Imposter Syndrome's Bigger, Badder Sibling: Shame  ## Metadata - Author: [[YouTube]] - Full Title: Imposter Syndrome's Bigger, Badder Sibling: Shame - Category: #articles - Document Tags: [[community]] [[mental]] [[self]] - Summary: Imposter Syndrome's bigger, badder sibling: Shame - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp5O0FbCvVk My name is John Alban. Um, I'm well known in the Drupal community for being a front-end developer. And uh, on Tuesday, someone asked me what I was going to speak about. And I told them, shame. And they looked at me and they said, "Is that a new JavaScript library?" Yes, it is. Um, no, people were surprised that that I'm my topic of choice. Um, I was talking to my boss, Alan Burke, um, at the Irish company, Anarchch, and he said, "Shame? You're talking about shame? Are you sure you're not Irish?" Because the Irish know all about guilt. And I said, "Ah, I have a slide about that." Not that slide, this one. Shame is not guilt. A lot of times we'll use these as synonyms, but there's a subtle and really important difference. Guilt is I did something bad and shame is I am bad. Guilt is how you feel about one particular incident that you can repair if you feel guilty. But shame is a chronic condition. And because shame is a chronic condition, shame is quite complex. There are about four different ways that shame can start and develop. There are um several different ways that our brains will process it and uh how it will store it in our brain. There are a whole bunch of different symptoms that shame can manifest as. And then because of all this complexity, how we heal is a multi-step process. I'm going go through all four of these in the next 15 minutes. Um, but I want to start with this third point because that is what we experience every day. Uh, and I'll help you sort of tie your specific experiences with all of this material. Imposter syndrome is just one facet of all of this thing in uh in shame and our unique experiences with shame can be this sort of complex uh process of how it starts. You can have multiple different ways that it starts different symptoms. This shape will be unique for you. So, how it manifests, uh, we're going to talk about just work context because there's a lot of ways that shame can uh, manifest outside of work context like suicidal ideiation, intrusive thoughts. Uh, we're not going to talk about that amount of heavy stuff here. Um, it's going to get quite deep, but we will not be talking about suicide or anything like that. These are some of the ways that can shame can manifest in your everyday work life. Imposter syndrome, avoidance, you don't want to be seen, uh isolation, poor communication, absenteeism, resentment between different colleagues, disengagement, procrastination, perfectionism, and narcissism. Um, procrastination and perfectionism, my favorite. Um now ah I feel like I need to uh it's all good just got it on paper. Um of all these symptoms a lot of these can be because of other things not just because of shame. So if you have procrastination it might also because you have ADHD. Um but if you have imposter syndrome or if you have narcissism th those two are definitely because of shame. But let's talk about imposter syndrome. Um about a decade ago, Drupalcon started talking about mental health and imposter syndrome was an obvious example that directly affected how we collaborate. Um and I um I just want to give a really simple definition of imposter syndrome. Um, and that is it's being qualified but believing you're not. From the inside, you may not even realize that you have imposter syndrome because you honestly believe you're not qualified. You think you are an actual imposttor. And from the outside, people are very confused. They can see how good you are, but then there are all these issues surrounding it. And once they figure out that you don't believe you're qualified, you can get advice like, well, the solution should be obvious. Just believe in yourself. Do some positive affirmations. Those might work for some people, but a lot of times positive affirmations will just make things worse because it'll feel like you're lying to yourself. And then you'll start to feel shame because, oh, this solution doesn't work for me. I must be really broken. And now you've developed shame about shame. And the reason why those simple solutions don't work because at the root of imposttor syndrome is shame. So what is shame? Shame is a relational wound. a wound that happens in our relationships with other people like someone who is very important to usually like a family member caretaker and because there's a relational wound we are missing a connection with them and shame develops in that absence of a connection. With this understanding of shame the path forward becomes a little bit clear. You have to fix the connections to your important relationships. And while this is a concise and accurate definition of shame, it's still a little bit abstract. So, let's do some concrete examples. We're going to go to how shame starts. There are four different ways that shame can start. The first one is direct shame. This is when um somebody is shaming you directly. They're yelling at you. They're blaming you. They're saying you're worthless. This is a very simple direct way of of acquiring shame. Then there's also indirect shame. There are two ways that you can get this. One is um you observe another person receiving direct shame and you preemptively develop shame in order to protect yourself from getting the same direct shame. Another way you can get indirect shame is if uh somebody that you love is being hard on themselves and directing shame at themselves and you observe that and you start to think that that's how I need to behave too and now you've also developed shame just by observing somebody else being hard on themselves. Next we have neglectful shame. There are two ways you can get this. Sometimes you feel as if you deserve the neglect. Obviously, I don't deserve the same things that other people get because I am being neglected and therefore I should have