Ep 13. Processing Shame: A Path to Emotional Healing that Aids the Healing of Chronic Pain & Symptoms

Welcome to Series on Emotions!  In this episode, I look at an often-overlooked emotion of shame and its impact on our mental and physical well-being. I share insights from a recent coaching session that included a powerful technique called the 'Three Rs' method (Recognize, Reflect, Redirect) to reframe thoughts and beliefs. There are many similar techniques with different names, Catch-Challenge-Change being another.  Discover how our perceptions (both internal and external) influence our sense of self-worth and learn practical steps to release shame, foster self-compassion, and how this can ease chronic pain and symptoms. Join me as I explore the mindbody connection and offer tools to help you heal emotionally and physically.
 
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 00:00 Understanding Shame: An Introduction
 02:05 The Evolutionary Roots of Shame
 03:30 Personal Experiences and Reflections on Shame
 04:31 The Work of Byran Katie & Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) 
 07:27 The Three Rs Technique
 11:51 Reality Check and Self-Compassion
 15:08 Releasing Shame from the Body
 15:58 Final Thoughts and Support
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 REFERENCES:
 - The Work by Byran Katie - https://thework.com/instruction-the-work-byron-katie/
 - Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT): https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/cognitive-behavioral-therapy?msockid=0c1d2b4f646864b6006f3bfb65996508

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Education and techniques discussed in this Podcast originate from many sources, countless hours of research, training, and self-healing unless otherwise noted.

Music credit: MomotMusic, Kyrylo Momot
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Disclaimer: Information provided by Migraine Oasis & Karen Ash is for general informational & educational purposes only & is not a substitute for medical advice, psychotherapy, or counselling. Utilizing any of the education, strategies, or techniques in the podcast is done at your own risk. Consult with a physician before engaging in any suggested movements. If in immediate danger, call a local emergency number or go to the nearest emergency room.

