00:00 

Well, hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 225, "Shame, Blame, and Disempowerment." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:22 

Alright. Hello there. Welcome to the podcast today. So glad to have you here with me. I'm just so grateful for the opportunity that I have to be here with you and to share thoughts and ideas that are impacting me and changing my life and changing my relationships, and I anticipate that they're doing the same for you and that that's why you keep showing up. So before we start today, I want to talk with you about a project that I'm working on. I want to start doing some Masterminds. If you're not sure what a Mastermind is, it is a group of people who come together to talk about issues and topics and discuss them and understand them better. And starting the first part of November, I am going to run two Mastermind groups. They're going to be limited to eight people a piece. They'll be much more affordable than one-on-one coaching. They will go for six weeks. So these particular classes will start the second week, I believe, in November. First week, anyway, second week. Well, I'll get the specific dates to you next week. And then they'll be finished by Christmas. But I think that they will be really, really great. I want to do one on when you're considering divorce. So just eight people who are in a space of considering divorce and we can just talk about all the things. How do we make sure that we're in a space to make a decision that we feel good about? And how do we clean stuff up and how do we show up our best selves first? How do we really show up honestly so that we know that our relationship is getting the best chance before we make such a big decision? And to just really clean up whether we want to stay or whether we want to go. 

02:21 

The other one that I'm going to be doing is going to be all about love. And this one I'm super excited about as well because I just think love is so multifaceted. Cleaning up our love, if you've listened to the podcast "Clean Love," that concept has shifted so many things for me and I think that will be really awesome for us to move into that. And the other one, I mean some other topics like how do we love people when it's hard? How do we love our kids when they're ornery? Just leave this...this really open for some really great in depth discussions. I know some of you all love this kind of content and you don't have people in your life who love it as well and you can't talk to them about it. So this would be a really great opportunity to do what we might call a deep dive into these two specific topics. And then I think I'm going to be looking at doing this on a regular basis. So then starting in January, I would start some new classes with some different topics. And I think it's going to be really fun. I'm super excited to move into a space of greater discussion and making these kinds of discussions more accessible price-wise for people who want this kind of discussion and interaction in their lives. 

03:38 

So that being said, let's go ahead and move on to today's topic. I'm super excited about it. We're going to be talking about shame and blame and how either of those spaces will cut off your power. And then we're going to discuss how to move out of those places and move into a space of empowerment instead. So empowerment that will allow you to stop spinning, to get unstuck and to move the direction that you want to in your life. 

04:07 

So starting off today, our human brains are super fascinating. When challenges come up, our brain has already figured out some coping strategies for dealing with these challenges. But unfortunately, they're often pretty ineffective. So remember that our primitive brains are wired to look for the best answer for right now, what's going to bring me the most comfort and pleasure right now? And in so doing, many of the coping strategies that our brains come up with are not useful at all because they don't move us in directions we ultimately want to go. They just keep us stuck. They keep us in in action. But because our brain has used these coping strategies for so long, very often we go into these places without any awareness at all that we're using them.So two very ineffective strategies our brain relies on are shame and blame. And they show up on a continuum with shame on one side and blame on the other. And both are disempowering. And we're going to talk today about why. 

05:17 

So let's start with shame. We talked a bit about shame last week. So as a reminder, Brené Brown describes shame as "the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. Something we've experienced, done or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection." So shame is the space where we believe that there is something inherently wrong with us. And all of us move into shame at some point with different things, but shame is disempowering because it moves us also into a space of judgment about ourselves. Shame shows up for me most often when I think that someone is questioning my judgment or my intelligence and I think "maybe it wasn't good judgment, maybe I'm not as intelligent as I think I am." And I tend to get this hot feeling in my chest that spreads up my neck and into my face and it feels a little bit buzzy in my chest and my mind starts spinning with thoughts of being small and not being good enough of wishing I could hide and not be seen. And if you all relate to that in any way, your your shame may show up feeling a little bit different but this feeling that "I'm not good enough," right, that's going on. So shame absolutely shuts down our ability to accept ourselves as we are. 

06:48 

And yet my friends there is so much power in who we are. I want you to think about Jesus Christ. He was not powerful because of what he did. He was powerful because of who he was combined with the fact that he knew who he was. So knowing who we are and accepting us for who we are, for who God created us to be, is a vital part of stepping into our power. Shame moves us into questioning who we are, into questioning our inherent worth. And when we start to question our worth, we start to judge ourselves for not being good enough. We then move into judgment because we believe that, inherently, we are the creator of our suffering just because of who we are. We start to judge our worthiness to be loved, to be accepted, not only by others but more importantly to be accepted and loved by ourselves. And when we don't love and accept ourselves, we move into disempowerment because we don't see ourselves clearly and we struggle to acknowledge our humanity. We just get all judge-y about our being a human and we beat ourselves up for not being perfect or perfect enough. We don't accept our humanity. 

