Now today, I had a conversation with my neighbor as if he were a house guest, and I was like, “Hi, I am Marti. I live over there.” And he’s like, “I know.” And it wasn’t until I walked away that I realized why he was looking at me so strangely, and I went into a wave of shame that made me want to plunge my head into the nearest swampy bog, because we have a few of those in the Pennsylvania forest, and just allow fish to pick at me to somehow compensate for my terrible sins. You know waves of shame. They’re icky, they’re toxic, they’re full of self-flagellation and self-criticism, and they’re not easy to escape. This is a particular form of that anxiety I talk about that just twists around itself. And oh my, I was in it. And I wasn’t just saying things about, “Well, that was a foolish thing to do.”

It was like, “No, I am always an idiot. I’m such a loser. How could I do such a thing?” Endlessly thinking about how much the neighbor must detest and look down on me for this ridiculous mistake. This, by the way, is not the first time it’s happened. When I lived in California, there was a couple who lived next door to my property, which was still pretty long away, far way away. But one day they came walking along, and I don’t know what happened to his face. I think maybe he was attacked by chickens or something? Anyway, he had a lot of little scars on his face and stitches, and he usually wore a mustache and a beard. Someone had shaved that and then put band-aids all over his face. So, I introduced myself to this couple and made a long conversation not realizing they were people I knew well, because here’s the thing y’all, I can remember a lot of details about a lot of things, but I don’t really remember my neighbors very well. It’s just a thing.

I think it’s because when I was a child, my siblings and I were very ashamed of our house, and we tried never to let people see the house and not to know anybody near the house. We had a crazy messed up tiny house with 10 people living in it, and we were deeply, deeply ashamed of it. So, I get fuzzy around areas where neighborhoods and neighbors are involved. So, that’s one of my waves of shame. And it repeats, right? I keep remembering other times I’ve done similar things and reasons I was ashamed to talk to neighbors, and it just redoubles. It pulls in all this energy that you’ve given to it for years and years and years.

As Brene Brown says, guilt is about our actions. Oh, I shouldn’t have done that. Shame is about who we are. It’s like, the only reason you wouldn’t recognize a neighbor is that you’re a horrible person who doesn’t consider her fellow humans enough to pay any attention to what they look like. So, shame attacks us at the level of basic self-identity. But the nice thing about it is that we’ve all had them, and the quickest way to get out of a shame wave is to go directly in opposition to what it wants you to do, because what shame wants you to do is keep secrets and hide things. So by telling you what I did this morning, I actually reduced the level of my shame. I mean, I’m embarrassed to talk about it, but then I realize, oh, well, all right, now I’m telling people about it and it’s out there. And the need for the shame inside me, which is to keep my awfulness a secret from the world, it really, it loses all its punch because now, well now you know.

And I have had to use openness against shame many times in my life. I did it when I was public about having been sexually abused as a child. I did it when I was publicly came out as gay, even though that was not a big, I was already gay by the time anyone knew who I was. I mean, I’d already come out. But it was a big deal for me because I didn’t even know I was gay till I was 30 something, 29. And then, there was the whole, now I have not just one partner, but two. See, I imagine you all just dropping off like leaves in the fall. What? That’s bizarre. How disgusting. That’s my projection of how people would react, even though we are probably the most domestic, tame little family that you’ll ever find living in the Pennsylvania woods. So, openness is a great way out of shame. Byron Katie says, “The thing you most want people to know about you is also the thing you least want them to know about you.”

So, if you write down the thing I least want people to know about me is, write that down, and then change it to the thing I most want people to know about me is, and you’ll find that they’re always the same thing. And it takes a little courage to break through the fear of being revealed, but it helps to know that other people have been there. So, one thing I do when I’m having a wave of shame is I remember these stories that were published online. Someone asked people to send in their most embarrassing moments, and there were three that always stand out in my memory. One is that someone was at the dentist and he went to put on one of those little bibs, and she thought he was coming in for a hug and a kiss. So, she embraced him and smooched him as he was putting on her little bib, and somehow by telling people that, I think it took the sting out of it for her.

Another one is when there was a young man and he was crossing the street, and he ran straight into an elderly lady who’s crutching her way across the street, and it knocked her down. And into his head came two conflicting things, which involved a word I won’t say, but one of those was, “I am so effing sorry.” And the other one was, “Are you hurt?” But what came out of his mouth was, “Are you effing sorry?” And he basically was still living that down 20 years later. And then, there’s a story about a guy who, he was walking along in a metropolitan area and he really had to pee, and there was a public library there. And he thought, “Oh, I can go use the lavatory there.”

