Episode 108: Why Shame Is At The Root Of High Functioning Anxiety
Shame is at the root of all anxiety. The more you can start building resilience around your shame, the more you can heal your High Functioning Anxiety.
Shame is at the root of all anxiety.
Everyone who struggles with anxiety has an underlying belief that they are unworthy, unqualified, a fraud. This belief causes them to worry and anxiously ruminate over feelings of shame and unworthiness.
We expect people with generalized anxiety, the kind of anxiety we've come to know through TV and memes – hiding out, not engaging, numbing – to respond to these feelings by disappearing into themselves. This reaction is triggered by their shame.
But not you. High Functioning Anxiety sends you down a different path.
No, your response is to over function. Your High Functioning Anxiety has you convinced that the way through the shame is to push yourself more, to accomplish more, to people please, hustle, and polish it all to perfection. All of this in the hope that you can relieve the feelings of shame and anxiety.
This month on The Happier Approach we’ve been talking about how High Functioning Anxiety plays out in your everyday life. And no conversation about High Functioning Anxiety would be complete without talking about shame.
Listen to today’s episode to learn:
How shame plays out in the everyday lives of people with High Functioning Anxiety
What the difference is between shame and guilt
How to know when you are acting out of shame by learning to identify Three Strategies of Disconnection:
Moving away from your shame
Moving against your shame
And moving toward your shame
And practical approaches to building shame resilience
Acknowledge the shame and ask for real empathy for what you are feeling
Give yourself kindness and compassion around your feelings
And start paying attention to your rules and then lovingly remind yourself to let it go
References & Resources:
Psychologist Linda Hartling’s Strategy of Disconnection.
Brene Brown Daring Way
Her video on empathy
And my book The Happier Approach
+ Read the Transcript
“Maybe you shouldn’t have shared that information about your Dad, I mean, the only thing people who are sick have control over is when they share the information.” And with that sentence, a fellow counselor sent me into one of the biggest shame spirals of my life.
I had just shared with my small group at a conference that after getting approval from my Mom, I had written a blog post about my Dad’s dementia in order to educate people on the horror of dementia. Afterward, this counselor pulled me aside to share with me her thoughts on my behavior.
What happened next was ugly, I immediately smiled and said, “Thanks, you are right. Maybe I shouldn’t have shared my dad’s health on my blog.” and she nodded at me knowingly. As we returned to the main conference. I thought, what just happened!? Why am I thanking her for calling me out on something that is none of her business?!?!
“You’re listening to The Happier Approach—the show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle, and achieve at the price of our inner peace and relationships. I’m your host, Nancy Jane Smith.”
This month we are talking about High Functioning Anxiety and how to see it playing out in your everyday life. No conversation about High Functioning Anxiety would be complete without talking about Shame, Shame is at the root of anxiety.
I spent the next few days of the conference in a huge shame spiral, obsessing about my Dad, worrying that I had betrayed him. I was ruminating about my qualifications as a counselor, daughter, and caregiver! That one conversation turned me into an anxious mess.
All of the symptoms I talked about last episode came out in full force. I spent the rest of the conference over-performing, trying to prove to myself and everyone else that I was a capable counselor I took tons of notes and attended every session.
I called my parents multiple times to check in and made sure I was a loving, kind daughter. I laid awake each night, playing and re-playing the initial confrontation and my thought process behind writing about my Dad. Why did I do that? That was so stupid, I told myself over and over again. Each night rather than being social with the other attendees, I hid out in my room, numbing on movies and room service.
Shame is at the root of all anxiety.
Here’s how it works:
You have the underlying belief you are an unworthy, unqualified, fraud and that causes you to have anxiety to worry and over ruminate about the shame and feelings of unworthiness.
And then high functioning anxiety sends you down a different path. What we expect with generalized anxiety, the kind we’ve come to know through TV and memes, is hiding out, not engaging, and numbing. Anxious people disappear into themselves--and shame is often the trigger that pushes them there.
But not you.
No, your response is to OVER function. Your High Functioning Anxiety has convinced you that the way through the shame is to push yourself more, to accomplish more, to people please, hustle, and polish it all to perfection. ALL in the hope that you can relieve the feelings of shame and anxiety. You think things like “I will show them” or “Who is SHE to judge me? I will own her one day.” or “she won’t be saying those things when I have achieved ____ (hello when-then syndrome) as opposed to Generalized anxiety where the response is to protect yourself by using the coping mechanisms of hiding out, not engaging and numbing.
