Claim Your Shame

All right, and welcome back. On today's episode, we're going to talk about a powerful shift I've helped a lot of men make with a fairly simple but pretty deep and pretty profound practice.

And essentially it comes down to this. You must learn to claim your shame. So this is one I particularly see come up a lot and be a powerful place for some pretty big shifts for guys when it comes to intimacy and dating and relationships. I tend to help men who want to date women or create deeper relationships with women.

But this is really applicable to any man. Gay, straight, queer, you name it. And the idea of claiming your shame starts with, you know, talking about what shame is. And shame is an incredibly powerful social emotion. So what do I mean by social emotion? Well, it's a feeling, an emotional state we have that's created in relationship to others. So shaming almost always happens in the context of relationship.

It's pretty hard to feel shame if you're not in any kind of relational context. If you were the sole human on a faraway planet and you had never met another human being, shame probably wouldn't be an emotion. You kind of know firsthand shame. Shame comes from being in relationship and from there being a perceived or sometimes true right way to be. And when we think there's a right way to be and we are not it, we will often feel shame.

Right? There was a right way to do something in a situation. There's a right way to show up in a situation. And if we're not that, that's where shame comes in, right? A feeling of, I'm not good, I did something wrong, I'm bad, or I'm embarrassed. Shame is such a powerful driver for us as human beings and particularly for us as men. And I see this a lot, right? When it comes to how we experience ourselves, we feel shame because other men are showing up in the world in a certain way.

Other men look a certain way. Other men are confident, Other men don't have problems with pornography, other men, you name it. And there's some guy that probably feels some kind of shame around it. So when I say claim your shame, I mean there's a powerful medicine and learning to take ownership of what we feel shame around.

There's a powerful medicine there and however we experience shame, it's our reaction to it that tends to cause reaction. Reaction in others. So this is kind of the crux and the key component here of why it's important to claim our shame. Meaning if I feel shame about something, right. I feel shame that I don't look a certain way, or if I feel shame that I get nervous when I'm around attractive women, or if I feel shame that I don't make enough money, I don't know, Name it.

Name a thing you might feel shame around. The thing is, it's my feelings about my shame around that that actually impact others the most. And what I mean by that is if I'm collapsed around it, others will feel my collapse around it. Like I said, I work a lot with guys on dating and relationships and this shows up hugely there.

Huge, huge. Huge there in that so many guys come to me and they don't want to be nervous when they approach women or talk to women, right? Or a huge one for a lot of us men is. Is they're worried about sexual performance, right? Either keeping an erection because they ejaculate too soon or have erectile problems or they can't get an erection and struggle to get aroused.

I was really enjoying this. Then we take a breath. That is going to have such a different impact when we're able to claim our shame and not be collapsed in it, but stand tall in it with Breath with openness and yeah, maybe with some embarrassment, maybe with some tenderness, but there's space around it. Our partner is going to experience us completely differently and actually probably feel even more connected to us and maybe even more turned on.

I see this one a lot. With the vices we carry as men, right things generally that we feel shame around are things we try to hide, try not to reveal to others. So for a lot of men that might be pornography, marijuana, alcohol, all kinds of addictions that we hide because we feel shame that we don't have, say, the self control to regulate around these things.

Now when we hide that stuff, it tends to have an impact on how we stand, how we breathe, how we look at people and how we relate to ourselves. And that relating to ourselves is what other people feel and that's not what feels good versus when we can name it. And obviously you're not going to claim this stuff with everybody but those in your inner trusted circle for sure. Hey, I struggle with this problem.

I want it to be different. It's really tough. I'm trying. When we claim that shame, it's going to again impact those around us in a completely different way because we're taking ownership of of it. And the more right we are with it ourselves, the more right others around us are going to be with it. That's the crucial piece, crucial piece that I just can't underline enough is as we bring whatever we're feeling ashamed of when we bring that into right relationship inside ourself, meaning we might want it to be differently, but we embrace it, we accept it, we come to own it and to experience it as our truth.

And when we can relate to it openly and without collapse, that's what's going to make other people relate to us completely differently. It also becomes a profound source of healing, connection and energy. There's a paradox and often the things we feel the most shame around are the things we withhold from sharing with other. The things we feel the most shame around are the pieces of ourselves, like I said, that we withhold and hide from others.

