76. How to Heal Shame: Why We Feel It & How to Let It Go

Dr. Vanessa Calderón: There's a feeling almost every one of us has felt. The one that whispers, if people really knew this about me, they'd pull away. It's not guilt. In fact, it's something older than that. And it's been shaping your choices longer than you realize. Today on the podcast, we're talking about shame, what it actually is, why your nervous system creates it, and two simple practices that can start setting you free from it. Welcome to The Authentic Path. I'm your host, Dr. Vanessa Calderon, Harvard-trained physician and healer. I integrate science and ancestral wisdom to support you in creating the success you desire in all areas of your life. I'm so glad you're here. Let's get started. Hi friends, welcome back to The Authentic Path. I'm Dr. Vanessa Calderón and I am so glad you're here. Many of you know my story. You know I come from the world of medicine. I'm a board-certified emergency medicine doctor and also a master executive coach and neuroplasticity trainer. And I've worked with people across the spectrum: physicians, entrepreneurs, department heads, Fortune 500 leaders. I've coached them through burnout, through reinvention, through the moments when their life stopped feeling like it was their own life. But I come from another lineage as well. I'm a first-generation Latina, the daughter and granddaughter of Indigenous healers from Mexico and El Salvador. And in that world, we don't just treat a symptom, we always ask what is underneath it. And long before I had a medical degree, I understood that our body keeps. The score of things we've never said out loud. Yes, I know that that is also the title of a fantastic book, The Body Keeps the Score if you have not checked it out. But it's just also what I learned growing up. And in 20 years of doing this work in exam rooms and boardrooms and sitting in healing ceremonies with many people, I have never met a single person who is free of the emotion we are talking about today. And that is the emotion of shame, not one. Not as not the CEOs I've worked with, not the surgeons or physicians, not the department chiefs, not the mother who looks like she has it all together on Instagram. Shame is one of the most universal, most misunderstood, and most quietly destructive forces in our human experience. And almost nobody talks directly about it because talking about it directly is exactly what shame doesn't want us to do. So today we're going to bring it into the light. We're gonna talk about what shame actually is, whether it's a truly universal feeling or something that some cultures can escape, why your body created in the first place, and how it keeps so many people like you, brilliant, purposeful people, stuck in patterns that don't serve them. then I'm gonna give you a couple practices, an ancestral practice and a neurologic practice that you can start using today. right, let's get started. So, what exactly is shame? I have read A million definitions on shame. I have read definitions across cultures, in parallel, perpendicular. And one definition I like that I think we can all relate to is the definition Brene Brown gives us, which is shame is the intensely painful feeling, a feeling that we have in our bodies, a painful feeling or an experience of believing we are flawed and unworthy of love and unworthy of belonging. So it's not just an intensely painful feeling. It's a painful feeling that is coupled with a belief that we are not worthy of belonging, that we are not worthy of being loved. So it's those two things together. So I want to quickly draw this distinction between guilt and shame. Guilt is a belief that we have done something wrong. Guilt is a moral stamp. It in Spanish is it's like the sense of pecando sinning. I did something wrong. I did something bad. So it's like a moral stamp. Shame, on the other hand, is a self-belief about yourself. Not that you did something bad, but that you are bad, that your identity, that who you are at the core, is bad. So guilt is about behavior. Shame is about identity. So the reason why that matters is because guilt can be adaptive, it can point back to your values, whereas shame is corrosive because there is no separation between. An act of shame, a shameful act, and your sense of self. As a physician, I was trained to essentially diagnose symptoms. However, as a healer descended from curanderas across Mexico and Central America, I was trained to see that shame itself doesn't live in behaviors. It doesn't live in the behavior at all. It lives in the body. It lives in the nervous system and in the story that a person has decided about their own worth, about who they are. So I'm gonna share a quick example of how this showed up for me early in my medical career. So I had some really intense imposter syndrome, and imposter syndrome is the most interesting phenomenon when I look back at it because it's such a distorted view of who we really are. Doesn't matter your training, your degrees, doesn't matter the certificates you've had or how many people give you acknowledgments. If you have that distorted self-belief about yourself, a distorted belief about your identity. Then you will never believe that you belong. So imposter syndrome is a fear, a sh of shame. I don't belong here. Someone's gonna catch me out, someone's gonna find me out. And so early on in my medical career, I was I had graduated from a fantastic residency. I had a degree from Harvard, I was a chief resident. And even though all of that was true, and and I was also a department chief my first year out of residency. I share all that with you because even though all that was true, I still had severe imposter syndrome. I still believed that I didn't belong in the work that I was doing. I still felt like everybody else was smarter than me and that I was gonna make a big mistake. And how that would show up when I was in the emergency department is I was terrified of anybody finding out that I wasn't good enough or smart enough. And so I was always so careful to do and say the right thing. My notes would take me forever because I wanted the people that were reading my notes to see that I knew what I was saying, that I was a smart person. And what I had realized is I was so afraid to make a mistake because I would have internalized that to make it mean that I was the mistake, that I didn't belong there. That is how shame showed up for me early on in my career. Now, a lot of people go back and forth on whether or not shame is universal. And I think that this is really important to talk about because Shame is not a Western or even a Judeo-Christian invention. Even more collectivist communal cultures have experienced shame, including indigenous communities. No one is essentially immune to There was a landmark study from UC Santa Barbara's Center for Evolutionary Psychology that paired with the University of Montreal. They studied 15 small-scale traditional societies across four continents. This included horticulturists in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It included communities in Uganda, herders in Mongolia, and fishermen in Mauritius. And across every single one of these radically different cultures, researchers found the same pattern. That the amount of shame people anticipated feeling about an action was directly proportional. So it matched almost exactly how much their community would disapprove of that action. So the research was really interesting because what it helped us to see is that shame functions as an internal signal that pulls us away from acts that would jeopardize how much other people value our welfare. So when you think about it that way, you see that shame is essentially an evolutionary response. Because this helps this holds true across cultures that had almost no contact with each other or with the modern world. There was strong evidence that shame isn't a cultural artifact necessarily, but essentially built into our evolutionary response, so built into the human experience. Even though it is a universal response, the context is very cultural. So in in more individualistic Western cultures, shame often centers on a personal inadequacy, kind of like my example of imposter syndrome and how I was afraid I was gonna get found out that I wasn't good enough, that I'm not successful enough is a big one that I hear from the clients, or I'm not smart enough, or I'm not doing enough. So all of that is essentially personal inadequacy. It's it's essentially shame. and in many collectivists and indigenous cultures, shame is more relational. It's tied to bringing dishonor to family or to community rather than the self alone. For example, you might hear people say, I've shamed my family's name. So it's the same emotion, but it's a different story wrapped around it. So the thing that I think is important to take away from this is that there's no culture, no personality type, no amount of achievement. That exempts a human being from the feeling of shame. So if you feel it, that's okay. It's normal. You're not broken. You're not flawed. You're everybody feels it. You're just simply being human. And I wanna just say that again because what I've experienced in the people that I've coached is when they have any little inklings of feelings that might lead down to shame, any thoughts or behaviors that are leading down to shame, they hide it in isolation because they're so afraid someone's gonna find out. And that is exactly what shame does. Shame keeps us in isolation. Because as I'm going to share with you in a little bit, the antidote to shame is light. It's letting it be out in the open. That's the antidote to shame. So if you're feeling it, you're not alone. In fact, you're just having a human experience. So it's really important for us to reframe shame from something wrong with me to really what it is, which is an ancient survival system. So I want to talk about. The survival of the survival system that Shame has supported us with, one evolutionary, one nervous system. So for most of human history, as you guys all know, if you've been listening to this podcast, if you were ever cast out of a tribe, and it would literally mean death. You would be in isolation, you would be out in the cold, out in the elements, you'd get eaten by a tiger. There would be nobody there to support you and keep you safe. And the human species has evolved to be a tribal species. We're a collective species. So shame evolved very early as an early warning system. So it fires before we act, nudging us away from behavior that would get us rejected by the group. And it kept our ancestors socially bonded and alive. So from the look of our nervous system, so when I think about the neuroplasticity behind shame, it's very interesting. Because shame isn't just a thought that we think. Shame turns on our nervous system response so quickly. That shame is not just a thought, but instead it's a full body threat response. They have done brain imaging studies to show that shame activates the same regions involved in our brain as physical pain. So if we are literally feeling pain, that's what shame invokes in our brain as well. And if you think about the polyvagal theory, so that's Stephen Porgis's work, intense shame can trigger what's called a dorsal vagal response. So that's the same like freeze response or dissociative response or shutdown response. That your body uses when it's overwhelmed. So that's the physiological root of the urge to essentially disappear, get small, look away, leave the room. So none of that, again, is weakness. It's all just part of our biology. It's all just part of how we evolve to survive. So in the ancestral traditions that I come from, this is described differently, but essentially points to the same thing, which is shame is held in the body, not just the mind. So long before we have the word that we use so much now, which is somatic healing, healers understood that an emotion that was left unspoken, it didn't just move through us, it didn't just leave, it gets stuck in our body. And one thing I want to name here, because I know this is going to really resonate with a lot of you listening, is that shame shows up the most intensely in people who are high achievers, people who are purpose-driven. So physicians, leaders, entrepreneurs. Why is that? It's because our identity is so tightly fused with our performance. We have, for many of us, we have essentially prescribed our identity to what we do. When people ask you, tell me about yourself, you say, I am a doctor, I am a leader, I am a founder, I am a whatever. I am, that is your identity. You have you have fused your identity with your performance. So that means that your identity is tightly fused with being the smart one, the strong one, the one that always gets things done. And the more we tie our identity to this sense of performance, the more shame we hold when we're when we're not performing at that level. So shame really creates a sense of imprisonment for us. And it's not just an uncomfortable feeling, but instead a mechanism that tends to keep us stuck. So there's a psychologist that's done a lot of research out of George Mason University. And I think this research is so interesting because what she did is her name is June Tagney. She compared shame-prone people to guilt-prone people. And what she saw was that people that were guilt prone were more likely to take personal responsibility when they made a mistake. They were more likely to repair relationships and show a sense of empathy. However, Shame prone people are significantly more likely to externalize blame. So look for other people whose fault it can be. They're more likely to get defensive and withdraw. And I think that's really important because, again, if you think about what we've made shame mean, that there is something wrong with me, that if you were to admit that you made a mistake, that means there's something wrong with you. So your ego and again, compassion for all parts of us. There are no bad parts. But what tends to happen is there's a part of us that shows up to try to defend. Defend us from that feeling that we don't belong, that we're not there. And that's the part of us that's trying to externalize the blame. That's the part of us getting defensive. So if you know somebody like that, we can offer just a ton of compassion because we know what's happening. They're so shame-prone that they're so afraid of being judged, of not being perfect. They're really hard on themselves because of what they've made it mean if they don't show up as the smart one, the right one, the strong one, the perfect one. So when you make a mistake. And you hide it, or even tell yourself it's okay. Okay, let me take that back. The other thing we know is that when people are more prone to shame versus guilt, that correlates with higher rates of depression, with substance use, and with interpersonal aggression where they can fight with others. So how this might show up is let's say that you make a mistake and instead of admitting it, you try to hide it so that nobody will find out, or if somebody does find out, you try to blame it on somebody else. Or it's your fault, or why did you tell me that? And you victimize yourself. And if somebody else makes a mistake, you are quickly to jump and judge them because you externalize all those things because it makes you feel better about yourself. So I'm gonna just share a couple patterns of how this shows up because they might resonate with you. So the pattern of perfectionism, perfectionism is a huge pattern of shame. We're so afraid that if somebody finds out that we're not actually good enough, it's gonna feel in we're gonna feel inadequate. And so we try so hard to always be so perfect. And again, I have so much compassion for that because first of all, it was me for so long. And I've just coached so many loving, incredible humans that are so powerful who were raised in a home where they were always praised for being so good, so smart, so perfect, so high achieving, you know. And so that's how their identity got wrapped into that. And so any threat of inadequacy is essentially a threat of maybe I won't be loved, maybe I won't be accepted. It's this so that's one pattern, the perfectionist pattern. Another pattern is overfunctioning. Again, this was also me. Overfunctioning at work to prove that you deserve to be there, to prove that you deserve your seat at the table. You you work so hard because you want to prove your worth. It could be that you stay in a relationship too long or there's