Treating Shame with Self-Compassion with Dr. Chris Germer

0:07Forrest Hanson: Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. We talk about a lot of difficult emotions on the show, and one of the hardest ones to work with is shame. That's partially because shame is a bit of a chameleon. It tends to hide inside of other emotions like anger or anxiety or grief, so it can be hard to figure out that you've got a bit of a shame problem. And part of it is because shame is really sticky. The story that it tells us is that this part of who we are can't be shown to other people, because if it is, we'll be attacked or blamed for it.

0:41Forrest Hanson: So we hide from other people and sometimes from ourselves, but that hiding is what tends to keep shame going. Then one of the best tools we have for working with shame is self-compassion, but even there we've got some problems. If you've ever tried to be kind to yourself in the middle of a shame spiral, you know exactly what I'm talking about here. The moment you try, you immediately come up with every reason that you don't deserve kindness. So shame blocks the thing that would help us with shame. So to help us through all of this, and clearly I need some help here, I'm welcoming back a very special guest to the show, one of the world's leading experts on shame and self-compassion, Dr.

1:18Forrest Hanson: Chris Germer. So Chris, how are you doing today? Oh, thanks. And what an amazing introduction to this subject. You just summarized the entire book. Well, I really appreciate it. I was definitely interested in doing this one with you today. And to tell you a little bit more about Chris, Dr. Germer is a clinical psychologist, a lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and the co-developer with Dr. Kristen Neff of the Mindful Self-Compassion Program, which I believe is now taught in around 30 languages from more than 3 ,000 trained teachers. It is a huge and very successful program. And Chris is also the author and co-author of a number of books, including his new book, Self-Compassion for Shame, a Step-by-Step Guide to Inner Freedom.

2:00Forrest Hanson: And last time that we talked on the podcast, it was a couple of years ago, we focused mostly on self-compassion, and shame came up as this major impediment to self-compassion. So self-compassion was the subject, and shame kind of got in the way of it. And now in this new book, shame is the subject, and self-compassion is the tool you're saying, hey, this helps us work with shame. And there was something in that that I just thought was really interesting, this kind of like inversion of the focus. So maybe we should start with just what is shame and particularly this distinction that you make that I think is really helpful between being afraid of an experience.

2:35Forrest Hanson: Like for you, you talk about a fear of public speaking in the book versus being afraid of being judged for something that's inside of that experience in some way. Or maybe just judged by who you fear people will see you as if you do a certain thing or come across a certain kind of way. So shame is an attack on the self. Shame means I am bad. And guilt means I did something bad. So when we're caught in shame, our sense of self is being devalued. Interestingly, when we practice self-compassion, our sense of self is being affirmed, is being valued. Our humanity, even beyond our current sense of self, is being valued.

3:21Forrest Hanson: So you cite a study in the book that found that shame tracks how much we anticipate being devalued by other people more closely than it tracks how badly we've actually behaved. And I thought this was really interesting because it highlights just how social this emotion is and how the pain points associated with it are mostly that like socially referenced aspect to it in terms of the fear of perception, fear of being seen. And then that gets, as you're saying, to some distinctions between shame and guilt and shame and other similar emotions like embarrassment. What the research shows is that actually shame is more likely to occur when we are devalued.

4:00So some people can break the rules over and over again and have a coterie of sycophants who support them for breaking the rules and they don't feel any shame. That you should probably feel shame about, you know. But then there are other people who maybe have an identity, which is a minority identity that is disparaged or devalued by the culture. And they're experiencing shame all the time, but they never did anything wrong. So I think it's important to think about shame as chronic shame or trait shame or the shame that we carry around with us a lot because we've internalized certain messages in the world.

4:42that it's important for us to think about shame as the product, partially of the product of being devalued, rather than just breaking the rules. One of the claims that you make in the book that I referenced in the introduction

4:55Forrest Hanson: is that most of us don't really know when we're feeling shame because it can hide inside of other emotions. I'm wondering what you think helps people recognize that there's a shame issue of some kind that's kind of like hiding beneath everything. That's a really great question. So, for example, I had public speaking anxiety for 22 years, and it was actually a shame disorder, and I didn't see it. I didn't see it because I just couldn't tolerate the thought of being devalued by people in the audience. Sometimes in order to see it, it has to be a little less. You know, in other words, if there's a lot of shame, then we could get overwhelmed by it, and then we just disappear and we can't address it, you know.

5:39So sometimes it has to be lowered a little. And that's what happened when I started to practice self-compassion. It lowered my public speaking shame to a point where I could actually see that I was feeling shame. But one of the things that we do in the Self-Compassion for Shame program, and it's also described in the book, is we learn to actually identify how shame shows up in our lives. So for example, some people blush. Some people have a sinking feeling. Some people behaviorally want to kind of go silent, disappear. Sometimes we have a lump in our throat. Sometimes it feels as if we just got smacked in the chest.

6:20Each of us has a way of feeling shame. And once we start becoming interested in shame, and hopefully this book, because it's kind of a positive, non-pathologizing view of shame, hopefully this book will inspire people, inspire their curiosity to ask the question, you know, knowing that shame is a universal human emotion, it's not a personal condemnation, to ask the question, how does shame show up in my life? First of all, how do I know when I'm feeling shame? And when we have that curiosity and we can actually identify shame while we're feeling shame, that's really the first step toward working with it and frankly bringing compassion to ourselves in the midst of shame.

7:03But most of us actually don't know it. We are shame blind. And if we can't see shame, we're less likely to be able to work with it.

7:13Forrest Hanson: One of the parts of that experience that can be so difficult to people, like a phrase you use in the book is wiping out the observer. There's this sense internally of kind of vanishing or going small or dissociative process, something like that, in part because this is such a painful emotional experience. So it can be difficult to be in relationship with it. Like you're saying, yours had to go down a little bit before you were able to even see it as a piece of the puzzle, because it can be just so overwhelming for people. And that dissociative process is not something that I was thinking about before reading the book and certainly before having the previous conversation with you that we did.

