Welcome to UnFuck Your Brain. The only podcast that teaches you how to use psychology, feminism, and coaching to rewire your brain and get what you want in life. And now here's your host, Harvard Law School Grad, Feminist Rockstar, and Master Coach, Kara Loyenthyle.

Hello, my flock. So today we are talking about a feeling that I doubt the chickens

have but that humans definitely have a lot and in fact it's been called the most human emotion and that is shame.

So shame is one of the emotions that we feel the most often but we understand the least.

At the same time, it's a motion that shapes and drives so much of our behavior,

both when we are feeling it and resisting feeling it.

When we are feeling ashamed, we blame ourselves and we withdraw.

But we're also so averse to feeling shame that we will often turn it into anger and lash out at other people

to try to avoid lashing out at ourselves, which of course doesn't work. So shame creates a lot of conflict and distress, both with ourselves and with other people.

I was looking up the word shame, the origins, which is something I like to do when I'm writing about an emotion

for the first time or for the podcast and the word shame is thought to come from

an older proto-Indo-European word, so there's a theorized language that was proto-Indo-European language,

it's spelled PIE, that is sort of thought to be potentially the linguistic precursor to all of the European or most of the European languages.

And so there's a word in that language they think that the word shame came from,

and that word means to cover. the word

means to cover. I think this is so perfect because shame thrives in darkness and in

secrecy and when we feel ashamed we don't want to be seen. It's impossible to feel

shame about something that everyone knows about and doesn't care about.

Because shame is caused by your predictions about the judgment of others. And of course those are really your judgments of others.

And of course those are really your judgments of yourself that you are projecting.

So what that means is that shame is not caused by any particular action you have taken or any experience you have had.

Shame is caused by your thoughts about yourself.

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