#16 Is There Such A Thing As 'Healthy Shame'?

In this engaging conversation, Teal Elisabeth shares her exciting news about expecting a baby girl and her journey of writing a book! The discussion transitions into Mark's DIMWIT of the week (the reward for the most ridiculous person he's met online) and the best FIRST date questions both coaches advise for clients. The main topic is an intriguing conversation on "Does healthy shame exist?". Is there such a thing as 'healthy shame'? The coaches debate this important psychological tenet.

Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:42 Teal's BABY News!
2:15 Teal's BOOK Deal!
3:35 DIMWIT of the week
11:20 Our FAVOURITE First Date Questions
18:41 Mark's Halloween Achievement
20:14 Does 'Healthy Shame' Exist?
39:28 Want Personal Help? Book A Call!

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:42 Teal's BABY News!
• 2:15 Teal's BOOK Deal!
• 3:35 DIMWIT of the week
• 11:20 11:20 Our FAVOURITE First Date Questions
• 18:41 Mark's Halloween Achievement
• 20:14 Does 'Healthy Shame' Exist?

Transcript

[Speaker 1]
Dimwit of the week, our favorite date questions, and is there such a thing as healthy shame? We'll see you right after this. G'day and welcome to The Tinder Project, the podcast where a straight Aussie man attempts to survive 365 days dating online as an American woman.

I'm your host, Mark Rosenfeld, Australia's dating coach for women. I'm here with my sidekick, self-love coach, Teal Elizabeth, and together, we have one mission to make meeting good men fun and easy for you. Let's give it a bell.

Teal!

[Speaker 2]
Hi Mark, how are you?

[Speaker 1]
Hello, you're back in my life. It's great to have you.

[Speaker 2]
I kind of like these every two, every week check-ins. We get to just sprinkle ourselves in each other's life, get updates. It's been good.

[Speaker 1]
And you have had a lot happening in seven days. Would you like to share with the listeners you've had two pieces of good news?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, it's been a really, really crazy, hectic last few weeks, but really exciting. Um, first thing being, we found out the gender of the baby and I am so excited. I've just found out we're having a baby girl.

[Speaker 1]
Yes.

[Speaker 2]
Congratulations.

[Speaker 1]
Congratulations. You've got the balance, the Libra balance that we know is so important to you. You've got a one boy, one girl.

How happy are you secretly that you've got the mix?

[Speaker 2]
Secretly and not secretly. I'm really, really happy. I've just been soaking it up all weekend.

Just the fact that, wow, this is really happening. This is really real.

[Speaker 1]
You didn't want to live in a house of just man, two boys, probably. I think your dog is a male as well. Yeah.

So you didn't want all that masculinity around.

[Speaker 2]
I love my men. I really do, but excited to have a little more balance. And especially for the work that I do with feminine embodiment, it's just going to be really exciting to be able to cultivate and just nurture her in that environment and see how she picks up on that and how she's able to take that into the world for herself.

[Speaker 1]
Congrats. Yeah. I'm very excited for you.

I heard, I read a coach actually on another coach's profile today. This particular coach said feminine and masculine don't exist. And this is a very popular coach actually.

So yeah, maybe that's a topic we should discuss another day or we might even see if we can get her on and have a heart to heart debate.

[Speaker 2]
But yes, I'd like to pick her brain on that a little bit.

[Speaker 1]
I'm, uh, congratulations. And you also landed an amazing deal. You are doing some?

Yes.

[Speaker 2]
I signed on with a book publisher and I'm writing a book.

[Speaker 1]
Boom!

[Speaker 2]
Yes.

[Speaker 1]
Congrats. And do we get to know the title? I'm guessing you're not going to tell us this.

[Speaker 2]
Still sorting out the title right now, but it feels like I'm just in this birthing era right now. I'm birthing a baby, I'm birthing a book and just, I am this creatrix portal right now. It feels very on fire and powerful.

[Speaker 1]
Did you say creatrix?

[Speaker 2]
Oh yes, I did.