a business decision that you avoid making because admitting it isn't working would would admit would mean that you made a mistake, that you made the mistake of like Choosing this in the first place, and that that might mean that something is wrong with you. So all of those things: addiction, procrastination, isolation, this chronic sense of self-criticism, that is all shame. And it's frequently the engine underneath all of those little things because the logic of shame is if I stay hidden, then no one will ever find me out. And then I stay safe. I don't get kicked out of the tribe. I stay loved, I stay accepted. So shame convinces us that secrecy is protection. And this is where I want to transition to give you some tools to move away from shame. Because here's the truth. The truth is I want you to imagine shame as sort of this like electric fence around a small part of you. Shame is so strong and it's so terrifying. We're so afraid to touch it because if we touch it, then we'll get electrified. But the antidote to that electric fence, the antidote to shame, the key to unlock that and let it go is to let it be witnessed. Because shame cannot live in the light. Shame only lives in the dark. Shame only lives in the dark. gonna give you an example of this. We had a neighbor many years ago who was going through a pretty bad divorce. And I We were very good friends with that family and we had a very tight-knit street, not like a gossipy street, but just a really tight-knit street where people cared about everybody. And of course, people are human, so people gossip. However, when this was happening, she knew she had not she had done nothing wrong. There was there's a lot of things that had happened in that relationship. I'm not gonna go into the details, but I'll say that there would have been a lot of reasons for her to feel shame. That she didn't show up strong enough, she should have been a better wife, all those types of things. But she knew she had done nothing wrong. And there was something inside of her that gave her the courage to speak it out loud. And so when we would check in on her, how's it going? She would just be so honest. He did X, and then he did Y, and this is how I felt. It felt horrible. I felt inadequate. and then this happened, and I couldn't believe I didn't see it sooner. And she was just so honest about the whole thing. That it let us just be so open and loving to her, but also it fizzled out any type of shame she would have felt because she was so honest. She didn't keep it hidden behind an electric fence, like so many of us do. So many of us, something bad happens, we don't want anyone to know. We want to pretend like everything's okay. We had trauma as a child. We tried to pretend like, that's okay. It taught me XYZ as opposed to being with it, you know, and like first of all, let yourself feel the rage if there's rage there, let yourself heal from it. And then from there, no, like, yeah, it happened. It was not your fault. And the same thing with this example. Because the more you can let it be witnessed, the more it fizzles out. Shame cannot survive being spoken out loud. It cannot survive empathy. Shame's power depends entirely on darkness and secrecy. So shame essentially creates this type of almost like a prison. And it keeps us inside that prison until we have the courage to say it out loud, to know that it's safe to be witnessed. When we know that to be true, it starts to loosen its grip. The moment it's spoken out loud, the moment somebody else receives it with warmth, it begins to loosen its grip. So I'm gonna give you a couple ways for you to practice this. One is to be to allow yourself to be witnessed. So if you have someone in your life that you trust. someone who has earned the right to hear your story for real, and someone that you know is gonna hold you with love and light, then it's okay to say the things that you're feeling out loud to them. And you can say to them, hey, I want to share something with you, but I don't, I don't want you to try to fix it. I just want you to listen. Is that okay? And once you give them the instructions, then share with them. Whatever it is that you're feeling shame about, hey, I feel really inadequate at my job in the ER. I feel I'm always so afraid that I'm gonna mess something up, that I'm not as smart as everybody else. And and then let them just witness, let them hold you. Because just saying it out loud, you're like, you hear yourself say those things, and you're like, that's so funny that I even think that, isn't it? I must, I can't be the only person that thinks that. And of course I know what I'm doing. Like I graduated from one of the top residencies, as you know, I have all these credentials. Of course I know what I'm doing. But it's not until it gets witnessed that you're able to see it with that level of love, light, and So I want to talk about what good witnessing is. So the job of somebody who's witnessing is to listen, period. To listen with love and compassion. It's not to jump in and try to fix it, it's not to try to minimize it. And tell them, it's okay, that's not big of a deal. It's not to rush to like reassure them, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. It's to stay present, to reflect back the person's worth and to let them know that it's okay. We all have those feelings, that's it. Just listen and just hold compassionate, loving space. One of the things that I learned from my sister, who is an incredible witnesser, because that woman just has so much