A Look at the Work of Brene Brown

I’m over at the Christian Research Journal Today. Check it out!​

“Public Shame to the Rescue,” blazed the headline of a prominent website barely a week into the American version of the worldwide coronavirus shutdown. “What could be more effective than a little public shaming?” the author asked in the first paragraph, going on to try to document the rise of shame on social media as a tool for curbing undesirable behavior.¹ If there was an ever a moment to pause and consider the use of such a powerful phenomenon as shame, this is it.

Into the breach steps self-styled shame expert Brené Brown, distinguished for her research of that fearsome subject, counselor to today’s most prominent self-help and pop-theological female voices. Her podcast, Unlocking Us,² premiered two days after my own family was quarantined for what our doctor hoped was not COVID-19. As I anxiously separated sick children into their separate rooms and furiously disinfected my house, I was propelled up and down the stairs by the soothing humor of Brown interviewing Glennon Doyle Melton, Tarana Burke, and others.

Brown is the one to whom the most prominent voices of today turn, not only for functional models for coping with shame, but for the deeper counsels of what to believe about the self, and the self in relationship to others. She is the font, the source, and the sociological justification of a self-oriented worldview increasingly adopted by so many, including Christian women. But she is celebrated in her own right, not just as counselor to this moment’s influencers.

Shame Is Everywhere

If you mention Brené Brown anywhere, the immediate response is always, “That was a great TED Talk.” Indeed, if you are reading this and haven’t seen her 2010, fourth most viewed presentation, “The Power of Vulnerability,”³ you should stop and watch it. The twenty minutes will show you an engaging, warm-hearted, funny, thoughtful academic committed not only to psycho-social cultural research, but to integrating her findings into her own life. Here is not some ivory-towered professor, lecturing the harried, isolated American woman who cannot get herself together. Here is a scholar who looks real people in the eye, listens attentively, and permits the implications of her conclusions to permeate her own soul.

A month spent with the voice of Brené Brown echoing in my ears made me sensitive to the voices clanging around me — my own negative self-talk, the deep rushing river of perfectionism that propels me out of bed every morning, and most of all, the nebulous “cultural” assumptions that swirl online, steeping me in a morass of unattainable expectations about who I should be, what I should feel, and how I should order my life. In other words, at a pragmatic, primal level, Brown exposes the pressures faced by a majority of women in America today. Her message is a crucial summons to self-examination, to a life more fully lived.

I found, however, that Brown stops short of reckoning with the deepest roots of shame, and therefore, her approach is not a substantial relief from persistent, shame-addled existential questions of the soul. By side-stepping the original source of shame — sin — and the reparative healing of the cross, Brown misses the effective hope offered by God in Christ who absorbs shame and covers the exposed and naked with His own goodness.

What Is Shame?

The first task is to establish what shame is. “Shame,” writes Brown in I Thought It was Just Me, “is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging.”⁴ She arrived at this definition by interviewing hundreds of women about their experiences with shame. Phrases like these emerged from her research:

• Shame is that feeling in the pit of your stomach that is dark and hurts like hell. You can’t talk about it and can’t articulate how bad it feels because then everyone would know your “dirty little secret.”
• Shame is being rejected….read the rest here!