This mix of shame and high functioning anxiety is why all the attempts to stop people-pleasing or stop being a perfectionist don’t work UNLESS you start dealing with the shame and anxiety. That is not to say that all people who engage in people-pleasing and perfectionism have HFA, but I want to make the point that if your attempts to loosen up your people-pleasing and perfectionism haven’t worked, it might be a deeper problem.
So what is shame? I think a great way to define shame is to clear up the difference between shame and guilt. Frequently clients will say to me, I have a lot of guilt, but what they really mean is shame.
As Brené Brown explains so well, guilt is I DID something bad where Shame is, I am Bad.
The beauty of guilt is that you can rectify it. If I did something bad, I can apologize, fix it, make amends change the behavior, etc. Let’s say You forget to pick up your husband’s prescription at the store. When you get home, he asks where it is, and you immediately feel guilty, so say, “Oh, I totally forgot to get it! I am sorry, I can head out after we eat and pick it up.” You did something bad. You apologize, you make it right.
As opposed to shame, there is nothing you can do to fix it because YOU as a person are flawed. Your response is, “I am such an idiot! I can’t believe I forgot it, let me head out right now and get it.” You miss family dinner because you are out picking up the script and drive like a maniac because you are so full of anxiety as your inner dialogue keeps playing what a terrible forgetful loser you are and how you HAVE to get better organized.
Frequently we take an action that we did wrong and turn it into the fact that who we as a person is wrong and rather than simply apologizing for an honest human mistake, it becomes a shame spiral about how irresponsible you are.
Another example, you forget a meeting at work. You forgot to put it on your calendar, again honest human mistake. You feel guilty, you go to your boss you apologize you ask how can you make it up or what did you miss, you have a good conversation you move on. With shame you spend the whole day in your office and beating yourself up for missing the meeting because that means you are a terrible employee and then your anxiety steps in to tell you that you will probably get fired.
To avoid shame, we often opt for a “strategy of disconnection.”. Psychologist Linda Hartling (2000) identifies three such “strategies,”
The first strategy of disconnection is Moving Away
This involves withdrawal hiding, silence and secrecy
You work really hard on a project at work only for it to be met with a wondrous thud. So you Grab your pint of ice cream and head for the couch and a Netflix binge.
Common thoughts “I am a failure, I am never going to succeed, I should just give up now”
The second strategy of disconnection is moving Against
Which involves becoming aggressive (yep, even passive aggressive), trying to humiliate someone else and being judgmental.
A fellow Mom calls you out for missing 2 volunteer days in a row. As she walks away, you think, “Who do you think you are to tell me THAT” “Look at what she is wearing today, and she is going to criticize me!?!” Next time you see her, you mention how easy it must be to be a “non-working Mom.”
The third strategy of disconnection is moving towards
Which involves people-pleasing trying to earn connection again. This is what I did when the woman at the conference called me out for sharing my Dad’s illness. This one was the most challenging for me to understand, and ironically it is my go-to. I think because it seems so counterintuitive, and yet I see it all the time in my office. People who say nasty things to my clients and they turn around and try to make them LIKE them more.
What I love about knowing these ways of disconnection is they help me recognize when I am acting out of a place of shame. So when I notice myself talking about someone or worrying about getting someone to like me or hitting the “yes I am still watching” button on Netflix, I know to check in with myself and see if shame is showing up.
Because shame is so tied to anxiety, what can you do about it?
The first step you will always hear me say is Acknowledge it. Acknowledging is just so important because it is something we do not do. Especially people with HFA, we have become masters of ignoring, denying, moving on to the next thing. So we engage in one of the shame defenses and push even harder to prove ourselves. The problem with this ignoring (other than the obvious) is that it keeps you stuck in unhealthy coping skills you. BUT when you can acknowledge it, you can do something about it. You can start shifting the belief that you are unworthy and broken and start recognizing you are human, and sometimes being human is HARD, but that doesn’t mean you are broken or unworthy.
And then Be kind to yourself, another one you hear me say all the time also because we don’t do it, and it is totally counter-intuitive to us.
