Episode 66 - Shame - Live from Seattle

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well what a year it's been everybody this is the final podcast of the year from us and the final bonus content from season three and we'll come back in january in the middle of january with season four this last one is a really special one it was the final gathering that we had of the year in seattle and it's on shame and i think it's gonna be meaningful to a lot of you so merry christmas and happy new year and we will talk to you at the beginning of the year much love everybody i was incredibly excited about kindergarten i lived on a small street i only had two friends who lived close by and as a little extroverted creative kid i was so excited to make new friends and when i got into the kindergarten classroom for the first time there were lots of other children i was very very excited and in the first couple of weeks we were out playing on the kindergarten playground in recess we were playing tag and i got i got tagged i was it i had that great honor and i figured out that i wasn't as fast a runner as literally anyone else in the class so once i was it i couldn't make anyone else it and the fastest boy in our class uh a couple of days later realized he could tag me and then run backwards in front of me and i still couldn't tag him which was quite ridiculous but i didn't mind because i had friends and we were all getting along and i was building a community and then this amazingly fast running good-looking kid said that my belly made waves like water when i ran and he started calling me water tank and so in kindergarten i got the nickname long before science mike of water tank because i moved like waves when i ran and as i got older and i had more experiences with my peers i learned to fear gym class being shirtless around other boys where they would make comments about the size and shape of my chest and my belly and i learned from my peers and from bullies that my body was something terrible something best hidden behind cloth and a c-shaped posture that bent to hide that which projects but that's okay because even though i didn't have friends my age at school the teachers were really nice to me really consistently so i would try to spend as much time as i could with the teachers during school hours except at every report card and at every year end there would be a conference with my parents where the teachers would tell my parents that i wasn't doing very well and that we should consider holding me back this year or had they considered putting me in a special learning class because i had trouble reading natural writing and so i learned that my inability to to to write on paper or remember things that i read or do arithmetic or all the other things that seem to come easily to other children meant that my mind was something that i should be ashamed of so as a as a pretty sad little kid but then something amazing happened really truly amazing in the early 1980s they started bringing computers into schools small problem teachers had no idea what to do with them no one had ever seen a computer they were like a science fiction mythology but i remember the first time they sat me down in front of a computer and i looked at these little squares covered in letters and you could just press a key and the letter would appear on screen with no effort at all you didn't have to know left from right it didn't matter if you thought of an e backwards the key would do it correctly every time and for the first time in my life i felt like i wasn't behind everyone else in fact less than two weeks after i started using computers in the seventh grade i'd learned to do basic programming by reading the manual from the computer i taught the computer to print my name over and over on screen which the teachers thought was voodoo witchcraft right no one could do this and so i learned like i may be pretty fat and ugly and i may be really dumb but no one understands these machines but i do and a funny thing happened when when friends and when society teach you that you should be ashamed of who you are how you look how you feel how you think any act of self acceptance is an act of rebellion but i had no beachhead with which to form a rebellion until i met the machines at which point i could do this amazing thing i could feel something good about myself and so believe it or not for the entirety of my life since i was seven years old the simple fact that i am good with machines has been the animating energy of my entire life and that's true today i write books i make podcasts i try to be emotionally vulnerable with people and invite them into self-acceptance and i'm usually under the illusion that i've overcome all that shame until today this very day preparing for this event i opened my carefully packed bags of equipment and realized with horror that i'd forgotten the power cable for the audio interface that records this very podcast it's kind of a big deal we told millions of people on the internet if it would come to seattle they could be part of a live podcast recording experience and i didn't bring the single most important and unreplaceable cable so of course i thought it's okay mike offer yourself grace like you would offer others we'll figure out a solution instead i went on a tirade in my own mind using language i would never use against another person i hopped in a lift and i went from music store to music store trying to find some other solution to our recording problem and in the third lift i lost it i started sobbing in the back of a ride chair very comfortable for the driver by the way and he said what's wrong and i said well i've got a thousand people coming into a room to record tonight only i left the cable we need to record they said well can you buy another one i said that's why i'm in this car can i tell you something i had decided about 3 45 to retire as science mike i was going to leave public work this is going to be my last appearance i'm not kidding because i realized that i am utterly without worth or value and that the thing i fear the most that all these people who started to follow the work that i do would figure out the truth i don't have anything of value to offer them because i forgot a cable self-acceptance is hard when the world has taught you to be ashamed and it only takes a tough day to cause crumbling down the edifice of self-worth we built around ourself to expose the gaping wound underneath so tonight we are going to talk about shame how it affects us how we respond to it and perhaps even how to be healthier people over time welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody [Music] all praise thanks and glory for the day of the disjoining if it weren't for that summer of the train that ran me into the tracks unleashing the unraveling those three years ago who knows perhaps i would have come to divorce stability and certainty come to conceive that my god was but the careful construction of 18 years steeped in christianity my god the teachings i'd heeded experience obedience devotion seated my god the male church leaders handed me the good the upstanding of integrity until i knew better of course until i found myself the beloved of he who'd been pastor leader mentor friend months my incarnation of christ's care he the planter of so much self assurance worth my unbelievable individual value laid out before me still in the same breath the drift into misuse abuse of position and power