Transcript

0:52

I want to talk about an emotion today of shame. And it's one that I don't really think about all that much. I think more about sadness or anger or some of these other emotions, but shame for some reason I just didn't really take a look at that until recently. I just had a coaching session in the last week that brought this topic up and I just wanted to discuss it a little bit because she gave me a way of looking at shame that I thought was really helpful and I wanted to share it. You look at the dictionary terminal, shame is a feeling of embarrassment or humiliation that arises from perception of having done something dishonorable, immoral, or improper. And usually somebody who has this experience of shame is trying to hide something, and this is where if you have chronic pain or symptoms, it is potentially causing you a problem from a brain that does not feel safe, a brain that feels safe is not going to trigger symptoms. Right? There's all different ways of how the brain could feel unsafe. One of them is if we have these internal feelings that are causing us tension within or causing this friction of we want to be perceived as this way, but we're afraid that if somebody knew of maybe what we've done or how we really think, or yeah, a different situation that has happened, they may think Ill of us, and this conflicts with this maybe goodism or wanting to be liked and wanting to be a part of the community and feeling like maybe you'd be ostracized if people actually knew the real you and these things underneath that you feel shameful about. And so, this is causing this inner tension, it's causing this rub against values maybe that you have, or there's all different ways and reasons why you may feel shameful. Many researchers see the root cause of shame as an emotion that occurs in response to a perceived or actual threat to interpersonal connection and a sense of belonging. This goes back to like our evolutionary type of existence where back in, say, caveman day, if you put out of the tribe, out of the pack, it meant certain death because you couldn't do everything alone. You couldn't hunt and gather and take care of the kids and fend off yourself from the wild animals and do all this stuff alone. You needed the tribe. You needed to be part of the community in order to be safe, in order to stay alive. So from all the way back, it sort of inate sense that we need to stay safe and in order to stay safe, we need to be agreeable to the pack and in the community. And if there's anything that we feel shame for, it's to keep us regulated and within the confines of how is acceptable to be in the pack. It could be something that we feel like we did bad or something wrong, and this is something that's eating us up and we're just feeling I shouldn't have said that, or I shouldn't have done that thing. And it's internally causing friction within us. It could be something physical, like I, I've had shame over my weight forever and I look back at pictures of 10 years ago or 15 years ago, and I think, why wasn't I happy then? I wish I could look like that now. Yet I had all this shame and judgment over, oh, I'm too heavy. My stomach's this, my thighs that or I'm not in shape enough. Somebody's too short. Somebody's personality's too much. There's all these different things that we could think of externally we're being judged for. When we're in chronic pain or symptoms, sometimes there's a shame of we're a burden to other people or other people are having to take care of us too much and that doesn't feel comfortable to us. There's a value there of we want to be independent, we want to be able to do things for ourselves, and there's the shame of feeling I have to ask for help again, and that doesn't feel good to many of us. Or shame of having to disappoint people because you have to say no to something because you're not feeling well. So there's many, many different aspects of shame. And what came up recently for me in this coaching, I won't go into the exact situation of what the shame was for me, but she took me into a meditation, trying to explore this emotion and where it was coming from and trying to show me a different perspective. And so what she did was we went through a little bit of breathing exercise, got me into a meditative state, and she had me think of one thing that I felt shameful about, and started asking me a series of questions, and it was gathered around the fact of, and this is the part that I really felt was helpful, that there's this external perception. And then there's an internal perspective. The external part, I could think of my situation and think, oh yeah, people, if they knew they would, judge me for that. They would think I was a horrible person. They would maybe say mean things to me or I would feel really bad if they knew what I had done, or, there's all these different aspects. And she said, I want you to shift now internally and how does it feel internally for that situation? And so we sat in silence a little bit and things were coming up within me and I was thinking. Yeah, I feel bad and I feel guilt and I feel like maybe I did the wrong thing or I didn't speak up enough or, uh, until it got to the level that it did. And so that's what created the situation. So it was my fault and guilt came in and all these other emotions, sadness came in and a little bit of anger came in. And after this short meditation, she then started talking to me about what the experience was like for me, what I had discovered, the thoughts that had come up around it. And she started challenging my external and my internal beliefs about this. Understanding that the external perspective is based on my interpretation, my assumption of how others maybe would react or would've thought about the situation. And she was saying the internal viewpoint of something that you're shamed about comes from, not you necessarily, but it comes from also the external world of your caregivers when you're being raised and what they think is right or wrong shapes your idea of what should be shameful and what not, or society even, you know, what is acceptable. In some societies actually, it's different in other societies than, from one to another or a group of people, maybe certain communities, something acceptable and some things are not. Certain religions, there's, there's all different types of aspects that are layer upon layer upon layer of conditioning that we have. We were using cognitive behavioral therapy, and it's called the three Rs, or the work by Byron Katie. And it's recognized, reflect, and redirect. The first thing was recognizing the thought or the belief. I was shameful for this situation because of the belief that I. She recognized, okay, there's an external belief there and there's an internal belief there. We went next to reflect, was it actually true? What I was thinking. And she had me do that for both. So externally, was it actually true that people would think poorly of me for this situation? And I came up with yes, some okay, some would, some wouldn't. And she asked further. Do you know? Do you actually know? Did you ask anybody? No. You never spoke of this situation to anyone. So I don't know actually how people would have reacted to me. My friends, my parents, my sister was the only one that knew about the