Summary
Joe and Brett explore shame in depth—what it is, how it operates, and how to work with it. Joe defines shame as nature’s mechanism for training us to be good tribal members: when we’re ostracized, we feel shame. But shame also stagnates emotional fluidity, keeping people stuck in patterns for years. He shares a childhood memory of feeling a “kick in the stomach” of natural shame that persisted for a year.
They discuss how shame locks bad habits in place by becoming addictive—like a dog that learns to run through an electric fence for the thrill. When shame gets wired to natural drives like sex or eating, people seek the shame-tinged version rather than the fulfilling one, creating an “empty ghost syndrome” where the thing never satisfies. The solution isn’t to push through shame but to dissolve it: feel it in the body, find the wants underneath, see yourself as inherently good, and—ideally—be loved within the very thing you’re ashamed of. Joe shares how he raises his daughters without shame or punishment, telling them “there’s nothing in me that wants you to be ashamed.”
Key Concepts
- Shame stagnates emotional fluidity
- Shame becomes addictive and creates empty fulfillment
- Shame outlines identity—what you can’t see controls you
- Welcome shame rather than pushing through it
- Seeing yourself as inherently good reframes shameful wants
- Being loved within the shame dissolves it
- Shame is love in disguise—it shows you care
Key Quotes
“Shame is nature’s way of training us to be good citizens. It’s not a perfect methodology.”
“Shame just seems to stop all the emotions and stagnate emotion… shame is often something that people get stuck in for years and years because it is a stopping effect of the emotional fluidity.”
“Shame is the locks that hold the chains of bad habits in place.”
“Every time you feel it, stop. Invite it. Love it. Welcome it. Welcome it back anytime it wants to come.”
“I see that you’re ashamed and I want you to know there’s nothing in me that wants you to be ashamed.”
“If I thought that I was inherently good, how would I interpret that want?”
Transcript
all we’re doing here is we’re actually freeing the blocking of emotions by feeling our body and creating love where there was abandonment welcome to the art of accomplishment where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease I’m Brett Kistler here today with my co-host Joe Hudson oh boy what a week I don’t even want to get into it I’m just going to say what a week it’s been strange I think it feels that way for a lot of when people are listening it might not be this way but I most of the people I talk to it feels like there’s kind of a certain amount of overwhelm I don’t know if it’s because like we’re all getting fully back into life after covet or what it is but there does seem to be like a lot of people aren’t overwhelmed right now yeah definitely lots of things changing after covid but oh also sometimes there’s just stuff in the air whatever it is yeah things happen and uh you find yourself in these little pressure cookers that the Universe creates for us to learn from right yeah yeah yeah which is great because uh today we’re talking about Shame Shame which is one of the things that we find ourselves in the midst of and when we find ourselves in sort of a pressure cooker situation in life last week we talked about Shameless apologies and uh I think it would be really good to get into really what exactly the shame part of that is like what is it what actually is shame how does it show up and how is it that it seeps its way into so many parts of our life including the ways that we make apologies but many other things as well yeah you know I think there’s so many ways of looking at shame the way that I I like to look at it is that it is Nature’s Way of training us to be good citizens right it’s not a perfect methodology or good tribe members or good family members or something like that and the way it it works for the most part is that when you are ostracized from the group you feel shame so an example of this would be let’s say you’re sitting with your aunts your and you are flatulent you fart and all the aunts laugh there’s not going to be any shame like you’re a little kid right you’re five years old but if you’re five years old and you fart and all your aunties are like oh shame on you know have that kind of like you shouldn’t have done that attitude then you’re gonna feel shame so shame is this mechanism that we have that teaches us on an emotional level how we should and shouldn’t be I haven’t seen any research on this but my personal experiences is that there’s actually natural shame as well meaning I think that there’s like all human beings are equipped with a certain way of acting and that they’re gonna their system’s gonna feel shame if they don’t act in that way generally um so it seems like that’s a natural thing that happens for folks that can be overridden or destroyed in somebody but it seems to be there I remember when I was like five years old I had this experience of I was at this school fair and there was a raffle and I was like at the raffle table my parents were doing something else and and there was like this GI Joe figure and he had a like amphibious unit and I really wanted to play with it so I took it off the table and started playing and and this guy got really angry at me well where’s your mother and my mom came over and my mom’s like he’s five he doesn’t know he’s just playing with her whatever he wants to play with like relax and so I didn’t get in trouble this guy was yelling at me but I remember that when my mom said that I got this kick in my stomach of Shame it was just