7:54Forrest Hanson: Because I don't conceptualize shame that way, I guess. But it is such a big part of it. And I think it's one of the things that makes it so difficult for people. Yeah. So shame, it hides in other emotions as we were talking about before, but it also makes us disappear, as you just said. And so those two factors make us lose proximity to shame, make us mean that we just can't see it and can't work with it. One thing we know is that when somebody has a truly dissociative episode where they lose track of time and so forth, often shame precedes the dissociative episode. So shame is very closely associated with dissociation, but we dissociate in little ways throughout our lives.

8:37It's called spacing out. You know, how often do we just kind of space out? Like the research shows maybe 50 % of our lives. Yeah, a lot. But I think we uniquely space out when we start to feel shame. It's like, no, I don't need to go there. Oh, isn't that a pretty bird on the tree or something? You know, in other words, we don't. We basically lose connection with what's going on inside of us. That comes with a price because ultimately shame is just a human emotion. You know, it comes and goes. But since we so systematically avoid it and because it so easily goes into hiding, it sticks. That's what makes shame sticky.

9:18Our avoidance, you know. What we resist persists. Avoidance is resistance. Getting absorbed in Netflix movies all night long or drinking or causing dramas in our lives so that we don't have to feel shame are forms of resistance. All this stuff keeps us from actually doing what we need to do in order to be free of the grip of shame in our lives.

9:45Forrest Hanson: So what is it about self-compassion then that helps us with that resistance aspect of shame? Well, so when we feel shame, we feel worthless and we feel really bad. And self-compassion affirms our worth as a human being. So when we start to practice self-compassion, actually external shaming messages are less likely to shake us up. our own internalized shame messages, we have a little more distance from and we can say, nah, that doesn't quite pertain here. In other words, the more kindness we give to ourselves, the more supported we feel from the inside to be able to address the intensity of shame inside of us.

10:34But in particular, the sense of self, the sense of self that's under attack. We can step back and we could say, is this true? I can give you a little example. Yesterday, I was being interviewed by a reporter from Europe, and I mixed up the times with the time zone difference. And when I recognized, oh, man, I basically thought it was going to be six hours later than it was. So I was late. And in me, instinctively, the old habit would be to say, oh, you idiot. How did you do this? This is like stupid. This was the instinct to say that. But after practicing self-compassion for shame a lot, immediately I was able to think, oh, you missed the appointment.

11:32This person is waiting for you. You feel ashamed. But you know what? This is a pretty common thing when we're dealing with time zone differences. And probably this person will, you know, give you the benefit of the doubt. And you know what? It's going to work out, Chris. You know, so basically there was a quality of kindness that mingled in that conversation of, oh, you idiot, why did you do this? You know, the sense of self that is immediately under attack when things go wrong, when we have a tendency to feel shame, we get a little perspective on that.

12:11Forrest Hanson: Do you think of self-compassion as being more a particular set of actions or more as a kind of tone? So to give an example, like a self-advocacy in self-compassion. What about like useful forms of self-guidance or self-correction? Oh, yeah, in the future, remember the time zone difference or whatever it might be. To me, in my experience with it, I think I've gotten more mileage as I've thought of it more as a tone or a vibe than as a particular set of practices. But as somebody who's done this for years and years, I'm wondering what your take is. I agree with you. I would consider it both. When we practice self-compassion, there are self-compassion practices.

12:53but what is the purpose of all these things? We're changing tone. In other words, when it comes to self-criticism, for example, which is the voice of shame, the tone of self-criticism is harsh, is harsh like metal. It has ill will behind it. So tone is about goodwill. Tone is about caring. You know, tone is about warmth. Sometimes the tone isn't quite warm, like when it comes to fierce self-compassion, it's more like, you know, fierce caring. But ultimately, I agree with you. Tone is the holy grail of self-compassion practice. We want to cultivate a tone of caring inside of us.

13:44Forrest Hanson: Is there a particular arc to a person's work with self-compassion and shame? What I mean by that is that are there common steps to the process that you find that people go through? Is there a starting point for people? Could you kind of walk us through the overall process or path here? That's a good question, too. Thank you. I've never been asked that before. But yes, there is definitely an arc. So when people want to first learn self-compassion for shame, they've already decided shame is a difficulty in my life. They've decided, actually, I probably feel more shame than I want to, and it's holding me back.

14:25Forrest Hanson: Yeah, they've done that recognition process, totally. So anybody who's going to actually read this book or going to take a course or something, We already have buy-in. They've decided, this is something I'd like to get some help with. Then they start to learn about shame. So in the first session of the course, for example, they learn to identify shame as it occurs within their bodies. And this is actually a pretty exciting and heady experience. Because if we've been just kind of knocked around by this invisible ghost within us, And then we can just turn toward and say, oh, this is a thing. This is an emotion.

15:04And this is what it looks like. And this is what it feels like. And not only that, everybody feels just like this. Everybody knows what this feels like. I am not alone. I don't have to feel shame because I feel shame. Then the second learning is, why do we feel shame? Why do we feel shame? And the reason we feel shame is because we're social animals and we need to get along with each other. we need to cooperate. In fact, we need to be loved in order to survive and thrive. So that deeper understanding, you might say the motivation behind, the subtle motivation behind shame, which is the wish to be loved, is like a second revelation.

15:45It's like, oh, I had no idea. When I feel shame, I feel like a horrible human being. But actually, it has this innocent emotion that even babies have who haven't done anything to feel shame about. Isn't that amazing? So these are our two preliminary steps. Then the next thing that's really helpful is for people to understand the causes of shame. And there are two main causes. One is patterns of disconnection. The other is patterns of devaluation. And when we can see the causes of shame in our own experience in real time, or we can see how we came by this, this gives us some more perspective. And it also inspires us to practice self-compassion.

16:32And that practice can either be fierce self-compassion, like not now, you know, not me, not now, not this, not my shame. Or it could be tender self-compassion, which is just to hold ourselves in loving awareness because of how we've suffered shame. That's kind of the arc. But maybe the last part of it is the most interesting. And that is many people, when they start to feel the wish to learn, to release the grip of shame, they think they're going to achieve a goal called no shame or I'm never going to think about shame again. And that's trap. So in the very last part of understanding what self-compassion is and practicing self-compassion for shame is the question, what's left unfinished?

