Special: How to Overcome Shame

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0:47Do you hear me? Does what I say mean anything to you? You are listening to The Oprah Winfrey Show, the podcast. We have some interesting guests here today. They're people who feel deeply ashamed of something in their past. There are a lot of us who carried shame for a long time. I'm one of those people who finally got over it. But some of the people here today have buried the truth so deeply they thought it no longer affected them. Shame always does, of course. The truth is always there for us to confront. Melissa England says that shame has ruled her life since she was just six years old. And that's when her entire world crumpled in front of her eyes.

1:27I had a father who worked. And then I had a mother who was a stay-at-home mother. We had a house like everyone else's. We played outside. It may have looked like a happy childhood, but hidden behind the smiles were parents who constantly argued until one day when Melissa was six years old, a disagreement over how to spend a day turned deadly. The argument escalated. My father left the house. He came back in the house with a gun. and he pointed the gun at her and he told her to turn around. And I thought she was watching me and I was so angry with my father. It was too overwhelming to understand he had just shot her.

2:07He took me outside and he rocked me. And then he went back in the house and he locked me in my bedroom and he went back into the bedroom and killed himself. I think from that moment, I stopped being a child. Melissa and her brother were sent to live with their aunt and uncle. They told her that talking about what happened would destroy her life. If people knew where I came from, they would put me away. I would be ostracized, I would be isolated. So I became something new. It's a secret she has slowly begun to share, but she still feels like a prisoner of her childhood. I don't believe I was born with original sin, but I believe I was born with original shame.

2:52Well, Melissa is here with us. She says that she feels ultimately responsible for what happened. Do you still? Yes. I've done a lot of work and I've done a lot of therapy. But some part of me, I couldn't get something from my parents. And I thought it was me. And I wanted to be loved and I wanted them to live. And I wanted them to do something that I thought everybody else's parents were doing. Uh-huh. And I couldn't get that. At six years old, though, you were six years old when this happened. And now, as an adult, what we're trying to understand, because we all hear that story, and we feel sadness for the little girl who had to go through that, but it's difficult to understand how you as an adult now, looking back on that time, can still feel that you had something to do with your father going, asking your mother to turn around and shooting her in cold blood.

3:47It's just hard to see that. Part of what I think my shame is, is that I couldn't get from my mother this love. I remember her arm up, going, you know, back away from me. And my mother and father argued because my mother couldn't get somewhere. So my father loved her. He adored her, wanted to get close to her. That's how I saw it. I wanted her, too. But I also wanted her to go away. I thought just my wanting her to go away caused that to happen. I was so afraid to look at this, I thought I was the one who pulled the trigger. I wanted to be loved, and I wanted my mother to go away and my dad to love me.

4:25Because if she couldn't love me, I wanted my dad. He killed me. But everybody wants that. But everybody wants that. See, but I'm... Some part of me thinks I caused it. My wanting that. I wanted it so bad, I made it happen. I wanted to be loved, and I must not have done it right. My father kills my mother. He goes back in the house. He kills himself. Well, he leaves me. I'm not enough for him either. I mean, my whole message has been, whatever I am, wasn't good enough, wasn't enough. No. He wasn't enough for himself. He wasn't enough. Best-selling author and lecturer John Bradshaw has written several books about shame, including Healing the Shame That Binds You.

5:05And so no matter how much work you've done, we can all see you've still got some work to do. Welcome back to the show, John. Thank you. What does she now need to do? Well, there are a lot of things she can do. One thing is that it can't be done quickly. But you and I were just talking, and I said, if you had that six-year-old little girl, just imagine, what would you say to her? What would you tell her, that six-year-old little girl, that witnessed this awful thing that's beyond my imagination even? My favorite words, the ones I tell my kids, it's going to be all right. It's going to be all right.