I should be ashamed of this. Another way is uh a lot of times neglect uh will be from poverty and you'll see that you have less things than other people, less clean clothes, uh dirty skin, not as much money and you will feel ashamed in your deprivation. And then the last way you can acquire shame is when shame becomes a bit too intense, you start to hide it from yourself by sort of developing this grandiosity. Um this uh narcissism that is a facade saying I'm actually worth a lot and that hides the shame and that develops into a kind of grandio shame. A lot of people who who have this grandioshame don't know they have grandio shame. So let's go on to how we process it. How our minds process it. Um this is going to be the most technical slide. Um and I got this from the paper uh shame abstract attachment psychotherapy too long. uh by Ken Banal. This is not an AI hallucination. I actually read this paper. Um and uh the four types of shame are basically it's a continuation of different experiences from sort of least severe to most severe. And the first type we're going to put on the left there is good enough me. This is when you have some shame about a part of yourself, but you also know that there are other parts of you that are good, that are worthy. And because you have access to the parts of you that are good, you're much more able to heal from the shameful parts. Now as we receive and develop more and more shame, we can start to lose access to the to the knowledge that we have good parts and we will start to think that we were entirely bad. And this is the bad me form of shame. You think that you are just not worthy of anything. And because you don't understand that you are actually worthy, um this becomes much harder to heal from. uh shame about shame resides here in the bad me. Um and this is a pretty terrible state to be in, but it's slightly better because you still have access. This is an emotional process. You still know you're still aware that you have shame. You're still aware of your emotions. Um and that that gives you at least some tools to try to move yourself to the left and then eventually into healing. Third kind of shame is not me shame. This is when the shame becomes so intense that your brain decides that it can't handle it anymore and it will dissociate from the shame. Your body will still feel shame. Your conscious mind will not even register that you're feeling an emotion. You will you will not even believe that you have shame. Not me shame. And the last one is know me shame. This develops when your brain may try to dissociate, but if you're receiving direct shame continuously, you can't you can't you can't consciously ignore it. It's in your face all the time and you start to feel like you shouldn't even exist. The shame is so powerful and that is these uh these right to not me and know me shame are traumatic states uh about a year and a half ago I figured out that I was in the not me shame section and I have been moving slowly towards the left. I think I'm about you know halfway between good enough me and bad me. Yeah. That's why I'm talking about this. So, how it manifests, we showed this slide earlier. All of these different things you can develop. And the last thing we need to talk about then is how we heal from it. Now, I want to be really clear. Um, we're tech people and we feel like if we can understand something, we should be able to fix it. But you cannot intellectualize your way to healing. Um, and if I can use an analogy, intellectualization is a accultation level, but shame is at the firmware level. Intellectualization is sort of an higher level uh process in our brain but shame can lie in our nervous system and lower levels of our brain. The good news about this is that you you don't actually have to understand like how you acquired shame like what uh what kind of shame you have. You don't have to understand any of that and still heal from shame. And the first way, the first step to understanding and healing from shame is to understand that it is it's a protective emotion. Shame was uh shame was first um evolved into human beings because it was a protective emotion. It helped us to survive. And how does shame protect us? It can downregulate our nervous system. So it moves us from hyperarousal like fight or flight and into hypoarousal or submission. It can temper other strong emotions. So if we're feeling angry or overly excited, shame will get us to sort of calm down in the presence of the danger that we're seeing. And there's also shame narratives. I'm going to skip over that because we're running out of time. But our brain wants us to survive. It loves us. And one of its survival tools is shame. So how do we deal with shame as it happens? First, give yourself permission to feel it. It is perfectly biologically logical for you to feel shame. It's okay to feel shame. You don't have to have shame about feeling shame. Then next, recognize that you are feeling shame. And then start to be grateful because that's your brain trying to protect yourself. And then finally, be mindful. So look at your current situation and your current emotional needs and decide if shame is actually appropriate for this situation. Maybe the people that you're next to aren't being critical of you. Um maybe they don't think less of you. Is shame really helpful here? And then you can start to relax, bring shame back under control, and try to experience what's actually happening in the moment. Now, this process is hard. Being able to do this when you're feeling shame is very difficult and I want to talk about some steps so that you can get to have the ability to do to do those three steps. Remember, shame is a relational room. It's the absence of connection, which means that it is it's healed with connection. connection to our body, connection to our emotions, and connection to other people. I'm going to talk about mindfulness and meditation on how to connect with your body, a little bit about emotional intelligence, about how to connect to your own emotions, and then mentioned that community and support networks