17:17What's left unfinished? And what's left unfinished is our sloppy humanity. is the fact that shame will continue to arise in our lives, the fact that actually old habits will continue to arise in our lives, that actually we never arrive. But that too is not a problem because we can hold ourselves with our shame, with compassion. And that ultimately again and again and again releases the grip. And over time, more and more, we are free from shame. But I consider the last part the most important part, which is to embrace our full humanity, including shame, with self-compassion.

18:05Forrest Hanson: Thanks for laying it out like that. And I think that's a great outline also for what we're going to be talking about a bit today. I think that we're going to touch on most of those things. One of the things that I wanted to ask you about was this section in the book where you talk about these three paradoxes of shame that I thought were great because I had never thought about it this way. First, that shame feels permanent and kind of all-encompassing, but it's transitory. It comes and it goes. It works like any other emotion, right? And second, shame feels isolating, but it's a universal emotion.

18:35Forrest Hanson: Pretty much everybody experiences shame. If somebody experiences truly zero shame, there's probably something else wrong with them, frankly. And then third, shame makes us feel unworthy, but it's an innocent emotion that calls for compassion. First two, pretty easy to get. That third one was a little bit more complicated for me to get. I was wondering if you could explain what you mean by an innocent emotion. Yeah, so I was alluding to it earlier, and that is the motivation behind shame, which is the wish to be loved. So it's very easy for us to be compassionate with innocent beings. We're compassionate with children.

19:12We're compassionate with puppies. We're compassionate with whales. But when we feel shame, we don't feel innocent. We feel, in fact, unworthy of kindness, of love. In fact, that could even be considered a definition of shame, a kind of unworthiness, unworthiness of connection, unworthiness of belonging in society. So all of this is our experience of shame. And indeed, when we fight shame, the consequences of shame can be quite horrible. In other words, violence toward ourselves, domestic violence, even international violence is often started by shame. And so what we experience as shame is very hard to respond to with self-compassion.

20:01But when we look at the motivation behind shame, in other words, when we basically bring our awareness to a more subtle level of the experience of shame, we do see that it arises from the wish to be loved. In other words, we would just never feel shame if we didn't wish to be loved. You know, the shame springs eternal because the wish to be loved springs eternal. We've been, we've wished to be loved since we were born. However, we haven't actually been loved exactly at the right time in the right way to the right amount by the right people. And we've been hurt over and over and over again. You know, even the best of parents can't do that.

20:42There's some interesting research on that we can talk about. Bottom line is that we've kind of forgotten the wish to be loved. We've forgotten ultimately the motivation behind shame. So when we reconnect with that, this is an incredible revelation for folks. When we reconnect with the wish to be loved, shame starts to dissolve. It loses its grip. One way of thinking about it is shame is like a net. It has a whole lot of thrashing fish. This is the way we feel when we feel shame. And so some fish are behaviors that we struggle with when we feel shame. In other words, we try to run away or we get high or do stuff.

21:23Also emotions, intense emotions, fear, anger, sadness, and also even body sensations. So shame is like a whole mind-body experience. But when we connect with a wish to be loved, we slip through the net to a very, we actually slip out of the net to a very humble, subtle, and innocent part of our experience, which is the wish to be loved. When we can say in a moment of shame, I only feel like this because I, like every human being, wishes to be loved. If we can say that, if we can, as it were, turn over the coin of shame, on one side is all the suffering, on the other side is the wish to be loved.

22:12When we can see the wish to be loved, it starts to slip away from us because we are at such a soulful place of existence where all of us live pretty much all the time if we were to admit it. Like right now, Forrest, you and I, you know, you wish to be loved. I wish to be loved. We don't pay attention to it. We're too busy thinking about the content of this interview. But imagine how much easier our lives would be if we remembered this all the time.

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26:37So this is a little bit of a sleight of hand, but it's truthful that enables people in the midst of shame to give themselves compassion, to see shame at a more subtle level.

26:52Forrest Hanson: It's really interesting because I think that people who are, I don't know quite the right way to say it, toward the earlier side of this process, but even people who've wrestled with this for a long time, they perceive that wish to be loved often as a kind of vulnerability because that's how the hurt got in. They wanted to be loved, and so they experienced themselves as not being loved, like you said a second ago, devalued or disconnected. And so there can be this kind of, I don't know, desire to purge ourselves of that, and people create these very firm exteriors in order to have that armoring around that desire that I think you're right.

27:32Forrest Hanson: We all have. We're big social mammals. The way that we survived was by getting along in groups of people. You know, we all want to feel this way. But people can have a kind of tortured relationship with that aspect of who we are. I'm wondering what you've seen about that and how you help people work with that. Yeah. So that's also a really wonderful observation, Forrest. So in the last interview, I think we spoke about backdraft. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. So this is basically the adage that love reveals everything unlike itself. or when we give ourselves unconditional love, we discover the conditions under which we were not loved.

28:14Bottom line is, if I start to connect with the wish that was with me since birth to be loved, when I start to connect with that, what's the first thing that happens? I start to think about all the times I was not loved or not loved in the proper way or were actually harmed or abused. So basically to consider that all beings wish to be loved is a lightning rod for suffering. It's a lightning rod for trauma. And so part of learning self-compassion for shame is to assume that, to know that, to know that when we just even consider the wish to be loved, that we will at the same time consider when we were not loved, and then we give ourselves compassion for that.

29:15This is how ultimately our hearts are transformed. This is how we develop what's called earn secure attachment. We can actually, by reflecting on the wish to be loved and being aware of when we were not loved and loving ourselves simply because this happened to us, we actually can learn to feel more and more secure in our own skin.

29:41Forrest Hanson: I would love to get a practical example or two of this. You have a whole bunch of different practices in the book that relate to, I think, aspects of what we're talking about here. Most of them are internal and self-guided, which I thought was interesting. I wasn't sure if that was just the self-help frame, the reality that somebody's reading a book, and so they're just kind of interfacing with it. Or if there was something in that, that was a deliberate choice. But either way, do you have a kind of example that comes to mind of how somebody could actually do this? Yeah, so there are many different ways.