5:42No one told me it was going to be all right, ever. So you can tell yourself that? Mm-hmm. That it's going to be all right? And I was afraid to look at her because I thought there was something so ugly about her, I couldn't picture her for the longest time. And then I... You mean look at yourself? Oh, right. When I tried to imagine, when they'd say, go through this imagery, you have this child that comes into your room, and I can't look at her. She's dirty, and she's ugly, and she's in a corner, and she won't turn around. That's how I pictured me. there was a moment where, with the help of therapy, I turned her around and I held her.

6:17And I told her I loved her. And I told her she was remarkable to live through something so horrible and that there was a possibility that this life I had could have been anyone's life, that I didn't make the difference in the story, that I didn't cause the things to happen, that it could have been that my parents were so sick that the play played out no matter who the six-year-old child was in that bedroom that night. That's the story. That's it. That's the story. She's got it. She's got it.

6:52I mean, that's the place that all facilitators are trying to get you to. So you understand that intellectually, you just don't? I still feel it. When we start talking about shame, I do reason. Well, now you've told your story to 20 million people around the world, 132 different countries in different languages that are being translated right now. I mean, you can't hardly tell any more people than you just told. It's not my secret anymore. It's not your secret anymore. No, it's not. See, and the only way you can heal the shame is to embrace it. The only way you can heal it. If you keep trying to hide it, there's no way to heal it.

7:29You've embraced it. Mm-hmm. And you've come a long way with it. You've come a long way. And you're going to have moments because that kind of scene is imprinted in your brain. It's a survival mechanism. Yeah. And a child will always blame themself, because the parents are godlike. So what you finally... And that's the idea... Even though it seems so unlikely that years later, you reach, you know, adulthood... ...and you're still blaming the six-year-old. Yeah, it's... But wait, but there's another piece to the story. As I'm climbing out of this hole and thinking, maybe it could be just this story, I marry a man who kills himself.

8:09Yeah. And that all that, those, that thing in my gut that went, I, I, there must be something in me that people can't stay around me. No. No, that's not it at all. No. That's the way you, you, you attract to yourself what you know. And just in a moment, this happens in all of our lives, but not to, you know, with that kind of devastation. Isn't this true, John? Absolutely. You attract to yourself what you know, and just when you think you know it is when it shows up in a bigger form to see, did you really know it? Yeah. Well, you're on your way. When you go and look at this tape, you're on your way.

8:41You really are. Best-selling author and lecturer, John Bradshaw is with us. Helga Mueller grew up in Germany during World War II. And until fairly recently, Helga had no idea that her own father was a sadistic Nazi responsible for unthinkable atrocities. So Helga's with us today to talk about this great shame that she carries in her family. And like so many people, you never discussed it. We just, in our book club, finished reading this book called The Reader, which is about World War II and a young boy falling in love with someone who was a part of the Nazi camps. And during that show, a second-generation German woman stood up and said that she, until reading that book, The Reader, had never watched any films about the Holocaust, refused to see Schindler's List, refused to read anything about the Third Reich, refused to say anything about it in the family.

9:37The family has never, ever discussed it, which is just amazing to the rest of us in the world that you can live with this in your past and never bring it up. That is a part of the shame, is it not? Yes, it is. Mm-hmm. So you said you went to see a therapist in 1989. Yes, I did. Why? Because I didn't want to live anymore. I...every day, every second, I thought how to suicide. I didn't want...I had no willing to live anymore. Did you know about this past? Nothing. I didn't know anything. But I had excluded World War II out of my life. We never talked about it at school. In my family, nobody ever talked about it.

10:23Never brought it up. Why? Because there's so much shame around it? In Germany, nobody is bringing up this. So the therapist said you should find out what had happened in your family. Yes, because I had dreams. I saw floating bodies face down in the water, and then my father, and again the floating bodies, and again my father. And my therapist thought we should know what my father had done during the war because something seemed to be very wrong. So these are just dreams that came to you, even though nobody's ever discussed it. And didn't your fa...your father died in a motorcycle accident? Yes, 1954.

