Today, some people are using shame to try to change others' behavior, but shame does more to drive people apart than it does to bring them together.
Join Jenna Slaughter, an embodiment coach who encourages healing in the LGBTQ+ community, and common decency expert Colleen Doyle Bryant as they talk about how shame actually increases the divides between people. Learn more about shared human values and how we can find common ground in these divided times on this episode of The Unlearning Podcast.
Shame is someone making this moral judgment of you that doesn’t say there’s something wrong with what you did, it’s something wrong with who you are.
The way people react to shame is to feel powerless... to feel small, it can make them feel defensive... Coming from a place of fear,… people will turn away… and they’ll turn to other people who will say, “You don’t need to be ashamed. There’s nothing wrong with you.”
If you want to get people to change their minds, you don’t attack them in such a way that they want to turn away from you toward people who will reassure them that there’s nothing wrong with them. It fosters more divisiveness. It doesn’t pull people together.
Learn more about common decency, shared values, and ways we can bridge our divides in Colleen's book, Rooted in Decency.
