Christian Research Journal Reads Episode 146: The Work and Worldview of Brené Brown

This is Episode 146 of Christian Research Journal Reads. This is an audio version of the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL article, “But What If It Is Me? The Work and Worldview of Brené Brown” by Anne Kennedy.https://www.equip.org/articles/but-what-if-it-is-me-the-work-and-worldview-of-brene-brown/ 


The following article was an Online-exclusive. For the purposes of academic citation, it would be considered part of Volume 43 No. 01. It was accompanied by Postmodern Realities Podcast Episode 181 But What If It Is Me? The Work and Worldview of Brené Brown.


This podcast presents audio versions of Christian Research Journal articles. As the flagship publication of the Christian Research Institute, the Journal seeks to equip followers of Christ to think and to live Christianly—to exercise truth and experience life. Truth, especially essential Christian doctrine, forms the basis for how we live our lives in Christ. As the apostle Paul instructed Timothy in 1 Tim. 4:16, “Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.”The Christian Research Journal enjoyed a print incarnation of almost 45 years. Now exclusively an online publication, the Journal consists of thousands of free articles. We hope that through these audio articles you are not only equipped to proclaim and defend your faith but that as a disciple you also draw closer to Christ in your walk with Him.  You can find the written version of each article that is an episode of Christian Research Journal Reads at the website of the Christian Research Institute, equip.org. All Christian Research Journal articles at equip.org are completely free and do not require a subscription and are not under a paywall.All episodes will be available at the following podcast platforms with more being added daily! You can help spread the word about this new podcast by giving us a rating and review from the other channels we are listed on and telling others!You can view off our Website at the at this link and off our Journal main page. 



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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
This is episode one hundred and forty six of the
Christian Research Journal Reads Podcast. But What If It Is Me?
The Work and Worldview of Brandy Brown by Anne Kennedy.
This article was published as an online exclusive in volume
forty three, number one in twenty twenty. The Christian Research

(00:30):
Journal Reads Podcast presents audio versions of Christian Research Journal articles.
To read the full text of this article and its documentation,
please go to equip dot org. That's e qu ip
dot RG.

Speaker 2 (00:49):
But What If It Is Me? The Work and Worldview
of Brand Brown. This article is by Ann Kennedy and
is read by an automated voice publishing to the rest
Blaze 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

(01:11):
to document the rise of shame on social media as
a tool for curbing undesirable behavior. 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 cell styled shame Expert Branni Brown, Distinguished
for her research of that fearsome subject, counselored in today's
most prominent self help and pop theological female voices. Her

(01:35):
podcast Unlocking Us premiered two days after my own family
was quarantine for what our doctor hoped was not coronavirus.
As I anxiously separated six 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, Terana Burke, and others. Brown is the

(01:56):
one to whom the most prominent voices of today turn
not only for functional mind models for coping with shame,
but for the deeper councils of what to believe about
the self and the self and relationship to others. She
is a 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,

(02:17):
not just as counselor to this moment's influencers. Shame is everywhere.
If you mentioned Brenne Brown anywhere, the immediate response is always,
that was a great ted talk. Indeed, if you are
reading this and haven't seen her twenty ten forourthmost viewed presentation,
The Power of Vulnerability, You should stop and watch it.

(02:37):
The twenty minutes will show you an engaging, warm hearted, funny,
thoughtful academic committed not only to psychosocial cultural research, but
to integrating her findings into her own life. Here it's
not some ivory tower 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

(02:59):
permits the implication of her conclusions to permeate her own soul.
A month spent with the voice of Brandy 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,

(03:19):
steeping me in a morass of unattainable expectations about who
I should be, why 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

(03:41):
the deepest roots of shame, and therefore her approach is
not a substantial relief from persistent shame addled existential questions
of the soul. By sidestepping the original source of shame, sin,
and the reparative healing of the cross, Brown misses the
effective hope offered by God in caer Ragastu, who absorbs
shame and covers the exposed and naked with his own goodness.

(04:04):
What is shame? The first task is to establish what
shame is. Shame writes Brown, and 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.
She arrived at this definition by interviewing hundreds of women
about their experiences with shame. Phrases like these emerged from

(04:25):
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. You work hard to show the world
what it wants to see. Shame happens from your mask
is pulled off and the unlikable parts of your scene.

(04:45):
It feels unbearable to be seen. Shame is feeling like
an outsider, not belonging. Shame is hating yourself and understanding
why other people hate you too. I think it's about
self loathing. Shame is like a prison, but a prison
one that you deserve to be in because something's wrong
with you. Shame is being exposed. The flawed parts of
yourself that you want to hide from everyone are revealed.

