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Greetings…Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes.

Today, I thought that we would take a deeper look at the emotion of shame. Shame is the first of the lower emotions as described in the Levels of Consciousness by Dr. David Hawkins. Typically, the lower emotions are called negative emotions but it might be more advantageous to look at them as energy draining. You know, the ones where you feel kind of bad, drained, lack luster.

Before we deep dive into shame, I wanted to foreshadow just a bit. Over the next few episodes we will dive into one emotion per week. At first they will seem very negative, which they are, however, there will come a tipping point. At that point we will move into the positive or energy creating emotions where the emotional needle will create a self perpetuating momentum and your life will take on a very positive, fun, exciting and rewarding rhythm…yay!

So, what is this downer emotion called shame?

Brene Brown has done tremendous work on shame and vulnerability. Take a look at her TED talk. It is amazing. She says that shame is an unspoken epidemic. Shame tells you are not good enough. Things happened when you were growing up and we all know it. Everyone is a critic but it turns out the harshest critic is you. She says shame runs two tapes, 1 not good enough and when you get past that the enters “who do you think you are?” shame is not guilt, shame focuses on self, guilt focuses on behavior. I am bad versus I did something bad. Shame is highly correlated to depression, addiction, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders. She says shame is different by gender. For women its about doing it all, doing it perfectly, and never letting them see you sweat. For men shame is “do not be perceived as weak. The antidote to shame is empathy and a great place to show and experience that is by consciously listening.

On a similar note, Dr. David Hawkins investigated shame by using muscle testing to create a hierarchy or staircase of emotions from lowest to highest. He talks about this in detail in his book, Power vs Force.

Starting from the bottom, he found that the lowest emotion is shame. Shame is experienced as the emotion of humiliation.

Let’s take a look at this. Your emotional state is shame. This starts as the basis for your narrative. This becomes the reference point of every experience throughout your day. Shame will determine how we parent, how we interact with others, how we view ourselves. Every experience is filtered through this emotion and will become self deprecating because it is a completely negative, downward driving and draining emotion. It is experienced through the need for perfection which of course sets up failure and thus spirals further downward.

Because you feel this through the filter of shame you feel miserable. On top of that you set the mood for the day as well as your overall approach to life. You have determined that all events, which by themselves are neutral, will pass through the filter of shame and humiliation. A great exercise is to write down as many of your experiences in one day as possible and see how your perception of them is determined by the reference filter of your base emotion.

Let’s say you have a stressful email waiting for you at work. You open it, read it and a dissatisfied customer lists their grievances with angry email tone. Is it really as bad as you make it out to be? Is the person trying to harm you? The problem is that the email is experienced through the filter of shame and any issue by the customer is seen by you as a failure within you. You were not perfect. Or you react to it with anger and violence because you view it as an attack.

If your base reference point for experiences in the day is rooted in shame then your difficult email just became an attack on you when in essence it was the author of the email just writing their frustration.

This has happened by 8:05 am. How...