Mindful Parenting Podcast Episode 507- Shame Resilience w/ Andrea Owen

Thank you so much for having me, Hunter. I'm happy to be here.

Yeah, mine was pretty uneventful. I am the youngest of five, but I have four older half-siblings, so I was the only child of my parents. They brought two children each from their marriage, so it was kind of like I had siblings but didn't have siblings, and also had the benefit of growing up an only child and having all of my parents' love and attention, but also having part-time siblings. So it was kind of a roller coaster in that regard. I was very lucky in a sense that my parents were very affectionate and loving, and we grew up working class and moved into middle class in the later 80s, which I think is similar to a lot of people when the economy was booming back then. But it wasn't until much later, when I got into parenting myself and some hard stuff happened as life does, and also getting into personal development, that I realized there wasn't a lot of emotional support growing up. Being Gen X, I'm probably not alone there. My dad called it benign neglect, which is a fair term. It's not that it was abusive by any regard, but it does create an impact when you're not taught or even acknowledged and seen for your feelings and emotions, and being dismissed, which was my experience. So trying to answer the question around how am I trying to parent differently than I was parented has been a roller coaster. Sometimes I get it right, sometimes I get it wrong.

My dad passed away in 2016. Before he died, he also got sober when I was 18, which was a pivotal moment in his life but also my life, and sort of paved the way for me to get sober when I was 36 or 37. I was a very high-functioning alcoholic, knew what was in store for me if I kept drinking, so I quit before I got ahead. My dad was starting to scratch the surface with his own personal growth journey, and he was kind of late to the game, but I do think he did some work and we had some really great conversations about it. It's been trickier with my mother, who is still here, and we have a complicated relationship, but we're working on it. I can say I'm working on it, but sometimes I'm not met in the middle and it can be heartbreaking.

Yeah, I guess that's definitely true for me, wanting that approval. I don't think my dad has read through my books, and that kills me. I'm like, gosh, they're such short books, like read these stupid books. Feeling like you're in fourth grade all over again. They're published by a publisher, Dad, can you read the book, please?

I was interested. There was a roller derby revival around 2005 in Austin, Texas, and I was watching from then. I had only seen roller derby in the 1970s, and the revival was definitely different from our mama's roller derby days. I wasn't a big competitive sports person growing up, I was a high school cheerleader, and nothing against that, but I was just so fascinated by the counterculture of it and the athleticism of these women. So I followed for a while, and then we moved from San Diego to the state of Utah, and they had a roller derby league in the city we moved to. I went and I was feeling the pull to try out, but I was so nervous. So I went and talked to them when I bought my tickets.

100% yes. And I think we're about the same age, so yes, roller skating. I had a roller skating belt that had a rainbow on it, all of those things. I also did rollerblading in the 90s, but hadn't been on skates for a minute. It was honestly one of those things where I imagined myself 10, 20, 30 years into the future seeing derby with my daughter or something, and then just mentioning that I always wanted to try out for that. If she asked me why I didn't, I would have to tell her that I was too intimidated, that I was scared, that I felt like I was too old because I was in my mid to late 30s by then. I didn't want to have that conversation with her or anybody. So I jumped and I tried out, and I had to train. In derby you can choose a roller derby name, there's some controversy around it, but I did end up choosing one. Veronica Vain. Our roller derby name is kind of our alter ego, and that was mine. She was more important to look amazing out on the track than to skate well, and that's how the name was born.

Yeah, for me I would vastly regret not at least trying. What I did for myself is I said, and this is the same thing I do with my kids when they don't want to go somewhere, I'll say okay go for 10 minutes and if you hate it, if it sucks, I'll just pick you up. You can leave. Not with all things, but like school dances or sleepovers that they're not sure about. So that's what I did for myself. If I go and I hate it or I'm terrible at it or everyone's mean to me, then I can leave. None of those things happened, so I ended up staying until I got injured. It was the most fun year of my life.

