Shame, Guilt, and the Church: Part 2 – Vulnerability and Shame

[This is part two of an ongoing number of posts that I am doing to try and better understand the place of shame and guilt in our lives. Then, (eventually) I will talk about their place within the Church.]

Shame is something that is universal. If we can feel emotion, we feel shame. Interestingly enough, it is rarely discussed directly. So when someone does decide to talk about it, it is not a surprise to me that people seem to respond so favorably to the discussion. It’s like they’ve been waiting for someone to talk about it their entire lives.

That’s what happened in 2010 when Dr. Brené Brown decided to share what she had been studying about shame and vulnerability over the course of six years at a TEDx talk. She clearly knew that it was important information and that people would relate, but she had no idea how many people it would impact. Her original video has been viewed over 12 million times. Her popularity after doing that original talk increased so much that she was asked by Fortune 500 companies to speak at their events and conferences (she references this in her second video). Eventually, she spoke again at a TED talk a couple years later building upon her first talk about shame and vulnerability.

I will share the two videos here. I can’t recommend them enough. For me she says things that I have thought for years but have never had the ability to put into words. She gives summaries, examples, and definitions about shame and vulnerability after doing years of great research, gaining quantifiable data on the subject.

PLEASE watch them. They are each about 20 minutes. I promise you they are worth 45 minutes of your time. You may even want to watch them more than once.

Here’s the first one:

Here’s the second one: