Episode #038
Fighting Shame with Compassion with Lennie Knowlton, CMHC
“Shame, shame I know your name” A saying that can be heard in grade schools all across America (At lease it was for me when I was there in the 90’s). I would be willing to bet there is some version of this is said in schools across the world. The interesting part is “I know your name.” Implying “I can tell others and they will know your secret.” Isn’t this the truth? Shame thrives in secrecy and if it ever gets out? It feels like worst thing that could ever happen!
We all have experienced shame. We all have things we don’t want others to know about. The fear behind others knowing our secret is “will you still accept me?” We are afraid, whether we know it or not, that this piece of knowledge would be the deciding factor for others to reject us. THAT’S SCARY! That is shame. Guilt is feeling we have done something bad, Shame is feeling we are bad. It takes away hope and drives isolation and secrecy.
In the episode today Lennie Knowlton, CMHC talks about her study of Shame and Trauma. We cover how shame works in our brain, how it manifests in our behaviors, how it shows up in parenting, being a child, and ways to fight shame from taking over our behaviors.
Here are some parts of the episode that may be of interest to you broken up by topic. (Add about 5 minutes to the timestamp because It does not factor in the introduction)
Scroll further down to read the complete transcript of the episode.
0:04:35 NEUROBIOLOGY
00:07:27 TRAUMA MAKES OUR BRAINS UNWILLING TO BE VULNERABLE
00:12:28 DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SHAME AND GUILT
00:33:47 THE IMORTANCE OF MINDFULNESS TO ADDRESS DISTRESS
00:35:21 PROTECTING CHILDREN FROM SHAME BY ADDRESSING PARENTAL SHAME.
00:41:20 CONNECTION IS THE ANTIDOTE TO SHAME
00:51:53 HOW DO WE EMPATHIZE WITH OURSELVES
01:00:34 EXCLUSION IS A SHAME TRIGGER “YOU’RE ENOUGH IF”
01:01:44 YOU’RE NOT ALONE AND SELFLESSNESS IS CRAP
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Braxton Dutson: 00:00:00 Thanks for meeting with me, Lenny.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:00:01 You’re welcome. Anytime. Really excited to do this.
Braxton Dutson: 00:00:04 So I’m curious. Tell me. I mean we’ve even, we’ve worked together for quite some time and you always have really fascinating stories. So I’m curious. Tell me a story about being a therapist or just like something that makes you, you.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:00:19 about being a therapist?
Braxton Dutson: 00:00:20 Either being a therapist, being a mom. I don’t know, just whatever stories popping up in your mind. Maybe it’s a funny story or anything that you feel comfortable telling the people of The Hive.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:00:33 Oh Geez. Um, I think as far as being a mom and a therapist, there’s, that’s a crazy road to try to navigate because you’re always going back and forth judging yourself from one arena to the next arena. Right? So I always try to be a super mom and teach my kids all of the cool things that I know and sometimes that works out really well by the kindergarten teacher calling and saying, oh, your kid pulled another kid that was getting angry and back into the reading area and told them how to belly breathe and started singing the song or it backfires in your face as you’re yelling at them and say, you know, “Get your butt in the car!” and they’re throwing out the Dan Siegel, “flipping your lid” hands at you, =, which generally doesn’t make you less mad. Right?
Braxton Dutson: 00:01:23 Oh, I’ll bet that fires you up,
Lennie Knowlton: 00:01:26 It fires you up. But I mean, when you’re in your calm moments, you’re like, yeah, like they’re really learning things. When your lids flipped, you just get as mad as anyone else. Right? So I think that the biggest thing to, you know, teach me and my kids and the people that I supervise. But that whole quote that Brene Brown says what? But just because I’m a good map maker doesn’t make me a good traveler.
Braxton Dutson: 00:01:49 Nice.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:01:49 I’m like, Whoa, I’m in travel mode right now, right?
Braxton Dutson: 00:01:54 Yeah. Scrambling, trying to figure it out. Traveling a
Lennie Knowlton: 00:01:58 I’m good map reader though.
Braxton Dutson: 00:02:01 Make the maps. Read the maps.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:02:03 Yeah. But sometimes you think that you’ve got it all mastered in that you can map maker your way through parenting and relationships and that’s just not a thing.
Braxton Dutson: 00:02:13 I love it. It’s so difficult to understand though for real. Like I think that anytime that someone talks to me about being a dad or being a husband because I do marriage therapy or do sex therapy, like, oh well you gotta figure it out. Then like, no, no, no, no. Yeah, no, I just know like the process. I know things that do work
Lennie Knowlton: 00:02:38 right and things that don’t work
Braxton Dutson: 00:02:40 don’t work. And then I continually do things that don’t work at times. You’re like, Dang it.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:02:45 Yeah. I mean how many times have I been in a marriage session being like, hey, you know, you really need to have some perspective on this. And then the back of my mind, I’m thinking, hypocrite, you suck. Like you just yelled at her husband like five seconds ago.
Braxton Dutson: 00:03:02 You’re saying “you just need to calm down and like, let’s talk this through,” and the whole time you’re like, yeah, okay, fine. I’ll go home and do that too. Sometimes you’re like, I just wish I wasn’t into that self awareness thing. It’s so much better, so much better. You’d have such a better argument. Right, right. Yeah. Well cool. I completely agree with you.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:03:20 Talk about shame spiral, Right?.
Braxton Dutson: 00:03:23 Yeah. Speaking of the shame spiral, that’s, that’s a big reason why we’re here talking today is we really want to be able to. I, I wanted to have you on this podcast for a long time to talk about shame because you. I mean, okay, obviously we’ve got Brene Brown and she’s kind of the shame guru or placed upon that however, in my life and the way that they can in accessibility, in everything that you talk about, you’ve even presented it to Brene Brown. I would. Is that the one that goes on in Texas? The Brene Brown conference, but I don’t think that’s what it is. It’s a funky little conference. It’s called courage, courage camp. Just for people who are certified in “The Daring Way” stuff.
Braxton Dutson: 00:04:02 Oh, okay. So wow. So it is people that have gone through the daring way, program therapists that are certified in it,
Lennie Knowlton: 00:04:09 therapists, leadership, organizational development, people in life, coaches who are all certified in the curriculum.
Braxton Dutson: 00:04:14 So you’re training the trainers right? On. Yeah. What was the, what was your topic? I forget
Lennie Knowlton: 00:04:21 my topic was, trauma. How to integrate trauma into the tiering way curriculum.
Braxton Dutson: 00:04:28 No Way … Holy cow. You also do a lot with Dan Siegel stuff, right?
Topic of Discus: 00:04:35 NEUROBIOLOGY
Lennie Knowlton: 00:04:37 I love Dan Siegel. He’s kind of my old man crush. My husband’s very aware. He’s just wicked smart. Oh yeah. And I think that one thing that’s really missing a lot from therapy or therapeutic curriculum in general is neurobiology. And again, it comes back to shame, right? Shame is this whole thing. But when we believe that our brains are doing the best they can to protect us and keep us alive from the things that we experience, then all of a sudden, all these reactions and all these stupid things we do, they make sense not right rather than we’re just some, you know, dumb person that it can’t control our thoughts, feelings, actions, um, when we realize that those are adaptations and that we act the way we do because if we didn’t, um, in extreme cases, right weight, we would be dead and then less extreme cases we would be, you know, highly disconnected or get into all kinds of disasters. So the way we behave is all kinds of,
Braxton Dutson: 00:05:51 right? That’s fascinating that we react certain ways and that our body’s reacting, even if we don’t cognitively in our mind, don’t understand why we’re doing something like in survival mode, which is what I’m excited to get into because I teach this with almost every client that I have, this Amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. So I’m really hoping to get into it. So let’s talk a little bit about what shame is. Shame versus guilt. What starts to happen is we start to get into even bringing a little bit of trauma involved into it. So tell me a little about shame. What is this?
Lennie Knowlton: 00:06:22 Well, in my, you know, dig deep moments with shame is definitely, you know, through Brene Brown. I mean she was Kinda the one that got me. I’m hooked on this. Actually it was prior to that, right? So I was doing really intense like trauma work through the state, working with all kinds of families and people who have experienced the worst of the worst. Right? And I didn’t know what I was doing. Like most undertrained state therapists, right? Yeah. I’m trying to make a difference and trying to is not screw people up. And um, we realized that there were a, lots of different kinds of themes, right? Every, every story is different and everybody is unique, but there are some definite flavors of symptoms that happen, right when people have been through really extreme traumas. So I got onto the Dan Siegel stuff because it gave kind of this neuro biological basis and these reasonings for why people would do the things they do and engage in certain behaviors after they’ve, you know, been in trauma.
Topic of Discus: 00:07:27 trauma makes our brains unwilling to be vulnerable.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:07:27 So I was super excited. Dan Siegel came up to Zermatt and I was going to go see him in person and it was his brain storm tour. I’m sitting there and I’m taking all kinds of crazy notes and he said, “the greatest biological effect of trauma on the brain is the creation of shame.”
Braxton Dutson: 00:07:48 Wow.
New Speaker: 00:07:49 And then he proceeded to follow up that said, um, “trauma makes our brains unwilling to be vulnerable.” So I was like, where have I heard this before? Right? And I had seen the Brene Brown ted talk and I knew that I loved it. Right. It’s like an emotional connection experience. If you haven’t watched that Ted talk, right? You listened to her and you’re like, like, damn straight. That makes sense. That is how we live. And so, but by going back, it gave it a lot of meaning because it, instead of just being something that you kind of connect with and it’s something that is really biological.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:08:32 So Brene Brown defines shame as the fear of disconnection, fear of disconnection, the fear of disconnection. So anytime that we feel like we’re not enough, and I like to take that one step further in the travel world because there’s lots of emotions that we’re scared of, right? Like fear. But when you say the fear of disconnection, we’re not talking about, oh, you know, I don’t want to be sad in front of other people or I’m worried about experiencing, you know, joy, we’re talking about like a primal, I’m going to beat somebody down. And that’s because if you’re a caveman, if you’re a caveman and you’re not big enough, smart enough, quick enough, fast enough, and you get separated from your pack. That’s not little stuff.
Braxton Dutson: 00:09:23 No, we’re not just sad. We die.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:09:24 You’re like a dead guy, right? You’re going to get eaten by a saber tooth tiger. When we talk about shame, we’re not talking about, you know, Oh, you should go talk to your therapist about your emotions. We’re talking about an emotion that is linked to our survival systems and our limbic system. It’s the system that makes you fight, flight, freeze. When we feel like we are at risk of disconnection in our lives, when we feel like we’re not, you know, good enough, smart enough, quick enough, fast enough to keep up with our tribe. That’s big stuff. And it’s doesn’t bring out the prettiness, right? It’s not that our prefrontal cortex is dictating the show saying, “oh, how do I get to choose my behavior when I find out that my husband’s been cheating on me? How do I get to choose my behavior when I feel like I’ve been physically, sexually abused?” Like that kind of disconnective stuff where the people who are closest to you and your tribe are disconnecting. It sends us into a panic
Braxton Dutson: 00:10:32 And panic can show up in any which direction from panic attacks to aggression, to gosh a whole spectrum of things.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:10:39 Anger, anxiety, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, anxiety is a huge one.
Braxton Dutson: 00:10:44 Isolation.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:10:45 Yeah. No. Yeah. Well, if anxiety is the emotion and the physical sensation that we feel when we’re at risk than it is, it’s hand in hand with shame. Because how do you feel like you’re all alone in the wilderness going to get eaten by a saber tooth tiger without feeling anxiety. If you didn’t feel anxiety, you know, he’s just hanging out trying to watch my mouth here. Dumb ass keeps coming out. Right? But, but I’m not what you do. Right? So people can come in to therapy and they’re like, “I have so much anxiety and I would like that to go away.” And you’re like, “no.” Right? We needed to figure out kind of what’s riding shotgun here. so that we can teach you how to like be aware of your anxiety and what it means, but if we make your anxiety go away. Like, is it healthy for me to say, “Oh, you’re in the forest being chased by a bear, we should work on your anxiety.” Like that’s not how it rolls.
Braxton Dutson: 00:11:47 No, no, no.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:11:48 And you don’t want to be the person without anxiety in that situation.
Braxton Dutson: 00:11:52 No, no it doesn’t. It doesn’t. It’s trying to be trying to make yourself feel in a safe place around the fire in a, in a cabin while you’re out in the middle of the woods. Like, I want to feel that way, but you’re, you’re not in a place to be able to feel that. Like you literally don’t have your cabin or your fire. You, you’re in a place that you could die.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:12:17 Yeah, “[Sarcastically spoken] I prefer to feel complacent about that.” but you know, generally with that fight to live and exist come some kind of anxiety.
Topic of Discus: 00:12:28 DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SHAME AND GUILT
Braxton Dutson: 00:12:28 Yeah. So some people start to. It seems like they intertwine the word shame and guilt. What are the differences between shame and guilt?
Lennie Knowlton: 00:12:36 Okay. So you know, again, these definitions come back to the Brene brown stuff, but essentially shame is I am bad. Guilt is I did something bad and it doesn’t sound like it’s a really big deal, but the reason that it’s a really big deal and that is important is that if my daughter comes home and she has failed a spelling test, right? And her self talk is, “I’m so stupid,” right? Um, there’s nowhere to go. Like if that’s where she is stuck in her head and she’s just stupid. There’s not really anything that’s going to be able to push her through that. Right?
Braxton Dutson: 00:13:18 Like, the, “you can’t fix stupid?”
Lennie Knowlton: 00:13:19 “You can’t fix stupid.” Right?