Well, I've always been the consummate cheerleader. I have an outgoing personality, I'm a hype girl. I started out 100 years ago in the fashion merchandising industry, worked in a couple of different careers, then ended up going back to school getting my degree in exercise physiology and was in the fitness industry, which is adjacent to life coaching. I've always been interested in wellness in general. My personal training clients would come to me and, like a hairdresser, they'd tell me what's going on in their life. I noticed that a lot of my clients really struggled with their self-confidence and wanting to commit to bigger goals beyond their fitness goals. They had all these excuses, or it came down to worthiness issues and self-confidence, which brought me to life coaching because I felt like fitness wasn't enough. Fitness was just the doorway to that. So I went and got my certification. I had no idea what it would bring me. Here I am three books later, writing my fourth, success beyond my wildest dreams honestly. Getting certified in shame work, like are you kidding? If you would have asked me that 15, 20 years ago I would have laughed hysterically that I would be interested in that type of work. But it's really brought me to my knees, to be frank, from a personal growth standpoint and also an entrepreneurship standpoint. I wouldn't trade it for the world. I feel like it's where my talent and strength lies. Sometimes I shake my fist at the guy and say, couldn't I have just stayed a personal trainer? I feel like it would have been so much easier on my heart and my stress level. But yeah, that's kind of how I ended up here, for the sake of telling a dramatic story, which I love to do.

Speaking of Brené Brown, I went and got certified in her work in 2012 and have never looked back. I'm obsessed with getting to the root of the problem, and for most of us, this is it. We all have shame, but we don't talk about it enough. The only people that don't experience shame are psychopaths and sociopaths. Your question around why it's so toxic is because it's one of those experiences that can change behavior on a dime. It works. I think probably every person listening has an experience where they have either been shamed on purpose by someone, a teacher, a parent, someone else, or accidentally shamed, where they walk into a situation that's shaming and it's by no fault of someone else, it wasn't done intentionally. Either way, it can make you behave in ways that you're not proud of. A lot of people fight shame with shame, they'll throw it back, or people isolate and completely go inward, they won't show up to different events, they'll stop relationships because of it, or they will go overboard in terms of people pleasing, brown-nosing. Those are kind of the three main reactions that we have to shame. I think everyone listening can think of an experience, especially in childhood, where it has changed us not for the better. It's one of those things that can be a great motivator, not in a great way, just in terms of changing behavior on a dime, but the long-term effects can be incredibly destructive.

I want to pause on that because that's what shame does. We call shame a full-contact emotion, a full-contact experience. You feel it in your body. That's part of the work I do when I take people through this work. What can be helpful is for you to understand and get intimate with how shame feels in your body, not so that you can get rid of it, because we can't, it's a universal experience, you will experience it again at some point, I'm sorry. But the faster you can understand that it's happening in your body and why it's happening, for you I would take you through an exercise where we talk more about those triggers. You don't want to be perceived as annoying. We all have ways that we don't want to be perceived, and we all have ways that ideally we want to be perceived too. In different areas of your life they can look different. I get excited talking about the how, when, why awareness of how to establish and learn shame resilience, because it's not about getting rid of it, it's learning how to become resilient to it.

For women, they are gender specific. I'll talk about men and women. For women, it tends to be around our body and appearance, tends to be number one. I don't think anybody can argue that we live in a culture that is beauty and youth obsessed. Girls learn at a fairly young age where our value is, and it is how we show up, the shape of our bodies, depending on culture, etc. For men, a lot of times it's based on their masculinity and how they show up in the world in that regard. When they get older, it's things like financial stability, status, and also partnerships, whether you get partnered or not. A lot of it's cultural, how we decided as a culture and as a society what is better than the other. Those are the more obvious ones. I also want to make the distinction that shame is rooted in connection versus disconnection. When you feel like you are going along with traditional beauty standards here in the US in the West, you will most likely feel more connected to people. When we don't feel that way, we feel disconnected, and that's where the impact happens in our bodies. As humans, we are meant to be connected. Trauma is created in relationships and it's also healed in relationships. We are meant to be connected with each other, and we will die without it, literally. I believe this is why it's a full-body experience. Our body is trying to tell us something when we are feeling disconnected and when we are feeling shame, we feel it viscerally in our bodies.

Yeah, and then some groups are proud of you for being against the establishment. It's very confusing.

Sometimes it's more obvious, like when we know we're in a shaming situation. If you get reprimanded at work in front of a lot of people, that's a more obvious situation. However, I typically don't talk about and teach shame from that regard. My second book is all about this, it's called 'How to Stop Feeling Like Shit' and it's 14 habits that are holding you back from happiness. I don't love the subtitle, by the way, publishers. But it's these behaviors that we do that are very common: people pleasing, isolating, numbing out, perfectionism, blaming, control, caring too much what other people think, all in order to try to avoid shame. I joke that perfectionism and control got me to graduate with honors from college, and it was because I didn't want the shame of flunking out, because I flunked out of junior college a few years prior. I knew that shame, so I didn't want it. It's not about not doing the behaviors, it's about knowing when you're in the poor coping mechanisms so that you can try to course correct. When we are doing any of these behaviors, isolating, numbing out, people pleasing, perfectionism, shame is running the show. I haven't met anyone, client or otherwise, who comes to me and we talk about values, what's important about the way you live your life. Never one of them has said isolating instead of connecting, blaming others. No, it's things like courage, authenticity, creativity, connection, and personal growth. Do you see the disconnect?

