321. Why You Don’t Have a Self-Love Problem, But a Shame Problem

Hey, I'm Amanda Hess.

I'm a certified life coach.

But what you need to know is I'm a sensitive woman just like you, and I'm going to help you understand yourself better so that you can approach your life differently and feel really good about it.

Let's go.

You don't have a self love problem.

Now, that might sound surprising coming onto this podcast today, right?

But what I have discovered through my years of working with women is that the issue isn't that you don't know what self love is.

Of course you know what self love is.

You understand intellectually what self love is.

But the problem isn't that you don't understand what it is.

The problem is you've got a completely distinctive other problem running at the same time, which is that you have a shame problem.

Now, every single human on the planet experiences shame.

This is true.

You are not unique in experiencing it.

In fact, we live in a culture that is really priming us for shame.

We are taught to be shameful.

This is steeped in everything we do.

And as women in particular, we are brought up to have shame.

We are supposed to have shame about the way we look.

We are supposed to have shame about the way we parent.

We are supposed to have shame about the way that we work.

Work, the amount of money we earn or we don't earn, how helpful we are in our families, how much of a good friend we are in a.

In a lot of ways, our culture, our society, has weaponized shame.

Is this a patriarchal construct?

Of course it is.

Of course it is.

Is it steeped in Christianity?

Of course it is.

Yes.

But that doesn't mean that we have to stay here.

Now, the thing that we do need to understand is that that shame experience, it is out of balance.

There is too much of it.

And when somebody comes to me and says they want to love themselves more because of whatever's going on in their life, what I see immediately is how much shame we hold and how much shame we carry.

We have shame about the way our voices sound.

We have shame about speaking up in a room.

You know, I could give you 25 different things that shame came up for me personally in the last past couple of days.

Easy, easy.

Even recording this podcast, I went to record it the first time, and I was using a little AI help to get my outline together, and I went to record it and I hated it and just decided, you know what?

No, I'm starting over, because I don't like how this sounds.

It doesn't sound like me.

What also was there was the shame of, oh, I already spent time on this, I already recorded it, and I've got to do it again.

And shame showed up as being a problem.

And so when I'm working with somebody and we are trying to get through shame, we, a lot of times, first of all, won't even identify it as shame.

That is not something that we'll call it.

What we will say is, you know, I'm sick of beating myself up.

I'm sick of feeling so badly about myself.

I'm tired of feeling so anxious and fearful and down.

But what we don't recognize and what we don't see, and what I see when I'm working with someone is how much shame is there.

I can tell you that in all of my client sessions this week that we have talked about shame in one way or another, and that a lot of times my clients will be weaponizing shame against themselves without realizing that's what they are doing.

It looks like I stayed in that relationship too long and I'm so mad at myself because I did that that I let myself be mistreated for that long.

I hear that one all the time.

It sounds like I should have known better than to take that job.

It sounds like I'm so stupid.

I should have known that before I started.

It sounds like I should have been.

I could have been.

Should is a real good indicator that shame is in the driver's seat.

I should have done it differently.

I should have known better.

I should have shown up differently.

I should have spoken differently.

Should is a very good indicator that shame is in the room.

Now, do we eradicate all shame?

No.

It's not even possible, right?

Our brains are really programmed for this.

Our brains are really set up to identify danger, problems, places where we don't fit.

Belonging is a human need.

So where does shame show up the most often in relation to other people?

Because when we're on our own, we experience very little shame because we are just doing what feels good for us in the moment.

But when we have somebody else in our space reflecting back to us that they don't like it, or we are doing something that we think the world at large maybe may think that that is, you know, potentially not ok, that is when we start to experience that shame.

Now, why is shame such a problem?

Shame is a problem because it has us shrinking and hiding.

Shame makes us real small and it really wants to grow in the dark.

So the thing about shame is we'll do something.

We'll feel the shame and Then we want to bury it.

But the problem is we're burying it for other people, but we're not burying it for ourselves.

So it is showing up at 2am it is showing up when we're having a conversation with somebody new.

It's showing up when we're asking ourselves, ourselves to do something scary or fun or interesting.

So what we will do is we will really have the pain, like shame pain when we are alone, when we are suffering in that way, it's usually in private.

