Shame doesn’t usually show up as a clear thought. It shows up as a heavy feeling that tells you you’re the problem, and it can take one messy parenting moment and turn it into a whole identity. In this episode, we slow that process down and name what’s actually happening when you get stuck replaying a conversation, judging yourself, and wondering why “I’m whole and valuable and wise” suddenly feels impossible to believe. We walk through a practical, repeatable framework for moving through big feelings using emotional awareness and the resiliency skills that build real confidence over time. You’ll hear how to treat feelings as information, notice what your nervous system is doing, and separate yourself from the story in your head so your thoughts stop running the whole operation. We also connect the dots between everyday triggers like laundry and the deeper values underneath them, like fairness, respect, partnership, and being the kind of resilient parent your kids can trust.
What you will learn in this episode
- Why shame and guilt are not the same thing — and why that distinction changes everything about how you work through hard moments.
- How to use the Awareness Box to slow down and see what’s actually happening inside you — body, emotions, thoughts, and urges — before you react or judge yourself.
- Why your big feelings are information, not a verdict — and how to get underneath them to find what you actually care about.
- How to separate the story you’re telling yourself from the truth of who you are, and why seeing your thoughts as a narrative rather than a fact gives you your power back.
- How to reclaim your sense of choice — moving from “I have to” to “I choose to” — and why that shift is where resentment dissolves and real resilience begins.
Transcript
There’s something that happens inside all of us when big feelings arrive. It’s almost a reflex to make sense of them by turning on ourselves. Today we’re talking about shame, what it is, why it feels so permanent, and the formula I use to walk mothers through it. This is Leadership Parenting: How to Stop Letting Shame Control Your Life. Resilient moms raise resilient kids!
Did you know that resilience is the key to confidence and joy? As moms, it’s what we want for our kids, but it’s also what we need for ourselves. My name is Leigh Germann. I’m a therapist and I’m a mom. Join me as we explore the skills you need to know to be confident and joyful. Then get ready to teach these skills to your kids. This is Leadership Parenting, where you learn how to lead your family by showing them the way.
That is where we begin and where we end. That’s my goal every single time. Now that that is stated, do you ever have a moment where that statement just feels absolutely impossible to believe? Where something has happened, maybe you had a reaction, a mistake you made, a feeling that you had in which you immediately judged yourself. And the idea that you’re whole and valuable and wise feels almost laughable. Like those words might apply to someone else, someone who has it together way more than you do right now.
Well, I think most of us have been there. And I think one of the things that gets in the way of really living from it deeply is shame. Shame is a really strange thing. It arrives wrapped in a feeling, then it digs its fingers into our thinking. And before we know it, we’ve built an entire story about who we are, all based on that shame. And what I want to do today is help you understand what’s actually happening when shame shows up, what it’s trying to tell you, how to tell the difference between shame and guilt, because that difference really matters a lot. And finally, give you a real practical formula that I walk my clients through when big feelings are weighing them down and making them feel stuck.
I was working with a mom not long ago who came in carrying something very heavy. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it at first. She had gone into this argument with her teenage daughter, one of those arguments that kind of spiraled in a way that she had no intention of happening. And she said something very sharp, kind of critical, not terrible, not really cruel, but just sharp. And the moment it left her mouth, she knew it wasn’t who she really wanted to be in that moment. And her daughter went really quiet and walked away. And from that time, this mom had been living inside this loop, replaying it, narrating it. What kind of mother says that? I know better than this. I’ve been working on this for years. I’m still doing it. I am the problem. On and on and on.
Well, what she was sitting on, she said felt like guilt. It felt like it was something that kept calling to her to undo, to repair, to be better at. And we’ll talk a little bit in a minute about guilt because guilt actually serves us sometimes. But as I started to unpack this with this mom, I realized that what she was actually carrying was something much heavier and not as helpful as guilt. Weird, right? Because the thoughts had stopped being about what she had done and started being about who she was. And that’s the distinction, that shift from I did something wrong to I am wrong. That’s exactly where shame lives.
