 7:
[40:01] That's what I should have said. Yeah. That's why I just do, I borrow this from someone that was one of the first early qualitative research participants. She said one of the things that she developed when she was in shame is to go like this, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain. And she goes, am I crazy? And I said, no, you're really smart because you're bringing your prefrontal cortex back online.

Speaker 6:
[40:26] That is very smart.

Speaker 7:
[40:27] Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 6:
[40:28] Yeah. Well, okay. So I guess I do have a way of doing this, mostly to help other people when they encounter it. What I like to encourage people to do is just to have a mantra, right, that will be a more effective way to connect to their values. My favorite one is I'm not going to let other people define my worth.

Speaker 7:
[40:50] That's really powerful. God, but it's so freaking hard.

Speaker 6:
[40:53] It's hard to do in the moment, right?

Speaker 7:
[40:54] Yeah. I actually think, would you agree that you'd have to be pretty squarely in this part of your brain to act on that? Not to say it. It could be the stepping stone from Fight, Flight, Fawn.

Speaker 6:
[41:10] It might be.

Speaker 7:
[41:11] Or I think Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn are all actually options, because I think a lot of people in shame just, yeah, they just, yeah, yeah, I think that's right. So do you think to say the mantra is step one of the neural pathway back to the front?

Speaker 6:
[41:28] It could be.

Speaker 7:
[41:29] Do you know what I'm saying? Like one of the things we do when we do, when we teach this work and facilitate this work, is we tell people this is hard because you're building new neural pathways.

Speaker 6:
[41:39] Yeah. Yeah. And ideally, right, that then leads to a bigger internal dialogue or conversation with a friend around why am I putting weight on what this person thinks. I don't even like this person. Of all the people that I might hand over the power to define my value, she would not be high on that list.

Speaker 7:
[41:57] I mean, that's it. You know, and people have, when I've told that story before about the mom at the school, they always say to me, why don't you, did you circle back and say, hey, I want to talk to you? And I'm like, hell no. I, that's an investment.

Speaker 6:
[42:12] Yeah.

Speaker 7:
[42:13] And I don't.

Speaker 6:
[42:13] That relationship is not worth it to you.

Speaker 7:
[42:15] That's not worth it to me.

Speaker 6:
[42:17] Have you heard from her since you've told the story? Did she recognize herself in it?

Speaker 7:
[42:21] No, I've never heard from her.

Speaker 6:
[42:22] Interesting.

Speaker 7:
[42:22] I think, I think certainly you're bringing up something that's really important to understand, which is a lot of the research on shame now will talk about unwanted identity. It's really the quintessential eliciter of shame, is unwanted identity. And so one of the exercises we have people do is, it's very important to me to be perceived as, it's very important for me to not be perceived as.

Speaker 6:
[42:51] Right, because your shame triggers are the identities that other people might attach to you, that you don't want any part of.

Speaker 7:
[42:59] That's it. Yeah. I think it's, unwanted identity is a really big part of it. And I think once you get into that work, you're in therapy. Like, I mean, like you're really trying to figure out, where do these identities come from? Like, I'll give you an example from my family. It was very shaming in my family growing up to be seen as high maintenance. Like three girls and a boy, I'm the oldest sister, go figure. We had to be like baseball hat, no makeup, let's go. If you had to, if you're on a car trip and you had to use the restroom and you were like, can you pull over it? And it was on the wrong side of the freeway, not the direction you're going. That's high maintenance. You know what I mean? Like, and so it took me 20 years to undo that.

Speaker 6:
[43:43] Wow. And now you say I'm complex.

Speaker 7:
[43:47] I am complex. But now still, I mean, like literally last weekend, Steve was like, we were driving from Houston to Austin. He's like, I'm gonna pull over at the truck stop. And I'm like, it's on the wrong side of it. He's like, okay, you sound like your dad, you know? And so those things, unwanted identities are tough.

Speaker 6:
[44:10] That's powerful.

Speaker 7:
[44:11] Yeah.

Speaker 5:
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Speaker 12:
[44:43] Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has been talking about the war in Iran in distinctly biblical terms citing Psalms, the resurrection of Jesus, and the book of Quentin.

Speaker 9:
[44:53] And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother.

Speaker 12:
[45:01] President Trump is comparing himself to Christ. Vice President Vance is fighting with the Pope. Watching all of this is the increasingly influential pastor, Doug Wilson. He co-founded the church that Hegseth attends. Wilson's a Christian nationalist who would like the USA to be a theocracy. He'd also like to help us get there, though he doesn't think it's going to happen anytime soon.

Speaker 13:
[45:21] I believe that it is accelerating. I believe that we're making significant gains. I see us assembling resources, and I'm encouraged in that labor, but I don't expect to see what we're praying for in my lifetime.

Speaker 12:
[45:34] Pastor Doug Wilson and how much you should worry about his plans on Today Explained from Vox, weekdays, afternoons, wherever.

Speaker 6:
[45:44] Okay, so this makes me think about imposter syndrome. Because in a strange way, there's an unwanted identity, but it's an unearned identity or it's an unearned image. So how does shame relate to feeling like an imposter?