like this kick and though she wasn’t upset at me he was upset at me the shame didn’t come when he was upset at me the shame came at that moment when I knew I shouldn’t have taken the the thing off the of the table and my mom was defending me and I remember that feeling and I remember for like a year after that every time I would think of that feeling I’d get that kick in the stomach again like it was like I have this very specific memory of it and not wanting to feel that and looking back at it now I realized it that was the second thing that Shane was doing which shame just seems to stop all the emotions and like stagnates emotion so you don’t get emotional fluidity and so that’s the other interesting thing that shame does is it just kind of stagnates the emotion which means that you shame is often something that people get stuck in for years and years and years and years and years because it is a slowing effect on or a stopping effect of the emotional fluidity yeah you’ve mentioned before that you you once wrote a list of all the things that you that hadn’t changed in your life over 10 years and every single one of them had shame around it so like last night as I Was preparing for this episode I I wrote a list of all the different kinds of shame that I felt over the past year shames that I avoided and I didn’t take any action based on and I looked at all the things that would have occurred in my life if I had actually just taken the actions that I had the shame around and some examples were you know shame of missed opportunity shame of feeling transactional shame of being salesy shame of not being able to take care of people shame of drawing a messy boundary and all these all these different things that it was just a little bit easier just not to do that and I look back and I’m like man I would have had a really different year and it would have been like it’s really exciting to think about what might have happened had I just done all those things I was ashamed of and also from where I’m sitting right now it doesn’t feel like there was actually any real danger in that shame other than just stepping out of my comfort zone yeah yeah that’s the interesting thing is like let’s say the shame of being salesy or transactional or something like that that’s something that a lot of people have learned you know so I work with some people in business and they’re just like of course I’m looking out for my interests of course I’m and and I respect other people who are doing that and that and of course that person’s selling because that’s their job they have a business and of course they should be selling and I would like them to you know see me as human and not be too forceful about it but that’s their job and then I have other people just like as soon as they think about marketing or sales they like they’re like ooh gross and I don’t want to do that and their shame around it and a lot of that is just what you’ve been taught by your specific Society you know your specific tribe and that’s the amazing thing about it is that all these people in today’s society it’s not like we all grew up in the same tribe generally and there is like the Norms of that like micro civilization it’s like your neighbor could have a completely different set of shames than you have which is just fascinating like the opportunity is you get to really say what are the social norms I want to live by and that I want the people around me to live by you get to think about that as you’re addressing us in your own shame which is cool yeah I feel like a good metaphor for this is like an electric dog fence you know you have this you have a road that has cars on it and dogs get hit by cars and that’s not good so you put a fence around it you want your dog to feel relatively free and you don’t want to build a physical fence around your yard so you put an electric fence in and then you train the dog by having it approach the fence and it gets the shock collar and every time it gets a shock collar it’s like unexpected and it recognizes that something something is wrong and it goes into this like uh there’s like a nervous system shutdown and then it just doesn’t do that thing anymore and then after it’s been trained you can actually turn the fence off and it’s just not going to go where that fence had been and maybe it’s not feeling Shame about going there but it’s it’s the same kind of nervous system response where we we develop these habits of oh yeah I’m not going to go there I’m not going to do that that’s going to get me rejected and then we just often don’t question it and we just live in that electric fence that we’ve built for ourselves or that Society or our parents you know kind of trained us on and it’s interesting that you mentioned now that you know everybody has a different electric fence and we have all these different micro societies interacting so there’s just so much tension around like what what are you in so much shame for what’s going on or you should feel shame you should be ashamed and then we have this like whole thing where people use shame as a tool for social justice or to try to change behavior in society which just doesn’t work no makes people rebel against it especially if they don’t agree and the other thing that’s really cool about your metaphor is that they I don’t know if you know this but there’s dogs that learn that if they just go through that fence really quickly it’s worth it so they just like run really quickly and that like it shocks them but it it only shocks them for like a little bit of a ton because they’re out of the Zone because it only shocks you within the zone and and that happens with people too and