Now, here’s something that I think we should really try to understand about feelings because it impacts how we deal with this. Feelings are not random, they’re not just noise, they are actually information. Every single big feeling you have points at something that matters to you. And we usually get afraid of feelings. We get so afraid of feeling our feelings because they seem like it tells us things about ourselves. But what I’m suggesting here is that we just look at feelings as information pointing to something that we care about.
And here’s the way I like to illustrate this: think about something you genuinely are indifferent to, something that comes up in conversation, and maybe you feel nothing. No reaction, no charge, no pull in any direction. We all have those things, right? Someone could talk to me about NASCAR for like 20 minutes and I would just wait for them to finish, right? That’s what it feels like when something doesn’t touch anything that matters to you. But now think about laundry. I had a conversation with a woman who laundry, I think, is kind of the representation of all the hard things in her life. Laundry, it just keeps coming, she feels alone with it. Laundry, I might have a reaction to.
Not because laundry itself is emotionally loaded, but because if I’m the only one doing laundry in a house full of people who are capable of helping, then at some point my feelings about the laundry stop being about the laundry. They’re about fairness, they’re about feeling respected. They’re about whether I feel like a partner or a servant in my house. And now we’re talking about something that I do care deeply about. That’s what I mean when I say feelings are information. We never get activated about something we genuinely don’t care about. So when you’re flooded with emotion, when shame or rage or grief or resentment rises up, your first job is not to make that feeling stop. Your first job is to get curious. What is this pointing to? What do I care about underneath this? That’s where the real information lives.
But here’s what I think tends to happen instead. The feeling arrives, we move way too fast, we skip the information part entirely, and we jump straight to a verdict. Either we turn inward and we blame ourselves. I shouldn’t be feeling this way. What’s wrong with me? I’m so reactive. We start putting labels and blame on ourselves. I’m so difficult. Or we can turn outward and blame other people. They made me feel like this. If they would just change, I would be fine. So two ends of the same stick, and neither one of them gets us anywhere. Both of them are a way of feeling the feeling without taking the information from it.
Running the whole operation in the background are stories. We all have them. Stories about who we are, stories about what we deserve, stories about what our feelings mean. Some of those stories are old, things we absorbed a long time ago in childhood, things we were told or shown before we had the capacity to kind of choose them ourselves, evaluate them, and decide whether they’re keepers or not. And some of those stories have partial truths in them that get kind of calcified into fixed beliefs. Some of them are just flat out false. But we don’t usually stop and look at any of these. We don’t question our stories. We just live inside of them. And then we wonder why we keep feeling the same things, reacting the same ways, landing in the same places, and often in a place like shame. So the stories and the feelings feed each other. Like a thought produces a feeling, and the feeling seems to confirm the thought. And around and around we go.
So what do we do with all of this? Let me walk you through the formula that I love to use. I want it to be practical because I don’t ever want to just leave you with an idea and no way to do something with it.
So the first step in this formula is to remember that any shame you feel — now remember, you might not know it’s shame at first. It’s that really bad, awful feeling, the hopeless feeling, the feeling like I’m the problem here. I want you to remember that’s a signal, not a verdict. So we’re not going to take that and run with it and make decisions downstream from that. Instead, I want you to be curious about what that means. It’s not the truth of who you are, it’s just a signal, which means it’s pointing at something that needs your attention. The moment you can hold it that way and experience it that way, even a little bit, you can create just enough distance to start working with it instead of feeling like it’s overbearing or you’re drowning in it.
Okay, second step, it’s self-awareness. Now, self-awareness is this kind of amorphous box, but the self-awareness I teach in our resiliency system is one of the most powerful tools I know. Before you do anything else, you need to slow down enough to actually see what is happening inside you. What does your body feel like right now? Where are you holding it? In your chest, in your throat, in your jaw? What emotions can you name? Can you put words with it? Not evaluate it all or judge it. Just name them. What kind of feelings are you feeling? Are you sad? Are you angry? Are you worried? Are you fearful? And then what are the thoughts that are running in your head? What’s the story you’re telling yourself? And then finally, what urges are showing up? You know what I mean? Like those little feelings that prompt you to do something? What is it you feel like you have an urge to do? Do you want to run away? Do you want to fight this? Do you want to try to fix it, to just shut down? You know, the truth is you don’t have to act on any of this. The first step is just seeing it because we can’t work with something we can’t see. That’s why self-awareness is so incredibly powerful.