But then he remembered that he had a $5 outstanding late return fee at that very library, so he didn’t dare use the lavatory without paying the fine. So he came in and he was like, he was going to pay his fine and he was going to use the lavatory and everything would be great. But as he went in, he realized the lavatories, the restrooms were under construction and he couldn’t use them anyway. But for some reason, he was just going on pure momentum and he walked up to the librarian at the counter and he slapped down a $5 bill. And then he said, “I have to pee,” and walked out.

I just really like that story. This reason this is funny is that when you’re on the edge of your own self-destructive impulses and someone else shows up openly and reveals their vulnerability, the release of your own anxiety actually makes you laugh. And then, you realize that what you’ve got when you have done something shameful is the seed of a great funny story. So, the more embarrassing the moment, the more ashamed you are, the more it can be turned into a liberating kind of humor that actually helps people feel safe. And for that reason, I thought, well, I just, I don’t mind my wave of shame. It took me, I was out there walking for an hour and it barely went down. By the time I got back, I thought, “I will tell everyone in the world,” and that usually helps.

So technically, psychologists tell us that when we’re stuck in shame, there are three things that we think about ourselves, and this is another way you can crack in if you’ve got some really intractable shame in there, like you’ve done something you feel really bad about. The three things that make you just shrouded in shame are believing that what you did in that moment was personal, permanent, and pervasive. So, instead of being just a temporary thing, a thing that happened, I immediately go to, “I always do that. I don’t recognize my neighbors, they think I hate them. What’s wrong with me?” It goes to these huge generalizations, always, never a lot of things that are simply not true. It doesn’t happen every time, but shame makes things feel permanent in our self-concept. Then, there is the personal. “Only I do this. This is my problem, and it comes from me,” when actually, a lot of people make memory errors and that kind of thing. But we become the worst things in the world to ourselves when we’re ashamed.

And then, the third P is pervasive, that this flaw in us pollutes everything we are and everything we do, and it starts making us more anxious. I’m getting ready to do this, and I’m like, oh, I look like crap from being out in the heat and sweating all morning. The light’s bad, and oh my gosh, can they see that behind me is a total jumble of thrown away paintings, because this is my art space? I get really anxious about negative things pervading everything about me. So, what we need to do when we’re stuck in a wave of shame to weather that thing, we’ve got to start picking intellectual holes. If telling funny stories doesn’t work, if sharing doesn’t work, if openness doesn’t work, start using your brain to pick holes in the story that whatever you see in yourself negatively is permanent, personal and pervasive.

So, think of something you did that you were ashamed of. Is it something that always happens? Because that’s what we say, “I always do that.” Do you really always do that? I have actually correctly identified my neighbors in the past. I plan to do it in the future. In fact, if I see a client that I only knew for an hour six years ago, I can usually not only remember them, but I remember their whole story. So, maybe I’m just using my memory selectively, but I don’t always forget everybody. Oh, I feel so bad. Okay, wait, wait, wait. I’m coming out of it again.

Okay. I’m going to pick holes in the story that it’s personal, that it’s just me. I’m hoping somebody is out there going, “I’ve done things like that too, Marti. It’s okay. It’s all of us.” It really is all of us. That’s what… Almost all comedy is about people doing things that make them embarrassed or ashamed or based on misconceptions, and whatever’s most personal is most general. We’ve all been there. And then, the pervasive thing. Does this really, this inability to remember who the hell people are, is it pervading every other aspect of my life? No. I could actually draw a scene. If I draw a scene for you, I can draw it again from memory 10 months later and get it almost perfectly right. My memory is not always giving me false information. I actually have a pretty good memory. I’m just, I’m focused more on what the dog looks like than on what my neighbor looks like.

Regrettable, perhaps, but at least I’m not forgetting everybody. I’m not so self-centered that nothing but myself is recognizable. Interestingly, being caught in a wave of shame makes you very obsessed with yourself, and that does not help anyone. And this is why my wonderful DEI coach Yvonne Jackson just said, “Enough with the shame, it’s not helping anyone.” And I went, “Oh. Oh, it’s not helping the world?” “No,” she said, “It’s making the world a worse place.” And I was like, “Well then, all right.” And I sort of felt myself bodily pick up my shame and say, “Well, if it’s going to hurt people, to hell with it.” And I just did it again. And I feel much better, I feel much better after talking to you. I’m so glad we met like this. Let’s see if we have any comments and things to talk about here. Huh? No.