as far as shame so let’s say you have a natural habit like sex meaning that it is in your nature to have sex I mean it is it’s more than in your nature it’s all you can almost say your nature is to have sex right because if we didn’t have sex we wouldn’t be here it’s as much as it is to eat as much as it is to eat so if you throw shame onto that urge right which most of society has done or onto eating for that matter or onto eating for that matter then you start associating shame with I mean it’s like things that wire together fire together so every time sex happens shame happens there’s actually something that happens where people get addicted to shame I would say where there the the shame is the addiction and so sex is an Australian unless there’s a little bit of Shame with it or eating isn’t it or shopping isn’t as thrilling if there isn’t a little bit of Shame with it so there’s actually there’s this weird thing that happens which is a lot like the dog running through the fence it’s like I want that thing I want to be roaming and I will take that shock and it’ll just kind of like add to the to the thrill of getting through and making it happen which is totally fascinating to me and and I think that’s the other thing that happens as far as keeping bad habits in place there’s this great quote that says shame is the locks that hold the chains of bad habits in place and I think this is one of the big mechanisms for it is because we actually become addicted to the shame because we want the stuff that comes with it like sex or food or things or a bunch of stuff in in our nature yeah so just keep going back to that shame place but then not actually getting the thing that we want because we’re locked up in shame and it blocks our emotions and right the emotions are part of our experiencing that the actual thing if we’re not feeling the emotions then we’re not actually right so it’s an empty ghost syndrome it’s like oh I got the the thing that I wanted but I didn’t get to enjoy it completely because there’s shame and so it doesn’t actually fully fulfill me so I need to do it again and again and again and again this seems like it would be a maladaptive evolutionary thing for to go into something where we feel shame and then all of our processing shuts down like that doesn’t seem optimal what’s what’s going on what is going on with this it keeps us inside the fence right that’s the thing is it keeps us inside of that line which is what we need evolutionarily to exist as tribe right like as a small group as a village as a nation to some degree like we need to stay within that fence or we’re just not going to work out as well and so yes it’s not perfectly adapted but it had a reason and the reason to some degree is useful I mean people without shame they’re Psychopaths right that’s the name for them is is Psychopaths as people without shame and they will like hurt people and then Society will completely fall apart if we had a society of psychopaths I don’t think that the society would operate very well right it sounds like one of the one of the variables here is just that Society is now changing so much more rapidly than it used to you know just with everything that it relates to our nervous system is just that everything is changing faster than it ever used to change so our every part of our nervous system needs to be able to update faster in order to maintain contact with what reality is now and not what it was 100 000 years ago and maybe and maybe it’s possible as well that like some of the ways that it’s adapting aren’t good for the long run either right so it’s kind of it’s It’s a you know I have no idea what’s going to happen societally speaking but what I can say is that what’s happening with the shame in people that I work with is that when they feel shame around something they usually are stuck in that habit and they’re usually stuck in that mode for an extended period of time and to be able to address and lift the shame is fantastic and the the crazy thing about addressing and lifting that shame is that there’s an intellectual basis to it and there’s also an emotional basis to it and you don’t really get the lift without the emotional basis meaning a lot of people know okay yes I realized that the church told me sex was bad I realized that you know my grandmother told me sex was bad but I know sex isn’t bad yet I still feel shame wanting sex and I still recreate sex in a way that I get to feel shame instead of having sex in a way that would make me feel no shame I I continually choose to have sex in a way that that gives me shame that whole thing that happens is has to be addressed with the emotions behind it you can’t just address it intellectually it doesn’t change anything for people yeah in fact even that can just increase the level of tension that you feel internally if you intellectually know that you quote shouldn’t feel this shame and your body does feel the shame and you don’t know what to do it about it then you can actually just stress yourself out even more and just vibrate in place yes yes yeah I’ve found myself in that a lot yeah I can describe everything thing that’s wrong with me but I haven’t but yeah but nothing has changed that’s a real that’s a like a little slice of pain and discomfort yeah exactly one thing that I noticed though is so when we’re talking about you know being the dog that runs through the electric fence which is like you know I’m gonna get my freedom you know sometimes he’ll run straight through the electric fence and get hit by a car yes and that’s like that’s one of the things that you just have to kind of do you just have to accept that it’s like okay if I’m