In This Episode:
Let’s explore the complex emotions that come with the turn of the new year. This week, we reflect on self-forgiveness and the often unspoken struggle with guilt and shame, particularly when it comes to our New Year resolutions. With wisdom from Brené Brown, and Brianna Wiest, I break down the distinction between feeling bad about an action versus feeling unworthy as a person. Together, we’ll ask the hard questions about our feelings and whether they truly resonate with our values or if they’re imposed by external standards.
Resources:
Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Writing Classes, and Workshops
Transcript:
Hey everyone, happy new year. At the time of this recording, we are officially one week into 2024 and, oh my goodness, I see so much stuff on the internet of people constantly dying to change themselves, and so I figured that I would take some of the content from my prior New Year’s Eve workshop and kind of make it into a podcast episode, because I really feel like there’s a lot of energy that I see online of people just really being hard on themselves, and so I just thought that maybe having some conversation, a one-sided conversation around self-forgiveness, might hopefully be helpful to someone listening. And so first I want to kind of talk through some terms, and I really really the big one that I want to talk about is the difference between guilt versus shame, and I’m pulling this from Brené Brown’s work, right?
01:12
So when we’re talking about shame, shame, according to Brené Brown, is a focus on yourself, right? Guilt is more so focused on behavior. So if you experience shame, it’s essentially like you’re saying I am bad, I am not worthy of connection, right? Like I’m a terrible mother daughter, I’m a terrible parent, terrible friend versus guilt is you’re separating yourself from the behavior and you can recognize that the behavior is not in alignment with your values, right. So you can say I did something bad, I made a mistake, and you can feel guilt appropriately regarding that behavior. But shame is when you put that all on yourself and that can be really heavy and that can really separate you from wanting to connect with others. And then you’ve even got, say, feelings like resentment or anger towards ourselves. And really, Nedra Glover Tawwab, when she talks about anger in her books that boundaries find peace, she’s defining anger as a feeling of hostility or annoyance, right, and that it can be expressed either inwardly or outwardly. So when we’re talking about what that might look like towards ourselves, maybe we engage in self-injurious behaviors, right, maybe we are returning to habits that we know don’t serve us, returning to people we know don’t serve us. You know that the way that we’re living is hurting us and we just continue in that direction because we’re angry at ourselves and we don’t think that we deserve anything better.
02:37
And so, you know, I would invite you to take a moment and think about what area of your life, you may be feeling some of these complicated feelings towards yourself. Right Like, where might you be feeling shame towards yourself? Where might you be feeling guilt or anger? And then sit with that for a second, because I’m not saying that these feelings are necessarily bad feelings to have. What I am going to say, though, is that these feelings are definitely providing you with a lot of valuable information, which I’ve said in the past. Right Like, you can absolutely get curious about any feelings that you have, especially if they are uncomfortable, because by uncovering what they’re telling you, you can probably move into action and work to maybe change the situation, or it might give you the opportunity to move into acceptance. Right so, like, for example and Brianna Wiess, her book the Mountain is you, is a really excellent resource on how to interpret emotions and what our different emotions are telling us, and so kind of pulling between her book and also some of Bernan Brown’s work.
03:43
First, like, let’s talk a little bit about guilt. Right so, guilt’s purpose is essentially just our body, letting us know that we did something that doesn’t align with our values. Notice, I’m not saying right or wrong why not, jessica? Because right or wrong is subjective. Anybody can see that something is right, and then the person next to them will say that it’s right. And there have been things deemed legal by governments that today most people would say are wrong. Right so, for example, segregation, it was legal, but was it right? No. So just to kind of give you that example.
04:21
So when can guilt become problematic for us? Right, guilt becomes a problematic emotion for us when we have not slowed down to determine what is right or wrong for us. And so we are sitting around feeling guilty about something that we never actually thought was wrong for us to do, but we were just taught that it was wrong for us to do. And so we’re here feeling guilty over some sort of basically social programming that we adopted, without actually determining if it’s something that does or doesn’t align with our values. So I mean questions that you can ask yourself, right, when you are experiencing guilt, like, hmm, is there something that I can admit to having done wrong based on my values, that I can correct moving forward, or is it something that I actually didn’t do wrong? Right, like, those are good questions to slow down and ask yourself and like, especially if the behavior completed does not fall out of alignment with you, can you give yourself permission to reframe this narrative around your feelings? Right, moving on to shame. So shame, right Shame.
05:39
Brianna Wiess talks about how it’s like a dark side of embarrassment. Like embarrassment, if you feel embarrassed, your body’s letting you know that you did something you’re not proud of. Right, you might feel like a little sinking feeling in your stomach. You might feel tightness in your throat. It depends on every individual is different, but when it turns into shame, shame is problematic because it makes us falsely believe that we’re not worthy of connecting to others. Right, and, like I said earlier, we take on this mindset of I am bad, I’m not worthy, etc. And that’s that’s hard and that’s heavy on the heart. And so if you are experiencing shame, right, like what are some questions that you can ask yourself?