[Speaker 1]
I love it.

[Speaker 2]
I am a creatrix.

[Speaker 1]
Creatrix. You're the only person I know who says now I'm pregnant is the perfect time to write a book and get a book deal going. So freaking superwoman here.

All the other women, including my wife, are saying I barely survived pregnancy. Like couldn't get out of bed or out of the toilet. It was just the trips between the two and Teal's here writing a book.

So.

[Speaker 2]
Don't get me wrong. I've had all that too.

[Speaker 1]
You've had all, ah, so even more of an overachiever. My gosh, no one can keep up with you Teal. What the hell?

[Speaker 2]
I'm not trying to brag. I literally have a problem. So my husband jokes.

He's like, Teal, you have a problem. You need to learn how to rest. But I just, I, like I said, I have so much creative energy just flowing out of me.

Good for you.

[Speaker 1]
I love that. I love that. I was so happy when I heard both of your news.

I was very happy about it. So congratulations. Do you want to hear what's going on with the Tinder project?

[Speaker 2]
I would.

[Speaker 1]
I had a fun conversation this week. So guys, we've got dimwit of the week here. The irony is this guy in terms of his actual intelligence is probably the least dimwit of a person you'll ever meet.

He scores dimwit of the week purely because of his texting style and actually indirectly because of his intelligence. So I'll kind of explain that in a moment. I'm going to put this on the screen.

Long story short, this guy is essentially an orthopedic surgeon. I've had a few brushes with orthopedic surgeons, more in the veterinary field than the human field. However, they do have something in common.

They all work absurd hours, absurdly long days and long hours. And this friend here on the screen, we'll call him Wayne. Wayne is no exception.

So Wayne, it is now the end of the month, guys. So we're recording this at the end of October. It'll probably come out in sort of mid to late November.

We're recording this at the end of October. This conversation started on the 6th of October. So we've been at this one 24 days.

That's three and a half weeks. In that time, we've exchanged six messages. Six.

So good old Wayne is averaging one message every, what's that, three to four days. His latest charade, if we'll call it that, was a nine-day gap. Now at this point, you might be thinking, well, after a nine-day gap, why is he even still there?

You know what? Great question. It's a fair question.

I don't unmatch. I just let people fall into the hidden folder and then I get kind of a chuckle when they bounce back up, just as Wayne apparently did. So after nine days of, and in his previous texts, I should add context as well, he's often saying, hey, I'm so sorry.

I get a little busy with work. I'm a little work obsessed. I can happen.

I really want to get to know you. So he would come back every few days with that text. So I was sort of humoring it.

Look, do I have any hope that this guy would be a great match or perfect for a client? Probably not, but it takes me two minutes to respond and I was getting a chuckle out of it. So here we are at the end of the month, 24 days later.

He finally responded to a question that we asked him about himself. So he asked his first question, we answered, and we asked him a question back. And he took nine days to respond.

And I was very surprised because it finally looked like the conversation might actually be moving somewhere, but then he disappeared, came back nine days later. He said, that sounds like an amazing weekend. My week was crazy busy on call, lol, but I'm finally free now.

Would you like to get a better form of connection than this app? And I wanted to call him out on this. I, you know, I'm not going to call him a bad person or whatever.

I'm not here to get into text fights with people. That's not fun, first of all, but it doesn't really help either, but I am going to call him out and just test the waters here. You know, the guy's a doctor.

He obviously works hard. So I'm going to give him a tiny bit of credit and more for my sake too. I'm just doing this project.

So I'm just kind of curious which of these guys might actually convert into phone calls. Can we train some of them to behave the way we want and kind of line up with our standards or are they all just a lost cause? So I'm curious about testing these kinds of things.

So here's what I responded. Remember, there'd been a nine day gap. So those who are watching, you'll see it on the screen, but those who are listening, I said, nine days, Wayne, haha.

I thought you fell into someone's abdomen, lol. Next paragraph, haha, sure. You can try calling me around eight tonight or tomorrow.

If that works for you, question mark, I'm 908 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That said, I'm getting the distinct impression. Your work-life balance may not be a match with mine.

Ha! With an exclamation mark on the end. I wanted to, I wanted to show you guys this because I think it's an interesting example of, we want to call something out.

We want to do it with a positive energy. And I just, I just thought it was fun to be honest. I thought it was an interesting little conversation.

Uh, what do you think, Teal? How does it sit with you?

[Speaker 2]
I love it. I love, I love your playfulness with all of your interactions.

[Speaker 1]
No emojis!

[Speaker 2]
And no emojis. I'm very impressed with the no emojis. But I think what really stands out to me, and I think this is a really important piece that you highlighted is that you called him out, but in a loving, warm way.

And I, you know, confirmed for me this as a man, not as a woman dating on the apps, but as a man, that men actually really respect that and respond really well to that. It's like men know when they're being shitty actions and shitty behavior. Right?

And so when a woman can say, I see you, I know what you're doing, and we're not going to pretend that this isn't happening. I respect myself enough and I'm going to call you out on your shit, but I'm going to do it in a kind, playful way. It makes them go, Oh, okay.

There's a guy. And it makes them respect you more. And I think that that's a really, really powerful thing to just teach.

And in part for women is that we really don't want to just be pushing those things down because it's very easy to say, Oh, he didn't text me, blah, blah, blah. What a jerk. And just pretend and say, either it's all fine and just keep going along with it, which then makes him think that that behavior is okay.

And he'd actually, yeah, he likes it. And all of that is actually discounting you as a person. So the fact that you stood up for what you wanted and needed, but didn't do it in a way that was like, you jerk.

You didn't text me in nine days. You're a horrible person. It really shows that you actually more desirable and that he probably will want to talk to you more because of it.

[Speaker 1]
And yeah, that's, this is what we talk about when we talk about finesse guys, because we want to be able to speak up and get our needs met. We do want to move the man to where you want him. This is a power of feminine energy.

And this is the power of using your feelings as influence men. We are coded to please women. Men have built buildings, fought wars, gone to battle, grown fruit, started businesses, just about everything you can think of so that we can get a smile and appreciation from the women in our life.

Sometimes we want many women. Sometimes it's just one. We're not going to get into that conversation, but the point is men are deeply affected by women's feelings and reactions to things.

So we want to please you, you know, we want to feel like we're doing a good job. And if we can change our behavior and even be challenged a little bit, or even a lot and get a reward for it, that's actually a really good feeling because not only do we, we don't feel like we're in trouble from a mom or a boss when we're changing, but then we get the appreciation and reward as well. We feel like we've grown as a human and we perceive you in a higher value because naturally a human brain, things that require effort are coded as more valuable in our brain.

Evolution pretty quickly taught us that the things that gave us survival were usually rare because other humans or other species were competing for them. So that's why a piece of fruit is so desirable or even something very high in sugar, because it's usually rare in our evolutionary history to come across those things. So anything we've had to compete for is often assumed by our brain that, well, it must have value.

If we have to compete for it, if it can be taken away, then it, or if it requires some sort of challenge, I should say, then it clearly has some value. So you also kind of help yourself by coding into the man's brain, your value, because literally the fact that there is a challenge to be with you makes you seem and be perceived as more valuable. The key, as Teal says, is doing it in such a way where it's not like A, you're his mother or his boss, or B, he's being reprimanded for being a bad little boy.

And that's what we avoided with that text.

[Speaker 2]
And at the same time, he is being a little boy in pushing those boundaries and wanting to see what can I get away with and where are the little limitations. So it's like he...

[Speaker 1]
Can I be a boy or a man with her, sort of? Like, can I do the boy thing or do I have to man with her?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, yeah. So I think this is a beautiful teaching moment in this dimwit expression that you shared with us today.

[Speaker 1]
And this is a guy who's probably smarter than like 99.9% of people, including myself, but he still wins dimwit of the week. So that was a fun one. I'll bring another one next week.

Teal, first date questions. I'm really curious to hear from you. I got some of my favourites.

