Psychological Safety
"When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them." - Martin Buber
Psychological safety is the belief that one can express themself openly and authentically, even about their disagreements, concerns, mistakes, flaws, and insecurities, and not be punished or humiliated for that expression. Psychological safety within is much more easily developed in a psychologically safe environment, and albeit more difficult to accomplish without one, it’s possible. Psychological safety is cultivated by understanding and reducing its main obstacle, shame, through non-judgmental and compassionate witnessing.
Shame:
"If we cultivate enough awareness about shame to name it and speak to it, we've basically cut it off at the knees." - Brene Brown, Daring Greatly
The enemy of psychological safety is shame. Shame researcher Brene Brown defines shame as:
A fear of disconnection - a fear that something we've done or failed to do, an ideal we haven't lived up to or a goal we haven't accomplished makes us unworthy of connection.
The intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love & belonging. 2011 research by NIMA and NIDA showed that it hurts just like physical pain.
Quotes on shame from Brene Brown in her book, Daring Greatly:
"We can't let ourselves be seen if we're terrified by what people might think. Often 'not being good at vulnerability' means that we're damn good at shame."
"We all have shame. We all have good and bad, dark and light, inside of us. But if we don't come to terms with our shame, our struggles, we start believing that there's something wrong with us - that we're bad, flawed, not good enough - and even worse, we start acting on those beliefs. If we want to be fully engaged, to be connected, we have to be vulnerable. In order to be vulnerable, we need to develop resilience to shame.”
“We all have shame. If you don't feel it, you're most likely a sociopath;
We're all afraid to talk about shame;
The less we talk about shame, the more control it has over our lives."
Shame is an insidious disease that we catch from living in a shame-based culture. As the Igbo proverb goes, "the fish is last to discover the water," so too are we often the last to become aware of how our culture is influencing our inner life, relationships and systems. Thus, not participating in the vicious cycle of shame can be metaphorically akin to a fish learning how to breathe air, it doesn't come easy, but despite that, I've found it does come naturally.
Before we were conditioned by our culture, as kids we were to love as waves are to the ocean, and there is no room in love for shame. As we grew older, love started becoming more conditional; "I love you when you're good," "I love you when you're attractive," "I love you when you're successful," "I love you when you're funny." And we start to get punished and humiliated more for "being" in ways that are undesired by the observer; "You are grounded for lying to me," "You get detention for cheating," "You're not ____ enough to hang out with us," etc. In domination societies of Western European origin, shame is used as a tool of control to enforce hierarchy. It convinces peasants that they aren't good enough to deserve what the monarch deserves. As Brene Brown writes in her book, Daring Greatly, "We enforce norms through shame tactics. We set cultural ideals for people that fall in certain buckets then shame them if they are outside of those cultural ideals." Putting others down lifts others up in power structures founded and keen on perpetuating inequality. Comparison, competition and ravenousness for perfection comes from wanting to know where in the social/power pyramid one stands, and thus how they can expect to be treated by others and the system they live in.
After a while of living in this fish bowl of shame-based social stratification, of course we would internalize the shame-colored glasses. As Brown writes, "Sometimes shame is the result of us playing the old recordings that were programmed when we were children or simply absorbed by the culture...Shame starts as a two-person experience, but as we get older, we learn how to do shame all by ourselves." It gets to a point where shame is so ingrained in how we think, that we start subconsciously judging and condemning ourselves and others to a detrimental degree. It gets harder to look in the mirror, around us or online without feeling disgusted and inadequate. It gets more difficult to look at the people around us without intense judgment or fear that we'll be judged. It gets easier to put people down to make ourselves feel better. It gets easier to take psychological safety out of the room, no matter which room you're in. Taking it away from both yourself and others.
There is no life entirely devoid of shame. There will be failures, mistakes and criticisms. There will be trauma, disappointments, hurt feelings and heartbreaks. Shame will try to protect you from those things, equating failures and misfortunes as reasons that you shouldn't keep trying, reasons you are somehow unworthy of love, belonging and joy. Shame will say, you aren't ------ enough, trying to convince you not to try anymore. Perfection and certainty aren't possible. Success, recognition and approval are not evaluations of your worthiness or justification for your existence. Courage is knowing you can fail and get hurt and trying anyway, bravely living regardless of it all. There is a way to transform shame into personal power and safety for both you and the people your life touches.
Wholeheartedness, Vulnerability & Courage:
Through her extensive research on shame, Brene Brown found that the antidote to shame is wholeheartedness, vulnerability and courage:
Wholeheartedness - living from a belief of worthiness. Includes:
Authenticity - Letting go of what people think
Self-Compassion - Letting go of perfectionism
Resilience - Letting go of numbing and powerlessness
Gratitude & Joy - Letting go of scarcity and fear of the dark
Intuition/Trust/Faith - Letting go of need for certainty
Creativity - Letting go of comparison
Play & Rest - Letting go of status/productivity as self worth
Calm & Stillness - Letting go of anxiety as a lifestyle
Meaningful Work - Letting go of self doubt & "supposed to"
Laughter, Song & Dance - Letting go of being cool and "always in control"
Vulnerability - uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure; also the most accurate measurement of courage
Courage - being honest and open about who we are, what we're feeling, and about our experiences (good and bad)
Quotes from Brene Brown on Wholeheartedness:
I am enough (worthiness versus shame)
I've had enough (boundaries vs one-upping and comparison)
"We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection. Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection, that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them - we can only love others as much as we love ourselves."
