About: Chris Germer, Phd is a clinical psychologist and lecturer on psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He co-developed the Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) program with Dr. Kristin Neff in 2010 and MSC is currently taught in over 30 language worldwide. They co-authored three books on MSC, The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook, Mindful Self-Compassion for Burnout and Teaching the Mindful Self-Compassion Program. Chris spends most of his time lecturing and leading workshops around the world on mindfulness and self-compassion. He is also the author of Self-Compassion for Shame and The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion, he co-edited two influential volumes on therapy, Mindfulness and Psychotherapy, and Wisdom and Compassion in Psychotherapy; and he maintains a small online practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
The Following is my conversation with my dear colleague, Dr. Chris Germer
Lalia: You know Chris, every time we teach together on the topic of Self-Compassion for Shame, your whole face lights up and your energy shifts to what looks like joy and passion. I’m curious, when and what peaks your interest on the topic of shame?
Chris: Haha. Shame is the most difficult and the deepest of human emotions, a negative self-evaluation. It is commingled with who we THINK we are which is fundamental. I discovered that, for example, shame was underlying my public speaking anxiety, now, there’s a quality of liberation. I think what you see, Laila, when I get excited about this is freedom. Talking about shame, meeting shame with warmth and compassion, connection, community, so the whole subject is very positive. Shame is a negative emotion, but the experience of engaging shame with mindfulness and compassion, is a positive experience.
L: When we teach, we often talk about how shame makes us go small, it makes us hide. In the face of shame, our instinct is to go inwards. However, when we practice mindfulness and self-compassion, we actually light up in the midst of shame.
C: That’s a nice way of framing it. It’s true, shame makes us go small, go silent, and go away.
L: Instinctively when folks feel shame, their brain also says, “don’t talk about it, don’t deal with it. Let’s just pretend this didn’t happen”. Actually, what we need is the opposite. The more we talk about it, we deal with it, we are bringing it out of the shadows and opening up the path towards healing it.
C: Hmm, for sure. What you just said is a wonderful way of framing it.
L: For our readers, can you please expand a bit more on shame as an innocent emotion?
C: The consequences of shame can be quite devastating. Such as violence and lot of cruelty occurs in life, as human beings try to avoid shame.
When we feel shame, we feel like we are to blame. And more than that, we feel we are unworthy, bad or inadequate. So nobody wants to get near shame because of that. However, the way to get near shame is to be able to see through shame. At the surface level, shame feels really bad, and it’s a form of self-condemnation. When we can see through all that, we see into the motivation behind shame, the wish to be loved. This wish is profoundly human since we are social animals, we’ve learned to survive and thrive in community. Therefore, every one of us is born with the wish to be loved, which is a survival mechanism and fundamental to being a social animal.
If you think about the wish to be loved, we realize that it actually begins the moment we were born, it is our most innocent moment and with us for our entire lives. When we can connect with the wish to be loved, we actually connect with a very innocent part of ourselves. Shame is basically the fear that we will be unloved. So if we connect with the wish to be loved, we can see it’s innocence. Just like an innocent baby, and we can see that shame arises, because we fear that we will not be loved. In other words, as long as the wish to be loved arises in human nature, shame will definitely arise in human nature, they go hand in hand. The motivation behind shame is the wish to be loved. Therefore, if we look at the motivation behind shame, we can say that shame is an innocent emotion.
L: Hmm, that’s so beautiful.
C: Consequences are not innocent though. Our attitude toward ourselves is not innocent, but the motivation is innocent. When we connect with the motivation, we start to turn toward shame, a stealthy act. This allows us to tap into our courage or the willingness to turn towards shame with curiosity which loosens the grip of shame.
L: And as we lean into this really beautiful insight with vulnerability and courage, we start to shift our perspective towards shame and therefore towards ourselves. As we mindfully lean in with curiosity, allow shame, even welcome it, we notice a shift arise within us leading to a deeper relationship with ourselves.