I want to know yours. If you're trying to get information from a guy, and I'll tell clients, you know, as we go further along, let's ask more in depth questions. Let's ask more sort of value based questions that might be more niche to you.

But I have a few favourites that work for almost anyone. Curious to hear yours.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, I would say, I mean, I will say I'm a little rusty at this. I haven't been on a date in over 10 years, but...

[Speaker 1]
What's working for your clients then right now?

[Speaker 2]
But no, what I really used in the past that I really love is I like knowing what a person does, right? What is their career and their job, passion, path? And then after that, I don't want to just know what they do.

I like to ask them, what is your favourite part about that? Or what lights you up about what you do? Or what inspires you about what you do?

Even if that job is I'm a mortgage insurance salesman, you know, it's like, well, what about that really lights you up? What do you love about that part of your job? And to me, that really brings you out of the head space and into the heart space.

And you get to really learn about something that really lights them up. And maybe it's a surprise to you. Maybe you learn something about mortgage insurance that you never knew about.

It's actually really cool. Or you get to really see what lights this person up.

[Speaker 1]
And I realize that's part of the human experience. Yes. What lights you up, even if it's different to me.

I was listening into a date yesterday. So I often have clients record their dates and, you know, we listen to them, give them feedback. And the guy started talking about cyber security.

And I think for 95% of women I work with, that would be kind of a snooze topic. And this particular client, I asked her because it sounded a little bit like maybe it was for her as well. And I asked her, Hey, do you actually have interest in this?

And she's like, Oh man, this was like the jackpot. I love cyber security. I'm all into AI and shit.

And I went, Huh. Okay. I didn't actually realize that because you're more leaning back in the conversation.

But anyway, because the other clients were like, well, I'm not into cyber security. What do I do? And I said to the other clients, basically what you said there Teal is one of the beautiful things about dating is you can have this like little window into another human being and just to find out what drives them.

It's like another window into the human experience. What would make someone possibly excited about mortgage home insurance or cyber security? You know, that's so out of most of our realities.

Or like if I met a woman who there was one, what came up the other day? There was a woman who had a really strange career. It was like something to do with like drilling oil.

It was unusual for a woman to be in it anyway. I was like, look, I would love to go on a date with that woman. If I was single, even if we didn't connect at all, just understanding what is it like as a woman in that job, that must be such an unusual set of personal characteristics that I'd be so curious just to just spend an hour with that person, just to understand it.

[Speaker 2]
Yes. And it's so beautiful that when you really show an interest in someone's passion, something that really lights them up, it gets them naturally talking about it. Next thing you know, they feel so bonded to you because you just opened up their heart.

So it's a really secret little, I don't know, emotional intelligence key hack to get someone to feel really comfortable in your presence when you get them talking about something that they love.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. I love that. That actually kind of feeds into my question.

So I have a few favorites to you. I would never use them all on the same date, guys. I kind of like pick your favorite or try different ones.

And they're along similar lines. Most of them are attaching to what gives someone's energy. In fact, that basically is one of the questions.

So the first question is what's been your best day of the year so far and why? If it's like January, you can ask them what's been your best day of the last, the previous 12 months and why. And they'll sit there and they'll think, and they'll have this really interesting look on their face.

And then they'll realize, oh, it was this day where I played ball games with my dad, or it was this day where I went to this amazing event with my best friend, or it was this day, you know, whatever it is. First of all, you make someone feel great because they're recalling one of their favorite memories. And second, you get an insight into, okay, it's really hard to not get a good insight on that question of someone's values.

Like it's almost impossible to lie and no one would even want to. So you just get a really clear image of like, all right, what drives this person? What kind of, what is their experience of life?

When is it its peak? And then you'll really know something, something deep about a person, even from reasonably superficial question.

[Speaker 2]
Well, and especially, I mean, it could be very eyeopening if they say, oh, I love getting high on cocaine and going to raves, you could be like, okay, well, that's awesome for you. Might not be my definition of my best day, or maybe it is.