08:16 

On the other side of the spectrum from shaming is blaming. So blaming is just as harmful as shaming, but it shows up differently. Rather than a lack of self-acceptance, blame swims in the waters of a lack of self-awareness. When we don't have awareness of ourselves and of our behaviors, we cannot see our responsibility. All we are capable of seeing is how other people are to blame for our situations. I will say that for almost a full year after my divorce, and for most of my 24 years of my first marriage, I lived in a space of blame. I was mostly unaware of what I was contributing to the marriage that was hurtful and dysfunctional. And because I was unaware, I was always in blame, thinking that it was my husband's fault that things were a certain way. In essence, I was being a victim who was helpless to fix the situation.So when we are in blame cycle, we are disempowered because everything going on is somebody else's fault. And if it's someone else's fault that we're unhappy, we don't have any control over being happy. We think the other person has to change before we can be happy. When we continually blame others for where we are in life, we give up our power. 

09:46 

Now this isn't to say that other people's actions don't go into our circumstance line because that's exactly where they end up. Okay? But that is the only line of the thought model that we don't have control over. Circumstances happen. We don't have control over what people say, what people do, how they show up, or the weather, or things like that. But we still get to be in control of our thoughts and our feelings and our actions and our results, regardless of what shows up in our circumstance line. And if we want to start feeling empowered, we have to move out of blame and into responsibility. We have to start becoming aware of our own role in our situations. And we have to start choosing to release our grip on blame and choose instead to grab hold of responsibility. I really look back and I see that I only started to really grow as a person when I started to become aware of my own dysfunctional additions to my marriage and accept responsibility for them. 

10:56 

So, shame puts us in a place of lack of self-acceptance and blame puts us in a place of lack of self-awareness. And these are both places of disempowerment because both of these, shame and blame, strip us of the ability to see the truth of what is going on. Shame does not allow us to tap into the inherent power of who we were created to be. And blame does not allow us to tap into the power of stepping into responsibility of choosing to become who we were created to be. So shame and blame are on opposite ends of the same can continue them. 

11:44 

The space we want to endeavor to move into is the place in the middle of the continuum. This is a place where we are empowered because it is a place of both self-acceptance and self-awareness. And it's pretty amazing how creating awareness and acceptance will shift everything for us. So first, here's why self-acceptance is so empowering. I touched on it earlier, but when we really step into self-acceptance, we can begin to see ourselves as God sees us. And how God sees us is full of possibility. He knows our strengths and He also knows our weaknesses. God knows what we are capable of and He knows what our calling in life is. He knows who He created us to be. When we can start moving in that realm, when we can start to tap into those small nudges of who we were created to become, of the contribution we can make in the world, then things really start to shift for us because there is so much power in who we were created to be. We tend to put a lot of stock into the things we do, but this is not where our power lies. It lies in who we are. And accepting that both our strengths and our weaknesses are the full package that will allow us to fulfill our possibility, to begin to step into the potential that God has placed within us, is imperative to becoming that person. 

13:18 

If you have children or other younger people in your life, isn't it incredible to look at them and see the possibility? We see all of this amazingness, and sometimes we get a small glimpse of who they really could become and the impact they could make for good in this world. And for whatever reason, most of them don't see it. They get so hung up on what they do that they think is wrong, that they get stuck on their weaknesses and their faults. And yet we look at them and we know that if they could just see what we could see, that none of those weaknesses would make a difference because their strengths would outshine and overcome all the other stuff. We see that their power would be in seeing themselves as we see them. When I taught middle school, I felt that way every single day with my underachieving eighth graders...if they could just see what they were capable of. 

14:18 

And the same is true for us. Our power will be in seeing ourselves as God sees us. In truly accepting us for who we are, we will find great power. And this means as well that we learn to embrace our humanness, that we learn to see our failings and our weaknesses, and our struggles as being part of what will make us strong and help us grow into our best selves. It means we focus on our whole selves, the whole package as being God-given for our greatest possibility. I love the verse in Romans 8:28 that says "that all things work together for our good." All things. Our good and our bad, our strengths and our weaknesses. When we can accept that our whole selves move into making peace with who we are, then we can stop focusing on ourselves. 

15:18 

So here's some fascinating insight. The less we accept ourselves, the more we focus on ourselves to the detriment of moving into our possibility. We end up focusing so much on our faults and weaknesses, we become almost obsessed with them sometimes, on being so hung up on our insecurities that it doesn't allow space to see how our strengths can contribute to the world. So when we're ready to really move into engaging at a higher level, we have to let go of shame for who we are. This shame keeps us focused on us, on our insecurities and our weaknesses and our fears. And moving into self-acceptance allows us to focus instead on other people and on how we can use our strengths to step into our calling in life. I think a lot of people erroneously think that the more we love ourselves, the more selfish and self-centered we become. Now I think that when we're doing it in comparison to other people, it does move us into the area of arrogance. But when we are loving ourselves from a clean place, without comparison. It opens us up to seeing how we can interact and engage with the world in better ways. It empowers us to start accepting our calling and moving into our possibility. And in this acceptance lies a whole lot of power to change our world and the world. 