are how you connect with other people. I've seen some other Drupalcons uh that recommend meditation. I saw some other Drupalcon presentations that said that meditation was no good for them. I understand the frustration with meditation. Um, but meditation leads to mindfulness and it is that mindfulness that's going to allow us to recognize we're feeling shame, noting it, feeling grateful and then, you know, reconnecting with ourselves in the c current situation. Mindfulness is what gives us the ability to do all of those things. And meditation leads to mindfulness. One of the things I did not know about meditation when I started it about five years ago um was the purpose of meditation um I was told to do meditation because it would help with my procrastination. Turns out it was ADHD but I kept doing meditation as a try to fix my procrastination. And I discovered after a couple years that I was starting to see changes in how I would respond to situations because of the meditation. Even though I thought I was terrible at meditation, there are applications where they will give you like a 10-minute time frame to do meditations and they'll like sort of walk you through it. They'll like focus on your breathing, focus on, you know, sensations, focus on sounds. Um, and then they will give you like some time to just be quiet and continue to focus. And I would always get super distracted during that time where it's just supposed to be quiet. And then I like, "Oh, I'm supposed to be focusing." And then I would get distracted. I'm like, "Oh, I need to focus." But meditation is the practice of moving from distraction to focus. Being overwhelmed with shame and coming into focus. It turns out that my meditations where I'm constantly getting distracted and then coming to focus was a really good session. That practice of being distracted and coming back to focus, that ability is what leads to mindfulness. I only have one minute left. Um, emotional intelligence, um, people's experiences with emotional intelligence are are very gendered. Uh women are people who are raised as girls are often taught to uh look to other people's emotions and prioritize those and because of that you sort of learn about your own emotions but it's it's not great right you should be able to focus on your own emotions first um and then people who are raised as boys are basically told not to have any emotions. Um that also sucks for different reasons. Um, emotional intelligence comes from self-awareness, self-management, and empathy for others and for yourself. Mindfulness also helps with that self-awareness. Mindfulness actually gave me the ability to accidentally teach myself emotional intelligence. I started to feel things in my body and eventually recognized that those were emotions I did not even know I had. Lastly, community and support system. Having somebody close to you that you can support on is essential to being able to do all of these things and heal from shame. But community is also important. And it doesn't necessarily have to be somebody that you feel like you could talk about really important stuff. Just being kind to other people in the grocery store, that can be a type of community that is very healing. So once you've done all these steps, remember to try to do this when you are feeling shame. My slides are already up on my websites. U that's the URL. And I am very grateful for you that you are here today. Thank you. Uh, are there any questions? You can also come talk to me afterwards. I mean, talking about shame in front of other people, I can understand it. It's a lot. Um, well, since there are Oh, wait. We got one question. >> Yeah. Okay, you mentioned like this is a thing about personal relations, but couldn't that also be if you're comparing yourself to something that is uh independent of personal relation like something absurd, some idea that you saw on the internet or somewhere and do you think that should be you and then you aren't that and then that's not really connected directly to personal relations or maybe you don't even see the people around you as the ones who can uh even if they tell you you're the greatest guy that they can pull you out of. Well, so um I would say that that that first scenario you described, that's that's kind of neglectful shame. You're you're neglecting yourself. You're thinking you should have those things, but you don't. Um uh and and yeah, like observing other people um that that can definitely lead to shame. Any other questions? One more. Okay, a couple over here. >> Let's take one more before we switch to the next session. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We need a switch. >> Uh just one question about maybe patient if you have any approach how to make it happen because I always consider it more medication like you have this thing you have at 10:00 a.m. for 5 minutes for 10 minutes. So you meditate for 10 minutes at 10:00 a.m. but I never saw any benefit. And you say you you didn't notice benefit but they were actually doing it. So how do you approach meditation? >> Um consistent uh repetition of it when um I try to do it regularly whether I feel like I need it or not. and that regular uh practice of it. The first thing that I noticed was I would be driving along. I I never I wasn't sure that meditation was helping at all. This is maybe like a year into it. And I was driving along and normally I like get really stressed and I found myself doing the meditation breathing without even consciously deciding to do it. I was like, "Oh wow." That was my first sort of inkling that it was actually really useful. It was slow. Um but it it really is useful. And I think that knowing that um it's the practice of going from distraction to to focus. That's a key because then you're like, "Oh, I'm actually this is this is what I'm doing, right? Makes it a little a lot easier." >> How? >> You can ask me afterwards because the other person is supposed to start in like a minute. Thank you very much. >> Indeed, John., Imposter Syndrome's Bigger, Badder Sibling: Shame, YouTube, 01k9ytxma6xxptd37agjzvq4yn.