30:12The book has, I think, 16 different practices. And it's not just reading. Anybody who gets the book can also access recordings of those 16 different practices. So it can be guided through it. Regarding the wish to be loved, it's such a slippery concept. And there is so much within us that prefers to be distracted and not pay attention to that. In fact, some of us even prefer to feel shame than to feel the wish to be loved, because when we feel the wish to be loved, it stirs up old memories, as I was saying. So one practice in the book is called simply remembering the wish to be loved. And in that practice, we remind people that you don't have to use an intense phrase like the wish to be loved.

31:05That tends to stir up more bad grief. But you can use other words like the wish to be respected or the wish to be appreciated or the wish to matter or the wish to be understood or the wish to be included or the wish to belong. Words like that. And then to create a phrase, this is practice, to create a phrase for oneself that sounds something like, just as all beings wish to belong or all people wish to belong, so do I wish to belong. Just as all beings wish to be appreciated, so do I wish to be appreciated. So whatever resonates for us but doesn't cause too much backtrack, whatever confirms basically our fundamental instincts as a social animal that we need to belong.

31:56And then when we get up in the morning, to put maybe two hands over the heart, if we're serious about wanting to, as it were, pull the rug out from under shame, we can just remember, ah, just as all beings wish to be respected, so do I wish to be respected. Say this a few times, you know, and then you get up in the morning and you walk into the kitchen or something and your kids, you know, ignoring you and looking on, you know, watching TikTok or something. Then you get strong feelings. Then you remember, ah, just as all beings wish to be respected, so do I wish to be respected. Ah, and then you go out on the street and you go to the bus station and somebody comes walking toward you and you're feeling, ah, you know.

32:42when you see other people and you know in your own heart that you wish to be loved, you wish to be respected, you wish to be appreciated, it changes how we relate to other people. Loneliness is epidemic in the world right now. And when we know that we wish to be loved, when we connect with the common humanity of the wish to be loved, we will see it in other people and we will not feel so alone and we'll also probably, frankly, be more compassionate. it. It's ridiculously simple, but not easy.

33:12Forrest Hanson: Yeah, yeah. The simple but not easy part of this, I think, is a really great summary of a lot of it. As listeners of the podcast will know, I've been on a kick recently with exposure therapy and appreciating inhibitory learning protocols and that kind of stuff. And so it's unsurprising that one of the practices in the book that I found the most interesting was what you call a self-compassion break for shame, wherein you basically think of a mildly shaming past event, and then you apply self-compassion to it and yourself in the present moment. One of the parts of that that I thought was interesting was that you get the self-compassion simply because you're experiencing a moment of shame.

33:52Forrest Hanson: So there's kind of a tying together of those two things. We're trying to create a slightly more automated response linked to an emotional experience. And so the break is asking somebody to deliberately recall a mild event located in the body. You're staying with it. You're labeling it. You're naming the feared judgment. This is imagining what other people would conclude about you if they saw this aspect of you. And then you're moving into a different kind of response, which is the application of self-compassion. This is the structure of a graded imaginal exposure. You're approaching the avoided internal stimulus.

34:24Forrest Hanson: You're titrating your dose, and you're kind of staying in contact with it as you go. I don't know if this was 100 % deliberate or not as you were putting the sucker together. But I thought that it was really interesting to kind of tie to the exposure aspect of this, where you're trying to find, and this is always the trouble with exposure, is what's the right dose? Because so frequently, people will kind of cannonball into the deep end of the pool when doing this stuff. And like you said yourself, at the very beginning of our conversation, it was only when you were able to reduce the shame load a little bit that you became more aware of its presence in your life.

34:58Forrest Hanson: And there's a part of me that wonders if we have this aspect of our psychology where we try to set ourselves up for failure with some of this tough stuff so we could then go like, oh, okay, it didn't work. I don't have to deal with that again. So I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about any aspect of that, either the kind of exposure aspect of it or the cannonball into the pool aspect. Well, I do remember that Dan Goldman, like 40 years ago, called meditation global desensitization. Basically, you sit there with nothing distracting you and whatever comes up, you're in a chill state and you linger with it in a chill state and it gets desensitized.

35:38So it could be called global exposure and desensitization.

35:43Forrest Hanson: Sure. I also know that what we're learning now is that pure exposure, like just throwing somebody in the old, in a fearful situation, first of all, most people don't do it and therapists don't want to make anybody do it because it's just all too hard. But what we're doing now is we're doing self-compassionate exposure. In other words, giving, and also mindful exposure, giving people skills that allow them to tolerate, not avoid, not diminish the experience, but rather just to be with the experience as long as it takes to lose its edge. So, you know, self-compassionate exposure. And ultimately, yes, that's what we're doing with shame.

36:25We're doing self-compassionate exposure. However, you know, it's exposure to an emotion.

36:33Forrest Hanson: Yeah, it's a different kind of game, totally. It's a different kind of game, you know. So the problem that leads to any kind of exposure is that it triggers the threat response, the fight-flight-freeze response. And self-compassion triggers the care response, which is more parasympathetic rather than sympathetic. It's a relaxation response. So you could say that we're pairing threat response with a relaxation response. And over time, we have what's called classical counter conditioning. And this is indeed how it worked when I first learned self-compassion. I was terrified about a conference coming up.

37:16I was panic-stricken. And for four months every morning, I just sat down, I said kind things to myself like, may you be safe, may you be peaceful, et cetera. And then I would think about this horrible conference and I panicked and I would say that. And then when I got up to speak at the actual conference, as per usual, I panicked. But four months of training meant the next instinctive response was, oh, may you be safe, may you be peaceful. So actually, I had learned to pair a threat response with parasympathetic, with a relaxation response, with a care response, with a compassionate response, and it changed the experience.

38:01So if you're interested in mechanisms, particularly from a behavioral point of view, I think this is a very simple and frankly powerful way of looking at it.

38:12Forrest Hanson: Totally. And it did make me wonder about one aspect of the book, which is that solo internal practice versus more like deliberately external or social practices. You have kind of rungs of the ladder of difficulty in the book, where some of these practices are more just you with yourself versus things like kind of a three-chair exercise, which is a very cool exercise where you're sort of playing these different roles in different kinds of ways. You also talk about some IFSE stuff in the book as well, which helps us separate out the different parts of who we are, what's that self-critical voice, what's the more self-compassionate voice.