Speaker 7:
[46:02] Not good enough. Just not good enough. Not smart enough, not good enough, not MBA'd enough, not experienced enough, not enough. And so when we talk about imposter syndrome, I always go to HBR article, Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome, February 2021, Ruchika Tulshyan, Jodi-Ann Burey. Like this article, I think it was the most downloaded article of 2021 on HBR. This is really important because let's talk about this. Let's get into it. I think imposter syndrome is real. I think people can feel like that, for sure. And I think some leaders and cultures go out of their way to make sure people feel like imposters. Then it becomes very dangerous when people internalize that.

Speaker 6:
[46:54] Yes.

Speaker 7:
[46:55] Do you agree?

Speaker 6:
[46:56] Yes. I'm so glad you made that distinction because a lot of the discussion I saw about that HBR article, I thought missed something really critical, which is there's an MIT professor, Basima Tewfik, who was one of our PhD students, and she's done these amazing studies. It's the most rigorous work on imposter syndrome, period, where she just surveys people on how often they feel those everyday imposter thoughts. I guess they're, sorry, let me say that a little differently. She surveys people on how often they feel like imposters. But it's not a syndrome, right? It's not, I'm a fraud. It's maybe I'm not as good as other people think I am. Maybe I'm not up to the challenge of this big role or promotion that I've gotten. And she finds that when people have those thoughts more often, they actually end up working more persistently. They end up learning more from other people because this is related to our discussion of metacognition. They know there's a gap between what other people expect of them and where they are currently. There's a sort of a confidence versus expectation gap. And they want to work hard and learn as much as they can to close the gap. And it becomes motivating to say, okay, I've got to live up to those expectations. That, I think, is a healthy way of dealing with those feelings. What you're describing is something very different, which is making you feel like you're not good enough. And trying to use that as almost a weapon to induce shame and motivate you to become a more indentured servant of the organization.

Speaker 7:
[48:27] Yes. It would be really interesting for I would love to understand. I would love to see data, maybe it already exists. I would love to see research on what are the variables that exist externally and within a person, where the gap between confidence and competence leads to positive.

Speaker 6:
[48:54] Yes.

Speaker 7:
[48:55] And when does it get internalized and lead to shame, self-doubt, and underperformance?

Speaker 6:
[49:04] That is the question. That is the question.

Speaker 7:
[49:06] Yeah. I just know that I can tell you for me, early in my academic career, I had a lot of imposter syndrome and it was engineered. I had some of my own and I was aware of it, but some of it was very intentional to drive kind of fear in, and what it was really is to drive deference of tenured faculty.

Speaker 2:
[49:37] Wow. Right.

Speaker 6:
[49:39] It's going to put you, we're going to put you in your place.

Speaker 7:
[49:41] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[49:42] Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[49:42] And I think, you know, it's, it's interesting because when I think about that, you actually just resolved a puzzle for me or you gave me, you gave me an idea about how to resolve a puzzle, which is this, this article comes out and it talks about how, you know, women are constantly told they have imposter syndrome. Whenever I bring up imposter syndrome, people stereotype it as, you know, a problem that's more pronounced among women than men. But what I didn't get until just now is, but men don't internalize it the same way. I know when I felt like an imposter, I just look at that and say, all right, like, I'm not there yet. Let me go and put on a growth mindset and try to figure it out. Whereas a lot of the women that I've worked with will be in the same situation and say, well, this must mean that I'm not capable.

Speaker 7:
[50:32] And what happens when you're in a culture like today, where in the military, you've seen black men and women, brown women and men, women discharge from positions of duty when they're excellent military leaders, when you've seen black women systemically moved out of the workforce. So it's not just, wow, I'm really insecure, folks. It's also like you've got cultural forces that are beating you down.

Speaker 6:
[51:05] Yeah. No wonder you feel like an imposter. You've been told your whole life that you shouldn't be there.

Speaker 7:
[51:10] Yeah. And then we've got an administration that is the ultimate act of cronyism and unqualified. So I think the big takeaway for me is imposter syndrome, shame, micro, macro lens. Look at both. Humiliation, micro humiliation. We see it tied to violence. But look at humiliation from a macro. Look at the current administration in the US humiliating every day for the last three weeks, Europe, our allies. Humiliation from a macro perspective. And I think this was Linda Hartling's thesis here when she said, not only the most underappreciated force in international relations, it may be the missing link in the search for root causes of political instability. Yeah. Like, how long are, how many times are you going to use your authority to tell people in other countries and of other cultures that they're less than, you know?

Speaker 6:
[52:18] I mean, I was just going to ask you what your biggest takeaway was, and you just nailed it.

Speaker 7:
[52:24] I think my biggest takeaway on Chame, on imposter syndrome.

Speaker 6:
[52:29] It's impossible not to laugh.

Speaker 7:
[52:30] Yeah, Chame.

Speaker 6:
[52:31] It takes all the wind out of the shame cells.