Thank you for bringing that up. That's a great example. In my professional opinion, it would be people pleasing if you feel like a boundary, whether it's been established or not, has been crossed. That's a fairly big ask, to have somebody come out for one day, five plus hours of driving, probably having to stop. If the person would have said, can you also bring a cake and veggie tray and come early to help me set up, I can see... For people that can't see Hunter's face, you're cringing right now. Basically, you've already set a boundary in your mind that you're going to come to the memorial and come home, you're going to show up for your friend. When you are going above and beyond that boundary, if you are either volunteering because you think you should to be a good friend even though you don't want to, or you're saying yes if they ask you to do those extras, that would be people pleasing. That is most often rooted in poor boundaries, wanting to avoid shame.

I would love to. We can use that example. I'm so glad that you asked it in the way that you did. I want to underscore that because you said 'how can we avoid getting stuck' — that's the key. I'm going to say this until the cows come home: we cannot avoid having shame altogether, but we can avoid being stuck in it and making our decisions from that place. I think all of us, whether you know it or not, have made a decision from shame. You have gone overboard. Let's use the example of you and your friend. The effort to avoid shame would be that you don't want to be perceived as a bad friend. This tends to be gender specific for women in that we grow up in a culture where we're taught that other people's comfort needs to come before our own. We never rock the boat, we don't want to inconvenience anyone. It's kind of gone over the edge of just being nurturing and taking care of people. Many times we take it to the extreme, like selfless is the only way to be, anything else is selfish. That's what we're trying to avoid. Let me start over with a different example. If we're talking about the steps of shame resilience, there's a handful of steps. I want to use the one that you mentioned about your trigger around being annoying. The first thing we need to do is understand what happens to our bodies, as I mentioned a few minutes ago. Knowing that we are in it, because you got to name it to tame it. If you don't know what's happening, you're just going to walk around and go about your usual self, and that's when bad things can happen. When I work with clients, we go through this whole thing physiologically, like what happens in your body. For most people, do you know what happens to your body if you're in shame?

Interesting. Mine is more I feel really hot all of a sudden, I can feel myself flushing, and I get tunnel vision if it's really bad. Everything starts to slow down. I also sometimes my armpits tingle, which is not that uncommon. You just have to know what your own physiological symptoms are. For most people, it's somewhere in their torso, either stomach, chest, or throat, or all of those things. First is knowing what happens to you physiologically, and then understanding why you're in it. This goes back to the triggers. I take people through an exercise where we talk about your ideal and unwanted identities. One of your unwanted identities is you don't want to be perceived by other people as being annoying. As parents, we have ideal and unwanted identities that we want to be seen as and don't want to be seen as. If you are partnered, as a mother you probably have ways that you want to be perceived by your husband and ways that you would never want to be perceived as a mother specifically. For example, how do you want to be perceived? If you overheard him talking about you and it was amazing, what would you want him to be saying specifically about your parenting?

And then how would you never want to be perceived by him as a parent?