(05:08):
You want to hide or die. In a recent Netflix special,
Brown went on to say that shame is the feeling
that you would get if you walked out of a
room that was filled with people who know you and
they start sayingful things about you that you don't know
if you could ever walk back in and face them
again in your life. Brown's definition is helpful for at
least three reasons. First, it reveals the disconnection felt by

(05:28):
so many women between the expectations of what Brown calls
society and a degree to which those expectations are accepted
as fair or realistic. So much of a sense of
shame arises out of the failure to measure up to
the external standards relentlessly communicated through media and advertising. Women
of the primary consumers in today's economy. Insinuating shame about

(05:48):
the body in particular, but also emotional happiness and life
circumstances is proven to drive sales. Wouldn't internalize these messages,
even when they know they are being sold alie, because
of the near universal dissatisfaction and even shane that women
naturally feel about their bodies. Second, her definition highlights the
contradictory messages that women embrace about themselves. The idea that

(06:11):
you can have it all rubbed shoulders with, be a
perfect mother, don't settle for anything less than success, collides
with nobody's perfect. Brown elucidates this humorously, and I thought
it was just me describing one of those unavoidable occasions
when every part of a fractured sense of self comes
into sharp relief. As Roles Colyde, mother's day just happened
to fall on the very weekend she gave been elected

(06:32):
to speak at her university's graduation ceremonies, and just to
underscore the pressure. Her daughter's ballot wrestle and teacher appreciation
day made a perfect time for the grandparents to descend
and enjoy the festivities. Brown's anxiety about keeping all the
logistical balls flying in the air without any one part
of her identity crashing to the ground reached a fever
pitch when she found herself staring into the eyes of

(06:54):
her child's beloved elementary school teacher and blatantly lying about
the existence of promised homemade cookies. Perfect mother expectation crashed
violently into perfect professor, which toppled over perfect daughter. The
aftermath left her feeling emotionally bruised and isolated. Third, this
definition illamines the disconnection that women feel within their communities

(07:16):
and families. Women in American society, despite so many technological
helps such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, are increasingly risk averse.
When they do manage to make meaningful connections with other women,
those connections are subject to the glass shards of judgment
and indifference. If there is a single theme throughout Brown's work,
it is that shame drives people, women, especially away from

(07:37):
themselves and each other into the nether world of depression, addiction, perfectionism, discontent,
and anxiety. It is a strong, bitter force, what she
calls a silent epidemic. It can be blamed for a
vast number of the emotional problems that women face, if
not all of them, and it needs a cure. Shame, resilience, empathy,
and the power of vulnerability. The experience of shame universal

(08:00):
and inevitable. Benjamin Kelbourne, in his fascinating article Fields of Shame,
elucidates a study done with infants and shame. He writes,
in phase two, the mother is instructed to sit opposite
the child, making eye contact but no facial expressions whatsoever.
For a short while, the child will try to make
faces at the mother. Then, when there is no response,

(08:22):
the infant will either burst out in tears of distress
or slump down, averting its eyes from the mother's face.
It is hypothesized that since the infant is too dependent
on the mother to entertain the idea that she might
abandon or disappoint it, the infant tries to evacuate disappointment
and fear, then feels ashamed of what it needs to
hide or get rid of, anticipating rejection should its mother

(08:43):
know these feelings. Thus, Shame masks shame, which masks still
more shame. One becomes ashamed of being ashamed and defenses
against being found out, build one on top of another hurt.
Thompson concurs describing the way shame functions within the brain
in ding neural pathways that become difficult, if not impossible,
to reverse. Shame, he says, makes its way into our

(09:07):
stories at an early age, so early, in fact, that
we usually have no conscious memory of our initial encounters
with it. He describes what he calls a sharing. A
deep sense of self consciousness emerges, Cognition becomes fuzzy as
our thoughts are disabled, words may be hard to find
if we are old enough to form them, and the
mind becomes caught in a vortex of images, sensations, and

(09:28):
thoughts that recycle and feed on each other at light speed,
reinforcing the experience. For Brown, such an embedded and universal
emotion must be accurately identified as the root of unhappiness
or pain. It lives buried in the darkness, producing inauthenticity,
or worse, addiction and other destructive self medicating behaviors. Because
it cannot be eradicated, the person suffering from shame must

(09:51):
develop what she calls shame resilience. We cannot become resistant
to shame, she writes, However, we can develop shame resilience.
Shame resilience is best conceptualized as a continuum, with shame
anchoring one end, in empathy anchoring the other end. Our
level of shame resilience is determined by our combined ability
to recognize shame and our specific triggers, our level of

(10:12):
critical awareness, our willingness to reach out to others, and
our ability to speak shame. Brown's expression speaking shame, though
it first might sound like the act of shaming another,
is the practice of identifying shame as shame one it appears. Shame,
as she says, is sticky. It attaches itself to everything.
It is communicated in silence and the act of questioning

(10:32):
someone's decisions, in the misery, of hearing your mother's criticism
or your father's disappointment in the back of your head,
of trying to fit into obeying suit. Stopping speaking the shame,
facing it, and moving forward builds the ability to withstand
the experience, becomes stronger and reach out to others. Reaching
out to others is crucial because as Brown says, we

(10:52):
are hardwired for connection. We are not meant to live alone,
unattached to the human community, though we may live in
physical proximity to five, family and work shamefit isolation keeps
us fractured and emotionally unconnected. Therefore, alongside building shame resilience,
Brown advocates what she calls a power of vulnerability. Vulnerability
is not mere self disclosure, letting people know everything about you.