Let’s see. I’m going to go over here. Cleo says, “This definitely not just you.” Mary says, “My parents use shame as a method of control. How do those of us who got shamed more often than usual move past it?” What a really, really good question. So, the first thing is to, this is what I would do. Go find a child, a picture of a child, a child on the internet, a real child in your vicinity, a little child, and look at this little kid and realize this is a human being in a tiny little body with very few years under their belts to have learned how to do anything. And they’re always trying their best. And they’re always, all children want to be good. All children want to be loved. So, would you shame that child? Would you deliberately slap that child across the face and say, “You are a bad person.”

I don’t think so. So then, you can use this whole permanent and pervasive thing. You can extend that tendency of the brain to generalize. You can say, “If one 5-year-old is not culpable, if one 5-year-old should not be ashamed of not knowing everything, then I can look back on my own 5-year-old self, and no matter what my family did or said to me, I was not earning that shame. That shame had nothing to do with me. That was their shame.” And they probably got it from when they were little kids too. I’m not going to blame anyone, but I am going to, imagine picking up the shame and giving it back to them, because no child deserves to be shamed. So, that’s what I would do it.

Michelle says, “As my trauma increases, so does shame. The trauma immobilizes me, and then I feel shame related to freezing, making me freeze. What can I do?” This is really an interesting thing. I was just reading how shame is the last emotion to depart after an incident of trauma. So, if you’re working through trauma, and we all have micro traumas, many of us have macro traumas. You work with the anger, you work with the grief, you work with the sorrow that you underwent something you shouldn’t have had to go through. So, you go through all of those, and be patient with yourself. Be so kind and patient. The wave of shame may be there for a long time. For me, with sexual abuse, it was there for a very long time, the shame. And the one thing that got me through it, one was the exercise. I knew that other people who had been sexually abused and who’d been open about it, I did not feel that they were deserving of shame, so I was able to constantly refer that back to myself.

And then, the other thing that I did was I knew that shame would be one of the last things to go. I knew that intellectually. I read stuff. Read stuff about whatever traumatized you, and it will talk to you about the process of healing from each kind of trauma. There’s really good stuff out there now. And then, when I got to the place where I was sort of over the anger, the grief, the confusion, all of that, I was able to start very gently picking holes in the story that there was something about me that was permanent, personal and pervasive that had, number one, caused the trauma to happen. Little kids think they cause, all of us have a tendency to think that traumas that happened to us were caused by us. Kind of gives us a feeling of control, but it’s not true. so ultimately, it’s self-defeating.

So, I just, I started picking holes in the idea that I caused things, that I deserved to feel bad. I just would work with one little belief at a time that was a component of my shame. And as I found my way to a truer thought, a truer sense of what had happened, each time I came from a thought that was untrue, like everything is my fault to something that was more true for me, we all have things that happened to us that aren’t our fault, I could feel physically my body re-centering and my breath getting deeper. I could feel my muscles relaxing. So, be really observant of how shame affects your body. And then, notice that all the information that is making the body react this way is coming from your brain, right? Shame does not come from the outside world. There’s no such thing.

The frogs and the foxes out there, they’re not feeling shame because they, I don’t know, got nicked by a car. I don’t know. But humans alone, well, that’s not true. They think apes feel shame too, and certainly dogs do. Sorry, back to my point. The stories in our heads about how we’re being viewed, that’s most of the impetus for the shame. And then, the feeling of that landing in the body is this contracted, exhausting burden. You notice that. That is not the feeling of the truth. And you go looking for truer thoughts like, “Okay, I don’t always do this. It’s not permanent. It’s not just me, it’s not personal. It’s not everything I do. It’s not pervasive.” Start to find little truths that settle and settle and settle. And as you’re kind to the parts that have been traumatized, kindness is absolutely paramount. It is the antidote to just about everything.

And as you become more true in your thoughts, and you notice that your body’s reacting with things like relaxation, comfort, joy even, it gains momentum and you start to feel the truth of the situation. And the wave of shame starts to fall behind you and you swim on to better horizons. Okay. Kate says, “This is so healing. I feel deep shame for not having a positive relationship with either parent. They don’t treat me very well, but every day I review this and feel terrible, even though I know there’s nothing new to figure out. How can I move through the shame of this? It does help to remind myself that I’m a good person, but still, I go through the shame every day.” This was so me. This is so me. I left my whole community of origin and all my friends from high school because when you leave Mormonism, when you’re raised in a very fervent Mormon community or any fervent religious community, and then you leave, everybody thinks you’re bad.

