Elly Brown: 0:00

Hello everybody and welcome to our Shame-Free Series. Shame-free Sundays is now being added to our podcast, A Better Way to Heal, where Faith Meets Therapy, because shame really is something we should be talking about when we're talking about healing. Join me and Harmony as we explore the intricacies of shame and how they have an impact on your life. We're going to look at things like faith and therapy and we're really going to bring them all together with this concept called shame what's healthy, what isn't healthy. Thank you for listening. Healthy. Thank you for listening.

Elly Brown: 0:48

Hello, for those of you who do not know me, my name is Eleanor Brown. Most people call me Ellie. I am jumping on here today. I'm starting a series today called Shame Free no More, called Shame Free Saturdays, and today's title is Shame no More, and I want to start this first slide just talking a little bit about shame and what shame is and what shame isn't.

Elly Brown: 1:21

Some of us think of shame as completely negative, that it is all bad, and then some of us, you know, we shame people or guilt people into trying to do the things that we wouldn't want them to do. For me, I've got a complicated relationship with shame and I can remember being a child and being ridiculed, talked down to. I don't know how you would explain it, but basically I would have people say things like this to me here's Harmony. We'll talk about Harmony in just a minute, but I'm just going to be on here for seven minutes, so we're going to keep this really short. But people would say things like this to me why are you talking so much? Why can't you be quiet? Why can't you be like all the other little kids and be a good little kid and go outside and play? You know, kids don't have any business underneath adults. Why are you talking? That really led me to believe that the things that I had to say were not, that no one wanted to hear it. So basically, I grew up believing that nothing I had to say or nothing I did was any good. I was living in a shame, like I was bound up by shame. So why do I say that? Why do I even share that little story? Well, one of the things that I, one of the things that I struggled with when I decided I wanted to be a counselor was I didn't think that I had the words to say that anybody would want to hear. And when I really started getting and developing a certain level of healing. I had to overcome that type of shame-based thinking and really walk into and finding my voice. And really, once I kind of realized the things, all the negative thoughts that I kept saying to myself, once I realized that that was shame, I was able to start overcoming that. But I really didn't understand that.

Elly Brown: 3:52

One of the things that I have created and I have it on my website and it's wwwEleanorBrownCounselingcom but I do have a shame quiz for people that don't understand whether or not the shame that they deal with might be the shame that they deal with might be, or even the things that they think might be dealing with struggling with feelings of shame, toxic shame, shame that keeps people kind of bound up and not doing well in their life. Negative thinking oh, I can't do anything, no one loves me, I don't have any friends. Why does everyone always I don't know you fill in the blank and why doesn't God love me as much as he loves someone else? All kinds of ways that we have a thinking that are really kind of shame-based thinking, but we don't really recognize that. So that's one of the some of the stuff that I hope to talk about over the next. I don't know how many weeks I'm going to start this. We're going to see. We're going to see where it goes, but these are basically going to be seven minutes at 7 o'clock shame-free Sundays we're just going to talk about shame. Feel free to put in the comments things that you may want to hear about shame.

Elly Brown: 5:20

What do you know about shame? What do you wish you knew about shame? Do you even know what shame is? I had a client one time tell me oh, I don't deal with shame. And I pulled out this shame quiz and out of 10 questions it's now 12 questions, but she answered yes to all of them and so what we found was that she really was dealing with some shame. And I write a lot about shame because I am overcoming and overcoming those feelings of shame and I'm really walking into a place of harmony.

Elly Brown: 6:03

And that brings me to introducing you to harmony. Harmony is kind of a representation of where I was shame really bound in shame and to where now I've walked into a level of not just surviving but thriving. And I walk in harmony, not balance, because balance implies that the scales are. It's a judgment type thing, but it's really. I live in harmony. I know I didn't explain that very well and that's okay. Y'all ask questions. What you'd like to hear more about, shane? And yeah, I feel like I've probably said all I want to say for today. I will say more next week and I hope y'all enjoyed the video. I think I might have ended just a few seconds early, but I hope y'all enjoyed the video. Thank you, I'll see you next week.