Shame as Control Unmasking the Manipulation

Mormon Discussions Podcasts – Full Lineup

Bill Reel

Religion & Spirituality

4.3 • 618 Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2025

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of Almost Awakened, we dig into the emotional weapon that too many of us have been shaped by—shame. Bill and Teresa break down how unhealthy systems—religious, familial, and relational—use shame to keep people small, obedient, and disconnected from their true selves. We explore the difference between guilt and shame, unpack the mechanics… Read More »Shame as Control Unmasking the Manipulation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome everybody to another episode of the Almost Awaken podcast. I'm Bill Real. And I'm
0:06.4	Teresa Hobbs. And we're grateful for the chance to sit down with you today. Today we're going to talk
0:10.4	about shame. And we've got a bunch of different unhealthy behaviors. So recently we've gone into
0:18.5	fragilization. We've gone into boundaries. We've done a couple of others that are unhealthy things that religious systems do, that unhealthy family systems do. And today we're going to talk about shame. So I'm going to put this up on the screen. Here's a picture of some man feeling shame with the stamp of shame all along his
0:41.7	arm. He looks really sad. Shame can make us sad. And I got the slideshow here up. What I wanted
0:48.8	to point to to start us off with, we're always trying to start off with some working definition.
0:53.3	Shame as control, how unhealthy people and systems keep you small.
0:57.9	This episode will explore how shame is used as a tool of manipulation, particularly in
1:04.0	religious environments, but also in family systems and personal relationships.
1:09.0	And we're going to walk listeners through what shame is,
1:12.4	how it gets weaponized, what damage it does, and how to reclaim sovereignty from it. And I'll
1:19.0	even add, we even have a slide on moments where maybe shame is even good and helpful and
1:24.7	beneficial to society. So with that, the working definition, we need to define
1:30.3	shame because its close cousin is guilt. And I've done conversations around this before, but there are
1:39.4	often something that is honorable or good in terms of how it's utilized in society. And then there's
1:49.9	often these cousins of things that are very similar, can be confused for the thing, but are
1:54.9	often used to hurt people or marginalized people or make people feel less than. And shame and guilt are these two
2:05.3	words. And so guilt is this idea that I did something bad and shame is the idea that I am bad.
2:12.4	Guilt can be used, sorry, guilt can be useful and adaptive as it points to misalignment with values.
2:19.9	And, you know, we all need to feel internally.
2:23.7	We need to feel some guilt sometimes for our behaviors.
2:27.0	We need to recognize like, oh, I can't believe I did that.
	...

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