gonna move through the thing that my entire system thinks is going to hurt me or get me ostracized to find out if that’s true sometimes I am going to get ostracized and find out that it’s true and sometimes maybe I won’t I don’t think it’s necessary I think running through the fence just starts wiring stuff together and and so I don’t think that’s necessary I think it’s just far better to turn off the fence so to speak meaning that like really address the shame underneath it and really investigate it both emotionally and intellectually and watch it fall apart and then take your action one of the ways to do that is to really feel the want in the shame itself meaning like really feel the desire to like what is the sexual experience you do want what is the eating experience that you do want right because usually the one that’s wired with shame is not the one that you actually want so it’s also seen that there’s nothing to be like to really intellectually take apart the thing that people think that they should be ashamed of so that it can’t exist yeah I think this can lead to another interesting place especially in in self-development or self-exploration where it’s easy for us to identify the shames that we’re like kind of ready to let go of and not identify the ones that are deeper and so we might go on a mission where we’re like you know what I feel a lot of Shame about sex so what I’m gonna do is I’m just gonna you know deconstruct all of my sex shame and I’m gonna go have all the sex that I want and then they’re not gonna maybe you might not notice that there’s actually deeper shames in there that you’re also recreating like shames of Abandonment or shames of uh like recklessness or just like all kinds of different things that you’re still recreating in the way that you’re going about exploring your newfound freedom in the one shame area that you’re exploring and that might take a couple of years of a process before you realize oh wait I actually was using using this exploration of shame to run more further from other shames that I wasn’t looking at you know if you have a group of people around you the best way to to address the shame is to see that you’re loved within the action you can’t do this by yourself but it’s a cool thing to do it’s like if you’re having shame around the way that you eat for instance how do you create a situation where you’re loved for you’re the way that you eat how do you create a situation where you can be appreciated where there’s nothing that you have to hide that you’re not like sneaking into the corner and hiding and so it’s like like when we do like a lot of our courses one of the things that we do is create that container of love because a lot of what people are ashamed of nobody else has a problem with it’s amazing you’ll hear somebody in one of our workshops and they’ll be like oh I want to feel pleasure and they won’t even say what kind of pleasure that is and they’ll be like oh I feel ashamed to even want I feel selfish I feel ashamed for even wanting to feel pleasure and I’ll ask hey does anybody here have a problem with them feeling pleasure who here wants this person to have a life that’s full of pleasure and it’s it’s like that perpetually it’s like if I asked a room full of people and said hey who here has a problem with Brett wanting to make his business really successful and going out there and really selling his business so that it can be successful as long as it’s in alignment with who he is anybody opposed to that nobody would say that they were opposed to that right and so to really see and feel that love is an amazing thing and that changes shame because shame is often put in place because of you know a society telling us that we were bad or wrong or being ostracized yeah I guess I wonder here one of the things that you said is it’s you know it’s maybe not about having not running straight through the electric fence and finding out what happens because that might be a little bit that might be more likely just to recreate it and so it’s more about just inspecting it you can create a group for yourself of people where you can you can test it out which you know there’s uh there’s that saying that we’re traumatized in relationship and we’re healed in relationship where especially for something like shame which is such a social social type programming that for not just our intellect but for our whole body our whole nervous system to experience the unexpected which is to be loved for the thing that we are ashamed of is really what’s kind of required to get down to that yeah if you’re doing it with other people that is the quickest way but there’s there’s lots of ways to address it within yourself and you mentioned this a while ago one of the ways to address it in yourself is to not recreate the behaviors so what I notice is like so for instance one of the things that we’ll go through in some of the courses is people getting in touch with their anger and being able to move their anger but not at anybody not in a way that hurts anybody but just like let that energy move and to learn how to love it in that process they might get anger angry at somebody or they might break something so then they can go see anger isn’t safe they’ll create the shame to reinforce the the world view or reinforce the identity and that’s one of the coolest things about shame is that it does like create it’s a it is kind of the outline of our identity often you know part of the outline of our identity is the things that we are ashamed of yeah and it can be subtle there’s just when when you have a couple layers of Shame over a possible action you might take it just doesn’t occur