Now I know that sounds like I’m making it really simple. And for a lot of us, slowing down enough to actually feel what we’re feeling without judging ourselves for feeling it, that can feel genuinely hard. We’ve spent years managing and suppressing and pushing through our feelings. And I’m asking you to not do that for just a nanosecond. Just pause and actually let yourself feel it. Let yourself see it, even just yourself seeing what’s going on. It takes a little bit of practice.
But here’s something that I think can help with the body piece because when shame is active, the body kind of contracts. It wants to make itself smaller. So before you do any of this thinking work, I want you to put a hand on your chest, right over your heart, take a slow breath in, just hold it for a minute and then let it go slowly. If you can do that two or three times, that’s just not a relaxation technique. That’s you helping your nervous system get the signal that it’s safe enough to look at this. And you need that safety so you can do the rest of the formula.
Third step is to look at the narrative in your head. I call it looking at the story. Sometimes we use the word story to mean like it’s fabricated. But what I mean is it’s the narrative, it’s the language that you have rolling around in your head, the thoughts going on. And I want you to see them without immediately judging them, just noticing them. And a great phrase to use is this is interesting. The story I’m telling myself right now, I can hear it. You don’t have to believe it. You don’t have to dismantle it yet, even. You just need to kind of be willing to see it as a story, which means it’s something that you can look at and something maybe has some truth in it, and something that also might have some errors or some faulty things in it. And it’s all worth looking at. And we want to be able to separate you from your thoughts. That’s what Dan Siegel calls name it to tame it. Have you ever heard that phrase? We use it a lot in our parenting. If you can name what’s going on, then you can tame the emotion. Now, I think it’s a great little phrase because it rhymes, name it to tame it. We’re not even looking to tame your emotions. We’re looking for you to be able to tolerate them, to be able to just observe those feelings and then observe your thinking rather than just letting it be inside of you, telling you exactly what you need to do when you don’t feel like you have any control or any power over it.
The fourth step is to get underneath the feelings and the thinking and find your values. Okay, when I say values, you know what I’m talking about? Those are the things that kind of are your North stars, the things that really you care about, the things that matter to you. That’s the connection we’re trying to make. When you have these feelings and you have these thoughts, we tend to judge them straight up. But if they’re just information, they’re just like signs or little clues about what you really care about. It’s so important to ask yourself, why is it that I’m feeling and thinking these things? What’s underneath it? Do I really care about how much laundry I do? The truth is, when I’ve got nobody around me and I’m the only one home and I’m doing laundry, I don’t have those feelings of resentment. I don’t feel like other people should come into my house and do my laundry for me. The thing that I care about is this sense of respect. I kind of have a fairness bone in my body. And if I’ve got something I’m doing that starts to trigger those things or activate — activate is probably a better word — activate those things I care about, then all that upset I’m feeling probably has very little to do with laundry or the fact that your teenager has so much on their plate that they’re so busy that that might be why they’re not helping you out with the laundry or doing their part. All of those things aren’t pointing out that you have to make all these external changes. They’re usually just telling you that something you really care about is making some noise, right?
Because the big feelings, the shame, the hurt, the anger, the resentment, they’re not arbitrary. They’re pointing at something that matters. And when you can name that thing, like this mom that I was working with, she cared about being a present and connected parent. She cares about being seen and valued in her relationship. She cares about being someone her kids can trust. Now she knows why she’s being so hard on herself for being a little bit sharp. She probably also had a lot of care and worry for her child. And when she started to get all worried about her daughter’s kind of wellness or her safety, that anxiety translated into something that she said. And that’s actually what happened. She was more sharp, more kind of harsh with something because of her fear, not because she was trying to be mean. This connection, this research, this little bit of sleuthing that you’re doing is so helpful because it gives you a connection to your compass. That’s what values are. They’re the things that are really hard to shut up because you really care about them. And they’re often influencing and lying underneath the things that we’re experiencing. And oftentimes we just don’t see it. We don’t realize it.