Lennie Knowlton: 00:13:23 So if she comes home and she was like, “Ugh, like I really screwed up on that test. I didn’t even study.” It feels bad, right? They both feel bad. It’s not like one feels better than the other. But the difference is, is that when you’re in guilt, there’s somewhere to go, right? So if you’re a therapist and you’re working with someone in shame, there’s not anything that you’re going to say that’s going to be able to make it better because the things that you’re saying and the things that you’re doing might make it better for people who aren’t, you know, stupid or not brave or who suck, right? But for that person, they’re constantly combating and say, all, all of these things that you’re trying to help me do all of these assignments and they’re essentially looking at the world that way. So even when people are trying to connect with them, it’s hard because when you feel like you’re not worthy of connection, there’s nowhere to go.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:14:24 So that’s why it’s really important. And kind of the number one assignment, you know, day one out of a hat, should I give my clients, is watch yourself talk. The kicker with that is you always have to give them this disclaimer. That’s like WARNING. If I tell you to pay attention to yourself talk and you have really negative self talk. The first thing people that have really negative self talk say is, “oh my gosh, I’m so terrible. I have such terrible self-talk”
Braxton Dutson: 00:14:54 It starts right back into the cycle.
New Speaker: 00:14:55 It’s this vicious cycle of like, “oh my gosh, I can’t even. I can’t even do well on my self talk.” Right? So it’s like, okay, we’re not judging, we’re not doing anything. We’re just noticing and paying attention and if you have to even make that lovely sound like “‘Hmmm… there it is.” That’s what we’re going for is the awareness. If you don’t tell them that they. I learned that the hard way right by people coming back and they’re like, I’m even worse than I thought I was. Right?
Braxton Dutson: 00:15:27 Like “I really suck it’s self-talk.” this is just all about the awareness. Yeah, I have awareness. That is how you’re talking about yourself. How would you like to talk about yourself and even if you don’t want to talk well about yourself, what is that like?
Lennie Knowlton: 00:15:39 Yeah, and the guilt! And I, because again, it doesn’t feel really different if guilt and shame initially felt really different. People I guess could choose guilt, but we don’t talk about it enough for it to be a different thing and it doesn’t feel really different out of the hatch. Now it feels different long term. Right? Definitely, but
Braxton Dutson: 00:16:01 like you’re saying with this spelling test out of the hatch, it’s, “I’ve got a bad grade. I have an issue whether I feel stupid about it or that I didn’t study about it.” That makes zero difference. However long term we start to believe that we can make changes or we can’t make changes.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:16:14 Yeah, and people who are really, really show shame resilient, don’t necessarily not experience the shame or navigate that, but they are in this place where they can say they can recognize it and say, no, I’m not stupid. I really need to study. Right, and that’s what shame resilience looks like. It’s like that feeling where you’re going. There were your number one thing is to attack yourself and then you’re able to kind of shift it into. No. At my core, I believe that just because I didn’t pass my spelling tests, it doesn’t make me not worthy of love and belonging. My tribes not leaving. I’m not really going to be eaten by wolves right now, it just feels like that, so I just have to kind of hold space for the Achy. Um, so I can move through it.
Braxton Dutson: 00:17:03 So if the first step is to recognize we’re creating the awareness around shame, what tends to be some of the next steps for addressing shaman in that acknowledgement to knowledge, to change your behavior or what? How does that tend to. I know it’s different for each person.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:17:19 Yeah. And I think it is a little bit different. It’s kind of like a Pie, right? You’re going to make a whole pie and you’re given different pieces with each person. A little bit of is point, shoot, aim, and kind of looking at strengths and deficits of a certain person and always start out with a, a strength based piece. It’s usually our tendency to identify someone’s biggest deficit and start there, but usually even if there’s really symptoms, giving them something to work with where they feel like they have some kind of a momentum is going to be your best shot. Like you would think that after a day that you had just eaten like crap, that you would be more motivated the next day to eat really well. but that’s not necessarily how it works right? Studies show that like if you just feel so crappy your next day is more likely to be crappy because you’re like, oh, I’m already in the hole. As opposed to if you’ve eaten really well for a week, you’re more tempted to not screw it up because you have a basis. So always start with somewhere where there’s some kind of wiggle room and then I think getting them to buy into the idea of shame versus guilt. I mean you have to kind of get them to understand what the differences are just in general, right? On a cognitive level
Braxton Dutson: 00:18:46 so you can make the change happen or there can be an understanding. Yes, there is change. You can make change in. This isn’t a. well that’s unfortunate. You got the hand that you’re dumb but you aren’t a good mom or whatever it may be, but you can make changes.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:19:01 Yeah, and then I think the tricky thing about shame, and all of the cognitive behavioral gurus in the world are going to hate me for saying this, but cognitive behavioral therapy doesn’t work with shame.
New Speaker: 00:19:15 HOW THE BODY RESPONDS TO KEEP YOU ALIVE IN TRAUMATIC SITUATIONS
Lennie Knowlton: 00:19:15 It works with shame after the initial onset of shame, right? Cognitive behavioral therapy operates on the premise that if I changed the way I think, then I changed the way that I act. Right? The problem with shame is if we’re talking about it being part of that survival brain, we don’t think act when it comes to survival behaviors. For example If you’re driving down the road and a car pulls in front of you, what would happen if you took the time to think about slamming on the brakes? It doesn’t end well. Whether that’s like death paralysis or a really bad like insurance claim, it doesn’t end well. so everyone identifies and sees this adrenaline cortisol as this. It helps with that fight, flight, freeze behavior, right? It gets our bodies to, you know, attack something or to run away as fast as we can.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:20:17 That adrenaline, cortisol is the first immediate reaction to the threat?
Lennie Knowlton: 00:20:20 Yeah, But the other function of that is that it actually creates a wall between your survival brain and your frontal cortex. So it makes it impossible for you to access the thinking systems in your brain.
Braxton Dutson: 00:20:36 So you don’t think in the logical sense.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:20:40 Yeah, Because if you thought you’d be dead, right? It’s like this is an immediate. This is a crisis thing. So when we’re talking about shame behaviors and anger is a huge shame behavior, right? Um, we react and then think, so if your therapy is based on, if I changed the way I think that I changed the way I act, but if your behaviors are shame based or trauma based, which is they come from a real, neuro, biologically where we’re wired to actually keep our brain alive place, that therapy in and of itself is going to create shame.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:21:27 So for example, going back to the car example, if you are, you know, you have, you’ve had this experience where someone kind of pulls in front of you and you slam on your break and then all of a sudden you almost feel like a hotwash come over your body and then you can do after you think, “oh my gosh, what just happened??” So you can feel it, right? You can feel you react, and then you can feel the cortisol drain out of your body in the solid, like a split second, right? And then you could feel that neuropathway open and it goes, “oh my gosh, what just happened??” as well. All of a sudden you have access to your thinking brain, right? But what will you see are all of these people who engage in a behavior?