and earned intimacy in which he undressed and drank deeply from me shame needled ink into my skin years afraid of on-call flashbacks the vehicle of guilt the night unconscious brunei preaches that which i too find true guilt is the good adaptive constructive it's shame that is dangerous oh the everlasting shame a chameleon laid low ubiquitous tireless you've heard one you've heard them all lolita 101 his love for me true understanding the both ands disdain in full knowing woven of deeply sown friendship tenderness and care devotion communication vulnerability of all the best kind but the imbalance of power unchanged all to dust all the intricate relational workings only the strings of manipulation praise for the disjoining of locality no oneness of this man of god with god though i once met afford the manifestation and said otherwise my limbic system i knew to know better praise fuck him but praise what was my god but the collaboration cognition a city the crossroad of years in the church sermons service trips domestic and abroad every spiritual and religious teacher mentor friend praise for the trauma of undoing praise for the possibility of error praise for possibility that the god of my construction could be so very wrong so very oft so very short from that which is the liberation bears rest hope abounds a hope for more for different than the arguments of those who speak the loudest praise for the disjoining bursting of binaries gratitude for gray shame undone in the face of empathy a collision with grace i take my victory though the war is not yet won praise praise be [Applause] that was a poem by emily rutt [Music] this is hilary mcbride hillary mcbride is a phd candidate in counseling psychology doing research and clinical work in vancouver bc this week she releases her first book mother's daughters and body image learning to love ourselves as we are welcome hillary mcbride i'm really glad to be here with you um because shame is something that's actually been a big part of my story and a big part of why i'm a therapist now and i know that everybody in this room has a story and so i hope that that you see a little bit of me in the things that we talk about and you see a little bit of you and in that that there is an undoing of the aloneness that comes with shame before we start talking about shame i want to talk about the thing that shame sits upon which is human connection shame means nothing if we're not a species that thrives and desires to be seen and known one of the things that i say to my clients regularly is have you ever seen yourself have you ever seen what you look like and of course they often say yes i know exactly what i look like and i'll say but have you ever really seen your own face at which point they often say something like are you getting into some weird phenomenological stuff because can i just get the therapy and then uh and i'll say just think about it for a second i i have never seen my own face i've seen the reflection of my face but i've never seen my face i can only know what i look like based on the composite of images that is reflected back to me by the mirrors that i stare into and the same is true of what the self is when you think about the self it's it's quite a nebulous term i i've gotten to many arguments with many academics about what it is but generally the idea that i hold about self is that it's the composite of what it means to be us based on all of the mirrors that we've looked into in our lives and all of those mirrors are the relationships of the people that we love that we believed loved us and so what happens if those mirrors that you look into say you're good and lovable that you start to carry that as who you are that's the reflection that you've seen if the mirrors that you look back into say if only you looked a little bit more like this you'd be lovable then that's something that we end up carrying too and sometimes we can have mirrors that are cracked that we look into and those cracked mirrors maybe show parts of who we are but someone comes along and says no this is what you're like and it can help us heal that the idea of the self is a construction it's actually a construction based on patriarchal constructs of existence and on colonization and actually the idea that we are individual that we are something separate from the other is quite a fragmented and unhealthy view of what it means to be human and so an understanding that the identity that we carry is actually a reflection of the relationships that we hold it's through that lens that we can start to understand shame so human connection is why shame hurts so much because there's a desire within each of us we're knit we're designed we're created we're grown to need the connection from the people around us to survive and if there's some of you in the room who've heard things from previous generations like that's just feeling stuff or you're just too weak or you don't really need people then they've actually fundamentally misunderstood science because science now tells us that the development of the self and the survival of our species is based on a sense of belongingness that we have with other people so not only is this about our our thriving this is about just being you can hear stories of people who grew up without touch who grew up without connection who will die it's something that we need to survive and so i want you to think about everything that we talk about about shame as situated in that crucible of a development that we need relationship to be alive so most of you might know or some of you might not know that there's a difference between shame and guilt and i want to start by talking about that as a way of helping frame the conversation about guilt and shame guilt is i've done something wrong it's a sense that we've violated our value system i i don't want to steal but i stole i feel guilty about that but shame is an entirely different animal it's the belief that we are bad that there's something about me that is unlovable that has been reduced actually inhuman in a way it's a reduction of the essence of being alive and so when we talk about shame it's not just the acknowledgment that maybe we could have done something different but it's a sense that there's something wrong with who we are at our core the differences in the kinds of shame that we can experience state shame and trait shame stay awake state shame is the sense that in that moment there's been a disconnection between us and someone else and it actually affects our nervous system i can talk a little bit more about that in a moment but there's a shutting down that happens of us a closing in of i'm too unlovable to be seen in this moment and so i'm going to try and disappear and what happens when that isn't repaired when that person who's looking back at you who's saying i'm so displeased with you doesn't rush in and say no no no i still love you i still love you i'm just really sad that you broke my china dish or it really hurt me that there was so much traffic that you were late for my piano recital when they don't look back and do a repair that that can get integrated that shame state can get integrated into how we see ourself and it can be something that we end up carrying around with us as part of our identity it can be fused into the very way that our brain processes relational experiences from that point on and so although shame can happen in an instant and it's painful and it's erosive and it