[Speaker 1]
I'm not about the drugs. I'm not about the cocaine, but I'm not going to lie. I don't mind a good rave.

Sober, of course, but do you know, it comes from when I hear, and here's why it's interesting for me. If someone asked me this question.

[Speaker 2]
Can we ask each other this question? I would be curious.

[Speaker 1]
Let's do it. I mean, I haven't been to a rave in the last 12 months, but if I was to answer about a rave, I would say, look, a lot of my personal growth, where was it? Most of you know my story.

It was in nightclubs. It was surrounded by booming, incomprehensibly loud music and I was always sober. So what are some of my favorite things to do now?

It's go to a boomingly loud music event and try to meet people sober. It's the same thing I did for hundreds of days. Now, if I get to do it, it kind of feels like, oh, like this is, this is my little growth place.

This is where I get to challenge my social muscles. And so for that reason, I've just come come to love. Raves are like, raves are a little bit of an underground term for it, but, but I love big, loud, overwhelming environments.

I just, I kind of cut my teeth there is the way I think about it. So those places make me very happy. If I was to say, I mean, I can't get past the day my daughter was born.

Obviously that was a very special day. What about you?

[Speaker 2]
As I was just doing a quick scan, I think for me, it was probably my birthday this year. I turned 35 and it was just like this beautiful moment where I just took a day to be with my husband. We had the baby with a daycare and we rented e-bikes and we went on a 40 mile bike ride through the trees, through the farms, through the ocean, like on this discovery trail here in Olympic National Park.

And it was just beyond breathtaking. And we got lunch in a little town, got some little, you know, fudge and a little local like sweet place and then biked back and had like sushi for dinner. It was just the most perfect little day together with my husband, which I haven't had many quality days like that with him alone in a while.

[Speaker 1]
That's very cute. Those are hard to get when you've got a less than one year old. That's really cool.

That's beautiful. The other two, I was going to say along similar lines, what's your proudest day of the year and why? A little bit different to best.

So more achievement based question, what are you proud of? And you'll get something that what has someone worked for that has a lot of value to them. I think that question really also unpacks someone's values.

And another one I like, it's sort of along the same lines is what gives you the most energy in life to either think about, to do, to talk about, exploring. It's sort of positive vulnerability in a sense because someone's opening up about something that really matters to them, but in a good way. So I really like that question as well.

Again, guys, don't go into the date with kind of list of questions, but if you throw in one of these, um, it can be really helpful in just getting to know someone and feeling out what matters to this person.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. Beautiful. Very cool.

I'm glad we talked about this.

[Speaker 1]
Let's talk about something that's a little bit darker, but I've been really fanging to get to this conversation because I'm so curious to hear your thoughts about it. Fanging, fanging to get to this. Been fanging to be here Teal.

[Speaker 2]
For sure. I mean, tomorrow is Halloween, so I guess it's fitting.

[Speaker 1]
Did you see the pumpkin I carved?

[Speaker 2]
No.

[Speaker 1]
Can I, can I show you maybe, maybe if I put it on, I'm going to hold it up to the screen and you're going to have to describe it to the listeners. Cause I'm pretty proud of this. And it wasn't just myself.

It was actually myself and my father who carved it actually even better Teal. I just realized I've got a photo of it on the computer here. So I'm going to click on it here.

We carved a pumpkin and I'm really proud of us. Let's see if it actually shows up here. Can I share this?

There you go. Can you see that Teal?

[Speaker 2]
Oh my God. I am impressed. Okay.

For the listeners, this is a full on skull with like scary teeth. Every teeth is outlined. Tooth is outlined.

It's got these eyes that are going like, wow. Did you have a stencil or did you do this by hand?

[Speaker 1]
No, I had a stencil.

[Speaker 2]
Okay. I was going to say it looks very beautifully stenciled. Oh my gosh.

And who's that in the background?

[Speaker 1]
That's my dad.

[Speaker 2]
That's your dad. Oh nice.