Lennie Knowlton: 00:22:05 So say that you have somebody who struggles with anger, that anger is that kind of that place where they go in that quick, you know, they’re easily triggered. And so their therapy goal is to remain calm, And in the cognitive behavioral world, then you would say, “oh, I, you know, let’s talk about the ways that anger doesn’t work for me. Right. Let’s talk about some other things.” But the problem is, is that if that’s our goal and they want it so bad, they don’t want to ever beat down anyone again in their whole life and they get triggered and then they beat someone down and then all of a sudden their cortisol leaves and they make contact with their frontal cortex and they say, “Oh crap, What did I just do?” Which then leads into this more awful place of “not like not only am I an awful person and not enough, but I’m not even enough to be congruent with my own goals.”
Braxton Dutson: 00:23:11 Like I broke my own value,
Lennie Knowlton: 00:23:12 I just break my own values and what a hopeless place.
Braxton Dutson: 00:23:17 Oh, sounds hopeless, and it just creates it because you’re reacting, you’re body’s reacting to whatever was triggering or everything like that. And then you realize, oh, I can’t control this,
Lennie Knowlton: 00:23:28 and that feeling is so bad that then you try to control it more. Which gives you more anxiety and the anxiety and cortisol you have, the less access you have to your frontal cortex, which creates this awful spinning cycle. Right? You take kids who were adults. Look at the prison systems. You take people who are in calm, stable environments, I mean not all prison environments are stable. We’re saying that, right? I’m disclaimer, right? We’re not supporting the current prison system, but you take people who have relatively safe for a certain amount of time and they do well and everyone says that they’re rehabilitated and then all of a sudden you put them back on the street and they’re determined they’re bound and determined to like do better, be better, and you get some trigger. Yeah. All of a sudden, right? You get an old friend, you get something, you get something that triggers you in that moment of like survival. Oh yeah, they’re back.
New Speaker: 00:24:22 HOW DO YOU CHANGE THE SHAME STORM? EDUCATION IS HUGE
Braxton Dutson: 00:24:23 Well, let’s just, let’s just take it straight to the. You don’t have food or shelter or where do you go for your basic survival needs, where, where are those? And if you don’t have those in any sense or your sense of safety is gone, I think of when we’re talking about sexual assault, when someone has been sexually abused, sexually assaulted or something along those lines. I. There’s so many people that are quick to say, let’s teach and this is how the wording comes out. Let’s teach women karate or self defense, or we’ll put. We’ll put everyone through the self defense courses and what we’re talking about. My argument to that is always been, we’re missing the point when someone is being betrayed by a friend by someone, they’re running down the road and it’s a stranger or whatever, something is being betrayed. Your body goes into this exact thing that we’ve been talking about. Your body reacts to preserve itself. Whether that’s fight, flight, freeze, and if you know karate or you know all these other things just in case you get sexually abused or you know there’s this attacker that’s going to come get you and you don’t use it. Then we’ve just started this shame cycle. Once again, versus understanding, hey, this happens unfortunately. And yes, there’s tons that we need to do. To change it, but your body did what you needed, what it needed to do to stay alive.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:25:42 We do that all the time. As therapists. I mean, I did a podcast for a domestic violence group. We were talking about safety plans and safe people. Right? And we set it up, okay, you know, here’s your safety plan. If this ever happens and this is who you’re going to call and what you’re going to do. And 90 percent of the time they have an incident where their attacker comes in and things don’t go well and they call their safe person, right? They have this brilliant safety plan and they’re so scared. Shock. Right? But they don’t execute it. So then after the fact they call their safe person was the very first question that their safe person asks them,
Braxton Dutson: 00:26:29 “why didn’t you call me?”
New Speaker: 00:26:30 “Why didn’t you call me?” Well let me tell you why they didn’t call you, right?
Lennie Knowlton: 00:26:37 Because again, it’s sleek saying, oh, and embarrassed chasing me through the woods. Do a math problem,
Braxton Dutson: 00:26:45 Not Possible.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:26:45 Not a thing, not a thing. So in this situation, so, so building resilience that, so how do you stop that? Right? If it’s just this reaction, how do you stop it? Like what do you do? What’s the normal treatment plan for somebody who is experiencing these kinds of things, right. Number one is education. You have got to educate them on how their brain works because then when they come out of that spiral, when they realize that they’ve reacted a certain way, instead of saying, “oh my gosh, I am not enough, they say, “wow, it happened again. My brain reacted in the way that it was neuro-biologically wired to react to protect itself,”
Lennie Knowlton: 00:27:30 So I had this experience and it was this crazy mom experience. Maybe this is the story I should have started with. We can always do it. But um, my son who’s 12, was taking his lead climb test up at the climbing gym to get his leed certificate. So at the son has anxiety and he’s a, he’s a killer climber and he’s one of the younger ones to take this test and super excited. So he’s going up to the climbing gym, my husband takes off work and they shut down the whole wall. So there’s all these people at the climbing gym watching him take this test. So part of this test is they have to first, they have to go through the safety checks on their ropes and check their rope and then the rope of their bilayer and make sure that everything is safe and then they climb this wall and they have to make sure that they climb it a certain way and don’t clip too far above them and they have people who were down there judging them. But the kicker is that at the top they have to take a safe fall.
Braxton Dutson: 00:28:38 Oh really?
Lennie Knowlton: 00:28:39 So they get up to the top and they touched the top and then they have to fall. So it makes my hands sweat just talking about it.
Braxton Dutson: 00:28:53 Holy Cow.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:28:54 Like at the top of. I mean I’m not very good at estimating feet, so I like say something. People will be like, “oh, it’s probably not right. But it was really tall,” So, so you know, there and everyone’s watching him and he gets up there and he said it before, but I mean take the extra kick in of anxiety and adrenaline and all these things. So first the first one, he gets it there and he hangs on, he hangs on too long and then he falls but he grabs the rope. So there’s a rope in front of you. You grabbed the rope and you’re not supposed to grab the rope because in other situations they could like give you pretty bad rope, burn at worst or tire on your finger and pull your fingers off at best. Right? So it’s very dangerous. You don’t want to grab your rope. So he grabs his rope. He was so ticked. Being the mom watching like I was just ready to Barf. It was awful. So they asked him, they say he that he can do it again because there’s all of these other people taking this test and he is by far like the prettiest climber, like he is good at the climbing. He’s on point, but it’s just this fall at the end, so they decide that they’re going to let him take this test again. So he gets up to the top. My heart’s pounding, I can imagine his heart is pounding. So he falls and he holds onto the rope again.
Braxton Dutson: 00:30:10 Oh No!