to you that it that action is even possible or that that this version of you might even exist right there’s just no I’m just not that way I’ve always been this way and not that way I’m you know I’m not a salesy kind of person somebody might say okay you know or I’m just not into sex right yeah exactly but what I notice is that we have this natural desire to unfold this natural desire to flourish this natural desire to become more and more free and we will as one part unfolds we will start running up against those things that we can’t see we start running up against the shames that we are that are so deep in us that we’re not aware of today let’s say somebody doesn’t have a group around them and they want to do some personal self-exploration on shame I just described what I did yesterday and that was really helpful which was just writing down as many subtle types of shame that I could find uh that that I found were just subtly something that I just didn’t want to didn’t want to feel so I didn’t take an action that would have led me in that direction I went in some other direction and then I you know find myself deeper and deeper into my comfort zone and then some form of stagnation occurs um I’m curious what what are some practices that somebody could take individually to explore their shame and use some of the tools that we’ve talked about on this podcast to explore it the best way is the body the body tells you when you’re ashamed quicker than the Mind ever will and so there’s a certain feeling that you get when you’re ashamed in your body and to be able to be aware of that and to see that happening that’s great your mind will often spin on shame so if you notice that your mind is spinning going over the same story over and over and over again then you can see that there’s shame in that and then you can start finding the beliefs in that as well so that’s another way to do it using your intellect to find it the other way to deal with it is just start dealing with the shame that you can see and then the other shames will present themselves you know like it you solve one and then the next one’s come and what you’ll start noticing is that a lot of the shames they contradict themselves so if you say to somebody who’s like um yeah I don’t want to always be talking and say Okay cool so are you good with like always being quiet like no Okay so what’s going on there what is it that you actually want and what you’ll notice is that that want isn’t it isn’t solidified in their their system they’re they’re very clear on all the things that they’re not allowed to want they’re very clear on all the things that they can’t do but they haven’t actually found the solution that goes okay I can do this and it’s as simple as people let’s say smoking if you’re like okay so do you want smoke they’re like no are you sure I’m smoking yes okay and do you want to never have a cigarette again in your whole life they’re like no it’s like oh wow what’s going on there and and so really being able to feel through your wants is another great thing to intellectually see how many double binds you’re in with your own shames where you’re you’re in no win situations where there’s no way that you have an out and then to find your wants so that you can see what the right out is that’s another those are really good useful things and the other thing is to feel the shame all the way through so shame has a a stagnation and the stagnation occurs because you don’t want to feel it you don’t want to think about it you push it aside and if you stop pushing it aside and you say okay what is that thing and and how do I love that because the shame is in a weird way is the absence of love right it and so if you can love that thing that you’re ashamed of then you can move through it yeah it’s almost even like an absence of awareness it’s like awareness tends to naturally draw itself away from where there’s shame and it becomes just this like kind of barren Wasteland in the body that’s right and if you bring awareness back to it it’s as though shame as a an emotion that blocks other emotions it’s like the in some emotional nemesis yeah it does it stops that fluidity from happening because we just like we don’t it feels so uncomfortable to us that we just push it and anything that comes with it aside right and so people who are ashamed of their sexuality they can’t feel that full desire they can’t feel that full wanting they can’t and when they’re having sex they’re not like fully deeply into the pleasure right it’s like the sex is going to be much quicker and harder and that they can’t actually fully allow all the pleasure of that sexual experience into their system and it’s the same thing with somebody eating if they have a lot of Shame around their food they’re not able to just really you know taste it and savor it and that’s not to say the people who don’t taste all have shame around their food that’s not what I’m saying or or that you can’t have like you know all sorts of sex and enjoy it I’m just saying that the capacity to enjoy it goes away if you’re if you have shame and it sounds like there’s a there’s a lot of subtlety here just with as there is with any emotion if you if you look at an emotion you’re like okay I feel sadness there could be more and more subtle levels of sadness I mean more more different subtle kinds of emotion that are something next to sadness Melancholy you know nostalgia and the like and the same can be true for shame and I notice that there’s sort of a progression that happens when we start to do more emotional exploration is that we start by just not being aware of the emotion or we report it as we feel good or we