06/08/2025
You are not the arbiter of shame. And neither am I.
It’s not our job to make people feel like s**t for their behavior.
What IS our job, is to communicate our boundary/preference/limit/need to the other side in way that takes responsibility for our feelings and what we’re willing to tolerate. To be vulnerable about how we’ve been impacted, and about how we’d like things to go in the future.
That’s a heck of a lot harder than just making someone else bad & wrong.
The impulse to shame is old, and it’s everywhere.
But it’s counter-intuitive;
it does not do what you want it to do.
You want it to make the other person fully understand the impact of their behavior so that they won’t do it again. You want them to feel what you feel so that they understand.
Instead, shaming brings up the other person’s walls, usually makes you unsafe and more of an ‘other,’ and creates a disconnect between you and that person. And if they already have trauma in this area, good luck adding shame to it (it’s going to make you very unsafe).
Sure, sometimes it’s effective in that the behavior stops. But it also begins to weaken the bond and the trust between the two of you.
The reason the world is so seemingly full of narcissists is because of how much we try to use shame to change other people. We project our pain onto them, hoping they’ll understand, and instead they absorb it.
But when you take it all apart, you realize that if we want to stay connected to someone and have them better understand the impact of their behavior, and want to grow together in the future, we have to do the hard, emotional self management work of vulnerability communicating this to the person we care about.
If you want some help learning how to communicate more effectively, especially in conflict, that’s just one aspect of what we'll work on in the 12 month Cycle Breakers program beginning September 2nd. Come learn new tools and ways of operating within human systems that might get you different results.
https://theeqschool.co/cycle-breakers