11:031954, your father died. And how old were you then? Thirteen. Thirteen when your father died. Never discussed. Never, never. OK. Now, this is something that is just hard to believe with all the stories that we've heard and read about the Nazi and Nazis in concentration camps, that your father was released by the Nazis because he was too cruel. Yes. And too sadistic. So he must have done horrible, unspeakable things. Yes. It is unspeakable, but I had to read it. Where did you read it? Where did you read? On the two hour away from the place I found these files, I got these files, to my home, near Munich in Germany.

11:44I had two hours to read 12 pages, and sometimes I was able to read just a sentence or only a word, and I had to stop again, because I never, never, never saw something like that, especially about the children. I was not able to read. And I never read it again because... About things that he had done to children? Yeah, to children, to women. And your shame is that you were born of this man who you now consider to be a monster, but who is your father? And not only born that, I lived with him for 13 years. And not thinking about it. For 46 years, I did not think for this. I lived with this. My grandmother, on my mother's side, she asked me one day, what do you think that the perpetrators still are looked for?

12:33So your grandmother asked you, what do you think of the government still looking for the perpetrators of Nazi crimes? Yes. Yes. And I said, from our viewpoint, it's very different than from the viewpoint of the victims. Yeah. And she didn't talk anymore. And then a little bit later she said, your father told me before he died that what had happened during the war could only be punished by death. I think that what a lot of Jewish people and the rest of the world cannot understand, and we were just talking about this with the book, The Reader, I was saying these people, the perpetrators were not monsters.

13:13the perpetrators were us. Because if you just make them into monsters, then it is believable that these kind of atrocities cannot happen again. Your father wasn't a monster. Your father was just a man. This is so interesting to now, a week later, to be able to sit and talk to you. Because he was a man who had a family, who came home and had dinner, and I guess, you know, did things with you and the family. Was he a good father to you? I don't remember him. You don't remember him? I was 13 when he left, and I don't remember him. You don't have one memory of your father? Some, some. In the house?

13:47No, in the house, no. Uh-huh. Just outside of the house. But your mom and your grandmother had said to you, he's a good man. He wouldn't hurt a fly? He's a wonderful man, yes. I hurt all my life. Did they know? Did your grandmother know and your mother know? Yes, they knew. My mother has visited him three months in White Russia. And she told me she didn't see anything. I went there in 1992, and I saw still hooks where they hang the partisans. I saw still the rest of the jail. I said...50 years later I saw. Mm-hmm. And she did not see it while she was there. She did not see it because she didn't want to see it.

14:27Yeah, sure. Didn't want to see it. But I find it interesting, I don't know if anybody else does, John, that these are the people who came home and they had dinner. They killed people during the day. They came home, they sat at a supper table. They had dinner. They went on with their lives. They, you know, conducted themselves as fathers and husbands. Absolutely. You know, we all have shame in our lives to some degree. This is, you know, unbearable, but you have borne it. And the other thing is that you become enmeshed with your father. I mean, a child, children all enmesh with their parents. And the more he's presented to you as a saint and a good man, the harder it is to see anything bad.

15:09But that's coming out in your dreams. You see, some level you knew there are no secrets. Toxic secrets are known, and they come out in your nightmares or whatever. You've got to set... That's in anybody's house. That's in anybody's house. When you're trying to keep a thing a secret, it comes out in the atmosphere of the house and the children acting out. Yeah, the kids know it at some level, and it comes... It was coming out in your dreams. The most important thing I see is that you are not your father. And in that kind of child-rearing that went on in the past, we got a mesh that you couldn't develop a self.

15:46And in a sense, the important thing is to go on with your life. You didn't kill people. Yes, your father did, and you can feel disdain for that. But you know that, right? You know that. Yes, I learned to live with it now. And you are helping. Did I understand that, that you were helping people? I hope I do. You were helping people who were victimized by the Nazis? Yeah, I hope I do by talking. My way to overcome this was talking, talking, talking. I lost all my friends because in Germany you don't talk about it. Ten years ago you did not talk. Now it's better. My way was talking about it, and in Germany I found nobody wanted to talk with me, so I had to come to Boston.