feel bad and then we start to recognize the emotion saying oh I feel shame and getting deeper it might be oh I feel specifically the shame around money but there’s sometimes I don’t feel ashamed about making money but maybe it’s I feel ashamed about making money if I don’t feel like I’m really creating value or like that it came from some work ethic that was trained up in me or I don’t feel like I’m if if I make the money but I don’t feel like you know I deserve it or you know there’s all these different subtleties but then also each of the subtleties you can get lost in like oh I have this particular subtle form of shame but then creating that label of that shame is still an intellectual barrier to actually experiencing and feeling in the body yeah and if you can feel and experience it in the body you don’t have to name it you don’t have to understand very much of it like if somebody was like what’s the quickest way for me to get through shame it’s like every time you feel it stop invite it love it welcome it welcome it back anytime it wants to come and when it’s ready then you move and then you keep moving until the next time you feel it if you just did that you wouldn’t have to understand anything you would just more and more be in love with your life and and each other and and there’s this fear like people think oh okay but if I do that then I’ll be the psychopath and I won’t and I won’t be able to to you know I’ll start hurting people and I’ll be only self-interested that’s the belief system but what actually happens is that you become more and more in love with yourself and everybody else if you really feel the love for all the things that you’re ashamed of and that love has a very strong moral compass right the more that you’re in love with people the less it the the more painful it is to do anything that would be knowingly hurting them in the long run you might be happy to hurt them in the short run if it’s for their great or good but or for their greater good but yeah yeah the very fact that you’re even asking this of yourself like well what if what if I become a psychopath like I don’t I don’t know of any Psychopaths or like well what if I became a psychopath and I didn’t care about people’s feelings or how I’m hurting people that’s just not how a psychopath operates so it’s this moral compass is even there in the belief system that would hold you back from feeling your shame oh that’s beautiful yeah I hadn’t thought about it that way that’s beautiful right yeah another cool thing you can do is you can say okay so you you find yourself you want something and you’re ashamed of that thing that you want you can just ask yourself this simple like this really cool and very simple question which is if I thought that I was inherently good how would I interpret that want how would I see that want so if it’s like oh I want a billion dollars okay that’s selfish that’s greedy I should be ashamed of that okay and if you saw yourself as inherently good what would you make of that want oh I I see that I want security I see that I want to feel safe I see that I want to um be seen as important I see that I want to help people I see that I want to not be I want autonomy and you would you could see what was behind the want and so there’s this what happens in shame is that there has to be a belief system that you’re not inherently good and if you can get in touch with your inherent goodness right and so what’s what’s interesting is the idea that is if I let go of my shame I will be bad but what’s actually happening is if when you let go of your shame you get in touch with your inherent goodness yeah and I can also see what our Notions of inherently good mean might also color this as well it’s like you know what I just want to I just want to become the leader of the Free World so that I can finally implement the surveillance and police state that will finally make everybody safe right because that’s just my inherent goodness coming out yeah so what I’m suggesting is more of when you feel the shame interpret it through the lens of your inherently good not using I’m inherently good to justify to run your shame down and push it down and justify your behavior that feels like crap inside of your system right and so how do you notice the difference between what you’re doing there if that’s if that’s the case yeah it your body doesn’t like it like there’s no way that the person who’s like I want to control everything so that I feel safe feels good in their body like I’ve I’ve seen those people they’re incredibly rigid right they’re held all the time their shoulders are rocks right they’re like those people are not not in conflict in their body they’ve cut themselves off from their body because if they felt their body they would be screaming in pain yeah so part of the practice here is becoming more aware of the subtle unconscious tensions in our body and the conflict in our emotions and that’s that’s just part of this entire Journey and shame is one dimension on which to make that exploration yeah so the way like if you go back to our original definition of Shame it’s what Society does to tell you that you’re not behaving properly and it controls like it’s that mechanism but it’s also the blocking of emotions and so what all we’re doing here is we’re actually it’s as simple as that it’s just counteracting it yeah so from that perspective it’s there’s a way that you could see shame as a way that we abandon ourselves there’s there’s some part of us there’s some natural instinct there’s some natural impulse to be fully who we are and we abandon that part by withdrawing from it in shame unless there’s the natural shame