When I work with clients and I have more time, we look at all the areas of their life: work, partnerships, friendships, as a community member, and we make lists of them. I want you to get intimate with how this is showing up in your life. The cruddy thing is that we have no control over how other people perceive us, we have very little control if any, and we're going to make mistakes. You're going to have moments where you get angry and you're not proud of how you showed up. What ends up happening for most of us is that we go in this cycle. When we are perceived as one of our unwanted identities, when we're perceived as annoying or angry by other people, what usually ends up happening is that we try harder to get to our ideal identity. This is where the people pleasing starts, this is where the perfectionism starts. For example, if you make a mistake at work and people notice, you drop the ball on a project, what a lot of people might do is start working a lot of overtime, coming in early, making sure everybody knows you're taking on extra work, crossing boundaries, doing things you don't want to do in order to make up for the mistake, trying to avoid shame. Where the resilience is, and this is the next step, is two main things. The research shows that self-compassion, which is something we give ourselves, speaking to ourselves with kindness, giving ourselves grace, letting ourselves off the hook, forgiving ourselves, that's self-kindness. The second piece is empathy, and we get empathy from other people, we can't do that by ourselves. As Brené Brown says, we tell our shame stories to people who have earned the right to hear them, and our hope is that you are met with empathy. This is typically a skill that is learned, not something we know how to do. Especially if you were raised in our generation, we probably weren't modeled that growing up with parents with a lot of empathy and compassion. It is a skill that we have to learn. It's acknowledging someone else's stuff. If I come to you as a friend and say, 'I made the biggest mistake at work, I was mortified, I missed an important client meeting and now everybody knows it, and I don't know what to do,' for you to empathize with me, you would say, 'Oh my God, that stinks, that must feel terrible, I'm so sorry.' That's an A+. But a lot of times what people do is they might say, 'Oh, it's not that bad,' or 'Oh, everybody loves you, you're fine,' or 'How could you be so careless?' We've all been in situations where we weren't met with empathy. That is the crash course five to ten minute version of what shame resilience looks like. When I teach it, I give a lot more examples and engagement, but it takes practice, a lot of practice, and it can change your life, especially when you can teach it to your kids.

Depending on age, when my kids were in elementary school, I started talking to them. There are two specific things that I did fairly young, and it doesn't matter if your kids are older, you can still talk to them about this. One of the things that I very intentionally and consciously wanted to have different for my kids than what I got is I told them over and over again: your feelings are never wrong. Your feelings are never wrong. Whatever you're feeling is right for you. What you are responsible for is your behavior that comes from those feelings. I always told them, you're allowed to be angry with me, what I won't tolerate is name calling, being nasty, slamming doors, whatever the boundaries are in your house. I just wanted them to grow up to know that their feelings were okay, because I think so many of us grow up feeling wrong for our emotions, being told we're wrong for our emotions, being told how we should feel, how we shouldn't feel, being dismissed, not being seen in our emotions. That can create long-lasting emotional problems that can bleed into our relationships. Also, what I started to notice in elementary school is when my kids would have a long day at school and be overstimulated and get in the car and tell me the rotten things that happened that day, I did my best to meet them with empathy instead of, especially if they told me some kid was messing with them, I'm like 'who are their parents?' But first, empathize. Sometimes I would tell them an anecdote from elementary school that happened to me, just to let them know they're not alone in what they're feeling and experiencing. Just let them talk it out, exactly like the example you gave: 'That sounds like a rough day, kiddo. I wish I would have been there to give you a hug. Can I give you a hug now?' Those are the two main things that I tried my best to teach them. Did it always land? Probably not. But did it land some of the time and be helpful? I think so, I hope so.

I want to pause there because what you said was so important and profound. I don't think that ever ends for us as human beings, as we get older. But I think it can be incredibly impactful if we teach our children from a young age that we are safe, that we are a soft and safe place to land. Then they are more likely to come to us with big things like drugs and alcohol or sex, whatever these big things that come up in the tween and teen years and into young adulthood. If we already have that foundation established, and I don't think it's too late. If your kids are older, what I would recommend is having a very transparent conversation and saying, 'You know what, I wish I would have done more when you were young, and I'm trying to do better, and I hope that you give me an opportunity as your parent to do better. Here's what I'm going to do.' There's so much to be said for transparency and just owning and taking responsibility for mistakes that we've made as parents and trying to do better. That is one of the most vulnerable things I think we can do.

It's funny, I wrote that chapter in 2016, 2017, where that meme of 'she gave zero fucks and lived happily ever after' was super popular. It was on t-shirts and it had some life, it definitely took off. I think it's toxic. I think so many personal development things have been miniaturized for social media and Pinterest, but that one in particular I wanted to write an entire chapter about because I work with a lot of people who are people pleasers, they struggle with boundaries as many of us do. They think that they need to go all the way, that the pendulum needs to swing all the way over and that they don't care at all about what other people think. This is an impossible goal. We are humans, we've established in this conversation that we are meant for connection. What I encouraged people to do is get very clear on where are the medium fucks. Care about the right things, care about the opinions of the right people in your life. Sometimes it's not your mom. I'm assuming the opinions of your children matter to you, I'm assuming the opinions of your partner or maybe a mentor or a close friend. Get clear on why their opinion matters, but it does not have to be black or white, one or the other. No one cares zero, and if they say that, they're lying. They're probably hurting a lot and need a hug or something. But medium fucks.

Pleasure. Yes, go forth and roll that shame right out the door.

Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks everyone for listening. I'm grateful for everyone's time.