[Speaker 1]
My dad carving pumpkins with me. Special Halloween moment for Mark. Sam said, you know what?

I'm going to take the baby today. I'm going to take it for a nap. You do what you want with your parents.

I was like, beautiful. Sunday, let's carve pumpkins. On the topic though, I want to talk to you about this.

I have been fanging to talk about it. Shame, really important emotion. I work with this a lot, particularly for any of you who do IFS shadow work, you'll kind of know the deeper psychology that that's important around this emotion.

There's been a lot of research on shame over the years. It's fascinating to talk about in different cultures. Brene Brown is the big name in this area.

She's done a lot of research on shame versus guilt and the difference there. So I'm fascinated by this question because, and here's the reason I'm fascinated about it, by it too. On the one hand, you know me, I'm very much about evolution, biology, why we came with the brains we came with, and nothing happens by accident in evolution, which means we evolve shame because it serves a very clear purpose.

Almost all human beings feel it in some way, shape, or form. It's very evident across every culture. It clearly is there for a reason.

At the same time, shame research is telling us that essentially there is no such thing as healthy shame. It's not functional in our society anymore whatsoever. And I also can say that certainly as coaches, and we're not therapists, but in some ways we play that role, putting shame in any form on our clients is literally the last thing we want to do.

That's basically malpractice. So the dichotomy of like, hang on a minute, there's this emotion here that nature has given us, and yet it seems to have no functional or formal purpose. I'm really curious, your experience on this, is there such a thing as healthy shame?

And if so, what the hell is it?

[Speaker 2]
Such a good question. I actually would love for you to go first on this and then I can kind of chime in afterwards.

[Speaker 1]
Okay.

[Speaker 2]
I can share some thoughts. Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
I've, as I say, I can go both ways on this. So to begin, I do a lot of quite deep work with clients where we are getting into parts of themselves that have been deeply shamed by a parent that they've had to shame to survive. To backtrack a little bit, I was looking at the difference between shame and guilt.

So the most common definition we see out there is shame is I feel bad about myself. Guilt is I feel bad about the thing I did to someone. So Brene Brown would talk about, well, shame is never healthy because shame is I am bad.

I'm feeling bad about myself. Whereas guilt is I did a bad thing. I'm not bad.

Essentially, I'm good, but I did a bad thing. Now, diving into this, we see interesting things, cultural differences. For example, we tend to see in Western cultures, guilt is more commonly used and encouraged.

Western cultures tend to be more expansive and individualistic. In Eastern cultures, such as Korea and Japan, you will see shame emphasised more than guilt. Even in China, it's hard to find a difference between the two words in terms of what they mean.

It seems in general that shame is an emotion that is more adept at, you could call it, clipping little edges off yourself or burying parts of yourself. For example, if you're young and you're very exuberant and your parents say, you shouldn't do that, you're a bad boy or a bad girl, or even you're out maybe in public and they say, you shouldn't do that, you're a bad member of the society. Shame seems to be very good at creating a more sort of communal Eastern-style society.

It does this. It seems to me, this is the way I visualise it, by kind of clipping the edges off, all those extraneous edges of the human experience that are a bit more unusual. Shame seems to be very good at minimising them and hiding them.

Guilt, on the other hand, does not do that so much. Guilt is more about, well, if I took something from you, I can feel bad about my action, but I'm not going to feel bad about myself. Shame would say you should feel bad about yourself as a human and come back into line.

Guilt is more like, well, you did something wrong, but you as a human are okay. And I think this has really interesting effects on culture because we see, and especially in the West in the last 10 years, our culture has been, in terms of capitalism, you get a lot more creativity, you get a lot more entrepreneurship, you get a lot more economic expansion in cultures that seem to de-emphasise shame and encourage more of a guilt philosophy. And I think that's because those extraneous edges and creativity of the human being kind of get to flourish.

What you also seem to see is more polarisation because with more edges flourishing, you will see more extremes of personality and more extremes of difference that are seen as culturally acceptable. I mean, I saw a story recently about children are allowed to identify as cats in certain schools now, and they have litter traits. I don't know.