feels like some of us when we felt it would rather die you can come back from that if in the connection that you experience in that moment or anywhere that connection carries you through and says i'm still here with you i still love you and even if it's not that person in that moment who says that if it's someone at some point who says that then you can move forward the problem with shame though is that often the things that are most shaming happen before we even have the language to understand them so we know from developmental neuropsychology that people who experience shame early with a caregiver with someone who's really important to them and that person doesn't repair it can actually get integrated into their self to a way that they don't even understand that it's there it becomes part of who you are and that's where trait shame comes from when i think about the neurobiology of shame it actually makes so much sense why shame is something we don't want to talk about because it actually does something to our body so for those of you out there who are really interested in neuroanatomy use your time to kind of shine with your friends you can tell them what all these things mean after but generally what happens when we have an experience of being reduced or humiliated or de devalued in some way it signals through neuroception to certain parts of our brain this is dangerous and remember what i said about human connection being part of survival it is actually a threat to our system and so our nervous system goes oh crap we got to do something about this and our hypothalamus and pituitary glands start to emit all sorts of chemicals glucocorticoid steroids into our bloodstream that actually get us really activated and worked up and it changes the way that we store memory it changes the way that our body responds and for anyone in the room has been through trauma shame can actually do the same thing to your body that trauma can do it can make you want to disappear or deflate and fold inward on yourself and so this isn't just an emotion that we can write off as just being feely feely sometimes i have people who say i'm not really into feelings they're too woo-woo for me they're too new age you're a kid of the 80s you know they're not for me but feelings actually are part of science we actually now have the science to understand that when we feel disconnected from somebody else it reduces us in a way that chemically our body says you're alone hide it's too hard to be seen right now i don't know how many people here are familiar with foucault's work and the idea of the panopticon but when thinking about shame i often think about how it's used in religious circles as a way of controlling people so foucault talked about this idea that came from jeremy bentham in the 18th century about the perfect prison and the perfect prison was a circular structure where all of the cells stacked on top of each other faced inward towards a pole or a central focal point where the guard could watch so the prisoners on the outside looking in would never know if they were watched or not and so they began to self-police you didn't need to know if the guard was right there to decide that you're not going to escape because you internalized the idea that the guard could always be watching and so vuco uses the idea of the panopticon to talk about a disciplinary society a society of surveillance where where we're so afraid of shame that we're going to do whatever we can to not feel excluded to not feel like we're bad in some way because we all want to belong and so as i was thinking about preparing for tonight and shame this idea of the panopticon kept coming up and i was thinking about how to how it makes sense in the context of religious trauma and spiritual trauma and shame and it's the idea that we we've been told that that god is in the middle always watching always waiting for us to make a mistake and so we don't actually need to say to anybody you know is this right or wrong it has been ingrained in so many of us that who we are that the way that we live is bad for other people other things have been put in the center church leaders the building of the church men people of authority and so the idea that those people could be watching makes us self-police and we internalize that shame and the problem is that when we carry shame around it's so stressful for our bodies that we live in a chronic state of hyper arousal which makes it very hard for us to have normal relational experiences because we're constantly trying to stave off another rejection another hurt for some people it's so hard to think about being rejected that it's easier to not engage at all and so those experiences of early rejection that we've had or rejected by the people that we loved shape our relational maps they shape the way that we interact the way that we let ourselves be seen or not be seen and where the idea of the panopticon and shame feel most personal for me have to do with the way that as women and men we're told that our bodies are always being surveyed that we're always being evaluated that our bodies are always being watched and if our bodies looked anything like we think we want them to or they could then we'll be discarded we'll be rejected and for me the shame that i carried as a human being was so visceral that my body got wrapped up into that story and for a long time i felt like it would actually be safer for me to disappear and so i tried to disappear in my body and that's what we call an eating disorder is this idea that there's so much shame about being who you are that it's easier to do everything you were told to do as a woman as a man to just disappear because if you take up space if you show up then you'll be critiqued then you'll be evaluated and you'll be rejected and i want to say this again rejection is threatening to our vital sense of existence to being alive shame is toxic and there's lots of research out there on what it does to our bodies to be in a constant state of shame and stress but what we need is released from that and if you think about the opposite of what rejection is it's being seen and known and loved it's having someone say i see the parts of you that are hurting and i love you all of the bits everything and including the things that you think are messy there are certain messages that we carry in shame cultures that make it really hard for us to thrive as human beings and so i took a few notes just to make sure i didn't miss anything and i'd be curious to know and if hypothetically if if there's some of these things that i read out that hit you in a certain way that create a visceral response that says i know that i've lived that messages given by shame systems are control what this sounds like is you have to be in control otherwise bad things will happen and if bad things happen someone needs to be blamed and if you can't blame somebody else you are blamed shame systems talk about perfectionism you always have to be right because if you're not right then you have no value here shame systems say we don't talk about hard things there's a no talk policy we don't talk about things that are wounding we don't talk about how you've been hurt we don't talk about how i've hurt you that doesn't happen here so it creates a culture of silence where people feel alone there's a denial don't talk about the things that you need don't talk about anything important don't talk about anything vulnerable and disqualifications