like I said which is like I think there is a natural shame if you’re doing stuff that you know there there’s certain behaviors that as humans if we do it we’re going to feel that shame probably with or without a society hurting people we love on purpose for our own good for our own short-term good is going to feel crappy in people’s bodies probably no matter whose body it is unless they are neurologically atypical yeah I think part of what what we’ve been talking about with exploring the shame and bringing attention and love to it is that it will distill into its more natural form and it won’t entirely Go away You’re Not By by doing self-exploration in any emotion you’re not going to be able to remove the experience of emotion just because you’re working to deconstruct it if it’s if it’s really meant to be there if there’s if there’s really something in you that’s bringing up anger you’re not gonna you could suppress the anger but you’re not going to convince your system to just fully release the sense of something being violated unless there’s just a story to be seen through and that story was just Vapor all along yeah so I would say that with all the emotions including shame if you’re trying to get rid of it then you’re not welcoming it so then you’re not actually loving it and it’s like saying it’s like welcoming kids into the house just so that you can get the rid of them like they don’t feel loved right so the idea is that you are actually welcoming the shame and you look forward to feeling it in you and you invite it it’s not in any way to get rid of it and as that happens it becomes more of its natural expression rather than the expression that people use to control you when you were a kid or to control you in society and not to say that they’re trying to control you because they were bad you know they were just passing on what they had been learned what they had learned yeah yeah and so this brings me to another question which is how we relate to others when others are feeling shame uh you know when somebody comes up and they get they give us an apology with a bunch of Shame and we talked about in the last episode how that feels to receive and so if let’s let’s say somebody in our lives is repeating a shame Loop and you know maybe the actions that they’re taking that shame Loop are hurting us maybe it’s maybe it’s an employee who’s you know not delivering or not being honest or maybe it’s a partner or maybe it’s a brother who’s addicted to some drug and there’s this shame Loop and you see somebody in it what’s what’s a way to be with them in that shame yeah there’s kind of two things there the first one is if I just see somebody in shame so like the way Tara and I have decided to raise our kids is that we don’t shame them we don’t punish them and we don’t shame them and what I’ve noticed in them is that they will shame themselves like we don’t have to we don’t have to do anything when they do something that is not in alignment with their moral compass man they will shame themselves and sometimes they’ll even shame themselves when I’m like that’s that’s ridiculous like that like please don’t and I will literally say that to them I’m like I see that you’re ashamed and I want I want you to know there’s nothing in me that wants you to be ashamed you’re welcome to be ashamed and I can be with you while you’re ashamed but I just want you to know there’s nothing in me that wants you to be ashamed and get just like imagine hearing that from your parent you know in a moment of Shame like it’s makes me like Misty inside to just think that I’m able to give that gift to my girls so there’s that and so and I think that’s so if you just see somebody in shame to be able to stand in love and say there’s nothing to be ashamed of is great with that said and and even when people do really have done some pretty bad things to me out of their own neuroses or whatever and you get a lot of that as a coach you know I will say to them hey I don’t want you to do that again and I might even stop our relationship and I don’t want you to feel ashamed and the reason I don’t want them to feel ashamed is because that’s just going to recreate the behavior and if they can feel my love then hopefully that behavior becomes less prevalent in their life now if somebody’s in a shame Loop and they are doing something over and over again and it’s creating that bad habit or it’s locking that bad habit in place then I think it’s usually best to just draw boundaries it’s not to try to save them from it it’s to be clear and honest with them and say Hey you know I don’t want you to be ashamed and I don’t want this kind of behavior in my life and so when you’re ready to not have this kind of behavior you’re always welcome here if somebody’s in a loop that can be really devastating for their lives and for yours I mean that is drug addiction that is that is constantly stealing from somebody and it’s it’s that kind of a behavior and so for me I I just draw boundaries around it I don’t and it doesn’t make sense it doesn’t help them for me to be codependent with them on it yeah one thing that you mentioned in the way that you relate to your daughters was you’re like I I don’t want you to feel shame you’re also welcome to feel the shame if you want to and I think that’s an important component here because otherwise people could be like coming from a place of trigger and frustration with somebody who’s in a shame cycle around them be like stop feeling shame and then that can just create a new whole new shame a whole new shame pattern around the shame yeah I did that once or twice yeah exactly yeah their shame was so uncomfortable for me that