I have a funny story about that, in 2014, I became certified in Brene Brown’s Daring Way, which is her methodology to build shame resilience. According to Brené there are 2 ways to combat shame
Empathy. Seeking out people who can relate to you and give you real empathy. If you haven’t watched her Video on Empathy I HIGHLY recommend it and even if you have, I highly recommend a re-watch just to refresh you.
Self-Compassion. Being kind to yourself, giving yourself some grace and love.
I walked away from that certification training and had spun it to be 70% Empathy and 30% self-compassion. So, I went back to my office and started doing groups around The Daring Way and I would teach people to seek out empathy talk to others, get support etc. And then my clients who attended the groups would come back to me and say it just isn’t working. They would say, “I talked to a bunch of people who were empathetic, and I still feel consumed with shame.” Then I saw Brené Brown in an interview with Kristen Neff, who is a leading expert on Self-Compassion and Brené said “I struggle with self-compassion”, And I realized man I do too. And then it hit me, “oh my I took Brené’s unconscious bias about self-compassion and applied MY bias about self-compassion and poured that on my clients who also had a bias against self-compassion and the result was teaching them that empathy was more important than self-compassion. When in reality, empathy was just easier (for US!) than self-compassion. People with HFA can find other that support them and give them understanding what they Struggle to do is support themselves.
The truth is you can line up 10 people who genuinely believe you are a kind, gentle good person who can talk you down from a shame spiral and you feel great for 5 minutes after but if YOU can’t give yourself kindness it goes nowhere. You end up repeatedly telling the story about how much you suck and what a terrible parent you are, you receive support and then BAM you feel crappy 10 minutes later. So you go back out into the world and tell the story AGAIN and the pattern happens over and over.
The problem is 2 fold, because people with HFA struggle so much with their emotions they tell the story as if it were a news report. “This person did me wrong, I feel crappy” and your friend chimes in with “yes they are terrible what an awful person, you are awesome forget about them.” So your friend isn’t really giving you empathy about how you are feeling and what you are experiencing she is giving you support around your news report.
What is missing is the actual feelings and emotions behind the story, “I feel defeated, miserable, sad and completely unworthy. This interaction has rocked me to my core.”
And secondly, Empathy without self-compassion doesn’t solve the problem. You HAVE to be kind to yourself and give yourself some love.
When I was in a shame spiral during the conference I told everyone I could about this terrible woman who shamed me but I never acknowledge how much it really HURT me. How it did rock me to the core how it did question whether I was a good daughter and therapist. Now common wisdom is to say, ‘Stop thinking that way you are giving her your power, why are you allowing her to take up space in your brain.” Which is a true statement but that statement doesn’t work until AFTER you acknowledge your feelings. AFTER you drop into your body and say wow that really hurt. I feel sad about that and just allow yourself to feel it. THEN you can say is there an action I need to take (this goes back to the idea of guilt vs shame, sometimes you did do something wrong and you need to make amends), do I need to talk with my Dad about this situation? Now for me this was more complicated because my Dad had dementia so checking with him about sharing his story was impossible but I did check with my Mom again and we had a conversation about it. And finally you can say ok time to move on, I need to stop giving her my power. And as a heads up you might need to repeat this process, acknowledge the feelings, give yourself some love, tell yourself time to move on.
In addition to empathy and compassion another idea is to start paying attention to your ‘good person rules’ People with HFA have a lot of Good person rules
These are usually super rigid and when you really look at them, they are a little silly
Such as “A good Mom is always willing to play with their child.”
A good spouse goes to bed when their partner is ready.
A good Mom makes dinner every night.
A good friend texts back right away.
A good worker always says yes.
Start paying attention to your rules and start to loosen them up a bit. Ask yourself is this rule valid? Honestly, sometimes we have a hard time deciding if these rules are valid or not. So it is helpful to check in with your partner/child/co-worker and verify the rule…I will often say to my husband I notice this silly rule that a good wife always makes dinner and he will usually look at me with wide eyes saying No not my rule at all. Hearing that from him starts loosening the rule and then next time when I hear it I can kindly say to myself, No sweet pea, that is not valid, let it go.
Shame is at the root of HFA so the more you can start building resilience around your shame the more you can heal your HFA. Acknowledging the shame, Asking for real empathy of what you are FEELING, giving yourself kindness around your feelings, and THEN lovingly reminding yourself to let it go is the key.