Speaker 7:
[52:33] It does. Chame Humiliation Impostor Syndrome is understand what they are and look at them from both a micro and a macro lens, you know? And I think all three of those have in common deep internalizing of things that don't belong to you. And I think a great final note on internalization is Giselle Pellico, the French woman who has, you know, when that court case came about about her husband, not only sexually assaulting her, but drugging her and inviting her 50 strangers to do the same.

Speaker 6:
[53:21] It's disgusting.

Speaker 7:
[53:22] They said, you don't have to face them in court, you don't have to bring them in. And her response was so powerful, this is not my shame to carry. We will put this shame on the right people. This is not my shame to carry. So a huge externalization of that doesn't belong to me, which is very powerful because it's so rare, because individual choices to not internalize are very difficult in a world where the social messages are so strong.

Speaker 6:
[54:00] I think that's so important. I think my biggest aha as I think about this conversation is, it connects to something one of my mentors Sue Ashford often talks about, which is past hauntings. And when you talk about, when you were explaining to me why people continue to feel shame about these unwanted identities that as an adult, they could know better. That's not me. There's so many of them are related to our past hauntings that the things we were shamed for as children, those got internalized. And I think that was a light bulb moment for me.

Speaker 7:
[54:42] I mean, I mean, hugely, yes, past hauntings. And we didn't talk about this, but I think it's worth taking a minute because the past haunting brings up something for me about how shame shows up at work. Because we think of our personal and professional selves as different, but they're one integrated self. Past hauntings that are personal, and I love the framing that you're putting on this, also show up at work and professional shame. And so two things I want to say. One, the number one shame trigger at work across the board has not changed in our research over 20 years. The fear of irrelevance. Think about what that means in today's workforce with AI.

Speaker 6:
[55:28] Oh my gosh, that's huge.

Speaker 7:
[55:30] Right. The number one shame trigger at work is our fear of irrelevance.

Speaker 6:
[55:35] I'm so glad you said that, because you just answered a question that's been in the back of my mind since our South by conversation.

Speaker 7:
[55:42] What was the question?

Speaker 6:
[55:43] It was about the shame-based fear of being ordinary as the definition of narcissism. I thought that was profound. I haven't stopped thinking about it since you brought it up last month. And yet, it dawned on me, there are non-narcissistic reasons to have a shame-based fear of being ordinary.

Speaker 7:
[56:00] Yeah.

Speaker 6:
[56:00] Which is, I want to make the best and highest use of my time. I want to make a unique contribution. I want to add value. And the threat of not being able to do that from AI, I can see how that could lead to pervasive shame.

Speaker 7:
[56:13] And I think that's what we're up against right now. I don't even think AI is presenting as a skills issue as much as it's presenting as a trust and agency issue. So the fear of being irrelevant is one way that shame shows up at work. But let me just list some others. Back-channeling, comparison, favoritism, is a huge shame trigger for people at work.

Speaker 6:
[56:37] Past haunting, a parent favoring.

Speaker 7:
[56:40] Oh my God, or a teacher. I was doing work in a company that was switching from servers to cloud, and they literally named them like old school and cool kids. And the top leaders would always in public stuff associate more with the cool kids, the cloud kids. And people were calling in sick, people were leaving after 28 years. Like it's just favoritism. I'll tell you the other big shame trigger, hidden gossiping. Sarcasm, tying people's self-worth through their protectivity to try to get people to produce more. Teasing. These are all ways that shame shows up at work. And I always say if you're looking for shame at work, it's like looking for, it's like looking for a termite in a house. If you walk through a house and you don't see termites, you still have the inspection before you buy the house because they could be behind the walls. And that's usually where shame lives in organizations. If you literally walk through an organization and you see shame, that would be like, that would be like looking at a house and seeing termites on the wall. This is not good. And I'm going to give you a great example of where this happens. You share your story with someone who's heard the right to hear it. And having an empathic response back is so powerful because shame dissipates the moment you know you're not alone. That you can be seen and cared for. Shame is like, shit, I can't hold on.

Speaker 6:
[58:40] The idea that shame shields are like a bandaid instead of a cure is another big aha for me.

Speaker 7:
[58:45] Oh my God, there's such a-

Speaker 6:
[58:46] I didn't realize that. But you're protecting yourself in the short run, but you're not actually putting yourself in a position to deal with the experience in the long run.

Speaker 7:
[58:53] And my aha, too, is I've never been able to articulate quite as clearly as you have in two decades of talking about shame shields, they move you away from your values. So while they may offer temporary relief in the second that you fight back with shame, or you people please, or you disappear, downstream, they cause more damage and more need for repair.

Speaker 6:
[59:15] Well, you said it. You were saying, when I do that, I'm not me. I'm not myself. I was just reflecting it back to you.

Speaker 7:
[59:22] I like the reflection. Well, this was an amazing conversation. Yeah, it was. I'm excited about the next episode. See you next time. The Curiosity Shop is produced by Brené Brown Education and Research Group and Granted Productions. You can subscribe to The Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app.

Speaker 6:
[59:40] We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

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