C: When we connect with the wish to be loved which is a very simple, fundamental, humble and a very truthful fact of our existence then we can not only see this wish in ourselves but in others as well. It can liberate us from the grip of shame. When people behave badly, it’s often because they’re feeling unloved. As Marshall Rosenberg might say, in nonviolent communication, a tragic expression of an unmet need.
L: In addition, when we reflect inwards and see our own wish to be loved, we can also lean in towards self-forgiveness which itself is a journey that may require us to return to it with compassion again and again.
C: Yes, I think there are two key elements that helps with self-forgiveness, common humanity and understanding the causes and conditions around our misdeeds. First of all, when we can see the mistakes we make in life are because we are struggling with the feeling of being unloved, not appreciated, not respected or not good enough, we can see that this too is part of the human condition. The other key aspect of self-forgiveness, is to be able to see the causes and conditions around our misdeeds. Then we actually discover that we aren’t entirely misbehaving but that there are conditions that led to this behavior. And the main stumbling block to self-forgiveness is shame.
L: These conditions also allow us to understand the dynamics of our life more fully. This insight enables us to extend the hand of common humanity to ourselves with grace, patience, and self-kindness. We then start to see, “oh it’s not just me, others have gone through this as well” and “I am not alone” and “I don’t have to hide in the shadows anymore”. These realizations empower us to lean inwards as we shift the inner-criticism to befriending the shame.
C: Yes! Laila, I’m looking forward to teaching together again soon.
L: It’s always such a pleasure to teach together Chris.
If you don’t mind, let’s talk about the role of wisdom and intention when it comes to self-forgiveness in the midst of shame.
C: So one definition of wisdom is the understanding of the complexity of the situation and being able to find our way through. In other words, to achieve a goal which will benefit oneself and others to alleviate suffering. So when we can see the causes and conditions that led to the problem, we become wiser. We can then downgrade shame to what we call guilt. When we start to consider the pain that we caused, we can shift into alleviating or repair. Wisdom is to see the complexity of the situation then take steps to the best of our ability as well as protecting ourselves from making further mistakes.
L: And if we are not ready to forgive, we can create the intention to someday forgive. Intention becomes our direction.
C: Yes, it’s super important to create the intention, especially when we do something difficult like face shame for the mistakes we’ve made. This requires courage and energy towards direction which is the intention.
L: Yes, energy towards direction is the intention. We don’t have to understand all the steps towards healing right away, but to simply trust that the path will reveal itself when we create the intention to forgive ourselves in the midst of shame.
Even when we feel shut down with shame, trusting that as we take each small step, we are stepping into courage and creating the path towards hope and healing.
C: Paul Gilbert has described compassion as the readiness or the willingness to descend to the reality of human experience. When he says that, he is referring to touch into suffering. In my view, the ability to descend to the reality of the human experience of shame is one of the deepest dives that we can take. This courage requires determination. Courage means that we are scared to death, yet we persist. So what allows us to keep going in the right direction when our heart starts to flutter, we get confused, and we waver? It’s what you said Laila, “intention becomes our direction.”
L: As you know, I specialize in working with clients who suffer from PTSD and Complex PTSD so let’s talk about shame and trauma. For over two decades, I’ve utilized compassion and somatic based EMDR therapy as well as Parts Psychology by Richard Schwartz and Ego State Therapy by John G. Watkins and Helen H.Watkins. When we look into the grip of trauma and shame utilizing the pathway of our parts or ego states, we can more easily apply the balm of self-compassion for trauma treatment.
C: Shame is a global negative self-evaluation, a global self-attack. So parts work dismantles the whole idea of shame, because we’re not global anything. As we look through the lens of parts, it becomes more accessible to dismantle shame.
L: The heaviness of shame starts to shift when we can see the light of our other parts that may also be holding resilience, self-compassion, hope, courage, strength, tenderness, fierceness, ….etc. Our inner light starts to shine the pathway towards healing.
Thank you so much Chris for this lovely conversation! I look forward to teaching our Self-Compassion for Shame course together soon.
If you are interested reading Chris Germer’s new book, Self-Compassion for Shame, A Step-by-Step Guide to Inner Freedom, please visit his website http://chrisgermer.com or go to your favorite bookseller.