Episode Summary
What happens when shame stops us in our tracks? When we find ourselves in freeze mode and realize that it’s actually shame that’s holding us there? How do we break the spell and move through that paralysis - and what if there is a way to release that shame back to wherever it came from?
Episode Resources
→ Sheila Rubin: https://www.sheilarubin.com
→ The Center for Healing Shame: https://healingshame.com
→ New Book: Embracing Shame: How to Stop Resisting Shame and Turn It Into a Powerful Ally: https://healingshame.com/embracing-shame
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About the Show
Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.
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Full Transcript
Rubin: In your family of origin, where are you to deal with the shame in this lifetime? And we have processes for giving it back, up the family tree, transforming it, taking the dignity, taking the creativity, taking the life-force back in processes.
What happens when shame stops us in our tracks? When we find ourselves in freeze mode and realize that it’s actually shame that’s holding us there? How do we break the spell and move through that paralysis and what if there is a way to release that shame back to wherever it came from?
This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. Today we’re going to talk about the “s-word” as our guest calls it. We’re going to look at shame. We’re going to consider shame. We’re maybe going to consider what it might look like to embrace shame. But before we meet our guest, I want to tell you a story. I’m going to tell you the story of how a podcast about the healing power of ritual came to be called Shame Piñata.
Several years ago, I was facing a big transition and dragging my feet about it. I had been at a job for 14 years and the Universe was telling me it was time to switch things up, but I didn’t want to go. Over time, I got kind of mired down in feeling ashamed that I wasn’t brave enough to make that change, and honestly kind of not able to make that change because I was kind of trying to find a new job but it wasn’t working. I began to feel worse and worse over time till I reached a pretty dark place. But then I reached out for help. I started gathering resources, and surrounding myself with people who could help me heal, and I was introduced to the concept of shame exposure - which basically means telling other people, safe people, about the shame I was feeling. I knew right away when I learned about shame exposure that I needed to do it and it needed to be a ceremony.
So I started planning, brainstorming, heart-storming, journaling, talking with a close friend, feeling into exactly what needed to move and how I wanted to invite my community to be there with me while it moved. So this is what happened.
In preparation for the ceremony, I gathered up all of the swag t-shirts I had gotten at my former job and journaled out my shame on each one of them with a ballpoint pen. I wrote one shame topic on each shirt, long-form, journal style, confessing how awful that one part of the story was for me and how horrible I felt about it inside. I did that until it was all out on the shirts, out of my body and onto the fabric. That was extremely important. Then I made a list of all of the negative self-talk pinging around inside my head and I pasted those words all over a cute little piñata. Sorry, piñata! And thank you for holding it.
When my friends and I gathered, just a small group, just my inner circle, my safest place to share such hard feelings, I took each shirt out and read out loud what I had written on it. And then one by one, I put the shirts on. Each time I put on a shirt, I felt worse. I think I had 6 or 7 shirts total and at least one sweatshirt, so it was a lot by the time I had read everything out loud and put everything on - by the time I had symbolically donned all of that shame. My friends were compassionate. My friends stayed with me and witnessed my shame.
Then I moved across the room and faced that shame piñata, almost mocking me with those harsh judgements pasted on every side and I picked up the stick. But I didn’t want to hit the piñata. I wanted to fall through the floor and let the earth swallow me up. I had no will or desire to fight back, to reclaim anything. I just wanted to give in. So I waited. And we waited. And after quite some time, I began to hear a small voice inside me saying, “No”. It was so quiet. But it began to grow louder. “No.” And it grew and grew until it filled me and flowed into my arms, and pretty soon that piñata was no more. I took a pair of scissors and cut a small notch into the top of each shirt so I could easily rip it off until the floor was covered in piñata, candy, and fabric covered in my words. And we danced and we celebrated.
And then I went out on the porch and poured a huge bowl of marigold water over myself to release that old energy. And after drying off, we sat down together and we had an amazing brainstorm session of what kind of work did I really want to do in the world? What was my mission? What did I have to offer? And, this is going to sound cliché, but I got not one but two job offers in the coming weeks, which helped me actually skate out of that old situation and into my next chapter. And what was different between before and after the ritual? I was. I was finally ready to move on.
And it was on a lunchtime walk with a colleague at that new job that the title Shame Piñata came into consideration for this new project, a show about the transformative power of ritual and how inviting the important people in our lives to witness our transformations can be extremely profound. And I’d like to take a moment now to thank you for witnessing this story and spending a few minutes considering how embracing shame might help us heal.
We’re going to continue considering shame now but switch gears a bit and hear from a different voice. We’re going to meet Sheila Rubin, who has been teaching about shame for 30 years. Sheila is a Marriage and Family Therapist and a drama therapist. And she co-directs The Center for Healing Shame with her husband Bret Lyon. They have a new book coming out on October 17 called “Embracing Shame: How to Stop Resisting Shame and Turn It Into a Powerful Ally”.