16:50 

So just as important as self-acceptance is self-awareness. These couple together in the sense that when we start to see our faults more clearly, when we can see the impact of our choices, when we can become aware of our weaknesses without shame, then we can start to take responsibility for them. And acknowledging that it's my responsibility puts me in the driver's seat. It means I'm not dependent upon anyone else to change or do anything for me to create what I want to create. When I am working with my divorce clients, this is often one of the very first places we start focusing on, because it can be so easy to see how if our ex-spouse would have done something different, then the outcome would be different. But this isn't just people who have gone through divorce that struggle with this mindset. I work with parents struggling with their children, thinking that if their children would behave better, meaning the way that the parent wants them to, that none of the struggle would be there. It's so easy to see how other people doing things can make our lives more difficult. And yet this is so disempowering because we can't depend on anyone else to do anything differently for us so that we can be in a good place. 

18:16 

We are responsible for our own happiness, nobody else. We are responsible for feeling peace and contentment, no one else. We are responsible for behaving the way we want. No one else, no one makes us do anything, no one makes us feel anything. When we can stop blaming and accusing and finger pointing and instead take responsibility for our responses and our reactions, then we become empowered. Responsibility is empowering because when I'm responsible, I can change things. Now, can I change what other people say or how they act or how they feel? Nope. But I get to be responsible for how I respond and how I interact, how I think, how I feel. And when I willingly embrace this responsibility, it is so liberating and empowering. It frees me up from spinning in other people's behavior to focusing on my own. And it's a self-focus that is also solution-focused. 

19:29 

Blaming keeps us spinning in the problem while responsibility moves us toward solutions. Blame is also disempowering because it is a space of not forgiving. When we can let go of the idea that someone has to be at fault and just embrace learning to live in harmony with ourselves and with our circumstances, we can start forgiving. Because as you know, forgiving someone has nothing to do with the other person. That's not why we forgive. We don't forgive because the other person "deserves" it. We don't forgive because we want to erase their sins, because only Christ can do that, right? We forgive because it stops the blame cycle. It untethers us from our pain and it allows us to move forward. Forgiving is giving up the control of thinking we know how they should behave and taking control of how we behave. Forgiving is taking responsibility for our path, for our progression, for our possibility, for the way we feel. And forgiveness is letting the other person take responsibility for theirs. So when we're really ready to start making some progress in our lives, self-acceptance and self-awareness are invaluable. They are the linchpins to unlocking our power and moving forward into creating the life we really want. 

21:07 

So one reason to hire a coach is because you get stuck in either shame or blame and you can't see what you need to see to get out. Or you don't even know that you're stuck in shame or blame. You know that you're just struggling to feel empowered, to feel in control, to feel like you are moving forward and not stuck. And as a coach, I get to help you see where you are stuck in shame or blame and I get to help you move into self-acceptance and self-awareness. I can help you feel empowered by helping you embrace both your humanity and your responsibility. So is this painful sometimes? Absolutely. So one of my clients told me this week that before every call, I work with my clients for 12 sessions generally, and she said before every call, she questions whether she wants to get on with me or not because sometimes it's just so painful to see what she's doing and how she's engaging. And then she followed up by saying as well, she kind of laughed and she said, "but I always come because I am so grateful of the growth" that she's experiencing from the self-awareness that she's gaining. She is in a very different place because of the shifting out of shame and blame and moving into acceptance and awareness. And I'll tell you what, it is painful, painful enough that every week she's like, "hmm, do I want to get on?" It is painful, but I promise you, promise you, heart and soul, it is work worth doing. Growing up means we learn to do things that need to be done, even when they're a bit painful. And if we want to fulfill our calling, if we want to step into greater satisfaction and fulfillment in life, if we want to create relationships that are deeply intimate, we have to do this work. And it's so worth it. Growing up is so worth it. I love it. 

23:28 

Okay. If you would like to talk with me about how coaching can help you become more aware of your blame and your shame and your self-acceptance and your self-awareness, let's chat. You can go to tanyahale.com. You can book a free consult and we can chat about your situation. We can chat about how coaching can help. I give you all the specifics of what's going on and how it works. And we can go from there. So that's going to do it for me. If you have not yet left me a review, please do. If you have left me a review, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. That helps other people find this podcast and find this content that is so life changing. Alright, my friends, that's going to do it for me today. Wish you all the best. Have an amazing week and I'll see you next time. Bye. 

24:21 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email, a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.