38:46Forrest Hanson: Okay. But there isn't a practice in the book that at least I didn't see it, I might have missed it, that's more like structured disclosure to another person or something like that, which feels like it would be the kind of top of the mountain of the shame practice, difficulty rung, and therefore maybe the value that somebody could get out of it. And I was wondering why that was. Is this just because we're doing self-help format here and you're reading the book as a solo person and so it doesn't really make sense? Or was there some other reason for it? That's a great point. And actually, if I were writing the book now, I might add a practice just as you did.

39:21Forrest Hanson: That's a great answer. I appreciate that. When I think about why we didn't put it in there, it's mostly because the book parallels the course, the Self-Compassion and Shame course. And that book is all about community. I mean, that program is all about community, practice groups, sharing in community, all kinds of things. Yeah. So there's naturally that community format. There's naturally in that, but in the translation to book form, I think that, you know, probably should have been a little more explicit. We do at the end talk, have a practice or exercise about going forward and how what we've learned we might like to integrate into our lives, which would include, you know, saying, take explicitly, you know, are there any actions I would like to take?

40:12Is there anything I would like to say to somebody? And if so, what? But that was just kind of left there as a invitation. You know, in other words, like in mindfulness-based stress reduction, Jon Kabat-Zinn calls the last session. At the eighth session, he says, this is the prelude to session nine, which is the rest of your life, you know?

40:37Forrest Hanson: Yeah, totally. So we were kind of pointing toward the rest of life, but to actually, you might say, commit to, you could say, exposure or to trying out self-compassionate responding to shame in a more objective social way, I think is a great idea. I would encourage anybody watching this podcast, do that when you feel strong enough. Yeah, I think that when you feel strong enough and the how to do it safely parts of it are huge considerations. When you've got the container of something like a mindful self-compassion course or deliberate self-compassion for shame course, you're doing it with people who are all in the water with each other.

41:26Forrest Hanson: They're all walking in with acknowledgement of this vulnerability, a focus on working on it. You've got experienced teachers who are doing this kind of stuff with people. Doing it in the wild, to put it a certain kind of way, is a very different animal. But even small versions, like you coming on a podcast and telling a bunch of people, I had this concern with public speaking. Even if it's just the two of us in this moment, you're seeing my face respond, it, I'm going like, oh, yeah. I'm not getting loaded about it. I'm not looking at you a certain kind of way. I'm just like, yeah, that seems like a thing people have.

41:59Forrest Hanson: I've got my own bullsh**, whatever it might be, that kind of orientation. That is itself already a pretty big exposure to think about it that way. I would grade that pretty high if I were looking at this sort of thing with somebody. So it doesn't have to be the cannonball into the deep end. It can be normal every day, you're having a conversation and you're a little bit more transparent about something you're thinking about or working on or whatever. And then you kind of see how other people take it. Yeah. So I think that's what self-compassion does. Shame, you know, can cripple our lives, but also just holds us back from being more authentic, you know?

42:37So the first thing we need to do is to stop hiding from ourselves. And when we do that, then we have the strength to not hide from others. And that's ultimately, I think, what this book does. It gives us the courage and methodology to safely and effectively go to places in our psyche that we often fear to tread in.

43:06Forrest Hanson: This does all make me wonder a bit about what you might call the fundamental exposure question. and I know I'm playing fast and loose with exposure as a term here a lot, but I do think it's relevant for this, which is what do you do when the bad thing actually does happen? So the whole point of exposure work is to help somebody learn that, to use a classic example, they won't necessarily get sick if they touch a doorknob, if they have a hand-washing compulsion or something like that, if you're doing more classic OCD work. So a lot of the self-compassion for shame work, as we've been talking about, is, you know oh it's okay you know it's okay if or other people won't yeah you will survive other people won't think about you this way right and there are plenty of experiences that people have in life where we really do get shamed by other people or where they really are highly judgmental about something that we did that we intended totally innocently so i'm wondering how you think about working with that particularly if you're a shame prone person already yeah so what we're doing is building the resource of self-compassion so that we can cope.

44:09And we know that this will happen in life. You know, in that last part of the course, What's Unfinished, what's unfinished is that life still happens, shit still happens. You are going to be shamed. You are going to feel shame. And you have what it takes. You have what it takes. That doesn't mean life is going to be easy. That doesn't mean life is going to be safe. But you have what it takes. So this is, we can't go around protecting ourselves from catastrophe because definitely we're all going to get, we're all going to die, you know? So things will not play out as we imagine, you know? Most things are not predictable.

44:55And the thing we fear the most will definitely happen. But throughout our lives, do we have what it takes to cope with it perhaps today better than yesterday? I think with self-compassion and understanding shame, the answer is yes. So much of what we do is avoidance of shame. So much, not just for a shame-prone person like me. Everyone, oh, I can't do that. I wouldn't look good. Oh, I can't do that. I'm too uncoordinated. Oh, I can't do that. I can't. I can't. I can't. Why? Why? Why? What's keeping you? What's keeping you? So often it's shame.

45:31Forrest Hanson: One of the big aspects of shame is external referencing. There's a sense of who we are in the eyes of another person and that who we are is fundamentally flawed in some way. Right. There's a lot of like judgment extending from them towards us. That's the essence of shame. Yeah, that's the game. And so it seems to me that some kind of greater sense of internal referencing, like moving to a more internal locus of control, or more of a sense of, like you were saying, earned secure attachment, even kind of with yourself, could really help somebody here. I'm not sure if the self-compassion piece is closely tied to what I'm describing or if it's kind of a separate track, but I'm wondering how you think about it and also what would help somebody develop that.

46:16Yeah. So Paul Gilbert talks about two kinds of shame. One is external and one is internal. So what you were describing was external shame. And that's mostly what I had with public speaking problem. In other words, my shame proneness was pretty low grade, low level. But when I stood in front of an audience of 600 people, it blossomed. That's external shame, actual people shaming us. Internal shame is when we've internalized this and we go around carrying negative voices inside all the time. That's internal shame. And the problem with shame is our self-worth. In other words, it's an attack on our, when I say self, I really mean our self-worth.

