How to Defeat Inner Shame

In this episode, John discusses how to overcome shame to gain access to your inner world and achieve inner peace. He explains the crippling nature of shame, its dual nature, and how it affects our mental health. John shares his personal journey with childhood PTSD and his years-long quest to understand mental illness and trauma. He emphasizes the importance of disempowering shame to empower oneself and offers practical steps to bypass shame and unlock one's true potential. 

00:00 Introduction to Overcoming Shame
00:11 Understanding the Nature of Shame
00:17 The Dual Nature of Shame
00:56 Personal Journey and Motivation
01:49 Shame's Role in Mental Health
03:28 Shame in Public vs. Private Spaces
04:31 Shame as a Barrier to Inner Work
07:42 Disempowering Shame
08:33 Objective Observation Exercise
13:03 Conclusion and Next Steps

To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com

Buy my book! 75 EASY: the ultimate challenge for personal growth
Amazon US
UK
CA
AU

Weight loss coaching - Join the Weight Loss Freedom Academy today

Join the free "Lose Weight with John" community

Check out the EASY WAY OUT Blog/Newsletter site

Watch the Easy Way Out on Youtube

Transcript

How to Defeat Shame - (So you can have inner peace, get unstuck and life the life you want)

[00:00:00] In today's video, we're going to talk about how to defeat shame so you can access your inner world, have inner peace

and move a major step forward

in resolving the things that are robbing you of your wellbeing and living out your true potential.

We're going to discuss why shame cripples your inner world. The real reason we feel shame, it's not exactly what you might think./

The fact that shame has almost a dual nature, and that's why it can be so confusing to deal with.

And finally, how to disempower shame so you can empower yourself, especially as you move forward in your healing journey. Simply learning to take better care of yourself getting to know your true self, apart from your survival mechanisms, or generally unlocking your potential in life, getting unstuck from the places where you don't want to be anymore.

And at the end of the video, I'm going to explain why the benefit of getting over shame isn't just the relief from the shame

and how this makes amazing things possible. Once you've resolved this shame issue.

This topic means a lot to me. I really want to help you get free. If you don't know, my name is John. In 2018, I was diagnosed [00:01:00] with childhood PTSD. I underwent a lot of treatment, but nothing I found, whether it was EMDR or talk therapy answered all my questions and got me the healing I was looking for.

So this set me on a years long journey

To understand the nature of mental illness.

And to learn both practically and on a deeper level how I could become my best self, how I could unleash myself from the places where I was very stuck. ,

what resulted is a philosophically cohesive model

for everything from healing from trauma to changing our bad habits.

reshaping or removing ourselves from unhealthy relationships, all that good stuff.

I'm basically here to share everything I have with you.

So if that's something you're interested, subscribe, like this video, and by all means, leave a comment, ask me questions about the things you're struggling with. So I know what to put into future videos. So back to shame. Shame is a foundational issue for any discussion about mental health. It's not just this crippling self hatred or self judgment.

It has a functional role. Shame can be [00:02:00] doing a couple different things, and it can be different aspects of your psyche using shame for their own ends. Not going to get way into the weeds on that today.

So instead, let's quickly define what shame is, and 

Let's try to break it down in a way that maybe you never have heard it done before. Shame is an emotion, and all of our emotions evolved in a context, very different than the context we live in today.

Shame is a powerful emotion because it's fear based and that fear has a lot to do with being exiled from our community.

As our brains evolved, we were living in somewhat nomadic groups of 30 to 60 to 90 people. Most of the time,

this is why we care so much what other people think. Because back in those days, you didn't have access to 7 billion people in the world. And if one person got mad at you, you could just go find another person who liked you and agreed with everything you said.

But back in those days, if a couple people really took a disliking to you, that could be a threat to your wellbeing in a major way, because back then exile was akin to death. We [00:03:00] ran around in small groups because we are social animals. We survive better in groups.

And back in those days, if you tried to go the lone wolf route, you weren't going to do that for very long.

So when shame is strong, it can be an absolutely crippling emotion.