Sheila and I spoke recently about many aspects of her work. Our conversation began with her early experiences of shame and then moved into a discussion of the book. Here was was my first question:
Thomas: Sheila, how did you come to work with shame?
Rubin: It's my favorite question. [LAUGHS] I was a curious child and I was a very shy child. And I decided that it was my job, not just to save my family, but it was my job to kind of like, secretly keep a journal of all of the times when somebody was, you know, kind of had their esteem up and their eyes down. And I was just noticing all the variations of, you know, shyness and discomfort, and, you know, what it was like to be a shy child. And I started keeping track of that when I was probably five years old. So I didn't know that it was shame. I just… I knew that it was an exploration of, maybe there's something wrong with me and if I could just figure everything out, I'll figure out what it is.” And then I'll be right. In the meantime, I thought, “Well, somebody must be interested in this. And probably I'll keep these notes and maybe someday when I grow up, I’ll write a book about it, because this is not anything that anybody talked about. So that is how I started getting interested in shame.
Thomas: Wow, that's fascinating that you knew at a very young age that you wanted to write a book about this thing and now you're publishing that book.
Rubin: It's amazing. Go figure. [LAUGHS]
Thomas: How does your inner child feel now that you are about to publish the book?
Rubin: She is so blown away. Because I have an inner child who's five who has been stomping her feet for a couple years, and going, “When’s it happening?” I did a couple performances, like about my mother and my family and you know, what it was like to survive kind of like an interesting family situation. And that was helpful for a while, but you know, she’s been stomping her feet, she started stomping her feet… it’s the inner teenager, that center, stomping her feet about two or three years ago, just like, they're both so excited, because of like, the book is not just for therapists, it's for everybody. And it's for people to kind of read and kind of understand that shame can actually be a friend. And shame can actually navigate things and shame can actually be helpful. And shame can actually be something that a person might want to embrace. And it's kind of amazing to say this, because my inner child was like, “You know, you don't say the S word. It's gonna embarrass people!” I know, there's all these words to say, but not one. But now I'm an adult and I can say the big s-word, which is shame. Because when you say shame, people go into shame.
Thomas: Yeah, that's, that's good... Wow, I hadn't. I hadn't realized that, but you're totally right. It is that powerful that we hear it, and instantly…
Rubin: That’s why I'm putting my hand on my heart and I'm like… it really touches me that you have this shame podcast and your shame piñata. And it's like, you've figured out ways of working with your shame. And so it's like, my inner child… I mean, I'm a trauma therapist, and I'm a regular therapist, and my inner child navigates a lot of the time and she lets me know if it’s safe or if I need to come back another time or, you know, it's like, when can I bring up this question. When can I not bring up this question. And so it's like, there's, there's a tenderness that I hear in your questions and there’s a curiosity that I hear in your questions. It’s nice.
I asked Sheila a bit more about the new book and learned it actively works with the concept of counter-shaming. This is something I actually hadn’t heard of before.
Rubin: We normalize shame. We say the book is a no mistake zone. You open the book and it's a no mistake zone. All the pages talk about all the theories of shame, all the different ways that we've learned to work with shame. All the ways of counter shaming are different because everybody's so different. Each chapter has exercises so people go through each chapter and they can answer the exercises that are there. They can write them down. There's meditation techniques. There's an origami bird technique. There's Tai Chi techniques, how to work with the energy in the hands to counter-shame while a person is reading the book. My inner child was with me as I was writing the book and Bret and I co-wrote that book. It is such a powerful book, because if it was just, if it was just my voice, or if it was just his voice, it would be missing something.
As part of her own work, Sheila offers Embodied Life Story Workshops which explore personal narrative through improvisation, playfulness, and sacred witnessing. As part of their work through the Center for Healing Shame, Sheila and Bret together offer workshops focused specifically on healing shame.
Rubin: You know, we teach people in the Life Stories, we do some tools and then we do witnessing and having a person's true self witness story and performance. And then it might be something that they never told anybody or it might be kind of like a realization that they're a creative person or realization that they're… whatever it is they discover about themselves in the group, it’s just kind of a beautiful process to be witnessed and kind of have that… Common in drama therapy, we have, like a self-revelatory performance that somebody does and drama therapy is their capstone project. And then the healing shame. You know, there's a curriculum. We do a different 10 week… every week… every month, there's a different workshop. There is one on shame and women, there's women on shame and men, there's a one on eating disorders, there's one, you know, empathy and how to show up for people but it's like, of all the different things means we're showing shows up, we have a different workshop each month. And each group that somebody takes, there's this deeper realization of, Ooh, not only was there nothing wrong with them, but they actually had some really good ideas in their family. And they actually had some really good things, ways that they weren't able to speak about, but in the group, were able to speak about it. And so that is life- transforming for people to go through that.