New Speaker: 00:30:12 So everyone’s there and they were like, Jack can do this. He can totally do this. And so they let them take it a third time and the third time he goes up there and he falls and he holds his arms back so far. And that’s exactly what we’re asking our clients to do. Right, exactly. It’s like your, your brain and of course the therapist mom the first time. What I say is like, “Oh, I’m so glad that your brain is trained for you not to die.” You don’t want to have the kid who just their brain did. They just let go and like, don’t think about it. Like as a mom, that’s kind of a consoling thing, but you’re essentially telling your people to train their brain that whatever they’re experiencing is safe now. So you don’t need to have that kind of reaction and it doesn’t always happen, It doesn’t always happen. You get up there and sometimes you panic, but knowing what that feels like in your body, that experience and knowing and really trusting and believing that that is what you’re trying to do in therapy when you come out of it and the Times that you have reacted or you know, not acted in the way that you want to and that you’ve engaged in those survival behaviors. It’s not a shame storm.
Braxton Dutson: 00:31:34 No, It becomes that education piece. So the first part is being able to be educated on how the brain works, why you’re doing what you’re doing. And then it doesn’t have to create the shame storm.
New Speaker: 00:31:45 YOUR BODY TELLS YOU BEFORE YOU KNOW
Lennie Knowlton: 00:31:46 Right. I had a, I had a teenage girl client who had been through all of these different therapists and was just so frustrated because I think at her core she really, really wanted to be able to do well in school and stay with her current placement, but she had witnessed her parent’s murder suicide and before that she had been abused for a long, long time and so convincing her brand that she was safe was not an easy task. So it was a really beautiful moment to sit down and she actually ended up writing a letter to her brain. “Dear brain, thank you for making the accommodations that you did when you did so that I would be here now.” The purpose of my therapy isn’t to try to do better, or be better. It’s to try to convince my brain that I’m safe enough, and that I have enough tools that it doesn’t have to react in that way continuously so that I can choose what kinds of behaviors that I want to have.
Braxton Dutson: 00:32:44 Definitely.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:32:44 And that’s really the direction that you’re wanting to go with that. So that education piece is huge. From there it’s really important to look like what are your survival behaviors look like? Are you a Fighter? Flighter? or Freezer? Does it show up as anxiety? How does it feel in your body? I think that’s a huge one because when you’re talking about survival stuff and survival feelings and behaviors, it shows up in your body before it would ever show up in your brain.
Braxton Dutson: 00:33:15 Definitely. So body tension tight muscles, sick stomach, agitation, crunching, whatever it may be, clenching
Lennie Knowlton: 00:33:24 temperature is huge! Feeling like hot. a lot of people will say that their mouth tastes different.
Braxton Dutson: 00:33:34 Interesting.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:33:37 All these physical changes that get us ready, essentially, to fight. Right.
Braxton Dutson: 00:33:42 Before your brain even recognizes “I’m in a survival mode!”
Topic of Discus: 00:33:47 THE IMORTANCE OF MINDFULNESS TO ADDRESS DISTRESS
Lennie Knowlton: 00:33:47 When I was down doing my Brene Brown training, it’s like super five day intensive where you talk about some pretty intensive stuff, but of course it’s, you know, like August and September in San Antonio. So I’m in flip-flops and this lady that I love that led our group, she just said, “Lennie, I need you to pay attention to your toes when you talk.” And I noticed that when I was talking, my toes were like as tight as they could be. I mean, they were just curled around and pressed into my foot flops, which was such a crazy thing. I had never noticed it in my whole life, but still now, even if I’m in a session hearing hard things, right, it was wiggle my fingers and my toes and it just is crazy how just acknowledging changes your awareness.
Braxton Dutson: 00:34:32 Yeah it changes your awareness of what’s going on in your body. When I’m talking with clients I have them do the same thing we do the body awareness, we do mindfulness things along those lines, education around shame and our body reaction to the Amygdala, the fight, flight and freeze, and even as I’m explaining that sometimes I recognize that I have my left leg push into the floor like my body tells are totally a scowl, left leg into the floor, and then my thumb flexed for some reason, oh, and I don’t breathe very deep. If you know those, it’s kind of. It almost becomes comical for me is I’m like, oh, I’m stressed. Take a deep breath and it can change everything within a few seconds. That cortisol level, the stress hormone in your brain can start to drop off within seconds if you’re aware of those body messages to you.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:35:19 Totally. Yeah.
Topic of Discus: 00:35:21 PROTECTING CHILDREN FROM SHAME BY ADDRESSING PARENTAL SHAME. YOUR CHILDREN REGULATE THROUGH YOU
Braxton Dutson: 00:35:21 So if you’re, if you’re a parent and you have a child that’s gone through a trauma or maybe even your child is going through trauma, but you’re recognizing your, your child is, you know, is anxious or you aren’t quite sure you don’t want to create shame in them. What can parents do to help out with that?
Lennie Knowlton: 00:35:40 Haha, ohhh You just opened up a ball of worms. So number one is, and I swear I’m to write a book about this one day. I’m pretty sure that every issue that anyone anywhere ever has can somehow be linked back to I say mom shame because I’m a mom, but I’m sure there’s dads that experience it too. But mom shamed hardcore, Being a parent being responsible for someone else, it’s hard. And so I think it’s crazy. Um, how, you know, we go to the beat and we focus on sunscreen or kids and we get some burned ourselves, I mean, we went to Belize and my husband was so focused on putting bug repellent on the kids that he came home with a Bot fly. This is how this works. So we do that with our emotions as well. I can’t tell you how many people bring their children into therapy without recognizing that their children are regulating through them. So number one is if you have a child with anxiety or who has experienced trauma, there is no human on the entire planet who has the ability to regulate their own emotions. We learn how to regulate through our caregivers. So most of the time, you know, in really hard situations, the parents are part of the trauma, right? And I think that that’s a really hard thing and that’s another thing, but in situations where a child has experienced trauma, generally the parents feel some kind of shame about that, right? As the caregiver, how did we let something like this happen to her child? And so we as parents around shame spirals and so as the child is trying to use us to regulate, to come out of their trauma,
Lennie Knowlton: 00:37:34 “How do I help my kid? How can I help my kid?” You help yourself and you realize that when you’re not in that kind of place to be able to be somebody to regulate through number one, you take your time, right, and you engage in self care and self compassion behaviors, but the other one is you have to be honest with your kid because kids get it right. If you like, go back to the movie Bambi which is kind of a creepy movie, but when Bambi, how Bambi learns that there’s hunters in the forest is not because Bambi, his mother says “Bambi. There’s hunters in the forest,” It’s because he looks at mom and mom’s ears stick straight up and she gets really stiff and he recognizes that something’s wrong and that’s how our kids are and that’s how we regulate.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:38:31 I mean, we love to say that like empathy and like feeling people’s feelings is because we’re just awesome and we want like take care of other people, but it’s kind of crap. We learned empathy because we regulate through our parents and we learned to sense danger through them and if we don’t know how to do that then we’re not safe. So that’s like ABC’s of empathy, So parents, number one, they don’t regulate their own stuff or don’t try. And then when the kids say, hey mom, are you okay? And the mom’s standing there with the ear straight up in this stiff as a board a month like, “yes, I’m fine, everything’s okay.” And the kid learns when I’m not okay. They don’t say, “oh, mom’s fine.” They say, “oh, mom’s not okay. And she’s saying that she’s fine.” So it teaches us this whole society that when I’m not fine, I act like I am or a lie and I say that I am. Which means that which is so much a part of our shame culture, right? It’s like “it’s not okay for me to tell you how I really feel. It’s not okay for me to be vulnerable with you” When, when, when I’m not. Okay. I say that I am when I’m not. Okay. This is how I regulate.
