Why People Aren’t Always As Supportive As You’d Hope

A week ago, I picked up a copy of Brene Brown’s Rising Strong, and just about every chapter has a “Daaaang, Brene” moment. As in, “Daaaang, Brene, that insight cut me to my core,” or “Daaang, Brene, I’ve never looked at it that way.” I’m not one to dog-ear or underline parts of books (I’m all about a pristine, bookshelf-copy version, even though very few people other than me ever read said tomes), but this book? I can’t help it. I want to scribble notes all across the margins and underline certain parts until my pen rips through the page.

I don’t get that way about a nonfiction book very often.

I’ve been reading the book in chunks, simply because almost every chapter ends with work for me to do; not because it’s a guidebook, with exercises or homework at the end (it isn’t), but because it really gets me thinking, and I feel like I have so much to process with each passage.

Since I’m still working through Rising Strong, today’s Tuesday Takeaway doesn’t even come from the book. It’s an insight gleaned from Brown’s interview with Texas Monthly, which initially got me fired up about the new release.

In the interview, she talks about how shame triggers a knee-jerk reaction to self-protect in most people. We want to shield ourselves from it, even when it’s other people telling us stories about moments they felt ashamed.

“If we have a partner say, ‘You know, I did this really stupid thing at work, and I got caught, and I got in trouble,’ it’s hard if you’re the partner hearing that to not go, ‘Well, what the f— were you thinking? Jesus!” Because you’re now overidentifying with it,” Brown told the magazine.

It’s a strange paradox: Our own need to belong and fit in compels us to lean away from people who don’t, as if their shortcomings will reflect poorly on us.

As a result, the person feeling ashamed feels even worse — he or she just reached out to connect, only to be rejected — and often, the other person gets lost in his or her own shame spiral, thinking of the ways he/she’s screwed up in the past too. Neither of you feels any better.

The antidote to all that shame is empathy, Brown explains. It’s sitting with another person, hearing that story and saying, “That’s really hard, and I get it, because I’ve been there, too.”

The part of that story that was so striking to me, though, was understanding — or at least reframing — where the rejector was coming from. While having someone recoil as you pour your heart out sucks no matter what, it gets a little easier to brush off when you consider the harsh reaction is at least partially caused by the other person’s knee-jerk fear of feeling that shame too. They don’t want you to look bad, because it makes them look bad, and it makes them dwell on last time they felt awful about themselves.

Either that, or they’re a huge, insensitive jerk.

 

This post is part of Life Between Weekends’ Tuesday Takeaway series. Every Tuesday, we’ll share the most compelling insight we’ve gleaned from a book, movie, tour, documentary or article to inspire you during the workday. 

Photo: Elijah Hail/Unsplash