Okay. Fifth step, this is important. We need to be able to separate the guilt that we feel from shame. And I want to spend just a minute here because I think this distinction is super important. And I don’t think we always have it clear in our heads. What is guilt? Guilt says, I did something wrong. Shame says I am wrong. Guilt is actually healthy. Guilt is your internal compass functioning correctly. When your child hurts a friend and feels bad about it, you’re kind of happy they feel bad about it, aren’t you? Because you recognize that something they care about or we want them to learn to care about, which is other people’s feelings and having good relationships, they’ve done something to cause an injury there. And that guilt helps them recognize they need to do something to repair. It’s a great friend for all of us, right? When you lose your patience and feel the sting of that afterward, that’s guilt doing its job. It’s handing you a message. Pay attention to this. There’s something here to look at. Take accountability for it. Repair it. And then, this is the key, it lets go. Guilt hands you the message and then steps back. It’s supposed to go away. It’s just a messenger. It’s not a label. It’s not going to move in with you and define your life.
Shame works entirely differently. Shame doesn’t hand you a message. Shame becomes your constant companion. It labels you. It tells you you are wrong. You are the mistake. It doesn’t say you did something wrong and you can repair it. It’s just labeling and it’s so destructive. It kind of creates this dead end because if I’m fundamentally flawed, if I’m the problem at the core, then what exactly am I supposed to do with that? Right? There’s nowhere to go. There’s no repair possible when the entire self is the thing that’s broken.
I sometimes tell clients to think of shame as a gnat buzzing around them. It is irritating, it makes noise, it’s persistent, but it can’t hurt you. Not if you know actually what it is. When you can look at it and say, there’s that shame voice again, rather than the shame voice is telling me the truth, then you’ve changed the entire situation. So when shame arrives, your job is to not believe it. First, you have to recognize that it’s shame and not guilt, right? Your job is to ask, is there something here that belongs in the guilt category? Something that’s really important for me to take care of, something I actually need to take accountability for and repair. And if so, great. Let guilt do its work. Look at it, own it, repair it, and let it go. If what’s happening is shame, if the message is about your worth and your identity rather than your behavior, then that is a signal that says you’re in the wrong place. Something in your value system is calling to you. Something matters, and that’s the right place. We’ve got to get down there because shame will keep you from even feeling worthy to look at that. It doesn’t give you any credit at all.
The sixth step is to make a choice from your values. Okay, so we got to get down there. Got to get in there and figure out why am I feeling so bad about this? Well, the truth is, you guys, you feel bad about saying something that hurts someone’s feelings because you care about people’s feelings. That’s what really matters. So that step is to make a choice from your values.
Now, here’s where a concept comes in that I think is really important for us to talk about — sacrifice. Do you ever notice when you feel resentful about something that you might be doing, something that on some level you actually chose to do? You know, a great example of this is getting up at night with the baby, driving kids to practice again, showing up for something you said yes to that you now kind of wish you hadn’t. There’s a particular quality to that resentment when we feel like something was — we’re doing something we don’t want to do, something it’s maybe even forced on us, like we had to do it, like we had no real say. And that quality gives us that sense of we just have to do it. That’s where resentment lives.
But here’s what I found most of the time. When I’m honest with myself, I have to isn’t really quite true. The more truthful version is I’ve chosen to because something I care about more than my comfort or my preference right now is on the line, right? So a mom that gets up every two or three hours with a newborn, is she happy about losing sleep? Is that like the thing she’s really wanting to do? No, not always. Does she wish she could sleep through the night? Probably. But she’s also choosing every single time she gets up to be someone who shows up for her baby. Those two things, wanting to sleep and choosing to care for this baby, they can both be true at the same time.
So caring about your daughter and worrying about her safety and wanting to listen to her and let her talk more and maybe even have more options or more freedom or more choices, those can be present at the same time. We’re allowed to want more than one thing and feel more than one thing and experience more than one thing. Our brains sometimes don’t know what to do with all of that. And so we make decisions like all or nothing, good or bad. And what I want you to do instead is see the complexity of it, to be able to hold two things in your hand at the same time. I have to do this, turns into I choose to do this because I agree to do this on the inside, not just the outside. That shift is where resentment dissolves, not because the situation changes, not in any way, but because your relationship to that situation has changed.