the things that hurt you don't matter here because they're not as bad as somebody else's pain your trauma the way that you were touched by that person i'm sorry that that happened to you or maybe not but it wasn't as bad as what happened to that woman in rwanda so your pain doesn't count unreliability don't expect things to go the way that you want them to don't expect consistency you can't trust anybody you're just gonna get let down again and incompleteness don't ever try and finish anything don't ever try and go to the hard places or let yourself be seen it just won't happen and if you do try it you're going to be pushed away and denied i'm not going to ask you to raise your hands but i imagine that every single person in this room has heard a message like that at some point from a family member from someone in leadership from a community from a culture that has said we don't do those things here and if you want to be fully you that thing isn't welcome that part of you isn't welcome that thing that you want to say or want to acknowledge not here so what happens when we've been told that we can only be a part of ourselves to be loved is that often we'll choose to cut that part off just to stay loved if we've been told you don't dress like that in this community you don't love that person you don't talk like that you're not interested in that because belonging is part of our survival we need to survive and we cut those parts off and tell at some point that hurts too much for a lot of people who carry shame experiences the pain that comes with the shame drives them to do all sorts of things just to get rid of the shame i'm going to drink to not feel how lonely i am but every time i drink and i drink to excess nobody wants to hang out with me and so i'm now alone and so i'm going to do the thing again to not feel the aloneness so sometimes the things that we do to try and run away from shame actually create more aloneness and they leave us feeling even more disconnected i mean that's that's a really easy example to point out but there's all sorts of things that all of us do to try and protect ourselves from not being hurt but they end up costing us they end up costing us the experience of being fully human and fully alive i don't know if i'd want anything else whenever i'm working with clients in therapy i don't necessarily say that i want you to be happy but i always say to them i want you to feel fully alive and i want you to know that who you are when you are fully alive here with me is good and i see that and it's good and so what does it take to undo shame well if you think about how shame develops like i was saying we need the opposite of that as brene brown says shame thrives on secrecy silence and judgment and so shame needs to be spoken it needs to be talked about it needs to be acknowledged not this just shame itself but also the thing that we're feeling ashamed of there's a quote by robert hilliker a psychodynamic psychotherapist that i like said shame started as a two-person experience but as i got older i learned how to do shame all by myself [Music] and so what we need is to undo that aloneness to take our pain to someone who says i see you and not everybody is safe to do that with sometimes you're lucky enough to find one person who can a therapist a friend a partner someone in ministry or leadership or someone that you find on the corners of the internet on twitter who says me too but we need to find some place in relationship to undo that relational note aloneness so that we can learn over time that the aloneness and that rejection that we carry it doesn't need to exist anymore because the aloneness that we carry and the things that we try to do to protect ourselves from getting hurt even more actually exacerbate the aloneness they keep us feeling hurt and keep us feeling distressed and so we need to find ways to undo that by joining with other people who remind us that all of the parts of us that we were told [Music] make us unlovable that was actually just a crack in the mirror that was being held up to us that was about the mirror not about who we really are thank you [Applause] [Music] sandy brown hair 5 8 and full of fury my dad stood in the doorway to my bedroom holding trash dug blackmail from teenage experimentation what is this he asked while i clenched my jaw to hide the fear from even myself [Music] squinting i coolly said a condom with only the slightest hint of valley girl flippancy across the room in a flash at the foot of the bed he unleashed with what are you doing are you trying to be like her time slowed the words echoing in my ears are you trying to be like her my balloon of undying loyalty popped filling my head with high-pitched helium thoughts aren't you glad i at least wore protection so i wouldn't end up pregnant and how dare you compare me to her stunned silent i didn't answer my mother sat crying on the edge of my bed was i trying to be like her i didn't even know her and my family didn't talk about adoption just like we didn't talk about sex so how could i know if i was trying to be like something that never really existed was teenage sex all that my birth mother was and if i had been there by a logical child having sex would they see me as a reflection of their genetics as a parenting failure or would they still blame an outside other the devil made her do it could any choice truly be my own i was a teenage girl born of a teenage girl and the one virtue i had was gone or maybe my actions simply reminded them of their brokenness and the shame of their infertility [Applause] that was a poem by jenna fox we've talked about on the podcast our falling away of faith years ago i was thinking about like what led me from pastor's kid worship leader having really good status in my community and lots of people that i could that liked me and you know and i was making a living like what led me to like no i i can't believe any of this stuff anymore i think one of the one of the big things was uh authority and so my experience with seeing the darkness of authoritarianism and how it bleeds into religion some of it was like thoughts about whatever science or whatever but i think a big one that i probably wouldn't have acknowledged it much at the time because i wanted to i i we all like to think of ourselves as rational you know and like especially as a five on the enneagram i'm like my mind i've got to figure stuff out and this doesn't add up with this so rationally this is what i decided i think there was a lot more primal belonging uh human shame kind of stuff happening underneath all of that that i was always trying to be okay right i always always try to be okay and by that point i had deconstructed so much in my life already i i had gone on this i remember went on this trip to a cc in 2010 where it was like this inter-religious silent meditation retreat and i was already at that point like very god i wouldn't call god even a being necessarily at that point like just it was very kind of more mystical i wasn't afraid of the guy in the sky anymore i didn't think i thought i had outgrown that i thought i had outgrown the the prison cell thing everything where god's watching who better watch out better not cry uh you know this like mean crazy being that's looking out and waiting to you know punish you or whatever i didn't i wouldn't have said that i believed that but even when i barely knew if i believed in god i still the amount of times that i would