The Prison and the Key: Why I Write About Shame

Eamon Perkinns

Facing shame can sometimes feel terrifying because shame itself is fear, the fear of not being enough and being unworthy, unlovable, and rejected as a result. The basic truth, as I see it, though, is this: if we want to flourish, if we want to be boldly authentic, if we want to truly love, if we want to transcend fear, if we want to cultivate kindness and forgiveness, if we want to find peace, we need to face shame rather than deny, repress, and project it. We need to meet it in an intelligent and self-compassionate way that works.

And that’s why I spend so much time and so many words writing about shame. Because it’s the substance out of which we forged the bars of our internal prison. And it’s also the key to our liberation.

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Resources on Shame and Cultivating Shame-Resilience

If anything I said above resonates, rings true, or sounds familiar to what you’ve felt, here are some resources about shame that I’ve found helpful.

• Above all, I’d recommend reading he amazing book “Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way we Live, Love, Parent and Lead” by the shame-researcher and brilliantly compassionate and inspiring Brene Brown.

  This book literally changed my life. It gave me words for feelings I had felt for years and had never been able to express. It cast light on powerful shadows. I’ve read it 3 times. It’s that good. It literally changed my life.

• Here’s a wonderful Positive Psychology article on Brene Brown’s “Shame-Resilience Theory” if you’re into a more psychology-oriented academic approach.

If you want some down-to-Earth distillations of the core principles from Brene’s book as I’ve applied them in my life, here are a few articles that I’ve written on the subject of shame and empowering ourselves with resilience against it. These articles are grounded in both solid research and in my own experience and practice, not hypothetical theories. My general rule is that I only write about tools I’ve actually used and found helpful in my own life.

However, don’t take my word for it. Let your own experience be the laboratory and the judge. I’m right there in the arena with you, facing the same issues. We’re in this together and we’re never alone, even though shame can make us feel that way and there are useful strategies that work to empower us to work with these things.

Here’s a brief guide to what the articles cover:

• “Silencing the Praise: Why Seeking Approval Fails to Fill Our Inner Void” introduces shame and identifies it as the name of the void we feel within us, the void that says we are “not good enough” and are thus unworthy of love and belonging. It then explains why approval-seeking fails to fill the void of shame because shame invalidates approval even when we do receive it. We are not hopeless, however; at the end of the article, I introduce a few healthy alternatives and powerful strategies to meet shame with resilience and compassion.

• “The Heart of the Void: Finding the Assumptions at the Heart of Shame”  breaks shame down into two key parts: a feeling part and a thinking part. The feeling part involves the emotions at the heart of shame (e.g. fear, anxiety, pain) and the thinking part involves the core assumptions about ourselves that are at the root of the feelings. This article specifically explains how to discover these assumptions and then how to reality-check and transform them once we do find them. This practice is a powerful tool for our shame-resilience arsenal.

• “Finding the Calm Within the Storm: Shame-Resilience in Practice” breaks down Brene Brown’s powerful shame-resilience method into clear steps and gives a real-world example of how I applied it to one shame story in my own life. I’ve seen tons of articles about the method online but very few concrete examples of how we apply it in our own inner experience. This article was written in an attempt to fill that void and also to practice “the courage to be vulnerable” that Brene Brown champions.

• “Forgive and Be Free: The Liberating Power of Forgiveness” offers a useful practice for compassionately addressing the feeling part of shame through forgiveness. Forgiveness was something I took for granted for a long time because I didn’t realize how simple, yet powerful it truly is. However, it was a key part of this puzzle for me.

• “Release the Past to Free the Present: Another Meaning of Forgiveness” expands on the previous article to explain how forgiveness helps us lovingly liberate our present from the stranglehold of the past. Since shame is powerfully rooted in our past thoughts, perceptions, and experiences, forgiveness thus is a powerfully compassionate practice for skillfully handling shame. This article explains how this works.