Braxton Dutson: 00:39:51 So you can teach vulnerability just by being vulnerable. mom’s feeling sad or I’m really nervous about something. “
Lennie Knowlton: 00:39:57 Yeah. And there’s a huge difference with saying, “oh, you’re right. You’re noticing that I’m stressed. I am so stressed right now. I want to reassure you, and you know, actually I should probably go do something about that, I’m going to go take a bath. I’m going to go take five and I’ll be back to take care of you.” Or “Hey, you’re right. I’m going through a really hard time right now. I want to reassure you that everything is going to be okay, but you’re right, you’re smart. You picked up on the fact that I’m having a hard time right now.” You want to reassure them that even in the midst of what’s going on that their needs are going to be met and that they’re taken care of and saying, “you know what? I’m having a hard day right now. Or you know what? Something really sad happened and I’m struggling with that.” It’s a lot different than like, you know, your dad left and he is an asshole and he’s cheating on it with, you know, at this stupid skank named Betty, like that’s not stuff you want to tell your kids.
Braxton Dutson: 00:40:49 the details, the support is not in the details. The recognization is validating that they saw you in an emotional state.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:40:56 feeling, validating the feeling, validating without dumping the adult situation.
Braxton Dutson: 00:41:03 Exactly, and being able to say “it’s okay for me to feel this way and if you’re concerned about me, of course you’re feeling concerned about me. Thank you for being concerned, but you don’t need to. I’m going to. I’m going to make. I’m going to go take care of myself. And if you’re feeling this way, what do you need to do to take care of yourself? Do you need to go do something to help regulate?”
Topic of Discus: 00:41:20 CONNECTION IS THE ANTIDOTE TO SHAME
Lennie Knowlton: 00:41:20 Yeah, and it’s full circle right now because if you teach your kids that you’re enough, even when you’re in a hard place, then they believe that there are enough, even if they’re in a hard place. Wow. Right? Yeah, and it increases connection. It increases connection and connection is number one. It builds neuro fiber in your orbital frontal Cortex, which means that it builds the fiber that connects all the different parts of your brain, that it makes it easier to integrate your thoughts with your feelings, with your emotions, with all of the sensory stuff that you’re bringing in from the world, right? So connection is a foundation for that. Connection is an antidote to shame, right? Because of shame is defined as the fear of disconnection. Unconditional connection is the antidote to that. How do we build this unconditional connection? So the crazy thing is that we have this great idea of, and it’s the thing that we just talked about in terms of parents extends across our entire community, and we’re not talking about that. You need to share your deepest, darkest secrets with strangers on the street. There’s definitely that you need to build trust, right? But where you have people who are disconnected, people who don’t have their tribe, people who don’t have somebody to come home to unconditionally, who looks at them and says, you know, “you’re enough. No matter what you did today, you’re enough and we got your back,” Then there’s no, I mean if you go back to the caveman metaphor, right at the end of the day, you need to be able to go into your cave. I needed to be able to let your cortisol go down and say we’ve started our fire, right? And our rock door is pulled and you’re safer right now, right?
New Speaker: 00:43:17 WHO CAN BE OUR TRIBE?
Braxton Dutson: 00:43:18 Being able to have the safety at home and it sounds like what you’re saying is the acceptance of in, in the screw ups and the successes and whatever’s happened, you’re still welcome here and you can be who you are here.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:43:32 Yep. And then our best case scenario, that’s our home, but we substitute that for teachers, coaches, people. We work with people in our lives, I would say more often than not, I mean therapists teach skills, but the skills that we teach kind of exempt us. I mean, I would say that there were definitely connected to our clients, but not on the outside world kind of way. We’re not going to show up at their birthday parties or whatever. So usually when there is someone who is experiencing a lot of trauma or you know, developmental trauma, like early childhood abuse, neglect, not having physical needs met and they make it, their story usually says. And then there was a teacher, right? And then there was a neighbor, there was someone who cared about me that gave me that support. They got that connection. Yeah, definitely. And I like, as you’re saying that, uh, as we experienced this unconditional connection or being
Braxton Dutson: 00:44:32 able to, to connect with others that were able to feel that safety sometimes being, um, all right. I think if it is, if we’re not able to feel that in the home or when we’re feeling it or as a parent, if we’re trying to give that, one of the hardest things is this thought that if we don’t get hard on where our child needs to improve, then the child is just going to end up a failure. And that tends to pull back on what am I doing as a parent. I’m a bad parent. If my kid can’t spell right, going back to your childhood, coming back and saying, oh, I didn’t do very good on my spelling test, and all of a sudden that peak something inside of you have like if my child can’t spell, they can’t get a good job and then they won’t go into college and they won’t have all these other things in your mind goes off into this story of why you’re a bad parent,
New Speaker: 00:45:22 PERFECTIONISM SAYS IM ENOUGH IF… HEALTHY STRIVING IS WHAT WE NEED TO BE
Lennie Knowlton: 00:45:22 which usually helps into our own shame, our own shame, right? Like we think and generally parents who are really hard or particular with their kids, it’s as much about their own shame triggers and and feeling their own like deep shame and then saying, I’m not enough as a parent, which comes out as anger comes out as all of these things on our children,
Braxton Dutson: 00:45:49 kind of the don’t make the same mistakes as I did versus allowing your child to make their own mistakes.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:45:53 It comes from a belief of I don’t believe that if I don’t believe that I’m enough no matter what. So you need to hustle and make all of these things happen to you. So you can be enough, right? It comes from a deep rooted belief that you have to hustle for your worthiness and so they’re going to teach their kid how to hustle for their worthiness, but parents and people who are shame resilient know that that’s not where worthiness comes from. Right? It doesn’t come from that hassle. Now that’s the difference between wanting to do better on your spelling test. Right? It’s the difference between perfectionism and healthy striving. If I’m a perfectionist and we use that all the time is like a great thing. Oh, I’m a perfectionist. The perfectionist is a shame shield. Right? Rolling arises. We’re saying is perfectionist. Well, I laugh because people who come in and they say, Oh, I’m a perfectionist. Or people who come in and say, oh, we don’t fight and our marriage, those are usually the people that I just like get real comfy and make sure I’ve taken my bathroom break because we’re going to be there for a while. Right? Yeah. Like, Oh man, it’s bad enough when you start with shame, but when you start with island perfectionist and then you have to get through shame, like it’s a lot of work, man. It’s a ton of work. A ton of work. Yeah.
