Minority Mental Health - Unveiling Shame: Nurturing Resilience and Agency

In honor of Minority Mental Health Month, we're highlighting key insights from our course “Unveiling Shame: Nurturing Resilience and Agency.” This course dives deep into the complex emotional terrain of shame, its roots in marginalized experiences, and how it shapes our sense of self, resilience, and agency.

Through a trauma-informed and culturally responsive lens, the course offers powerful reflections and practical strategies to help clinicians—and those they serve—navigate shame, perfectionism, empathy, and self-compassion. Below, we've curated 8 thought-provoking questions and answers to spark reflection and support your clinical practice.

Q1: What is shame?

A1: Shame is what's called a self conscious emotion or self conscious affect. Self conscious emotions are cognitively complex. You have to have a self concept and the ability to self evaluate in order to experience a self conscious affect.

Q2: What's the difference between feeling shame and being shamed?

A2: I think the internal experience is what matters more than what's happening on the outside, because if someone is intending to shame you, that doesn't necessarily mean you are going to feel ashamed. It depends on your relationship with yourself, depends on your capacity to tolerate. For me, it also depends on my hormone levels in any given time. Do you respond by feeling shame, if someone tries to shame you? Or do you respond by getting mad, which means you may be experiencing humiliation or just a healthy protest that someone's treating you like a jerk. It totally depends on the context.

Q3: Is guilt constructive?

A3: Guilt is constructive, yes. We have access to our prefrontal cortex when we're experiencing guilt. An important distinction is that guilt is about behavior, while shame is about self.

Q4: What is empathy?

A4: From Brené Brown, there are five main components. They are staying out of judgment, perspective taking, recognizing emotion, communicating the understanding of that emotion, and mindfulness.

Q5: Is development of shame a coping mechanism?

A5: It's a coping mechanism. Because in our childhood, we develop survival strategies that kept us alive. For example, my dad was really angry. Nobody in our household was able to express anger except for him. If I would have expressed my authentic anger about a plethora of situations that happened when I was a child, I would have been in big trouble. I could have gotten beaten within an edge of my life. So instead, I assumed that the protests that I have were wrong, I’m making my experience bad and wrong. And because that happens so often, early in my childhood that became normal.

Q6: Why is it important to know what self is?

A6: If we have no self, then what are we? It's really, really important to know what self is. From a psychoanalytic perspective, self is seen as evolving all of the time, it's always changing, it’s shaped by both internal and external factors, early experience, interpersonal relationships, and intrapsychic conflicts. If I have a solid core sense of self, I'm not necessarily going to be impacted by what's happening on the outside, even as horrific as it might be.

Q7: What is self compassion?

A7: There is compassion, meaning to suffer with, and self compassion, meaning to suffer with oneself. It's the recognition that we're experiencing suffering and being kind to ourselves in the moment. We're practicing goodwill, not good feelings. We're not trying to make bad feelings go away, or pretend they aren't there, we’re just holding loving space for ourselves when we do experience negative emotions

Q8: How can perfectionism negatively impact us?

A8: Perfectionism gets in the way when we're measuring ourselves against something that's unrealistic, and if we continue to be attached to that unrealistic idea of self, we're not going to take it well and learn to react without shame.

These conversations around shame, identity, and healing are essential—especially for mental health professionals serving marginalized communities. By understanding the nuanced ways shame operates and learning how to nurture compassion and resilience, we can foster deeper connection and growth, both within ourselves and in those we serve.

We invite you to share these insights with your colleagues, revisit them often, and consider joining us for the full course if you haven't already. Together, we can continue dismantling shame and building a foundation of empathy, agency, and healing.