I wanted them to stop it you know which brings us back to apologies like hey I’m sorry that I have feelings around your shame and I’m trying to control you I have I have shame exactly yeah yeah and I think the thing about shame is it’s a bit of a paper dragon in the fact that our paper tiger I can’t remember which one is the phrase but there’s the it melts with love and it in a weird way I would even say that shame is it’s a version of love in the fact that it is care so it’s weird we feel shame and we interpret that as oh there’s something wrong with us there’s something bad there’s something that’s unacceptable in US and the only reason that we would think that is because we care to be good we care for other people like it is the thing that shows us that we love it is an action of love it is a it is a sign of our inherent goodness that we feel it and when you see it that way instead of as the way as like this horrific thing that you want to get rid of it really can transform and the way that it looks when it transforms is it it just kind of becomes a natural guide rails about how you want to live your life and if you you know if you do that it’s going to feel crappy so you don’t you don’t want to do that and so it’s just like that but it’s not based on what other people said it’s based on your love and how you want to be in the world not based on some weird authority figure who needed to have you know people act a certain way so they can feel safe and in that sense it feels like there’s sort of a natural progression of things where when you’re when you’re a child it makes sense for your parents your family your tribe to install a new the understanding of what is or isn’t accepted or what will or will not get you ousted and then as you as you develop and mature as an adult you get to develop your own inner compass and like connect more and more to that to that Compass yourself and inspect that shame and test it out and see what really actually feels good now that you understand the world a little bit more you’ve you’ve lived in it sometime and then that locus of that internal Compass becomes yours and not something that you’ve just adopted from the outside yeah the only thing I’d change about that is that my experience with my daughters is that the moral compass is in them you know I wouldn’t say right from the start but it starts developing around six five six years old and there’s this natural desire to be to be good you know if if they haven’t been traumatized if they haven’t been shamed you know like right if you just allow them to figure it out and listen to themselves they’d learn this thing very naturally it’s a you know they want to love and be loved humans want to love and be loved and you traumatize them you beat them up you tell them that they’re bad and they will believe it and then they will stop getting they will not be in touch with that desire to love and be loved and start trying to make up with it for control or dominance or violence or whatever right so all those things just delay the onset or perpetually perhaps forever delay the onset or stunt the onset of that that internal compass compass and it’s natural for it to arise much earlier than we might expect if we’re bought into the belief systems that shame is a you know shame is a tool for social justice or shame is the way that we teach people how to operate in society yeah so one thing that what I’ve noticed also is that uh and something we’ve talked about before is that one way to to relieve some shame in our system is to share it uh if we’ve been in a codependent pattern with somebody just be like hey you know I know that yeah I’ve been trying to control you and I realize I’ve actually just been avoiding my own shame and just just noting it and saying that can be a way for the whole thing to just start dissolving in US absolutely that’s what AAA is built on that 12-step programs are built on that promise right yeah absolutely a lot of group work is built on the premise of like oh if I bring my shame out into the light and let people see it especially if those people still love me and can still accept me then the shame can vanish yeah so as we close this episode my invitation here is that uh I’m going to add all the things that I wrote in my notebook last night that I’m ashamed of into our show notes and I also invite anybody else to go to our website art of accomplishment.com podcast and there’s a feedback Forum there you could just say hey here’s some use a fictitious name if you want no name we’re not going to use names in the in those show notes and as they come in I’ll just add them to the list and then you can go check out and see what all the different kinds of shames that people have had that they’ve sent in and see where some of them might show up in you and be like wow I hadn’t even thought of that one but yeah that one’s real for me that’s cool and also when you’re going through them and you go that’s ridiculous and anybody who’s ashamed of that and that’s ridiculous any evaluation into that know that there’s somebody out there looking at your Shameless thinking the same thing they’re like they shouldn’t be ashamed of that that’s just human that’s just natural awesome what a pleasure what a good idea thanks for coming up with that one Brett yeah all right thank you Joe thanks everybody for listening yeah thank you thanks for listening to the art of accomplishment if you enjoyed what you heard today please subscribe and rate US on your podcast app we’d love your feedback so feel free to send us questions or comments you can reach out to us join our newsletter or check out our courses at Art of accomplishment.com