Braxton Dutson: 00:47:15 I like how you worded it. Perfectionism or striving, striving, striving.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:47:21 Yeah. Healthy striving. Perfectionism says, I’m enough. I’m enough. If I do this, I’m going to. If whatever has a and so it means that there’s not things that are more important than that, that in order to be able to be admitted into the cave at night, you have to be all of these things. Right and healthy striving says, I’m a member of this community. I’m a member of this cave, and as a member of this cave, I want to do everything that I can to take care of me and the people I left. That’s the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism. Gotcha. I’m enough starting. I’m starting enough and I want to do as much as I can to provide enhanced. And the scary thing with perfectionism, I’m, is that if you’re enough, if right, if you go after this thing where you’re enough, if then if you don’t end up achieving those things, if you’re not those things, then all of a sudden there a chance to bottom out. And that’s the scary place, right? So if I’m not those things that I’m not enough, and that’s where you get a lot of hopelessness, suicide,
Braxton Dutson: 00:48:30 because we’re not reaching that qualifier
Lennie Knowlton: 00:48:33 because you’re not just enough. You’re only enough if you’re only enough yet. And if those things aren’t working for you, right?
New Speaker: 00:48:41 THE OPPOSITE OF ADDICTION IS CONNECTION
Braxton Dutson: 00:48:41 So if you’ve got in your mind that all your kids are going to do this and not all your kids do that, or you feel as though this needs to happen in order for you to qualify as a good parent or your kids don’t make mistakes. You find yourself in so many different areas of either overprotecting standing for your kid falling into hopelessness, trying to push your kids so hard to be calm
Lennie Knowlton: 00:49:05 and then it shows up in so many different ways. I mean, it shows up in anger. It shows up in perfecting. It shows up in addiction, I don’t know if you’ve read any of Johann Hari stuff, but that stuff is close to my heart right now. So he did the Ted talk and wrote the book. His first book is the opposite of addiction is connection. Oh Wow. Which talks about how well they did some interesting studies, but the premises which goes along with the shame, right, and these anxiety, like I don’t want to feel anxiety, so we’re going to
Lennie Knowlton: 00:49:41 numb it out. We’re not connected. Right? So numb it out. So you’re kind of. If you’re connected, right? If you have a home, if you have a tribe, if you have a person, but if you are trying to navigate all those feelings of being out in the wilderness by yourself all the time, then that’s how we get addictions. And so trying to perfect all the time or trying to pretend that shame doesn’t exist. We get addictive behaviors, whether that’s sexual addiction, gambling, addiction, food addiction, whatever it is, whatever it is. numbing it out
Braxton Dutson: 00:50:16 and it can be a workout addiction.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:50:18 It can be a workout addiction. It can be a social media addiction. There’s lots of addictions.
Braxton Dutson: 00:50:24 I mean it just becomes, the addiction thing just becomes such a code word for. I use it all the time and it is my main go to coping mechanism that I am using more than I want to or more than is probably helping my lifestyle. Because you can overwork out, you can overeat, you can gamble, you can oversee research, you can overwork. Anything that we can even deem ms healthy can become something that we over rely on and it affects us in harmful ways.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:50:56 have you ever watched these Christmas movies, where the dad’s like a workaholic. And then at the end of the day and he learned his lesson and is reconnected to his family. Like point and case, right? Like maps where we go. So yeah,
Braxton Dutson: 00:51:06 and I think one of the hard things too is we’re talking about this, one of the first reactions, you know, as you’re reading this transcript to this podcast. what could be happening is you’ve seen all these things coming up in your own life, how you’ve been pushing your kids, how you do push your kids.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:51:18 You WILL see this going on in your life. If you don’t, you really need therapy, right?
Braxton Dutson: 00:51:24 And so doing, knowing that it’s great time to check in with. What does your feeling of shame look like? What, what comes up for you as you’re reading to this and you’re thinking of all the ways that I don’t know that you’ve screwed up or that you haven’t done enough or that this pertains to you and what do you want to do about it? How can you start taking care of yourself? I think you were talking about having the abcs of empathy and how do you, how do we empathize with ourselves when we’re going through a hard time like this?
Topic of Discus: 00:51:53 HOW DO WE EMPATHIZE WITH OURSELVES
Lennie Knowlton: 00:51:54 Oh Geez. So um, or what would you say to one of these listening, if you’re talking about if you’re going through and we talked about the kind of, the first thing is to check yourself talk, right? So something that goes hand in hand with that, which is, which comes from, you know, Kristin Neff’s work, who does a lot of the mindful self compassion stuff, but she says, am I talking to myself? Like I would talk to somebody that I love and that one’s a really good one, especially going back to that kind of parent piece because we talked to our children, we talked to our friends, we talked to her neighbors, you know, it’s hard to complete strangers so much kinder than we talk to ourselves. A lot of that has a social stigma, right? If you take care of yourself, you’re selfish and that’s really, really harmful. So taking care of yourself is really, really important. Um, and making time for self care and self care is really different from self care. Not really different. It’s part of self compassion, but it’s different, right? You can go take a bath and still talk to yourself like you’re a piece of crap while you were in the bathtub.
Braxton Dutson: 00:52:57 That’s true.
New Speaker: 00:52:58 So a lot of people think that they’re engaging in all of this. There’s take care of ourselves so much, but they still beat themselves up in their thoughts. Right. So that’s another.
Braxton Dutson: 00:53:10 So being aware of those thoughts, being aware of yourself, talk and do you work on, I know you’re recognizing in nonjudgment if you’re seeing it, do you give yourself permission to say I’m, I don’t need to talk to myself that way? Or what permission do you give yourself?
Lennie Knowlton: 00:53:26 Well, first you just kind of say, wow, this is really an interesting thing. “My brain really doesn’t want me to calm down right now. What is it scared of? It’s really worried that if I calm down or let myself, love myself would be in this moment that I’m going to not be okay.” Usually that takes us back to someplace.
Braxton Dutson: 00:53:52 And here we are, even as I’m asking these questions and um, being aware of myself, I’m totally like worried about my readers. I’m like, “you guys know, don’t feel shame.”
Lennie Knowlton: 00:54:00 No, you will feel shame. You will feel shame for sure. You will feel shame.
Braxton Dutson: 00:54:05 so I need to just sit back and say “Wow. I’m being very protective now.”