like under my breath god i'm sorry oh god i'm so sorry i'm sorry for being a sinner i'm sorry for myself just please forgive me just like this constant kind of like i'll be okay and it was repentance and i was taught that repentance is a good thing to do you know so i was always was this even when i would have said it was like a tick i was like i don't know why i'm doing that i think god if there is a god loves me fine um but i still had this like i'm sorry i'm not okay make me okay and the first time when you've heard me talk about some of the relief of giving up belief completely it was the first time that i didn't have to do that anymore even though i had deconstructed so much of what i thought i was like i'm not going to believe there's a god and for the first time i'm like okay i'm alone which means i'm like an animal or whatever which means like what's the construct that makes me think i need to be something other than what i am and there was this real there was a freedom in that and it actually made me a better person um it made me more loving more present more and free for i wasn't in this constant like i'm sorry i'm sorry and i think that's a big part of the reason that i never i'm never when i meet people that are like going through deconstruction or they don't know what they believe anymore they say they can't believe anything anymore i'm like oh good good for you [Laughter] i mean i i got to the place where i found some things lacking about what i i missed some spiritual practice i missed whatever we've talked a lot about that but there was something that was really moving forward about getting rid of the santa claus character fully you better watch out yeah you better not cry cause almighty god is ready to smite sounded good in my head uh but i would love to talk about how our myths our constructs our beliefs feed into this you know in the book sapiens we should recall name the podcast referencing the book sapiens talk about it a lot there's a lot in there both of us it's like sapiens uh but harare talks about how groups of 150 or more people they have a really hard time up to 150 you can they can get along really well more than that you need some sort of myth to hold people together you need some sort of like we are part of this tribe or this nation or this belief system and there needs to be some kind of story that binds because at 150 people or more than that the gossip can't hold it all together anymore you can't know everything that's going on with everybody's lives and that's the thing that holds the group together you need something else and so these myths get introduced into society and i think one of the products of these myths no matter what they are is they form i love what you were saying about who are we and thinking about that question in this regard because those questions like who are we and what am i here for when all those things get framed and what is the nature of why we're connected and how we're connected and what we're trying to do by being connected that it creates all these expectations it creates like i am supposed to be this kind of being this kind of person that adds either value to my tribe or that is a person who brings the kingdom of god into the world or is born again so that i don't go to hell and burn for or whatever whatever the story is that you're incorporating and when we say myth it's not like just an untrue a lot of times we use myth in a way that's like an untrue story that's not what we're talking about it's like a patriarchy like patriarchy yeah like yeah people of certain positions or who are assigned certain genitals have more worth or value or like white supremacy like those myths yeah like those i like that phrasing i like the phrasing assign certain genitals because you're like putting like a really progressive view in kind of a creationist framework like god's in the sky going and you get a penis and you get a penis you get a vagina oh you're number 110 you get a mixture of both that was a math joke i'm sorry how how do these myths stories beliefs affect um our experience of shame or belonging or love and feeling like we're okay as human beings what is the relationship between our thoughts our myths our beliefs our constructs and this feeling of i'm okay well i want to attack the kind of the underlying assumption in some of those statements that thoughts and feelings are different and that they're distinct and that there's a dualistic way of being and our thoughts and our feelings are actually inherently connected and so anything that we think and evaluate is what shapes how we experience something and why we decide something is meaningful or not and nobody experiences shame on a desert island because there would be no story about what was meaningful or not to the people around you i would have because i would have been masturbating and i would have felt bad about it but how would you have learned to feel bad about masturbation unless you've been told by other people oh like a permanent desert island i thought like if i went to a desert island i'd be like i'd be super ashamed because i can't feed myself or fish or make wilson from a volleyball like i'm useless so permanent desert island there we go yeah but it's interesting how when we create structures which say these are people who are more powerful and therefore they have more social value that that feeds into our desire to be valuable and so we'll do whatever we can to be like those people we'll do whatever we can to behave in such a way that our society is constructed as being socially valuable and desirable sometimes at our own cost or a cost to our identity or you could argue true self or soul or relationships or whatever it is and so as you're talking i'm just thinking about all the things that i know that i've done to try and be valuable based on why oh why it hurts so much that someone doesn't love me and how desperately i want to get away from that feeling but when we've been given a structure or a hierarchy when you're like this when you make this much money when you behave this way when this person's your friend on twitter when when you do this or you have this degree that somehow you're more valuable we'll do whatever we can to get to those things because it's survival to be loved and if we've been told that our lovability is conditional we're going to try and meet those conditions unless we find some other way to feel like we have value and worth that creates some amazing things in our society our experiences something started happening i guess a year and a half ago and it's continued to occasionally i'll be scrolling through my twitter feed which is the thing i really should stop doing but uh and i'll see someone tweet something and i'll favorite it and then in like 10 minutes someone will screenshot the tweet like the person that tweeted it and then tweet the screenshot omg science mike favorited my tweet and i'm like i did that on the toilet and i'm a pretty obscure christian atheist podcaster so if like the validation society has told you is the most minor possible twitter celebrity favorite your tweet now you have a sense of self-worth that's pretty wild and then i thought about like the way from what you guys are saying um sorry for using a gender uh specific collective pronoun from what y'all are saying is it's funny how the shame relies on like symbiotic shitty mimetics so like i found it really easy to be a calvinist when i was young shout out to