Shame, Vulnerability and Self-Worth

In the process of expanding my understanding and expression of myself through dance, I encountered an author whose work would come to significantly influence my development. I first came across Brené Brown in a TED presentation she gave on vulnerability. I’ll insert it here in case you’ve never seen it.

On the one hand what she said seems so straightforward as to be self-apparent, yet at the same time for me it was as if a curtain was lifted from my mind and I could finally begin to understand some things that had never made sense. The connection between vulnerability and shame fit my life situation very accurately.

Many months after watching that first video, someone shared with me a copy of Brown’s book Daring Greatly. Subtitled How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead, this book proved truly transformational. I’m not usually one to read books like this, but I found it so powerful that after returning the copy that had been loaned to me, I went and bought my own and read it again, this time making tons of marks and notes as I read.

As in her TED presentation, Brown draws the connection between shame, vulnerability and weakness. I had never thought of shame before I began to explore my identity, but her discussion of it resonated with my own experience in life. Why had I never shared this aspect of myself with anyone before?  Because I was ashamed of myself and afraid of what people would think of me. “Shame,” she writes, “is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”  That describes very well how I perceived myself most of my life. I’m not going to unpack for you all the ways that this impacted my development as a person and my actions throughout my life, but it most certainly kept me from developing confidence in myself, from taking risks and from revealing my deepest thoughts and struggles. I believed in my heart that I was not enough. As she writes elsewhere, “If we don’t come to terms with our shame, our struggles, we start believing that there’s something wrong with us—that we’re bad, flawed, not good enough—and even worse, we start acting on those beliefs.”

I believe now that part of the reason I chose to become a missionary was in the unspoken, unrecognized belief that if somehow I could do enough good as a missionary it would make me worthy, acceptable, good and specifically that I could be loved by God. Naturally when that all fell apart it left me feeling only more worthless and flawed. I think that the Christian church often communicates this very message. Even as Christians speak of God’s unconditional love for people, they also insist on emphasizing that we’re so fundamentally flawed that there’s no hope for us. So we inculcate in people, at least people like me, a sense of shame so deep that it cannot ever be erased. And if, like me, your identity lies outside of traditional understandings of gender, that only makes you even more flawed. Since you cannot talk about it, your sense of shame becomes ever deeper.

Brown argues that we must learn to take off the armor we put on to protect ourselves from being wounded, from revealing our shame, from being vulnerable, if we are going to live full and authentic lives. This challenge, coming at a time when I was beginning to reach an understanding of myself, provided an open window to my dark internal prison. All of my life shame, the belief that I was unworthy of love, had kept me from loving myself, from opening myself fully to others, from embracing who I am. I robbed myself and others of the richer experience of a full and authentic me. As I read and processed Brown’s book I began to reorient my thinking from “I’m not enough. I’m unworthy” to “I am enough. I am worthy of love.” It’s a message I had to tell myself over and over (and still do!) but like water dripping on a stone it began to have an effect. I began to find the courage to love and be myself and to open myself to others, ever so slowly and hesitantly, but the door had finally opened a crack.