06:20
Again, kind of going back to the same guilt question am I feeling shame about something that doesn’t align with my values, or is this something that I was taught that was wrong but it actually isn’t right? For example, addiction is a great one. A lot of people who struggle with addiction carry around this heavy shame that they are, you know, not worthy of love, not worthy of getting help, because they have believed the stigma that was passed on to them without stopping down and slowing down and thinking well, it’s actually not my fault, maybe there isn’t anything really wrong with me, right? So just something to think about. Another question that might be helpful to ask yourself let’s say you did do something that is actually outside of your values. What if you recognized it and took accountability for what happened, right?
07:14
Brené Brown talks a lot about this in terms of the shame resilience piece, and a part of that work that she says is that you, basically you own your shit, right? What if you owned it? What if you owned your shit? And if you do choose to own it, do you have a safe space to reach out to somebody else, to another human, and talk about this experience, right? How would you treat a loved one who was in this situation? Could you? Could you practice that love that you would show them, but turn it around and practice it towards yourself?
07:49
What about if you’re experiencing some sort of resentment towards yourself, right? Or anger towards yourself, right? When you’re feeling that kind of emotion internally towards you self-directed, I mean, your body is basically letting you know that you’ve set some sort of unrealistic expectation for yourself, right? And when the expectations we set for ourselves are not immediately attainable. We’re breaking trust with ourselves, right, and so we’re hurting our own relationship with ourselves. And so questions you can ask yourself.
08:20
I feel like I said yourself a lot, but whatever, what expectations did I have for myself? Were my expectations reasonable and within the scope of my control? If they were within my control, can I break this goal down into something that I might be more confident in achieving in smaller increments? And then let’s say, this thing that I want to achieve is outside of my control. How can I practice acceptance, say, for example, in my case, when I was younger I used to run a lot and I’ve hurt my knees. I’ve had like six knee surgeries, like in my twenties and early thirties, and I can’t run anymore. I honestly I’m pretty confident that if someone held a gun to my head and told me run or die, I would probably have to die because I literally cannot mechanically run, like it’s just not a motion I can do anymore.
09:10
For a time I became resentful at myself and angry at myself because I had hurt my knees, but honestly, back in those days I didn’t really understand what was going on with my body. I was not caring for my body in any way, shape or form. To be honest, and at this point, like I feel that resentment or I feel that anger because I want to run, like I would love to be able to get on a treadmill or go outside on a trail and run, just run. But I can’t do that anymore and so this is outside of my control, and so the only option that I have is to practice acceptance and have peace over the situation. Or I can be continuously like feeling the pain of being resentful and angry towards myself, and that’s not going to be helpful. But I wouldn’t have this self-awareness if I hadn’t slowed down to kind of talk this through and ask myself is running within the sphere of my control and it’s just not right.
10:14
Same thing, going into more specifically anger right, like anger is when we experience it like, let’s say, towards another person. It’s typically because they have violated a boundary that maybe we didn’t even know existed, or maybe we did know it existed and the boundary still was violated. But you know what? We can violate boundaries towards ourselves as well. We might violate our own boundaries, and so when we feel angry towards ourselves or anger towards ourselves, we’re learning that maybe there’s something that I need to take action on. Maybe there’s something that I actually really care about that I need to work more on.
10:49
Right, you can ask yourself what are my core values? How did my behavior violate them? How would I treat a loved one who made the same mistake? Right? What limits do I need to set with myself moving forward, and what support might I need? Right? And so, just kind of using these reflection questions to look at these different emotions, we can move from the narrative that these are just terrible emotions to have and gosh, how can I numb them, how can I escape them? Oh, I’m such a messed up person. Why am I angry and resentful at myself? We can move from that narrative to okay, what information can I pull right? What can I do now that I know this about myself?
11:36
And so I say all of this because it’s January 7th and you may be listening to this and you started on some sort of a goal and it’s already not happening and you’re a perfectly fine human, exactly where you are. But especially if you’re feeling some frustration about some of these goals, I invite you to like get curious, just there, right, like why are you trying to accomplish what you are trying to accomplish. I always ask people that where did wanting this goal come from and is it in alignment with what your values are Right, and if you’re finding that you have these complicated feelings coming up, then dig deeper, get more curious. But again, if you are feeling frustrated with yourself, if you’re feeling like man, I already broke my trust with myself, then maybe break down that goal just a little bit more. And also just so you know, not all goals, I don’t know what the goals are that you’re thinking about, right, but maybe some goals are meant to be like left alone for a little bit and you can focus on just doing one thing and doing that one thing. Well, there’s always the people that like, try to do 50 different things at the start of the year and none of them get done. Well, so you know, don’t hesitate to make those kinds of decisions.
13:00
But anyway, with that being said, I hope that you have a great rest of your day. Thank you for listening. Again. January 27 starts my bottomless to sober book study, so I hope that you will join to check out the body keeps the score, and you can sign up for that on my website bottomless to sobercom. Thank you so much and take care. Hey, if you are enjoying what you are listening to, I invite you to subscribe and share the podcast. But also go to my website, bottomless to sobercom, and find out other opportunities to work with me, from free workshops to writing classes to one to one life coaching opportunities. You can schedule a free consultation for that. Everything is available at bottomless to sobercom. See you then.
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