calvinist in the room and listening we know your relationship with the liturgist podcast is complicated um but here's why here's why it if bullies called me fat all the time and the teacher said i was dumb and god said i was totally evil and only worthwhile if jesus loved me boy that was a logical set of conclusions but then once i accept that it becomes a framework that encourages other people to believe that they're completely worthless without god's grace which is is really strange to think there's an all-loving animating force with personality and intelligence that made with his infinite power a bunch of things he hates so much that he can only love them if he kills somebody and that is the foundation of my acceptance of that was not just social indoctrination but totally inborn internalized shame i find it so interesting to think about how people have elevated you to a status based on this name science mic and then taken screenshots of you favoriting a tweet but then today that you would share with us that the identity of science mike actually got in the way of people knowing and seeing you and and you as your value might be pinned on that thing that made somebody else feel valuable it's turtles all the way down [Music] [Applause] i love that people not only got that joke but screamed over it you are my people yeah just it shows that all of these these ways that we create social value are constructed and and that sometimes they're at the actually let's rephrase that they cost people something maybe humanity maybe fullness it's like we're chasing a tale of social value that we can't ever quite reach because there's always always someone higher and it's all hollow so what do you do completely hypothetically sure yeah if you're at a point where most days you feel pretty okay about you let's say hypothetically that you're saved 237.65 pounds hypothetically with shoulder and back hair and um every time you walk past a mirror shirtless you think i still got it like every time yeah that you you've internalized such a sense of self-approval that you walk on stages all over the world and think you know what if i just show up and i'm honest it's gonna be enough they're gonna like it because i'm good and then hold on and then completely apathetically you leave a power adapter in los angeles yeah and you your sense of self acceptance evaporates like a mist and you get caught in a little thing i call a shame spiral yes where uh you sit in the back of a completely hypothetical lift and you say i am so stupid and worthless god you idiot why do you always do this shouldn't you have worked harder shouldn't you have paid more attention and the more this circle happens the closer you get to the drain yeah i thought very briefly today in front of a guitar center in seattle about stepping in front of the 415 bus just very briefly wow when you start getting in that kind of pattern how do you get back out okay i want to do a therapeutic exercise but i'm going to need all of you to participate when when mike shared his story of shame what did you feel [Music] known yeah relieved empathy connected yeah what's happening for you when you hear people say that based on your crushing experience of shame when you feel people respond to your pain in a way that actually helps them feel like they know you and see you and see some of themselves they thought they came to see me but i came to see them and so what happens to the shame spiral [Music] [Applause] it gets a lot better yeah it really does yeah because all of a sudden you were with us and we were with you and there wasn't aloneness and everything in the weight of this podcast on your shoulders that there was a human experience and what was so moving to me is that you took the risk to share that you didn't have to and that's part of this is that i couldn't have just mentioned that and used all of your feedback if you hadn't have participated in creating a space where we could talk about hard things here and so to undo the shame we've got to speak the story and then we let people who love us speak back to us this is my job are you ready what would you like to disclose the internet she turned to vishnu so that's why everybody laughed they can't see so sounds like that's right in the podcast audience yeah yeah it's like subtitles yeah so i think i think we just did something here that undoes that shame spiral we talk about the shame and we invite people into it the people who count the people who want to see us who value us and not just for the performance but for the for the essence of who we are and that undoes the aloneness that undoes the pressure of having to be perfect to carry it all on our shoulders yeah and what if instead of being with the liturgists someone is with a community that says why do you talk about your feelings so much yeah yeah it puts you in a difficult place because we all desire to belong but there's a part of being human that requires feeling and so that creates i could imagine this inner conflict of what's more important this kind of authentic experience of being alive or relationship which are kind of relationships are part of being alive and so often people i think that's where i see a lot of people come to therapy is i don't know how to be a healthy individual and a person in relationships because being in relationship means i can't necessarily show all parts of me all the time to this group but being on my own means that i'm alone and so it can be very very important to find a community of people who say i see you and actually in recovering from eating disorder was really important for me was join was to join with a community of people who said your body is good just as it is and we do not want you to disappear and to find belonging with that group of people made me feel like i could live again and that happened to be a particular feminist community so loaded politically and taking a very vocal stance on women's bodies and and women's spaces and what it means to be kind of consistently devalued and minimized to how you appear so i found a new group are there any other practical sort of steps or practices you know for me spiritual practice has said you know nihilism was it was a good temporary answer for not not feeling uh need to repent but still coming to this healthy view of oneself probably needs a little bit more than just nihilism and i'll qualify with probably yeah oh absolutely i'm with you but the but spiritual practices that allow you to see for for me that have allowed me to kind of pay more attention to my ego to the games that it plays especially like the one up games that we all do where we try to not only feel like we belong but like we stick out and we want the ego one that we want to be like seen and special and better than that guy and i think shame is also part of that game like when you're playing that game and you're not better than that guy then you're worse than that guy um so the spiritual practices that kind of help me keep in alignment with i can kind of see the thoughts of oh look at you're you are trying to be special you're trying to be seen you're trying to be um more important and seen as an expert in this or whatever and you can start paying attention to those kind of things or for me like centering prayer meditation mindfulness all these kind of things really keep an eye on what that tricky ego likes to do and as you kind of see that that constant letting go in that practice as well of like i see that