Thomas: Wow.
Thomas: Do you do specific work with your clients or in your workshops around healing, healing the ancestral line or ancestral trauma?
Rubin: Yeah, I love your questions. Yeah. In the Life Stories, it's all about healing ancestral line. But there's levels and levels of complexity. So we heal the ancestral line, and then it's like, not enough to one, sometimes people come back for another 10 weeks, and they do another line. And, you know, and then they go back to the grandparents on this side, and the parent is on that side and often there's been a war or, you know, genocide, or, you know, something happened along the family line, that sometimes people don't even know about, but there it is. And it shows up in the processes. And we you do process too, we do ritual at that point to honor the people what we can't even imagine they went through and then we give the shame back - not to them to whatever was oppressing them or darkening their light - and then we take the person's pride and we take the person's energy hands like okay, well now that you've done that ancestral healing now what you want to do in your life?
Thomas: Wow.
[MUSIC]
I asked Sheila if there was a specific practice she recommended for releasing shame and she shared a deceptively simple process with me of flicking a hair band across the room.
Rubin: I work deeply, deeply, deeply. But if I want to have a quick healing shame it’s like… this is like a hair band. It's kind of a stretchy hair band. And I want to just kind of say… if I want to give that shame back to where it came from, I could just go, “ding!” and it just goes and it’s gone. I could bring it back again or 10 times but each time I could let it go. And each time, we are a little bit stronger, a little bit clearer, a little bit creativity…, a little bit more of our true voice comes out. And the ritual of that is what makes it work in the imaginal realm, work in the heart realm, and work in kind of this somatic imaginal you know what you is thinking… what is feeling? What is in that place between both? What is more powerful than both is the imaginal realm? Let it go. And then see what comes up and let that go again. And it can shift. Working with physical objects… it's like right there. We're in the imaginal realm. We're in, we're in the imaginal realm. We're in the symbolic realm. We're in the dream world. You know, when I have people do the live stories workshop, we are using physical objects to help the client or the, you know, the person who takes the workshop, use a physical… a physical object to represent something that has not been able to be named, or has not been able to be talked about, or that has not been able to be grokked at this time, in this place. It gives it a power and it gives it a deep knowing. Iit allows our body and our mind all the different parts of us to wake up and go, “Wow, something's happening here!” And, you know, we're talking so much about shame, and I missed the most important thing. We have resilience. Brene Brown talks about getting people to resilience, and we have pride. In every moment, people are moving from pride or shame, or resilience or shame. It's wired in our nervous systems, I help people figure the way between pride and shame in the moment… To be able to know that there’s shame and to be able to say, “This is a no mistake zone” and to be countershaming. And many of the objects around me are counter-shaming objects.
Toward the end of our interview, Sheila held up a beautiful greeting card with an image of two fish swimming in a circle.
Rubin: This is one of my favorite, you know, these are the two fish. [LAUGHS] And it’s like, whenever Bret gets grumpy, or we have a little dynamic or something, you know, I look at these two fish. And it's like, it's two fish and they're so different. They look the same. They're both orange, but they're so different. And they're going round and round in this beautiful little card. And that just reminds me of the whole point of the life is not to pass, but to enjoy the moment and notice, where I might be stuck for my clients or students might be stuck and then say, “Okay, is there something artful I could do with that?”
Thomas: Well, thank you so much. This has been a joy and an honor to speak with you today.
Rubin: I'm so happy and touched by your questions, really, really, really good.
To learn more about Sheila’s work and the work of The Center for Healing Shame, check the links in the show notes. If you would like to read a free excerpt of and pre-order Sheila and Bret’s new book you’ll find a link for that as well. As a reminder, it’s called “Embracing Shame: How to Stop Resisting Shame and Turn It Into a Powerful Ally”.
I want to thank you so much for joining us for today’s topic. Shame is never an easy thing to talk about. But as Sheila and Bret note so aptly in the book, “Once we embrace shame, it loses much of its power over us.”
Sheila Rubin is a marriage and family therapist, a registered drama therapist, and Co-Director/ Co-Founder for the Center for Healing Shame. She has a 6-hour audio series called “Healing Shame” by Sounds True with Bret Lyon and their new book "Embracing Shame" will be out on October 17.
Our music is by Terry Hughes. Find us on IG, YouTube, and X at shamepinata. Reach us through our website, shamepinata.com. And subscribe to the show on your favorite player. Also be sure to check out our second show, Daily Magic for Peace, supporting you as you support Ukraine. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.