And they literally told me, “You are bad. You’re going, not just to hell, but to outer darkness.” It’s even worse than hell. And I would go every single day. I would go through the shame of having all these people think that about me and taking it on myself. If so many people thought that about me and I didn’t know that many other people who didn’t think that about me, they never talked about it, it must be true. This is another thing that children think about shame. If people say that I should be ashamed, they must be telling the truth. But I refer you again to the experience of your body when you’re thinking a thought that shames you. It is not the body’s response to truth. It is the body’s response to a lie. So, Barb, you can get every day and say, “Oh, wave of shame still upon me. All right. Bring it, bring it, bring it.”

Okay. Are there other people who have had to break ties with their family of origin, their people of origin? Yes. Are all those people, should I shame all of them? Would I say they’re all bad and horrible? No. So, how could I be the only person out of all the people with difficult situations, I’m the one who deserves the shame of thinking I’m the bad one? It doesn’t track. It doesn’t make sense. Do I have other relationships that I’ve kept going? Even with my own personal journal? Do I have, am I kind to animals? Find the places where the bad qualities you ascribe to yourself are not permanent, they are not pervasive, and they’re not personal. They’re just things that happen in nature. And you can start to let go, let go, let go.

So, Cleo says, “Those of us with a lot of trauma and shame, putting yourself out there is super tough. You’ve mentioned step-check-step. Any thoughts on how this all works together?” Oh, great, Cleo. So, step-check-step is a description of a method for revealing yourself without becoming completely vulnerable. So, very often, people who’ve been mired in shame because it’s very childlike, when they do tell the truth, they vomit it. It bursts out of them like a volcano, and they tell everybody every bad thing they’ve ever done. And there’s a kind of “ooh: response. I certainly have been there. Yeah. So, the step-check-step method is that, for example, I come here, I talk to y’all. I say, “I didn’t recognize my neighbor. I’m so deeply ashamed.” And then I say, people say, “Oh, this is so helpful. It’s helping me.” And I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m not the only person who ever did this.”

Even though I’m getting quite long in the tooth and I’ve been doing this for a while, it’s still so good to hear it right after I did something I’m ashamed to have done. So, I put it out there with y’all, and then I check. I check the comments, are people hating me? Maybe a few, I don’t see them. Maybe somebody’s being nice and getting rid of them, but there are many that are like, “Yep, been there, done that.” Woo, thank you. Now, I’m going to go another step. So you tell a little, you check the response, you make sure there’s not more shame coming at you, that the burden feels lighter, not heavier, and then you take another step. Okay, I talked to you about forgetting my neighbor, now I’m going to talk to you about being gay. Now I’m going to say I have two partners for the last eight years, and some of you might not even know that because it’s really scary for me to come out and say that even though I really, really like my life and my family.

So, I’m checking, I’m stepping, I’m checking, I’m stepping. And look, Nomad Rose says, “We love you,” and it just makes me want to cry happy tears because when you find your people, Barb noticed this, they’re very forgiving and they’re very accepting. And there’s so much love to be had, and we keep trying to get it from the people who messed us up in the first place. That’s the last place we need to go. But we’ve got a community here where we can love each other and where we can be open and honest and where we just all come. You can drag me out of the waves of shame and towel me off, and I’m like, “Yeah, my hair’s still sweaty, but I feel better now.” And I can do the same for you. And Dance and Devotions say, “There’s just nothing to forgive.” Everybody is just bringing such sweetness.

And you know what? That is permanent, personal and pervasive. You are a being of love. You really are, through and through. You are always trying to do your best. I don’t believe there’s a single person out there who gets up in the morning thinking, “I’m going to try to hurt people and ruin lives.” I think you’re always trying to do your best. And I think, yeah, that it pervades everything you do. That love pervades everything you do because I’m looking at the messages you’re sending me, and so much love has got to end up filtering into everything around it. So, with that, let’s do, I know we’re right at time, so I just wanted to do our meditation now and give it a special commitment, a special devotion to the parts of us that have felt shamed. The parts of us we’re afraid to show, the parts of us that feel isolated, alone and not so good. So, let’s ask the question. Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

This just sets us into the groove, the alpha waves of the brain. Can I imagine the distance between my eyes and the back of my head? Is it possible for me to imagine everything, all the space between the bottom of my neck and the top of my head? Can I imagine the space inside the atoms going down through my body, the atoms that make up my heart, my lungs, my whole torso? Can I sense the stillness under which all the activity of the material world is occurring? Can I hear the silence under all the sounds? Can I feel the love that holds all the pain and all the shame and all the fear, and filters it with kindness, waiting for us to let go of our illusions? Can I imagine that this love is the only timeless thing?

I love feeling you people, and I love that you show up, and I am hugging every single one of you out there right now and thanking you so profoundly for being my people and my friends and all part of one big self. No shame, my darlings, no shame. We’ve got better things to do. I will see you next time on the Gathering Room. Bye for now.