that's happening and okay okay and not trying to fight it like i used to don't do that be humble be which is counterproductive but just like oh interesting look at that's the ego doing it trying to be better than that guy cool look at that and then it kind of loses its power and then you can just kind of be and be present and and for me learning more and more how to be present and in the moment and uh okay with what is as the sacred holy now as perfect in this moment allows me to not have to play those games so so violently and and jarringly uh within my own person and you see it i see it happening here and there and just kind of look watch it um so are there other practices other exercises practical steps of how people that experience and deal with shame can start moving out of that spiral well first before i go on i want to kind of point out something very specific about what you said which was you acknowledge something within you in a way that you were relating to it does that make sense when i say that it wasn't it wasn't pre-conscious you were thinking about it and you were having an interaction with it and in that way there was a relationship so if we go back to what i was saying when i first started talking shame is about the fragmentation in a relationship and the experience of aloneness or being devalued but you can you can create a relationship within yourself you can be with yourself and you can be with yourself in a way that is loving and present and attuned and giving and names pain and sits with pain and says i see you and you can come with me nerves i see you you're with me but you can come with me to the liturgist gathering tonight you can come under my blazer you can sit right here in my pocket and in doing so creating a relationship with yourself which isn't the same as being with someone and feeling them look back at you and say i see you but it's a pretty good start that's what you have you can relate to yourself in a way that's shaming it's the it's the internalization of the oppression that oppressor that shames us that lashes us inside but we can change that relationship like that quote i learned shame in a relationship but i do it all by myself now because it's the internalization of what will other people think of me that creates this wounding that we perpetuate within us and we can change that relationship in a way that represents what a relationship with another would be like and so as we'll do in a little bit often what i have people do is i have them connect inward with the relationship inside with their body with their thoughts and change that relationship to a dyadic conversation that is actually loving and supportive and accepting and non-judgmental which is the peace i see you there fear oh i see you there ego you're working super hard to be loved okay i see you and even if nobody else does we got this so working on that inner relationship is important but that takes an incredible amount of attunement and presence and and stillness and self-awareness to be able to notice your feelings as they come up and to be able to be just outside of them enough that you can be compassionate to those feelings i often say to clients feelings are just information you don't need to be scared of them you don't need to be scared of shame it's just an artifact of a relationship you once had where something kind of like what's happening now made you feel unlovable it's just information and that's information you can use to understand yourself and the world and being alive much better you don't need to be afraid of it i think that it's important to develop compassionate practices of mindfulness and stillness but when we're talking about relationship what i also what i think about your story is this idea of relating to what's the word you're using now divine true divine okay all the words all the words all of the words are fine yeah that was interesting about that is if we're thinking about it as our relationship with god with the divine as it's often been constructed in church settings while that may have been a relationship of hierarchy and power it can also be a relationship where we see mirrored back to us our value and our worth and so we can draw on this source of of some thing someone this thing this god that is bigger that sees all and says it's good it's really good and i think that that's the heart of the gospel message like i see all of you and i want you and i don't want anything in the way this is a poem by warning warning dissociation trigger warning the mirror catches my eye keeps it who is reflected there not i i say no i think i cannot speak my jaw's clamped shut i cannot breathe my jaws clamped shut i cannot blink pale eyes reflected staring into my soul from beyond this world angel or demon friend or foe i am brought back to three years ago writhing on the ground nails digging into my palms ratcheting breaths through my spine incapable of speaking as if someone had a tight grasp on my voice box they didn't believe me when i said she was in control when fear took my body strangled my mind i was not myself [Music] sometimes in the mirror she stops me again [Music] [Applause] [Music] she is not something to only take to use up and throw away to consume a masterbate too not a dog not a toy on a string not a pretty little thing you could tire [Music] she's woman [Music] she's beautiful woman beautiful girl [Music] it takes all every corner [Music] no more shame no more penance and no more [Music] she is [Music] [Applause] she's beautiful woman beautiful girl oh you have the sky all of [Music] and you are not alone you are beautiful woman [Music] beautiful soul [Music] [Applause] do not shrink from the downcast face nor insult with savior songs do not echo the upturned nose nor think to shame it down do not leech the steady gaze nor distrust it for a lie in every countenance is mine own hear and heed its cry simply be with me [Music] i didn't truly understand shame until the moment my abuse was discussed openly with the elders in my church [Music] as they accused me of lying or over exaggerating my experience i sat there while people i thought loved me openly discussed the sordid details of my abuse without my consent i was victimized in a time when i didn't even know what that meant a teenager seeking help from her church and told to sit down and shut up they attempted to find the lie and the loophole and the truth of the life i had lived shaming my experience further when i tried to talk and i was told to forgive and forget the 17 years of my past horror shame became my being because my being was no longer [Music] accepted [Music] i couldn't get the water in the shower hot enough to burn away the disappointment in your voice that stuck to my skin like tar [Music] wandering in darkness suffocating dreams shame lurks and squanders fighting for each breath hope in subtle shadows of doubt linger in the questioning wonder in the wrestling break through break free rise shine seek and you shall find [Music] those were poems by caitlyn arthur sydney king sandy kennedy and aaron mccarty and if i may say if you wonder why we talk about there's room at the table for all who are hungry why on our podcast we work so hard to be inclusive is because a faith which at its heart about love and acceptance has become a system which tells people to feel shame and as i was so moved by those words i want everyone in this room to know that you are welcome exactly as you are and i want