47:03So where does our self-worth come from? So it can either come from outside of us or inside. And so when Kristen Neff, as a developmental psychologist, first formulated self-compassion, what she was interested in is the assumption in a lot of the self-esteem research that our self-esteem depends on external approval. And it does in part. But there's another source of self-esteem, which is inner kindness, inner encouragement, inner support, inner validation, inner wisdom. These internal qualities, which are roughly understood as self-compassion, are an alternative source of self-worth. And so that kind of self-worth we can carry around with us everywhere we go.

47:58It's portable. It's stable because no matter what people say to us, we can still access this inner resource. However, especially, say, for teenagers, when kids start leaving the home and they join groups and they are basically obsessed with how am I doing, this is a developmental necessity, but their self-esteem is so fragile because it depends entirely on contingent social support or external approval. And so what self-compassion does is it just kind of softens that a little bit. It allows us to have an additional source of self-worth. We'll always care what other people think about us, but we don't have to be entirely dependent on it for our self-worth.

48:50Forrest Hanson: Back to the show after a quick break. This episode is sponsored by Huel. Out of every sponsor we have ever had on the show, I think that Huel is the one that Elizabeth and I have used the most. It's always been tough for Elizabeth to eat enough protein, and she's been trying to build some muscle recently. And, well, we're both busy during the day. It often feels easier to just grab something rather than taking the time to make something that's actually healthy. But what if you could do both? Huel, that's spelled H-U-E-L, has solved that problem for us. Their Black Edition powder is a complete meal you have instead of food, not a shake on top of food.

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50:14Pink Panther us here.

50:16Forrest Hanson: Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences and personalized products and discover custom playlists on spotify built just for you based on who you are and how you listen live your story with coach learn more at coach.com now back to the show there's so much of this that to me is very reminiscent of a fundamental mindfulness Buddhist adjacent practice that I'll call basically lightening up, for lack of a better way of putting it.

50:59Forrest Hanson: There's this kind of shrugging that starts to come in around a lot of what you're talking about, Chris, a kind of shrugging at the reality that other people are going to criticize us, kind of shrugging at our own internal narrative, like, oh, what a funny thing I'm thinking right now. Oh, look at that over there. How weird is that? And that for me has been a really useful part of the whole process, including appreciating my own like cave of bats that is the mind, you know, to steal a phrase from my dad that he likes a lot. There's just a lot of stuff cooking around in there, and I don't really have control over it, but I can turn the wheel a little and move the car into maybe a slightly healthier direction over time.

51:43Forrest Hanson: But that lightening up process, including in this example that you're giving around external validation and increasingly viewing it as dependent, inconsistent, variable, not entirely tied to my behavior, all of these other things that then kind of help us do the shrug in its direction, I think can be a really helpful practice for people. And certainly I've gotten a lot of mileage out of it myself. I love that. The shrug. Yeah, the shrug. I don't know a better way to put it. Just kind of like, it is what it is. In Buddhist psychology, the language is often non-attachment. In other words, I can be myself.

52:20I can't control how people respond to me, but I will try to behave in a way which is positive and good for others, and it's not going to work, and people are going to blame me for even things that I do right. Oh, well, shrug. So non-attachment. In other words, what is non-attachment? mean. It means letting go of the attachment to the outcome of what we do. And if the outcome of what we do that we seek is approval, and we actually can start to let go of that, we can get free. We can become so much more free. But I like the metaphor of the shrug. It's visceral.

53:06Forrest Hanson: Yeah, it has that visceral, physical, embodied aspect to it. So it just feels very, it feels natural and accessible in a way that sometimes the more, even though I'm a very cognitive person, as you can probably tell, some of the more high-minded stuff doesn't always like get in there in the same kind of way. I'm thinking a little bit as we're talking of natural yeah buts that a person might be thinking about or have kind of cook in here. And one of the big yeah buts with self-compassion is, yeah, but I really did do fill in the blank. I really did do the bad thing. I really was the bad person.

53:40Forrest Hanson: And I should feel shame related to that. I have to imagine that this comes up all the time when people are talking to you. And I'm wondering how you think about it, work with it. Well, there's state shame and there's trait shame. There's adaptive shame and there's maladaptive shame. There's helpful shame and there's unhelpful shame. So this book is mostly geared toward unhelpful shame. Yeah, trait maladaptive. Trait shame, maladaptive, chronic, toxic shame. Basically, the stuff we carry around with us everywhere, it's a burden, limits our freedom and joy as well as that of others. That kind of shame.

54:23That's trait shame. State shame is a good thing. You know, in other words, if we do something that harms somebody, you know, say Johnny hits Mary, you know, Johnny's 10, Mary's 8, Johnny hits Mary and mom says, shame on you. That's not so bad. It means like, Johnny, knock it off. There's a lesson to learn here.

54:45Forrest Hanson: Yeah, totally. Yeah, there's a lesson to learn here. And then if Johnny says, well, I'm a bad person, I hit Mary, that's not so bad as long as it is a state. In other words, if it becomes a trait, if, say, mom or dad is always telling, you know, Johnny, he's a bad boy. And then it'll stick and he's going to take it out of the house and he's going to take it out on other people. You know, if we feel bad about ourselves and we can feel bad about ourselves even when other people don't tell us we're bad. In other words, if that's what we call disconnections rather than devaluations, we could just feel terrible because we've been ghosted in a big way by, you know, the people we love.

55:27And so when that happens, when we feel like that, ideally, we're in a social context that can reabsorb us, particularly when we're able to acknowledge that that wasn't such a great thing that I did and I don't want to do it again. And then we get reintegrated and then the shame disappears. So this is historically like shame is a evolutionarily positive emotion. You know, it basically kept the tribe together and they survived. You know, what some evolutionary psychologists say is because people felt shame and felt so terrible about, you know, breaking off from the group, then they would want to get back in with the group just because of shame.

56:10They didn't have to be clubbed on the head by the other members of the tribe to get them back into the group because that would be like a big burden for everyone. So shame is an internal way of keeping the group together. So in daily life, if we have a moment of shame, that is not a problem. The problem is if we can't find our way back into connection. And if that happens consistently, then we develop what's called trait shame or chronic shame.