(11:15):
The overshare vulnerability is having the courage to take emotional
risks with others. When a person, or a family, or
a company, or better yet, a whole society chooses to
build a culture of vulnerability, creativity and ingenuity inevitably prosper.
What about shame, though, There is one crucial way in
which Brown, by not considering the deeper roots of shame,

(11:37):
fails to make all the connections that are necessary for
dealing effectively with shame. She hints at it many times,
but doesn't probe into its debts. This is the question
of worthiness, which is fundamentally a question of sin. Look
again at her basic definition of shame, the intensely painful
feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore
unworthy of acceptance and belonging. Her solution building resilience alludes

(12:01):
to the bending flexibility of a tree that can bow
low before a great storm and stand upright again when
the wind ceases. The shame is something that passes over,
leaving the essentially whole well person in its wake. But
what if the shame isn't just something that exists out there?
What if shame, as opposed to guilt, which is the
sense that I have done something wrong, is felt because

(12:21):
something inside the person is wrong or broken. What if
wrong action flows out of a broken orientation? In fact,
I would argue, while human beings feel shame for a
whole world of reasons, some of them justified and some not,
one of the primary reasons that people feel shame as
members of the human family is because of a corporate
and individual rejection of God. Brown never addresses the question

(12:43):
of sin in d In her Netflix special, Brown says this,
you let people into your life because they love you,
not in spite of, but because of your imperfections. Emphasis added,
The most that could be wrong with a person or
their imperfections, which can be superseded through the courageous practices
of vulnerability and empathy. Though she often describes scenarios and
occasions when she, her friends, and the subjects of her

(13:06):
research do wrong things, she never probes down to the
roots of those wrongdoings. Lying to her child's elementary school
teacher is the result of stress of having too many
roles to juggle. It could not be because she, as
a member of the human family, has a deep proclivity
to lie to herself, to others, and to God. The
solution to seek empathy and understanding from a friend does

(13:27):
not begin to touch the broken self that out of
fear lies her humorous example of shame, unwittingly gets to
the very hard oft shame itself. We have committed ourselves
to sin and death. We have made ourselves worthless. That
sense of worthlessness is the key in the well worn
biblical creation narrative. God made Adam and Eve in his

(13:48):
own image and gave them dominion over every living thing.
The beauty of the garden, the joy of their common work,
and more importantly, their life in his presence. All communicated
the high honor God bestowed upon his head creatures. They
were worthy because God, who made them is worthy. This
worth was put into sharp relief by the choice then
set before them. Everything about their lives depended on their

(14:10):
connection to him. When they disobeyed him, which was an
open rejection not only of God himself, but of everything
that He had made, including themselves, they experienced shame for
the first time. They discovered themselves to be, in the
language of Genesis, naked and ashamed. They rejected their own
worth when they rejected Him. When I look in the
mirror and feel unworthy, it is because I have cut

(14:32):
myself off from the source of my worth. God. The
feeling I have is just and right. It is a
mercy of God to let me feel it so that
I will be compelled to do something about it. Not
build resilience to the feelings so that I can better
endure it, but to be completely delivered of it forever.
By being found worthy in God on the basis of
who He is, rather than who I am, is joy possible.

(14:55):
In her Netflix special Brown says that joy is the
most vulnerable of all human emotions. Brown is more perceptive
than she knows. Joy is to look upon the one who,
in cataclysmic reversal, took the shameful, naked rebellion of Adam
and Eve and all their inheritors onto himself, absorbing it
so completely that every spot and stain is removed from
the one who looks on him to live. Looking there,

(15:17):
seeing the forgiving love of the one who holds all worth,
who hath the power to destroy shame, does produce deep joy,
that astounding vulnerability available only to the one whose life
is hidden in the everlasting and unshakable love of care rest.
The subjective experience of shame cannot be eradicated in this life,
nor should it be. Besides, in many cases being the

(15:38):
guard rails of social life, it has the spiritual value
of driving unworthy sinners to the objective work of the
Cross of ker Orst, to the mercy and forgiveness that
eternally do away with shame. Although Brown is helpful for
working out the practical experience of shame and its day
to day implications, insofar as she rejects the Cross, she
fails to offer a life of freedom, worth, honor, connection,

(16:00):
and especially love.

Speaker 3 (16:02):
Thank you for listening to another episode from the Christian
Research Journal Reads podcast, which provides audio articles of Christian
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(16:37):
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(17:00):
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