16:28Shame is silence. Shame is hiding. and you're coming out of hiding and you're talking about it. You know, when I was listening to your story, I was thinking, well, I don't know how you don't grieve that. You have to grieve that. You have to grieve it. Just like Melissa has to grieve what happened to her mother. You have to grieve that and then you have to move on. Yeah. Have you allowed yourself the time to grieve it? I don't know. See, shame is about honor and dishonor. You're dishonored by that. He was dishonorable, but you're not dishonorable. and your grieving will help you separate from that.

17:04But you want to grieve it and go on with your life because he still has power over you. Yeah, I know. Oh, yes, I know. And that's what you want to grieve and separate from. You're doing penance for what your father did, and there's a point where you have to give it up. You have to say, that's enough. And I'm not saying you're there. Grief may take two to five years when you're really working on it. But there is a point where you say, that's enough. I'm moving on. Holly was just 14 years old when she learned a secret about her father, a secret that filled Holly with a deep sense of shame, something she still struggles with every day.

17:39A 23-year-old psychology student, Holly knows the price of secrets. She says her father's secret and the shame it caused her scarred her youth. Dear Oprah, in 1994, my father died of AIDS. Five years later, I still have to force myself to tell people what he died of. As a child, Holly says she saw her father mostly on holidays. Her parents divorced bitterly when she was two, something she and her mother never discussed. I always knew he was gay. I think my mother didn't discuss it with me because she was still dealing with the shame that she felt about it. Both of us were very uncomfortable about it, and I felt terrible that I couldn't open up about this subject with her.

18:20Then, when she was 14, her father reached out to share devastating news. My father sent me down and told me that he had AIDS and that he had had it for about two years. I was so ashamed and scared that people would not like me because they would think I had it because he did. I thought that I was the only person who had a gay father. I thought I was the only person who had a parent dying of AIDS. Alone, uncertain, Holly couldn't even turn to her mother. My mother and I never talked about the fact that my father had AIDS because he told me not to tell her that I knew. As her father grew sicker, Holly simply shut down.

18:56I didn't take advantage of time I could have spent with him. I didn't... I didn't show him that I was proud of who he was. He was proud of being a gay man. He was proud of me and who I had become. But every time I cringe at telling people how he died, I feel like he would be so disappointed in me. Well, you won't be cringing anymore because you've just told the world. Does that still feel hard? Yes. Very hard. Why? I lived with it for 10 years without telling anybody. Mm-hmm. Nobody. And then in the last probably two years, I've been trying to tell more people. And obviously this is the most people I've told.

19:34But, I mean, up until this point, it was probably 20 people. Yeah. You don't have to worry now. You'll go to the Kroger store, the EMP, go to Walgreens, they'll say, oh, hi, Holly. So you obviously wanted to release that shame, correct? Right. Well, you know, I was just saying to John here, It's so amazing to me. We just heard about a family, you know, generations of Germans who have never discussed the Holocaust, never been brought up in their house, never discussed, you know, major things that go on in your home. Why did you never discuss with your daughter? At the time, I thought I was protecting her.

20:09Mm-hmm. And I had come from a shame-filled life, and the one thing I wanted to do was to save her from that, same sort of shame I felt in growing up. And so I thought by my silence I could protect her from that. And you see that you don't? Absolutely. You don't? No. Yeah, I hope everybody sees that. These children know toxic secrets. There's a realm of privacy, good shame, privacy. But there's also, in the realm of toxic shame, there are no secrets in families. All the secrets get acted out. Right. So it's very important that we all hear that. It's not that anybody was bad for not doing that. That's the way we were raised.