56:41Forrest Hanson: We're now sneaking up on nine years, I think, of doing the podcast, which is pretty wild for me to think about. And if I had to summarize everything down to the biggest problem that people deal with related to psychology, I think it might be all or nothing thinking. I think it might be like movement away from the middle path. And what you're describing here is a way where shame as a part becomes shame as all of who we are. so if somebody is able to stay in a world where I did that bad thing and related to that bad thing it might be appropriate to feel a little corrective shame as an emotion but I am a complex person made up of all of this different stuff and that one bad thing is 0.01 percent of the total experiences and actions that I will have over the course of my life.

57:39Forrest Hanson: So I am 99.99 % a perfectly wonderful, worthy person with this one little tile on the mosaic that is complicated and might involve some kind of correction around it. If you can stay in that frame, I think you're pretty good to go. And the problems that we run into over and over again are when that one little piece of the mosaic starts to just kind of infect all of the other ones in this way that just has a lot of consequences for people. And I think you can expand this out to thinking about probably most of the common issues that people deal with related to their psychology. It's when this little piece starts to become a bigger and bigger piece of the overall puzzle and starts to crowd out all of this other complexity.

58:27Forrest Hanson: And if I had to flag one thing that IFS has done that I think is like really right on, it's highlighting this kind of internal complexity and the way that we're made up of all these different pieces and parts and how that is a perfectly normal way of being and a good way of being, actually, something we should kind of aspire to here. And so that's what I'm kind of hearing in what you're saying. Yeah, I think that the view of human personality or human nature to be consist of parts is fundamentally de-shaming in the way you've just described. Yeah. Because shame is not just a negative self-evaluation, but it's a global negative self-evaluation, just as you said.

59:09When we feel shame, we actually don't think that this is just a part of myself. When we feel guilt, we can say, oh, this is a part of myself. When we feel shame, By definition, the experience of shame is global and bad. And if we have a parts view, I think like an IFS view, then more quickly we could get to the place of, what part of me did that? And then all of a sudden, you are actually not quite in shame. We become curious, and eventually it gets downgraded to guilt, and then we can actually do something about it.

59:46Forrest Hanson: What do you think helps people develop that? more of that complexified view of who they are. This might be a psychoeducation thing, which can be great for a podcast like this one. It might be a little bit of a mindfulness thing. I'm wondering what you've seen help people. I think that the main question that humanity has in this life is, who am I? People pursue an answer to that question in many different ways. But I do think it is the essential question that we all have. We don't want to get through this life without spending a little time on that if we want to have a meaningful life, in my view.

1:00:22So everyone has a different way of answering that. Some people hear about IFS and they just go for it and it's really helpful for shame. Other people hear about parts and it just makes no sense whatsoever. In other words, parts, I'm not fundamentally parts. I'm fundamentally nothing. And everything I think I am is constructed in interaction with the world. That's more of a Buddhist view. So all these views are, I think, important. But the main thing is, what do you need to learn about yourself? Do you need to learn about your personality? Do you need to know something about the structure of your personality?

1:01:07Do you need to know something about the structure of mind? Do you need to know whether there is something to humanity or human psychology that is beyond mind, that is pure consciousness, that is pure love? What is it for you? So everyone, I think, engages in this question in a different way at a different time in their lives.

1:01:33Forrest Hanson: As we wander toward the end here, Chris, I'm wondering if there's anything that we haven't talked about or anything that's been just kind of burning in the back of your mind a little bit that you wanted to make sure that you said or make sure that we kind of touched on here? There was a book out many years ago, maybe even 40 or 50 years ago, that is Love is Letting Go of Fear, something like that. Love is Letting Go of Fear. I'm going to have to look it up, but it's in the back of my mind. And I was thinking recently, actually, what are we afraid of? I think ultimately love is letting go of shame.

1:02:11I think that is closer to the heart of loving. What I found in doing this work, Self-Compassion for Shame, is that people are able to more and more, not just love themselves, but love other people. And even start to move slightly into an expanded sense of self, into more of a we, into a greater sense of common humanity as being fundamentally loving, even though we have strange ways of showing it. And so for me, kind of the larger vision of self-compassion for shame is know who we are. It's not nearly as limited as we think.

1:03:05Forrest Hanson: I think that's a great feeling to close our conversation on. I really appreciate it, Chris. You've been great today. I've learned a lot, as always. Is there anything you want to let people know about where to find you, where to find the book, the related course, anything else you want to give some information on here? No, no, no. I appreciate any interest anybody has in this. There are lots of courses. People can go to the centerformsc.org. Someone can go to my website, chrisgirmer.com. We've had just a really interesting conversation. I always really love talking with you, Forrest. For your listeners, the really cool thing is to see how this works in your own experience.

1:03:46Do the practices and get free in that way. That would be my invitation.

1:03:52Forrest Hanson: Amazing. Thanks again for doing this, Chris. I really appreciate it. It's been awesome.

1:04:21Forrest Hanson: human. This is a natural human experience. We all experience shame, at least to some degree. As I said early on, if you don't experience any shame at all, there's probably something else that's wrong with you. And so our hope here is that self-compassion helps us increasingly view these experiences as a part of who we are, one tile in the complicated mosaic of you as a person, as opposed to being all of who we are. So sure, we're somebody who said that stupid thing or made a mistake or had something else that came up that made us feel a certain kind of way, but that's just a feeling. That's just a thought.

1:04:59Forrest Hanson: That's just a piece of this much bigger, much more complex picture. Shame is an extremely devaluing experience. It's the feeling of being dropped down the social totem pole, and maybe even more than that. It's the feeling we get when that which should be hidden is revealed, either revealed to ourselves and to other people. This means that shame is often something that we disguise. We hide it under other emotions like anger or fear or anxiety, and the protocol for working with shame is challenging in part because the antidote to it is exactly what it's trying to get us to avoid, which is revealing this vulnerability, revealing maybe underneath it all, as Chris said, the feeling that we all want to be loved.

1:05:46Forrest Hanson: I asked Chris if there was a common arc to working with shame. He started it with identifying that this is an issue for a person. Then they typically move into more psychoeducation. This could be learning about shame and learning about where shame comes from. Then maybe the person would learn about self-compassion and why self-compassion is a good antidote to shame. Then they learn particular practices, including maybe identifying particular areas where that person experiences shame most often. And then there's this kind of movement into moving away from the arrival fallacy, the idea that once we get there, we'll feel okay, we'll suddenly feel better, we won't experience shame anymore.