situation at the time. So no, I didn't give anybody an option to even judge me because I felt so ashamed that I didn't want to speak it because I didn't want to risk the fact that somebody might judge me. I felt very vulnerable in that time and I think it was more subconsciously that I didn't even wanna invite in any opinions on the matter. Then it went to, okay, is that actually true? What you believe of yourself? She pointed out, I, at first I was struggling like, yeah, kind of. And she pointed out, actually, you're a lot stronger than you think because this, this, and this. She started pointing out all my resources and why I could maybe reframe this in a different way. Then we started looking at it from the internal's perspective, and was this true for me? Was it helpful and was it something that was aligned with my values? And so we talked a bit about that. That no, it wasn't aligned with my values and that's why it was such a rubbing point and a sticking point for me, but was it true that I was this horrible person? No, I couldn't come up with a concrete proof of that made me actually a horrible person. It did not. The next one is to redirect, and that is the one that is very important because you're taking this thought and you're reframing it, and you're choosing to look at it in another way. Then she walked me through, okay, well if you're not a horrible person, and that situation happened. Is it maybe just a part of you? This is just, it's not you. It doesn't define you, but it's something that happened. It's a point in time and it's something in the past that is already gone, so it's nothing to continue to beat yourself up over, even though that's what we tend to do. Once you raise awareness, once you ask yourself these questions and you are able to recognize it, reflect on it, and redirect, then things start to shift and you get out of this pattern of just this internal shame and this internal feeling of not being good enough, or not being worthy or not being seen as equal to some, or to being judged by others and all these different things that causes tension within the body. Whether you realize it or not, a lot of this stuff is going on on the subconscious level. So it's a situation for me that happened back in my late twenties and has stuck with me all this time and has shaped some decisions actually in my life, whereas now I'm looking at it again with closer eyes and trying to reframe this, to reshape this and stop this like hum from underneath the surface continuing on, of making me feel in, yeah, bad about myself and that sort of things. So that was one of the tips or the techniques to use this three Rs as a way of, once you do spot something that you are feeling shameful about. It can work for any other emotion, and it can work for any thought pattern and belief that you have. If you spot it, you can think about it and just say, is that actually true? Do people actually think that or am I actually being judged by that person? The other tip that she gave me was, you use that technique and then you do a reality check. Her point was to actually go to the people. If it's a certain situation that you feel shameful about or you feel like maybe you're being judged for, and to actually be discussing it with the person to say this is how I feel like maybe you're perceiving me and I just want to discuss it with you. And if it's somebody close to you, you could potentially have these conversations. And her point was, many times we just get the wrong perception altogether and we're feeling this shame and this guilt when it actually doesn't even need to exist because this is an internal thing that we are feeling based on an external judgment we think is there. That is not even accurate. And so it's this reality check she was saying to just continue to watch for opportunities to do that, to be able to actively discuss with the person to get the direct information so that you are not concerning yourself with things that actually are not even on the radar of somebody else or of concern or as a judgment. Ultimately though, it doesn't matter what this external side thinks it's internally. The whole message was internally, what do you think? What do you feel regardless of what anybody else does? Is this actually defining you? Is this actually making you a bad person? And if you really dig around, you can find proof that no. No, this does not define you. No, this does not mean that you are a terrible person. The last point would be to have self-compassion and to really try to let go of this judgment of self. To treat yourself more as a friend and as somebody who needs care and is of value and is worthy of love and affection and attention and care and forgiveness and all the things that you would do for a good friend or somebody else going through a similar situation. I hope that maybe sheds a little bit of different light on this topic and gives you a couple tools of how to use different emotions and shame being one of them to work through your external versus your internal view. And really questioning to see where is this coming from, is this true what in my mind internally, I have made this mean to me. The more that you can soften things, the more that you can give yourself a break. Give yourself some grace. Give yourself self-compassion. The more this tension eases from the body. You allow yourself to release this stuck energy and shame is a, a big one that just feels, even when I'm talking about it, I just feel like it's a very heavy energy. It weighs you down and that is the last thing that we want in our bodies. It's something that we need to like, get up and out of us. Whether that's journaling, whether that's talk therapy that I was doing. Whether that is doing some somatic work and trying to feel where that feels in your body. Like, shame was in my chest, this is where I had felt it when I was doing this meditation. Feeling where it is and trying to actively release it. You can only do so much in your head. You can't just think your way through all these things, you have to drop down into the body in order to release it from the body. Because the head, if we could think our way out of things, we would've done that long ago. Many of us in chronic pain are very analytical, very self-aware, and very much in our head just over analyzing things. So the point of this would be to actually come back down into the body and feel what is going on and try to release it from there. Please do leave a comment and let me know if you have any questions on this or if there's something else that I missed. Obviously this topic is huge and you could talk about shame and other emotions in many different viewpoints and ways. This was just one technique that I found interesting and wanted to share with you. If this is something interesting to you as far as working through emotions or understanding how that affects your body and how that can affect chronic pain and symptoms coming, this mindbody connection and how it's all related and how giving yourself self-compassion and alleviating these energies from the body can actually help heal your chronic pain and symptoms and you want support with that, then just let me know, DM me or reach out and we can discuss how we can work together. In the meantime, I hope this helps someone and I will see you soon.