Now in the holding and with hiding, we're actually cutting off connection. And something I've seen in the many, many men's groups I've run and the coaching program I run is that oftentimes that thing we feel the most shame around that nobody else could possibly understand, that means I'm bad in a way that no one else is bad. When we share that in a trusted community, it's often the thing that makes people feel the closest to us.

That's right. It's actually often a source of incredible connection when we share those pieces. Because oftentimes we're not the only one, particularly in something like a men's group, who's experienced that. And one thing I've seen over and over and over again is when truth is revealed in the moment, it almost always relaxes everyone and creates connection. And so when a man shares something that's very true, very vulnerable, maybe a source of great shame for him, they'll often be a giant exhale or release in his body of energy, of breath.

And when it's accepted by peers who, who, hey, maybe don't totally love what happened or what that thing was, but don't totally reject him as a person, but actually often welcome him and resonate with him and tell him it's okay, I get that. I've had that too. It creates so much connection and almost always opens up the entire group it was shared in. And it all comes from claiming our shame, claiming.

Claiming those things that we think we must hide from others. Because if they knew this, they would reject me because I'm bad. And this thing is proof of it. However, like I said, when we change our relationship to the shameful parts of ourselves and come into right relationship with it, and all that means is just acknowledging the truth, not collapsing around, changes the whole game. It completely changes the way we show up in our bodies and speak about it and how much trust and openness others feel around us, right?

Hey, I feel ashamed I did X, or I feel a sense of shame that Y, when we make that unhidden heard, it frees us. It frees us as men. And it's a source of incredible power when we learn that oftentimes there's so much wound up in those things we feel shame around that it actually limits us from getting a full experience of life in the world.

And when we let go of that, speak that truth and acknowledge what is and claim the different things we are ashamed of, right, we claim our shame. We own it, take ownership of it. By taking ownership of it, by claiming it, we actually become bigger than it. And it's just a part of ourselves. It's not us. It's just a component of me. That's what I mean when I say come into right relationship with it.

As a guy who works with and coaches men, I know this firsthand to be true. Through this podcast and other podcasts I've been on, I've shared a lot of my own personal story and the things I was Often ashamed of in terms of my experiences with women, or more said, my lack of experiences with women, my addictions to pornography and masturbation, my troubles with finances, you name it, I've been a pretty open book.

And the thing is, it's the truth of those stories and my ability to just speak them as they are because I've done the work to be with them that calls in the right men to work with me because they hear me and resonate. This guy gets it. He's experienced what I've experienced. Maybe it would help to talk to someone like him. And I'm not the only guy who's doing this kind of work. But this idea of being able to claim one's shame is something you have to learn how to do.

Otherwise it just hides inside and it collapses us. It totally collapses us as mental. Just think about the body posture of shame. It's heart caved in, shoulders rolled forward, usually a hunch in the back, chin and eyes looking down, no eye contact. It actually closes us off to relationship and closes us off to the world and thus connection and energy and vitality.

Whereas when we claim our shame and in right community, which is an important piece, you got to be in a community that cares, can speak about these things and be heard in an unjudging safe space. It makes us lighter, it makes us more open, it makes us more free as men. I've had many men on calls or in our group program share things with me or the men's groups I've been leading that they've never told anyone in their whole lives.

They've been carrying that burden and that weight for all of these years. And I'll tell you time and time again, I see when they do it, their body changes. Something relaxes in them, something opens in them. Some piece of them realizes, oh, I'm okay, maybe I did something bad or I had to learn a hard lesson, but I'm not inherently bad.

I'm still okay, I'm good. And they get that experience, at least in the work I do, by learning to tell some stories, stories that are often closely linked to things they feel the most shame around. So they get we get to practice actually claiming it and naming it and speaking it out loud so it loses its shadowy grip on us. If you want to work with me, you can head to Evolutionary Men and join a Drop in Mine men's group on the events tab, do some one on one shadow coaching with me on the coaching tab and join my group coaching intensive around masculinity, dating and relationships under the webinar tab.

Just take my free training. Until next time. Take care.