And this is why it's basically a fear of death. Social death.

And we can see that shame plays a pretty big role in culture, especially, it's definitely having a moment in our culture right now. But the next major point here is that. Shame as it pertains to your inner world works very differently than shame in the public space, because in the public space, shame is applied to people to change their behavior. But in the private space, the way shame works is actually trying to avoid people in the public ever finding out what's wrong with us or finding out about the terrible things we did,

if you stole berries from the communal resource, you wouldn't want people. To find out about that because then they might shame you, i. e. they might exile you, punish [00:04:00] you.

So up until something becomes public and it remains in that private sphere, shame works differently in the private sphere. Shame is about hiding the things we have done from the public view. So all this self judgment recrimination, almost feeling like a prisoner to your own shame.

It's all a wall. That's aimed at making sure you don't let the cat out of the bag

so that other people can't see your vulnerabilities or your mistakes or things that they might misinterpret and decide to judge you for. Right. And obviously when shame has gotten really powerful and it's overrun your inner world, we could convince ourselves that. Yeah. Any aspect of who we are is shameful or might be interpreted as shameful by somebody else.

Even like some of the best things about us, right? Your best qualities, your brain on shame could tell you, Oh, you need to hide that because so and so could get mad at you for that.

But now this next point is where shame kind of does an inception on you,

there are various levels of consciousness 

like, have you ever just forgotten a word in the middle of a [00:05:00] conversation and been like, this is a simple word. I don't know why I'm forgetting this.

Or you're taking a test that you totally studied for, but then you get down to that one question and it's like, what year was the declaration of independence signed? And you're like, ah, blanking out 1946. I, It's not that you don't have that information in your brain. It's that due to anxiety or whatever's going on, your consciousness doesn't have access to it at that moment.

So our minds can choose actually to do this on purpose ,

this is how we've repressed memories that we don't like emotions we don't like.

 Shame can get you to stop seeing a lot of your inner world. It can brick it off.

And a lot of times it shows up like a bouncer at the door. Every time you try to get in, it goes, nah, this is too terrible. You don't want to see this. Have you ever not wanted to get on the scale because you don't want to know what it says.

Shame! Have you ever noticed the bad habit and then as you go to examine it your brain kind of just freaks you out and distracts you with thinking about anything else. Shame!

Do you [00:06:00] ever try to do inner work but then start to get so perfectionistic and fatalistic about the whole thing, that you'd rather do anything else and you just bounce away from it. Shame, right? The bouncer at the door is saying, you're not allowed to come in here. And that's basically the reason you stay out of your inner world.

That's one of the most important functional aspects to shame that I want you to understand is that it is keeping you from doing the work full stop. You are not even making one tiny step toward a better life because every time you do shame is Just annihilating you.

So remember I said, other aspects of your psyche can use shame for their own purposes. Any part of your survival mechanisms that are invested in sabotaging certain efforts, like there could be aspects of your psyche that have decided you're safer if you're extremely overweight. This is one of the reasons people get overweight is it's a self protective mechanism in a lot of ways.

If you're afraid of being seen, get super overweight. The world will stop seeing you in a [00:07:00] lot of ways. 

And that's just one of many examples.

So multiple forms of self sabotage inside of you could be also using your shame to keep you from doing the inner work. And getting at the root of your issues and shame will bounce you off into. You know, instead of actually getting to the root of your emotional eating issues, it'll say do keto, just do intermittent fasting, right?

Do something extreme. And that's just a little bonus tip that if you're always jumping into extreme solutions to your problems, that's a big clue that shame is running the show and you want to stop, turn around and go straight back toward the shame and go, Hey, wait a second. I saw what you did there. And we want to bypass that shame and get into our inner world.

How do we do that? Well, in short, without making it sound too simple. . Basically, it's all a big mirage. It's an illusion. The bouncer at the door. I call it the 600 pound gorilla is a picture of a 600 pound gorilla. It can't actually stop you, right? Shame is [00:08:00] just a highly uncomfortable feeling.