I think that is a thing actually, but without getting too much into political stuff, it does seem like... I can't quite reconcile this because it seems like on the surface, it's almost like a culture needs a little bit of shame to prevent those extreme extraneous edges kind of cropping in. On the other hand, I can never see myself actually applying that, and this might just be the job that I do because, as I say, in a client session, it's so important that we actually minimise shame to help a client grow.

As a client brings more parts of themselves to the surface that may have been shamed by a parent or an ex or whatever it is, they become more whole, they become more vibrant. And keeping things down with shame takes a lot of personal energy. As in, if you're shaming everything, you don't have much energy left to actually give to others.

So keeping things buried is not just a passive process. You do it once and it's done. It's like shaming parts of yourself requires constant upkeep.

So in terms of dating and relationships, I can't see any real healthy shame that occurs. The counter to this, in my head, is two things. I think, number one, do we need it a little bit on a cultural level to, to some regards, keep our society in some uniformity, at least a little bit.

And I think the other is preventative. And I sometimes think to myself, well, if we didn't have shame, if we just deleted it, would we have more people just doing bad shit? As in, let's say there is no shame in cheating on your wife.

You can feel bad about what you did, but you're still a good person. You're still a good man. You're still a good woman if you cheat on your husband.

I can't help but think it doesn't seem like shaming people for stuff they've already done is helpful. It just puts it even into a darker corner and makes people more messed up. But it does seem like it, and if we look at Eastern cultures, we can see, it seems like it does some sort of preventative work where fewer bad things happen, fewer people get cheated on, fewer people get murdered or steal or whatever the crime is, adultery, because there is some ingrained human fear of feeling like a bad person, i.e. shame, which prevents us doing some of the worst shit, that without that emotion, maybe we would do a lot more. So that's where I'm at. In an individual setting, it seems like it has no value whatsoever, and certainly not in a therapy setting.

But I can't help but wonder if we just deleted it, if society would in some ways really, really go off the rails more than maybe some would say it has. What are your thoughts on this?

[Speaker 2]
I love everything you shared there. You brought so many beautiful nuggets there. It's not something I've ever really given much thought to.

Absolutely, you're right. In client sessions, that's the farthest thing that I am thinking of is I want to be as supportive as possible and just be that reflector for them to just see the parts of themselves without shaming it, without judgment at all.

[Speaker 1]
And validate them, which brings them out, which is usually, that's very healing. That helps them connect to themselves, which helps them connect to others.

[Speaker 2]
But I will say there is some beauty in that reflection, not where I'm bringing in the shame, but allowing them to sit in those feelings of shame to move them out of it. I think the evolutionary adaptation that you're talking about, why it's still present, definitely culturally, I think you're right. I think you're onto something.

We need a little bit of corralling with maybe some shame to keep people from going off the rails more than they have been. But I think even on an individual level, there is probably a little bit of healthy shame just in almost as an action to get you out of it, if you're willing to look at it and let it move you. I think you're right.

It can be very debilitating, especially if it's projected onto you from your parents and putting you into a very tight box that keeps you from feeling like you can be yourself. And that's why therapy and coaching is so supportive and important. But in those moments when you are ready to look at it, it doesn't have to be a bad thing.

It can be something that says, wow, okay, yes, this has been here. And it's also something that is allowing me now to build a new sense of self, a new sense of resiliency, a new sense of empowerment. I almost think about it as like a video game where like Zelda, like where you're going through this video game of life, and you have all these dragons that you have to slay.

And every time you slay a dragon, you like level up and you get bigger and you get stronger and you get be more powerful. So what if these moments of shame or fear, the way I see fear, especially and shame, are almost like built in Easter eggs on our hunt, on our quest to improve ourselves and strengthen ourselves. And obviously, those people who have lived in so much shame or have had a really, really difficult experiences growing up, like my heart goes out to you.

And I don't ever want to purposely say, yes, like you deserve to have all those moments of shame on you. No, nobody deserves to feel shamed for being who they are.