So I was doing this experiment on Instagram and I posted my top, I think my top five things I felt shame about in the last three days.

It really resonated with a lot of people.

They were really minor things and they were a few somewhat major things.

You know, some of the things I pointed out was sharing my belief that using proper pronouns is base level, human decency and sharing that at a campfire where everybody else there disagreed, disagree.

Now, you might listen to that and you might agree with me and you might disagree with me.

Either way.

What I will tell you is shame showed up.

Now the question is, are we going to let Shane be the boss of us?

And the answer should be and needs to be no.

But in order to do that, we have to first of all just really understand what shame is and how it feels.

Now, shame in my body feels like a burning hole in my gut.

Okay?

That's what it feels like.

It is hot.

It is intense, it is red.

That is how I feel shame.

I can feel it kind of coming up my esophagus and trying to block my voice.

That is shame.

It'll light up my face like I'll turn really hot right when I feel shame.

And so that is what shame feels like.

And we need to allow the feeling, right?

I was reading somebody else's post where she talked about allowing the feeling and questioning the thought.

And I've said that and so many different ways and I think that we can logically understand it.

But I want to show you what this looks like.

Allow the feeling.

Feel that hot, red, hot, yucky feeling like, okay, that's what shame feels like.

That's shame.

Now, why is it really important to label it?

It's important to label it because your brain's not probably going to label it as shame.

Your brain's going to label it you did something wrong.

Look at that all.

Look at all these people looking at you and disagreeing with you.

Why are you always so disagreeable?

Why can't you just go with the flow?

Why do you have to always state your opinion.

That's shame.

That shame showing up, trying to shut you up.

And it's not because shame hates you.

It's just that shame is a safety mechanism.

You are not safe.

Shut it down.

You're not safe.

Be quiet.

You're not safe.

Stop doing that.

It's a safety mechanism, but it's out of balance.

So we have to look at that and go, oh, that's so interesting.

Like, I experienced shame now after the fact.

What am I going to think about that?

Well, did I speak according to my values?

The answer is yes, 100%.

Unequivocally yes.

Is it wrong for me to speak about my values?

No.

Is it wrong for me to have a dissenting opinion from other people?

If I believe that the opinion is important and something that needs to be said out loud?

No.

Perfect.

Then I can feel that shame.

But I have questioned the thought.

I have questioned the thought because the thought is simply not useful.

So when we're talking about self love, right?

And self love not being enough, I could have gone through that experience and just said, oh, I love myself.

I love myself.

I love myself in front of a mirror.

It would have done literally nothing.

What self love is, is.

It's an active process.

Yes.

It's something that we apply like an ointment and we have to apply it for it to work.

Work.

It is not a set in, forget it thing.

It's not a destination that we get to.

So this podcast, right?

How to love yourself no matter what means how to love yourself even when you feel shame.

Now listen, sometimes we feel shame and we agree with what we did, and sometimes we feel shame and we don't agree with what we did.

But the process is still going to be the same.

Shame wants to be tucked away and buried and put in the dark.

But that game of Whack a Mole comes up to mind, right?

Where if we do that, it will pop up at very inopportune moments, like when you're trying to sleep or if you're trying to do something that you did before that you've experienced shame about, or somebody says something to you that triggers the memory of that, or somebody even directly tells you you're a bad person.

When that happens, when that shame comes up, we gotta know what to do with it.

We gotta know how to handle the shame.

Because just saying I love myself a hundred times is not going to get you there.

That's not enough.

Not even close.

The truth is, is that true self love is loving yourself no matter what which means loving myself through feeling shame.

In fact, loving myself through every negative emotion that I could ever experience.

Is shame a useless emotion?

No.

Sometimes shame teaches us.

Sometimes we do something and we realize, I really shouldn't have done that.

For instance, when I was really young, like a little, little girl, I went to a wedding with my family.

I was standing there with my mom as the bride walked up the aisle, and loudly, really loudly, I said to my mom, the bride's not very pretty, is she, mommy?

Now we can laugh about that now.

But my mom was, of course, mortified.

I was mortified because I could see the reaction from my mom, realized my voice was really loud.

It was a great learning experience.