Every time you go near things https: otter. ai Cause trouble for you if other people found out about it, or if by extension, you found out about it,

 Clients seem to really like when I explain that it's not a bank vault, it's a curtain with, a bank vault door painted on it. Okay. You can just move it right aside. And that might seem impossible. That might seem like I'm just talking crazy because of how big and powerful shame feels in your inner world.

Try it out. Take an aspect of your life that you're not happy with, a place where you feel stuck take out a notebook, get out a journal and write down objective facts about whatever situation you're dealing with, whatever place that you feel stuck, whether it's your situation at work, your lack of boundaries, a toxic relationship,

emotional eating,

and describe in as much detail as possible using only objective language, the bare evidence, the bare [00:09:00] facts of what's going on. And what you'll find is that as you try to lay out objective facts, simple things like this, I eat too much. I eat too much of unhealthy foods. I don't exercise.

You'll notice your brain jumping in with all these additional statements, right? Shoulds. That's a big one.

And we're not talking about fixing any of these things, or ending any compulsions, or suddenly,, unraveling a toxic relationship. We're not talking about doing any of that yet. We're just talking about, can you

dispassionately observe the most important topics of your life? Because chances are, if you deal with a lot of shame, you can't without shame, trying to chime in and add a bunch of extra subjective context.

To your narrative, right? And this is where most of our problems erupt, not in the objective facts of our lives, but in the subjective meaning that our brains layer on top of them. So you can just, with any issue that you're dealing with, draw a line down the middle of the page on the left hand [00:10:00] side, right?

Only the objective facts. These are things that if, if I was there watching you from the bushes, what things could I note down about what you're doing? Right. Okay. Jen went to McDonald's today. She ordered six quarter pounders. She squished them all together into a giant ball and shoved it into her mouth all at once.

Okay. At no point am I saying, and it was so disgusting and da da da, right? I'm just describing the actions that are taking place. I'm not saying what this means for her future. I'm not talking about anything that I don't have Information on

And again, we don't have to change. The shameful narrative. We don't have to change the subjective narrative yet just by differentiating the objective facts of our situation from the subjective narrative. We're telling ourself about the situation. We are starting to see the difference between, Oh, that's a bank vault door that I cannot get through versus, Oh, that's a curtain with a picture of a vault door on it.

And I can bypass that. [00:11:00] Simply by a shift in awareness, simply by understanding the game and not falling for the trick anymore. And here's the thing with shame. It's like the wizard of Oz. , right? Once you see that the wizard is just a man behind a curtain running a projection system, you can't unsee it.

Right? So shame will still be around, I've been successfully dealing with this , for myself and clients for years now. Shame still pops up. Shame still will, you know, kick the crap outta me some days. But once I recenter her and go, okay. Hold on, what's going on? What are the objective facts and what is the story playing in my head?

I can very quickly cleave those two from one another.

And we're not getting into, you know, how to totally cure that part of you. That's that's creating all this shame. We're just trying to get into the inner world because that's what. Disempowering shame really does for you. It gets you access into your inner world, the factory that's creating everything in your life.

You could get in [00:12:00] there. You could figure out how it's working and you can start to tweak things. And all of a sudden your life can produce very different outcomes without you having to try and white knuckle everything.

So it's not just about alleviating the shame, which you definitely deserve.

It's about gaining invaluable access to your inner world.

It's gold because none of the solutions to the things you're dealing with in life exist in the exterior. Our brains love to think that that's the case. We love to think that we're just going to hunt down the right solution, the right fix, the right diet, the right partner, the right job, the right bank account.

And somehow all of our problems are going to go away.

And it's almost never the case. And almost always the case is that our current situations that we're not happy with, they originated on the inside. And that means that the new life we want to live is going to originate on the inside as well. 

If you're ready to be done with half measures and hacks and just trying to white knuckle your way to, A significant transformation in your life. This [00:13:00] is where it starts. Shame is a great place to start.

That's all for today. Let's keep the conversation going in the comments.

Toss me a like for the algorithm. This is a new channel. I really appreciate your support.