1:06:23Forrest Hanson: And more toward what I was talking about at the beginning of the outro, the idea that we are this messy, complicated person made up of many parts. We then talked a bit about how the self-compassion protocol that Chris has created has a lot of overlap, at least in my reading of it, with other forms of exposure-based inhibitory learning. One of the key practices in the book is deliberately recalling a shame event that's at like a three or a four on the intensity scale, locating that event in the body. What does it feel like for you when you feel shame? sticking with it, labeling it, naming the feared judgment.

1:06:59Forrest Hanson: This is what you are worried other people will think about you if they saw this aspect of you, and then responding differently. And in this case, responding differently by applying some self-compassion. This is basically the structure of a graded approach to exposure. And as with exposure, one of the big problems here for people is finding the right amount of shame to start with. What's the experience that doesn't totally blow them out of the water, but is significant enough that it can be a real target for them. Now, the trouble with using self-compassion in this sense is that typical approaches to exposure say that soothing yourself during a exposure experience can block the learning that you receive.

1:07:41Forrest Hanson: What we're trying to help the person learn is that they can be exposed to a given stimuli and still have the feared event not happen. If your internal explanation for why things went well is something like, well, I studied for 40 hours for this test or something, not because I'm an intelligent person and I only had to study for maybe eight hours. Well, you're just learning that the coping mechanism works right. The difference with using self-compassion for shame is the prediction that's baked into shame. So with shame, the prediction is that if the feared event occurs, if people see who I really am, then they will shame and attack me.

1:08:16Forrest Hanson: They will cast me out. but they won't love me anymore. By directing self-compassion to ourselves, we are creating a different outcome than we predicted. This creates an expectation gap, and that expectation gap is what we actually learn from. So we learn when the shame feeling comes along, we can experience self-compassion. And so we're creating this different kind of linkage between an emotional experience we're having and then what happens after that. And there's something I want to say during the outro here that we didn't really talk about during the body of the episode, but it's a cool point having to do with how good forms of exposure actually work.

1:08:52Forrest Hanson: There's a lot of value in explicitly naming the feared judgment that you think other people will have about you if they see this aspect of who you are. So in Chris's case, he talked a lot about his fear of public speaking and the shame that ran underneath it, how he thought that if he struggled when speaking or if he stumbled over his words or something like that, he feared that people would assess him as incompetent or whatever his other fears were that were cooking away in there. And so he could turn that into a specific phrase, I fear I will feel incompetent if... Or I fear other people will not love me if...

1:09:35Forrest Hanson: Like that kind of a format. Because shame is defined by the imagined gaze of other people upon you, and particularly a kind of forecast of how those people will assess you if they only knew this thing about you. But that forecast is typically not directly stated by us. It just kind of runs in the background, lingering away. And because it's vague and general and amorphous, we can't really do much about it. We can't do much about a generalized fear that other people won't love us. We have to come up with specific targets that let us test whether or not people will still love us if they only knew the thing about us.

1:10:15Forrest Hanson: We talked a bit during the episode about where shame comes from, and Chris highlighted these two words, devaluation and disconnection. Devaluation is the more obvious one. We have specific experiences, typically developmental experiences, but they don't have to be just developmental experiences, where somebody communicated to you that you weren't worthy in some way. And then if we hear that message for long enough, well, it becomes a kind of trait shame. Shaming voices from the outside start to echo around inside us. And the line blurs between what do I think and what do other people say about me.

1:10:52Forrest Hanson: Disconnection we didn't talk about as much, but I think in some ways it's a more important one to emphasize because it can be a little subtler. Disconnection occurs when you are reaching out for connection. You're searching for somebody else to be in relationship with you, and you're not being met in that. And this is an experience that can actually be particularly common for people who are not neurotypical. A neurodivergent person could conclude that they are just weird after having repeated experiences of disconnection from others, as opposed to having some kind of a different conclusion where, oh, you know, my brain just works a little bit differently, or, oh, that person didn't know how to respond to me, or oh, I didn't communicate around these different kinds of issues or experiences, and therefore we weren't really set up for success in that moment, or whatever else that person might conclude.

1:11:41Forrest Hanson: When a kid feels lonely, it's natural for them to say, oh, there must be something wrong with me. In part because we can do something about that. We can do something about there's something wrong with me. It's a lot harder to do something about, wow, the world is a cruel place. And this took us to the reality that one of the best ways to work with shame is by developing a stronger sense of internal referencing. And self-compassion is a great tool that helps us do this. In general, self-compassion is a common factor that runs underneath so many other good things. When we're a little bit more compassionate towards ourselves, it helps us lighten up or direct that shrug, which I talked about during the episode, toward all of the different ways that people can naturally criticize us.

1:12:25Forrest Hanson: It helps us shrug a little bit, experiences of shame in general, because we go, ah, this is a universal experience. It doesn't have to be so bad for me. I can kind of lighten up around this a little bit. It can also help us with creating that more complex sense of who we are that I was talking about. And when we have a little bit of compassion that we extend towards the self-critical voice, we can go, oh, okay, this is why you're talking to me in this way. This is why you think the things that you do. Oh, that's where that voice comes from. Wow, there's a part of me that feels bad for you. I feel a sense of suffering with that part of myself and going, oh yeah, I really get it.

1:13:03Forrest Hanson: And once we're able to extend that to ourselves, all of this space can open up inside of our own experience where we care enough and are soft enough in order to maybe do something a little bit differently in the future. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. Again, Chris's new book is Self-Compassion for Shame, a step-by-step guide to inner freedom. If you're interested in these topics, I would really recommend it. He also mentioned his website. He mentioned the Mindful Self-Compassion site. There are a lot of resources of his that you can check out. If you made it this far and you haven't subscribed to the podcast, if you could take a second to subscribe, that would really help us out, and I would really appreciate it.

1:13:41Forrest Hanson: You can also find us on Patreon, on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, all of the places. I'm writing a little bit more on Substack these days as well, and you can check out my work over there. Until next time, thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.

1:14:16Forrest Hanson: and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, built just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.