Elly: 0:00

Hello everybody and welcome to our shame-free Sundays series. This is a part of our podcast A Better Way to Heal, where Faith Meets Therapy. We talk a lot about shame on this series. Shame is that inner critic that never lets you rest, that voice that says I'm not enough, no one could ever love me, I'm damaged, I'm defective. Before we dive in today, I just want to ask you have you ever had any of those thoughts? Well, I created a free shame quiz to help you get some clarity, to find out if you're struggling. So just head on over to EleanorBrownCounselingcom. Slash shame dash quiz dashfreebie. Don't worry, I know it's a mouthful, the link is in the show notes.

Elly: 0:50

Join me and Harmony as we explore the intricacies of shame and how it impacts your life. We're going to look at how faith and therapy come together to help us understand what's healthy and what's not and how to walk in freedom. Anyway, I'm here with Harmony Again. My name is Ellie Brown and this is Harmony. I introduced Harmony last week to you and we talked a little bit about shame, what shame is and what shame isn't. I feel like I wanted to talk more about the differences between healthy and toxic shame, but before I do that I want to invite you to go to my website and download the shame quiz If you have any thought that you might deal with shame after you listen to us talk about a few.

Elly: 1:40

We're going to talk a few stories. We're going to give some examples. I'm sorry, this virtual background and Harmony don't seem to get along well. We'll see if we can fix that for next time. So we're going to.

Elly: 1:52

I'm going to share with you three stories, real quick stories, just to kind of point out what the differences are between healthy and unhealthy shame, toxic shame. So the first one is Harmony. Harmony here, she broke a vase and when she broke the vase she has two choices. And one day Harmony broke the vase and she was sorry and she apologized and she tried to put it back together and she recognized that it was a mistake and that everybody makes mistakes, even little bears, and so we moved on and moved away from it. Another day she broke something else and she said you know, I'm just so clumsy, I can't. I keep breaking things, I'm just a bad person. No one wants to be around me because I keep breaking things. That's kind of an example of going down a toxic shame cycle.

Elly: 2:59

Another one of our stories is Harmony forgot to get a friend of hers a gift that she promised to give her. She left it at home and she apologized to her friend and she realized that she needed to be a person of her word. And so she decided next time she saw her she would make sure she took the gift then. Now, if Harmony was in a bad place emotionally, she may have really beat herself up for not taking that gift to her friend and she may have been so embarrassed that she avoided that friend altogether. Or she may have just said I'm just a bad person, no wonder nobody likes me. And that would have been her narrative. So Harmony has decided that she will take the friend, her gift, instead of beat herself up.

Elly: 3:59

So the last one is she hurts someone's feelings. The last one is she hurt someone's feelings. I don't really know what Harmony could do to hurt someone's feelings, but she was mean to someone. She had a really rough day. You know, playing all day long just led her to feeling grumpy and she she bit one of her kids heads off. You know, not literally bit the head off, yeah, yeah, y'all know that, right, but she just went off on her child instead of listening to her child and trying to spend time with her. Well, that may be more of an Ellie thing than a harmony thing. Well, that may be more of an Ellie thing than a Harmony thing. Yeah, so she could apologize I could apologize whichever and make things and realize that you can't. Doing things like that is not healthy. So I take some time to not do those things anymore. Decompress before I come home, figure out what it is. Harmony is really just not liking that. How about we just sit right here, harmony? We know she's here, or maybe, so we're going to set Harmony to the side for a minute. But you know, when we make mistakes, sometimes we really want to make it right, so much that we want to beat ourselves up enough so that we never forget again, and what that can do is it can lead us down this bad path to where we think that we're the bad thing instead of the thing that we did. That was bad, and so that's one of the whole reasons why I wanted to do the shame series, because I don't think a lot of us recognize that we're dealing with toxic levels of shame, and so I really wanted to just pop in here for a few minutes and just share these stories. If you get anything from these, either now or later, drop your favorite emoji, I'll send you the shame quiz. There's no strings attached. The shame quiz is free and it's really just to help us understand, when we're bound up by things, how they will impact us. And they impact not just us, but they impact the people in our lives, our loved ones, ourself. We aren't very effective for other people when we are, when we're beating ourselves up because we really we're not very helpful and on that note, I think I am just about out of time. I really wanted to keep this really under 7 minutes. I want to value your time and I thank you for whether you're watching this now or whether you're watching this on a replay. I really can't see with this software if anybody's here, but I'm really hoping that you get something out of it. Again, if you want that shame quiz, drop your favorite emoji or just go to my website at wwwEleanorBrownCounselingcom and you can get a copy a free copy of the shame quiz. With that note, I will talk with you next week. Please drop a comment and tell me whether or not you like these, uh, this series, and if there's anything that you want to know about shane. Thank you, bye-bye. Thank you for watching us. We really appreciate you being here. If you enjoyed the episode.