everyone listening on the subway or jogging in their car wherever you are right now to know you are welcome just the way that you are and i'm not ashamed to know you actually i'm quite proud so we're going to do something together we're going to do a meditation and before we start i want to let you know that you don't have to participate in this this is not a an expectation it's an invitation and if you feel like it's triggering or difficult or scary or weird you can go to the wolverine place that mike talked about earlier you can distract yourself you can stay with your breath you can look at me you can feel your feet on the floor or you can quietly get up and go so continue consider yourself welcome to this and and to the extent that you feel like you need to participate please be invited to do so so get comfortable i want you to feel like you can be alert and awake but relaxed and if you like you are welcome to close your eyes or soften your gaze find a spot on the floor to look at and i want to start by inviting you to find your breath and i want you to notice what it feels like to breathe in to settle into the moment to feel yourself quiet to feel the room quiet and see if you can track your breath for an entire cycle perhaps picking a point in your chest and staying with the sensation as you breathe in and out you might try breathing in for a few beats and pausing for a moment feeling the tightness in your chest perhaps the burning or the fullness of your lungs before you breathe out all the way and it may help to take a breath out that lasts a few moments longer than your breath in which can signal to your body it's okay to be safe now [Music] and you might imagine that what we've been doing today is is like shaking up a snow globe and all the ideas and thoughts and interactions and feelings have been shaken and they're swirling [Music] and i want you to notice them as snow globe studies and all of the things and the feelings the ideas they begin to drop [Music] slowly moving down to rest [Music] and if while i'm talking you feel the snow globe start to shake again you hear a noise or a thought comes into your mind i just invite you to to imagine seeing that snow globe steady [Music] and just to observe again as everything settles nothing will be lost everything's still contained but you can rest you can either do this now or imagine doing it but placing your hand on your chest [Music] and i want you to slowly and gently press on your chest with the fingers of your hand and for a moment be your chest feeling the hand touch you feeling the hand say i'm with you feeling the hands say you're not alone [Music] here and then switch for a moment and allow yourself to be the hand that's touching as you press gently on your chest feel yourself be the one who's bringing comfort as an extension of love itself back to you and then widen your conscious gaze of this moment and feel yourself both being loved and loving that the cycle is happening in this moment in your body as your hand moves love and energy to your chest and it feeds out through your arm and back through your hand and there is an undoing of aloneness [Music] and from this place of being with yourself i want you to call to your mind a moment when you felt loved and seen it could have been by someone that you loved or someone that loved you a pet a group by a tree itself but a sense of being seen and known and loved and enough as you do that i want you to think about what's around you in that memory [Music] you might see colors or textures there might be a smell and if it's a being on the other end i want you to allow yourself to see them looking at you saying with no words at all that they are with you and allow yourself to take that in in this moment to remember that experience and to go there again right now it might feel easy to to imagine running away you might go back to your snow globe or to the sounds around you but i want you to see if you can stay with that moment just a bit longer to allow it to deepen in your body to take up more space just notice what they're saying to you with how they look at you and notice what you feel in your body while you're you're feeling that come from them and notice now what that allows you to feel towards yourself [Music] [Music] and connect that with the feeling of your palm on your chest [Music] maybe it's like you're holding the memory between your hand and your chest holding up against your body to keep it close to you or maybe the heat from your fingers on your chest is like the words and the voice and the eyes of that person making real your value in this moment again be aware in this moment that you are feeling yourself as the hand and as the chest connected [Music] with yourself [Music] and may this awaken in you in this moment the awareness that everyone else in this room is doing this too find your breath again and you can keep your hand on your chest or put it down whatever feels most comfortable for you and allow yourself to follow a breath from beginning to end the sensation in your chest and lungs while with yourself here in this moment and with your breath become aware again of this room and this day and this event know that you're here [Music] i'll count upwards and when i reach five take as long as you need but you're welcome to open your eyes one two three four five this is from tara brack she's a clinical psychologist and does some meditation stuff may all beings heal and awaken into the love and awareness that holds and honors the fullness of being [Music] you're beautiful you are loved you are seen i try to tell my baby girls this all the time obviously i have a seven-year-old who's for the first time i'm starting to hear little things that the world is handing her i'm like no like things that tell her she's not perfect and that she needs to be this way and so i tell her as much as i can you're made of love fearfully and wonderfully made and you're beautiful and you're loved your whole being is being held together [Music] with this source of it all [Music] and uh the little games that we play of like i stand this much higher than this person i said you're alive that breath that you were just given each one of those breaths is this miracle that keeps coming and coming and it's just this ocean wave of love love and so it's been implied all night but i just wanted to say it explicitly you are [Music] [Applause] beautiful so we hope you've enjoyed this episode of the liturgist podcast and we'd like to let you know that we'd enjoy your feedback at the liturgist.com podcast at the liturgists on twitter or instagram i guess maybe it's a story i don't know uh or uh facebook.com the liturgists we'd like to thank our hosts the university temple united methodist church in seattle of course we want to thank hillary mcbride for being here [Applause] joining michael were william matthews and lisa gunger in the music you heard we heard some amazing poets who we appreciate your contribution to the program yes also how about those strings not bad uh our main man heath is on sounds and of course we want to thank iris corey greg jim and all our patrons who are part of the liturgist team that made this event possible and of course you can email madison thelitus.com if you're interested in creating custom liturgies in your faith community thanks for listening everyone i'm science mike i'm hilary mcbride michael gunger thanks for listening everybody thanks for listening everybody [Music]