- Brene Brown, Daring Greatly
In a perfect world, we would all naturally live from this space and learn these things from our culture, but it's not a perfect world, and most of us haven't experienced enough psychological safety to completely live without some percentage of shame. It's much easier to let shame go when feeling safe, comfortable and loved in every area of one's life, but unfortunately, not many can say that to be true of their lives. Instead, we must do the inner practice to cultivate compassion and courage to give ourselves and those around us the compassion and safety we so lack.
If you're struggling deeply with letting go of shame, it could be deep rooted in terms of formative trauma, internalized guilt, or something so seemingly ugly that you can't possibly feel anything but shame about something about yourself or your life. In these cases, I recommend a more thorough spiritual journey working on rearranging your neuropathways through meditation, mindfulness, empowering meaning making, hypnotherapy and the like.
Guilt:
An important distinction to clear up is shame versus guilt. Shame impedes one's ability to learn and grow because it is a belief that there is something inherently wrong with the person rather than just something wrong with what the person did. Guilt is a remorseful feeling about doing something that was harmful or didn't align with one's values, and it is a beautiful emotion because it means that one cares, doesn't want to do harm, and wants to live more authentically.
Trauma:
We can feel a tremendous amount of shame when we are concealing trauma within ourselves. I understand that this type of shame is the hardest to contend with, especially when it's not easy to find a safe environment to share it in. Unfortunately, many people don't want to hear about the hard things people have gone through, especially when they are partly responsible for those things happening. For example, I was abused and neglected as a child, and none of my family members wanted to talk about it with me for years, and when I talked to my friends about it as a kid, they stopped being my friends. I learned to keep it inside, like it was a dark secret about me that if anyone knew, they would dislike me for. I felt shame for having trauma because I didn't have psychological safety until I was in my twenties. When dealing with shame around trauma, these are some important pieces of advice from Brene Brown:
"Surviving and metabolizing trauma requires:
1. Acknowledging the problem
2. Seeking professional help and support
3. Working through the accompanying shame and secrecy
4. Approaching the reintegration of vulnerability as a daily practice rather than a checklist item
Prerequisites for deep sharing: Trust, mutual empathy, reciprocal sharing, ability/space to ask for what each person needs & boundaries clarity"
- Brene Brown, Daring Greatly
This means that it's not necessarily safe for you and/or others to talk about your trauma openly. It's important to make sure that A. You are safe, comfortable and wanting to open up about it and B. The person listening has the ability to compassionately or even professionally witness and create a safe space for your sharing. I know from first-hand experience how painful and invalidating it is to share with the wrong people or at a time when I didn't feel like talking about it.
Unshaming:
"Only when we're brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light." - Brene Brown, Daring Greatly
One of the most powerful practices I've come across is unshaming: the practice of compassionately witnessing every wound, pain, struggle, insecurity or error in order to find the truth, beauty and wisdom within it.
My life's biggest example of unshaming was my depression and suicidal thought patterns. I felt so much shame around feeling so numb and in complete despair, even to the point of wanting to end my life. I called myself selfish, ungrateful, broken and dramatic. However, when I began practicing witnessing myself and my mental health issues with compassion, I realized that my depression was trying to isolate and kill me because it didn't want me to feel any more pain. It was a very unhelpful effort to love me and keep me safe. It was also an indication that my childhood wasn't okay, that the conditions of abuse and neglect I experienced weren't condonable, and since no one had acknowledged that, I felt as though I didn't matter and that I needed to prove the injustice by showing the world how much it hurt me to go through that. It was telling me that my current roles, identities, relationships and situations weren't healthy for me and that I needed to go find out how to heal and get myself in a better situation. Unshamed, my depression and suicidality were acts of love trying to keep me safe and unsatisfied with conditions that were unacceptable. They were actually quite beautiful.
Everything you are ashamed about has a beautiful side if you can witness it with compassion and understanding. Sometimes we need others to see the wisdom and beauty in our seemingly "ugly" sides, but we also can do that for ourselves.
Compassionate Witnessing:
The two places I've experienced the most psychological safety were at Third Nature Summer Camp in the U.S. and the Mindfulness Project in Thailand. Third Nature's philosophy is about consciously co-creating a better reality through entrepreneurship, spiritual growth and connection, and thus it attracts very considerate people with whom there is an air of non-judgmental witnessing. I can tell when I'm there that each person is allowing me to be who I am and that they believe in what I can create in this world, and being able to see myself from that perspective gives me a sense of safety and freedom as well as deep encouragement to follow my passion and embody my most authentic self. The Mindfulness Project literally teaches mindfulness and conscious relating from the Buddhist tradition, creating an environment where there is nothing but compassionate witnessing and opportunities to become more intentionally vulnerable, courageous and authentic. These two places were like finally being able to come up for air after living under a sea of shame.
Quotes from Brene Brown on love and compassion:
"To truly love and be loved is the most scary and the most rewarding thing in life."
"Each expression of the universe is inextricably connected by a force grounded in love and compassion, and each of those expressions and the connections between them are sacred."
"Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged, healed and rare."
- Brene Brown, Daring Greatly
The bottom line to creating psychological safety is to get rid of shame by practicing non-judgmental and compassionate witnessing, to even take it further with mindfulness and conscious relating to stay aware and intentional about not replicating harmful subconscious patterns picked up from cultural conditioning and past experiences. We can create an environment within us and around us that is psychologically safe. We always have that power because we are love; we just forget that sometimes.