So the next step is to reclaim your choice. Choices, your agency that increases the moment that you’re no longer operating from shame, and when you are in charge of your decisions and your choices, because shame will narrow your choices and make you feel powerless, right? But when you’ve done this work, when you’ve felt the feelings, you’ve looked at the story, you found your values underneath, you’ve separated guilt from shame, and you’ve decided what you actually want to do, and that it’s okay to have big feelings about it all. You then get to ask yourself real questions. What do I need right now? How do I want to feel? What do I want to think and believe? And what do I want to do? Those aren’t passive questions. Those are the questions of someone who knows they have themselves to count on.
The mom I mentioned at the beginning, the one sitting in that loop of self-judgment after the argument with her daughter, what she found when we slowed it down and worked through it together was that underneath the shame she was feeling was something she really cared about profoundly. She wanted to be a mom who could handle hard moments without taking them out on someone she loved. And that mattered to her. And when she could see that, when she could separate the story from, I’m terrible at this, I’m the problem, from the values that she had — I care about how I treat my daughter — she had somewhere to go with it. She reached out, she acknowledged what happened. She didn’t collapse in shame or minimize what she said, right? That’s the other option. She didn’t do either of those things. She repaired it. And that repair felt kind of like a door that opened up where before there had just been this wall — that she was the problem and she was never going to be able to be better and ever have a different outcome. That is resilience. Not the absence of these big feelings, not the absence of mistakes, not things that go really well all the time, but the ability to feel all of it and to let it move through you. And most importantly, inform you and help you find your way back to what really matters most so that you then can make a decision. You could decide what you’re going to do based upon what matters to you.
I still do this work every day. I still get caught in stories. I still feel the pull of shame. I still have moments where I move too fast and judge myself before I’ve given myself the grace of even looking at what’s going on. You guys, I’m in this with you. This is not a destination any of us just arrives at and then stays. It’s a practice, and it gets more natural over time. It never stops being something we’re working on.
So I hope what you take from today is this — your feelings are not your enemy, even the hard ones, even the ones that make you want to look away, even the ones that make you feel resentful about the things that you really care about, but you’re not quite sure how to deal with all the emotions about them. All those feelings, they’re information and they’re pointing at something that’s important to you. Shame is not the truth about who any of us are. It’s a signal and it deserves curiosity, not surrender. You’re allowed to have more than one feeling at a time. You’re allowed to want to sleep and also be present for your baby, right? You’re allowed to feel grief and also feel grateful, to be angry about something and also love the person that you’re angry with. None of that makes you too complicated. It’s just being human.
And the work of the resiliency system, specifically self-awareness, self-talk, and self-compassion — did you hear all of those things as we talked today? Being aware of what you’re feeling, letting it be present without judging it. That’s the self-compassion. And then working with the narrative so that you feel calmer and more confident about going forward in the direction that you want to go. That gives you the tools to do that very thing. Not to stop feeling things, but to feel them in a wise way, to let them inform you without letting them define you, to find your way back to your center every single time.
So we don’t have to be afraid of conflict. We don’t have to be afraid of feeling sad or disappointed. When resentment comes up, that is our signal that we haven’t completely looked at all the feelings that we’ve got about what’s going on. Something’s bothering us, and we can work through it. If you’re in a season right now where this feels especially heavy, where shame has been louder than your own voice, I hope that you can take these steps and just see them as a little path back to feeling like you’re safe and that you’re okay.
This is amazing work that we’re doing. Listening to this podcast gives you tools to be able to look at your life differently without having to have your life change. Isn’t that miraculous? It’s like I can get out of jail by realizing that I don’t have to be there. No one has to come and let me out. No one has to do something different. I can feel the feelings I’m having and not blame myself for that. And I can choose to do the things that are most important to me because I’m not spending all my energy circling around in this cycle.
Keep listening. We’re gonna work on this over and over again. I love you all. And I hope this week, whatever it holds, you can feel a little more light and a little more hope because you are whole and valuable and have wisdom within you. So start there. Whenever you feel like you’re getting away from there, come back to it and trust that that truth, that truth, is really love. And love is so much bigger than fear. I will talk to you all next week. Take care.