unconditional love flowing through her, my younger sister Jenny. She is an incredible witnesser. Anytime I used to need some something to be witnessed, I'd call her and she would always pick up the phone and she would always listen. And when I was done, she'd be like, man, that's really hard. That sounds really hard. Wow. Yeah, I get it. And that was it. That's all she'd say. And it was so healing to have somebody like that. So that's what I try to practice all the time. So you too, hashtag practice being Jenny. So I talked about two practices. One is witnessing, and I want to give you sort of a different path here, a different experience, because in the indigenous healing traditions I come from, we know that shame and pain were never meant to be carried alone. They're never meant to essentially be processed by yourself in private. So in fact, when there are healing ceremonies in Indigenous communities, the healing ceremonies are in community. People come together in community. And sometimes they have like an ache in their wrist or an ache in their knee. And the curanderos are so skilled, the healers are so skilled, they can go down and see, okay, this is probably stuck energy in the form of shame or guilt or something that needs to be moved through. Maybe it's grief, maybe it's rage. And so they hold them in community and everybody speaks out loud so that they can be witnessed by other people. This is the practice of co-regulation. So co-regulation is something that we're using a lot in modern psychology right now, but it's something that we've been practicing for thousands of years in indigenous communities. The practice of being held in community, witnessed by others so that your nervous system can heal. The other thing that's also available to you, if you Don't feel safe having s having yourself witnessed by somebody else is to journal what's coming up for you. Because even writing it down and allowing yourself to be your own witness can be really, really healing. So if you don't feel like you can speak it out yet, journal it down. Write it down and allow yourself to be a compassionate witness. Don't read it as an inner critic. Read it as a loving friend that would would read it. Just say, I see that. That's okay. The other thing that's gonna be really important whenever you're gonna start noticing doing this work, and you wanna, you wanna essentially start being more conscious about the amount of shame you feel is I want you to start to notice when you use the word should or people say shoulding on yourself, because should is essentially a disguise of judgment. I should be further along, I should have known better, I should be more productive, I should be handling this better than I am. Every should is often a shame statement that's wearing the sort of like, costume of motivation. So I want you to practice the technique of noting. I talked about noting in the last episode. I talk about noting a lot because it is incredibly powerful. It's a mindfulness practice that's rooted in vipassana tradition and used by many mindfulness teachers. The moment, so the way you would use it here is the moment you catch a self-critical thought, like I should have X or I should have Y', as soon as you hear the word should, you pause and you say, I notice that I'm using the word should. I notice that there might be something here I'm judging myself on. That's it. And you name it. You can even say, This is judgment or this is shame, because labeling an emotional state measurably reduces its intensity. And then it'll activate the brain's regulatory regions, so your prefrontal cortex, so it can regulate the threat response. So now instead of going into fight or flight, you turn on the part of your brain that creates a parasympathetic nervous system. So it causes your brain to relax and regulate. All right, sweet friends, we've talked about a lot today, and I want to wrap up by essentially reminding you of how I started. know, I've been doing this work for over 20 years, and in these 20 years, I've worked with a lot of people. I've worked with every type of physician, surgeons, pediatricians, ER docs. I've worked with leaders that span the gamut from just starting out as a manager all the way to leading a Fortune 500 company. And I'll tell you, there's no Physician, there's no CEO, there's no parent that is exempt from the feeling of shame. And the more you are tied to your identity as a performer or achiever or your ambitions, the stronger the shame will be. So the goal is not to stop trying to feel shame for the rest of your life. No, the goal is to stop mistaking shame for the truth about who you are and stop allowing shame to keep you imprisoned. In this electric fence where you can't get out and you think you have to stay hidden, because that is not a fun way to live life. That is a very small way to live life. Can you imagine what would be possible if you allowed yourself to come out to be witnessed so that people can love all parts of you? That is the goal. To allow yourself to see all parts of you, know all parts of you, love all parts of you, and allow yourself to be seen, witnessed, and loved by everyone around you. That is my my wish for all of you today. Okay, sweet friends, if you of course want help doing this work, then I would invite you to schedule a one-on-one coaching consult with me. This is the work I do every day with all of my coaching clients. I would love to support you in doing the work too. right, sweet friends, I will see you all next week. Adios.