Joe offers a simple proof: think of any bad habit you’ve had for a decade. You can guarantee there is shame around it. If shame worked to change behavior, you would have stopped years ago. The thing you shame your child about is the thing you’ll be shaming them about for five or ten more years — because shame doesn’t change anything. It locks patterns in place.
Shame functions like a punch in the gut — it stops emotional movement. It prevents the fluidity that allows the nervous system to update and learn. When you beat yourself up for a behavior, you’re actually punishing yourself for noticing the behavior, which slows down the natural pendulation between understanding and not-understanding that constitutes real learning.
“Shame is absolutely an emotion that comes up that we don’t want to feel and so we try to avoid it, but at the same time shame is the thing that locks bad habits in place.”
The alternative is to fully feel the pattern without shame. Joe tells the story of a young woman who noticed herself manipulating boys. Rather than strategizing, she simply felt the experience fully the next time it happened — and stopped doing it, because it didn’t feel good. No action plan, no figuring out. Just awareness.
Related Concepts
- Shaming a behavior is the best way to guarantee it repeats
- Shame stagnates behavior rather than changing it
- Shame never changes behavior
- Shame addiction keeps you stuck in the patterns you regret
- Fully feeling a pattern ends it without figuring anything out