20:52If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. See, often, and I've heard therapists say this on the show, often, and many times families, there's this, you know, this metaphor of the black sheep in the family. And oftentimes when that happens, it's because something is being kept a secret. There's some underlying tension, some unspoken something in the family. And there's one child who's usually more sensitive than the others who takes all of that on, takes all of that tension, all of that bad energy, all that unspoken stuff, and acts it out anyway. So everybody thinks they're getting away with it and not mentioning it for years, and it's being acted out anyway.

21:28Right. Yeah, all the secrets. The Bible says all the secrets will be revealed. And these are shame secrets, toxic shame. There's a difference between there's a healthy shame. Unfortunately, in English, we only have one word for shame. Every other language has two words. One means discretion, modesty, awe, reverence. The other word means disgrace. And I think that we need to understand that, that there's two levels there. When is it toxic? It's toxic when it becomes an identity. Instead of saying, I made a mistake, you start saying, I am a mistake. Instead of saying, I did something wrong, you start saying, there's something wrong with me.

22:11I feel flawed and defective. It becomes an identity. And so that's the kind of thing. And the healing of it, that's why coming out of hiding is so important. Because you can't heal the shame unless you embrace the shame. That's right. The toxic shame. That's right. So many of us are so screwed up. I include myself. But I got unscrewed. I'm still working on unscrewing myself. But part of my screwed up debility, if there is a word, was the fact that I had this image. We all have this image. We're screwed up because of the Cleavers. Because we wanted June Cleaver. And we wanted June Cleaver in our lives.

22:53And we were, each of us dealt whatever it is we were dealt. And so you have that model of what you think the perfect family is. You have that model of, you know, someone coming home from school. For me, it was, nobody was home to nurture me. I remember the first time I got in trouble and I thought, why don't you sit me down like Ward does? Why don't you talk to me, you know? And that didn't happen in my house either. And so I had this paradigm of what I thought a family should be, and mine was the opposite of that. And so you're constantly in search of that thing. And grieve it. You know, just grieve that I didn't have a childhood like I imagined.

23:30Like I wanted. Because it is an imagination. I mean, we've got a lot of people in here who had some pretty bad childhoods. But there's that hole in your soul, and it has to be grieved. One of the ways you heal shame, toxic shame, is by grieving it. But grieve it, not yourself. Right. Not yourself, but you grieve it. You have to eventually, regardless of what all the therapists say and the metaphors for your inner child, the bottom line is get over it and move on. Suffering. Isn't that the truth? Yeah. Because suffering is all you have. That's the environment. Life is difficult. The first step to healing shame is acknowledging it, So everyone who told their stories today is already one step ahead of the game, because you hold it, and then it has its own power with you.

24:17Absolutely. Absolutely. It becomes like an energy. The next step is coming out of hiding, which is what each person has done here today. Has done today. Yeah. Incredible healing in doing that. The next step is to talk about how you feel about it. And, you know, to feel as bad as you feel, but the grief process, as Oprah said, needs to get finished. You can get addicted to the grief, and then you can hold on. And that was this idea of suffering is ordinary. Don't get addicted to the grief, so that all you are is a victim, and your whole identity is being a victim. Yeah. Recover your innocence. What does that mean?

24:52Well, what I see that is, is getting back to the spontaneity. It doesn't mean that we didn't do anything wrong, but it's a way to describe reconnecting with that vital, exuberant part of our life. Forgive yourself and others. This is hard. This is very hard, but the forgiveness is for you. It's not, you know, I mean, what I say is like, if father's still an alcoholic, you say, whenever you're drinking, I'm not going to talk to you. When he's not drinking, if you do care about him, call him and tell him you like him. Thank you to all of my guests today. Thank you for sharing your stories. And thanks to Anna.

25:35Thank you. I'm Oprah Winfrey, and you've been listening to The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Podcast. If you haven't yet, go to Apple Podcasts and subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. Join me next week for another Oprah show, The Podcast. And I thank you for listening.