Now where we can start getting stuck is thinking, oh, that makes me such a terrible person.

Now, I don't think anyone thinks a little girl saying that her wedding is a terrible person thing to do.

Now, some people might have decided I was a terrible kid, who knows?

Or that my mom was a terrible mom.

I have no idea.

But what I can say is that I was able to really look at that after the fact, look at this now and go, oh, that's just.

That's just how you learn.

You know, you don't.

You keep.

You keep those thoughts inside yourself and.

And you probably want to work on seeing beauty in a lot of different way.

And there's so much nuance here.

But it doesn't mean I'm a bad person because I thought that I said that I was reacted to like that.

Yes, it gets more complex as we get older.

So we can do things and say things and show up in ways that maybe we don't want to show up like that.

Maybe we are in a meeting and we get angry and we yell, well, shame is going to say, you shouldn't have done that.

And to an extent, yes, I think our value system would agree with that.

But at the same time, there needs to be balance.

Okay, you yelled.

It doesn't make you a terrible person.

And even if you were to, say, get fired after that altercation, the reality is, is that we need to come back in with self love.

Now, what does that look like when we come back in with self love?

It looks like applying the ointment.

Applying the ointment is I'm not a bad person.

There's a reason why I showed up the way I did.

There's a reason why I was so angry.

Now, it may have to do with the situation at hand, in which case maybe we agree with ourselves.

It may not.

It may be that, hey, this triggers a really old wound for me, or this is something where I've been really struggling to deal with frustration.

And so I overwhelmed my nervous system and I completely exploded.

This can be true.

Now the question I have for you is, can you be on your own side while going through this?

Because that is what's going to be required.

Now listen, that is a skill.

That is a muscle we built.

We must build this muscle.

If I've established on this podcast that we're all experiencing all kinds of shame and internalized shame and externalized shame and all the shame, right?

And that this is in our day to day life and it's perpetually there.

We have to grow the skill, grow the muscle of being able to move through shame with love.

That's really what it is.

So when someone is saying to me, I want more self love, I'm like, you're gonna have to become way better at dealing with shame because it's going to be everywhere all the time.

And if we don't start noticing it, if we don't start addressing it, it will eat at us like a cancer that we don't know about.

And that's what I don't want for you.

I experience a tremendous amount of shame personally.

I personally also don't make it a problem.

It doesn't eat me alive, but it used to.

For many years, for over 20 years.

It ate me alive, the shame.

And it really deteriorated my confidence and deteriorated my ability to be myself and to show up in a place and really even be present.

And what we don't realize is when we're having this, you know, problem with ourselves, when we're fighting this battle over and over and over again in the background without even really realizing it, a lot of the times our capacity, like our emotional capacity is getting shrunken down and it just gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

Why is that a problem?

Well, the smaller your emotional capacity is, the more likely you are to be very reactive.

Now, for some of you, reactivity is going to look like my reactivity, which is going to be outwardly reactive.

I am going to show everybody every feeling I've ever had.

Okay?

It's going to be just right there.

For some of you, you're really going to internalize, you're going to shut down, you're going to withdraw, you're going to pull back, you are going to shrink.

Either way, it's a net negative for you and for anyone that's around you.

So all of your loved ones, all the people you care about, they don't win with that version of you.

You don't win with that version of you.

And that's why I really wanted to talk about this today.

It's something that doesn't get talked about enough.

We need to learn how to be the advocates of ourselves.

In order to do that, we need to understand the things we feel shame about.

We need to know when they come up, and we need to be willing to process through it probably a few times to start really discovering what are the things that matter to us and how do we want to approach them, how do we want to address them.

We are raised in a culture where we're taught to not ruffle any feathers, to not piss anybody off, to be likable.

What I want to offer to you today on this podcast is we have to fix that entire line of thinking that our likability is our most important quality.

That can be your most important quality if you want to be the most unhappy person.

Okay, said with so much love.

If you want to be a happy person, if you want to be a fulfilled person, if you want somebody that has real connection in her life, this requires more than likability.

In fact, it might mean that you need to be a lot more disliked.

We're not going out in the world trying to be dislikable, but we are going out in the world deciding whether or not what we say, what we do, how we act is in alignment with our values and whether or not we're going to have our own back.

Many times people will even ask me, isn't that narcissistic?

I'm like, listen, if you ask me if you're being narcissistic, it's completely untrue that you would be a narcissist.

It's not even possible.

You're already thinking about other people.

So it's not narcissistic.

But even if it was, it doesn't serve you to continuously stop taking care of you.

Even if you fucked up royally, even if you have done the worst thing ever, it still doesn't serve you or serve anybody around you to beat yourself up incessantly, to listen to the shame and have the pain of that shame and then have it grow more pain, which is what it will do in the dark.

Instead, we need to learn how to be the person who is curious about ourselves, really be interested in, why is my nervous system so dysregulated?

Not from a place of how do I get myself to calm down so other people like me, but from a place of I'm not okay, just the same as I wouldn't be okay if I had the flu.

Like, I had the flu a couple weeks ago, right?

I was rocking a fever.

I was really sick.

Then I had terrible vertigo.

And it has been a journey.

And I look at that and go, my body was going through something.

Not, oh my God, I'm such a terrible person because my body can't handle a fever.

You see what I'm saying?

We have to understand that we are an ecosystem.

Our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, our bodies, our.

Our whole system is an ecosystem.

Everything feeds everything else.

And when we are going through something emotionally difficult, for whatever reason, that might be because it's triggering, because it's just a difficult moment.

Because we didn't.

We didn't ever learn how to take care of ourselves emotionally in this way.

Because we are a highly sensitive person, because we are neurodivergent.

Whatever the reason is, we haven't learned how to navigate this.

That doesn't mean you're a terrible person.

It just means we have to figure out how to navigate it.

But we need to learn how to navigate it with love and openness and curiosity.

Now, other people might not be able to give you that in this scenario.

Depending on what's happened, depending on what's gone down, there might be people that are mad at you, there might be people that hate you, but it's actually irrelevant.

Learning how to move through the shame and to develop an understanding of yourself that is pro you, that will move you through that process faster than anything else you can do.

It will make you a better partner.

It will make you a better parent, it will make you a better friend.

But most importantly, it will make you be okay with you being you.

It will give you the peace that you're looking for.

Shame in itself cannot be cured by forgiveness.

It cannot be cured by other people deciding it's okay.

Even if people do that for you, you still might not be able to get rid of the feeling.

And the reason why is because it doesn't actually come from them.

It comes from you.

It comes from what you make it meet.

Yes.

So we have to start getting to work on being the person that is there for us.

Going towards shame, putting it into the light, owning it, and recognizing this is something that happened.

But I don't have to feel shameful about this.

That isn't required.

I don't always have to choose it.

Even if somebody else says that I should, that I can experience this in my body and recognize this as a feeling in my body.

And it's going to go through like any other and then I'm going to wake up tomorrow and it's just going to be a new day and I get to decide what's true about me.

It's nuanced.

We need to find the shades of gray, but you need to learn how to be pro you.

That is self love in a nutshell.

So to me, self love isn't the absence of shame.

Self love is knowing how to move through shame and have your own back.

And when you do that, you have more self love and the cycle just continues.

And that's the cycle that we want to move into.

So if that speaks to you right, we can talk about coaching.

I don't really have any spots available in my one to one coaching, but for the right person I would be willing to talk about it with you.

If you want to set up a discovery call, go to amandahest ca bookacall.

We can talk about what's going on for you, we can talk about the shame pieces that are there and I can show you what the path is to meant moving through.

And if it seems like we are a good fit, we can talk about coaching.

Which to me is the top tier way to get through any of this.

So don't let my availability or lack availability availability hold you back.

Book that phone call.

Let's have a conversation about it.

If this is speaking to you at the end of this podcast, what I want you to walk away knowing is that Shane is not something to be afraid of.

It is something to walk into, put light on and walk through.

All right my friends, I hope you have a beautiful day and I'll talk to you next time.

Bye for now.

Thanks so much for listening today.

If this podcast is helping you, please follow wherever you listen and consider leaving a review.

It truly helps this community grow and allows me to support more women.

Women like you.

I'm excited to see you back here next week with a brand new episode.

Until then, take care friend.