New Speaker: 00:54:12 VULNERABILITY AS AN ANTIDOTE AND WHY IT’S SO HARD TO SHOW
Lennie Knowlton: 00:54:13 it’s because we don’t want to talk about it because it’s so ugly, right? I know it’s so ugly and you don’t want, you don’t want to be like, “everyone’s enough. Don’t ever feel like this.” but you are going to feel like this, right? It’s like saying don’t feel anxiety, right? You didn’t feel anxious about things. Yeah. And you want people to feel shame. It’s part of being alive. If you don’t feel fear of disconnection, you’re not going to connect. And connect keeps us alive. Right? So she’s paying attention to noticing it. And the other piece is that vulnerability and talking to people about it as an antidote, right? So Brene uses the metaphor of if you take shame and you put it in a petri dish and you douse it with a little secrecy and silence and judgment, it will grow exponentially. But if you take shame and you put it in a petri dish and you douse it with a little bit of empathy, it can grow, right?
Lennie Knowlton: 00:55:07 So unfortunately, unfortunately, right bending on the way you look at it, it requires vulnerability. And as a society we are the messages that people are sent and families and by community oftentimes is that vulnerability is weakness. So we have all of these people who are experiencing shame, but vulnerability is weakness, right? Like with mom, like “I’m fine, everything’s fine.” Then we’re going to have shame crawling out of every corner of our community and we have that right now. I mean, suicide is up at a ridiculous amount, right? religion and politics, something that we use to kind of taboo about talking in therapy or the other people, it’s part of people’s core values and kind of their core who they are. And so it’s. We can’t not talk about it anymore. Not talk about it is creating the shame, like oh, well you believe different from me, but we’re just not going to talk about it. That doesn’t build connection.
Braxton Dutson: 00:56:15 Especially because shame can, like you’ve been saying, can make us feel like we’re the only one experiencing something or the only one that believes this way.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:56:22 that’s the trick of it. And I tell people all the time. I think one of the things that I wish people knew most of all, like coming into therapy is that the irony of therapy is that people come into this private little secret room, And I can’t tell you how many times it starts off with, “Oh, I bet you’ve never heard anything like this before.” And maybe the nuance of their story or unique, but the feelings are not. There is nothing about what these people say, but they feel so alone that they have to come to a private secret place to talk about it because it’s not okay to talk about anywhere else. And a lot of times I, you know, kind of my own self compassion thing is to kind of give my own little hand to squeeze in that moment and be like, wow, this is really hard to hear and then say, “you know what? if you could hear the stories, all the other stories that have been told in this room, you wouldn’t feel this way.” Everyone has their stuff.
Braxton Dutson: 00:57:32 I think if it is when, because I, I’ve worked with clients are coming in to see me specifically for sex things. There’s so much shame around sexual behavior, thoughts, beliefs, fantasies, erotic desires that really that it just encompasses. And ithey think “you’re the only one that has a panty fetish. This is, you’re the only one. Everyone thinks you’d be a perv. You know, you don’t like doing things this way. You don’t like doing things this way. Oh, you have you get excited about this?? No one likes that, only you” and it’s so othering. But if they could hear all the stories, like you’re saying, that people come in with, they’d sit there and be like, holy cow, yeah, I’m fine, and wow, I love this other person. And there’d be a connection there.
Lennie Knowlton: 00:58:26 Totally. That’s part of being human. But we give permission. I mean, and thank heavens, I mean I think the therapy is valuable. Clearly, I’m a therapist and it’s connecting and talking to me, his therapist about it is so much better than not talking to anybody at all. Right. Yeah. But if everyone knew how much ever other people feel lonely or other appeal, people feel like they’re not enough or other people feel like you know, that they’re not worthy of love and belonging. If people really got that, then ironically right, the shaman, our community would disappear. The other thing that’s really important is that our highest shame triggers coordinate with our highest values. Okay. And so the things that you’re talking about and if we’re talking about, you know, I am bad versus then I did something bad when it comes to sexuality is stuff. People try to separate that from kind of who they are, but it’s this piece that people really feel as part of who they are. Right. So how do you separate that from you? Right? How do you do that? There’s this idea that maybe you are different ways that people have tried to create that, but when the essence of who you are as in conflict with your values or society’s values or your family’s values, that’s a really difficult thing. It’s not like, you know, I mean I, before I use the, the example of a spelling test when it comes down to who you are and your sexuality or things. That’s not a spelling test.
Braxton Dutson: 01:00:07 Yeah. And there’s, especially when it comes to sexual health and things like that, that tends to be one of those that there’s a lot of values that are put out there on, how you should be. There’s a lot of sheds. And so it’s easy for. We’re not talking about it, but whatever is released into the community can definitely make you feel like I really am not enough, or I don’t follow that one or I kind of follow up, but I don’t. Whatever your culture is around where you’re living
Topic of Discus: 01:00:34 EXCLUSION IS A SHAME TRIGGER “YOU’RE ENOUGH IF”
Lennie Knowlton: 01:00:35 And if you live in a culture where there are really specific criteria to be in the tribe, it’s really easy to identify yourself on the outside and that’s a shame trigger. Yeah. And again, if you are not enough, you’re going to go into panic mode and if you’re in a society that believes that you are enough, if there’s a lot of room for bottoming out. Yeah, right. Definitely. So promoting culture and space for people that just says you are enough. Right? Where, what would you like to do with that today? I’d like to do with it today. Yeah, definitely. That’s, that’s a healthy space.
Braxton Dutson: 01:01:21 A hundred percent. I want to ask you the question I ask everyone at the end of these, these shows essentially is if you, if you could add anything or if you want people to take one thing away from this episode. Trying to sum things up or something that you want. If you could have everyone know parenting wise or individualize, what would that be? Especially when it comes to shame.
Topic of Discus: 01:01:44 YOU’RE NOT ALONE AND SELFLESSNESS IS CRAP
Lennie Knowlton: 01:01:44 Two things. Essentially. You’re not alone, right? Everyone feels shame. Everyone feels the feelings that go along with shame and shame is darkened alone and isolating and it’s hard right now, but that finding your tribe or space that you can connect with and that connection is the antidote to that. And then the other one is that society teaches selflessness and that’s crap, right? Yeah. If you want to be kind, if you want to be a good person, scratch selflessness and replace it with empathy for yourself and others and boundaries.
Braxton Dutson: 01:02:34 Yeah, sounds great. Hard things to do.
Lennie Knowlton: 01:02:37 Oh yeah. It definitely takes a lifetime. You’re always working on it. We’re always working. No matter how you try, you still have your traveler moments, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Braxton Dutson: 01:02:47 and we just keep doing our best. I think for me, I love the sign that you’ve got up on your wall. The attributes of empathy, one, perspective taking. Stay Out of judgment, recognize emotion, communicate emotion, and use mindfulness. Yeah. As we’ve been talking, I’ve been looking at them just like, wow, that’s phenomenal on things that we can use it to help us in our path of getting through shame.
Lennie Knowlton: 01:03:11 Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah. But you have to have empathy with yourself too.
Braxton Dutson: 01:03:17 Well, thank you so much for being on the show. Really appreciate it.
Lennie Knowlton: 01:03:20 Yeah, it’s good to talk to you.
Braxton Dutson: 01:03:23 All right, well thanks so much for tuning into birds and bees podcast. We’ll see you in the next episode.