There are likely mistakes in the transcript. But NO SHAME ;)
Hi there, friends quick note here at the top of the episode to share that this one will feature discussions of shame, mental illness, and substance abuse. Reminding you– if you are struggling you are not alone. The Suicide prevention lifeline is available 24/7 by calling or texting 988. Now, for today’s episode.
My friend Claire, an old friend from Juilliard, and I were catching up this week after months of missed facetime calls. She had just come from the gym. When I asked her how her 2023 was going so far, she said she had joined a sports club reluctantly, trying again to get back in shape… then she stopped herself. “No, that’s not the right phrase.” She said. “Not get back into shape. I joined this gym because I enjoy moving my body and that act makes me feel strong and joyful.” And that right there is why Claire is my friend. She went on, “The hardest part about all of this is the whole locker room chatter post-workout. Women of all ages, standing in their skivvies, with all our creams and potions and hair straighteners and tools for attempting to make ourselves acceptable, offering each other our thoughts (sometimes completely unprompted) on what is working for us…”you know a quick steam followed by an ice-cold shower is good for your metabolism?” Or “when I get my protein and water intake up I usually feel so much better.” Claire sighed. She went on, “I don’t want to project my issues on these women. They mean well. They have no idea that I just stepped out of the suffocating shame sauna that was my dance career. How would they know that? So yeah, how’s your 2023 going??”
This podcast is for Claire.
It’s for anyone else who has recently become aware of the shame they are swimming in
It’s for artists who are looking for practical tools for self-compassion and empathy.
This show is for anyone looking to debunk that “tortured artist” stereotype, for those who want to believe that the creative life can bring us deep satisfaction, healing, and even joy. I’m so glad you’re here.
I’m Merideth Hite Estevez, and this is Artists for joy the podcast
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each week I will share stories of artists seeking joy… We’ll explore how so many travelers along this the artist’s way have left us breadcrumbs—wisdom and inspiration that can help us stay joyful on the journey.
This week is the final of my three-part series exploring my words of the year. The last one, SHAME-RESILIENCE (technically a two-word hyphenate, but It's my year I can do what I want!) Oooohhh this one was such a tough one to write for me because it feels vulnerable. I will share some about what I am learning on the journey I have been on to become resilient to shame. I’ve got some practical tips you can take as an artist who wants to stop the shame cycle including a poignant story I heard this week about one of my favorite painters. I'll answer a listener's question about something. And of course, I’ll give you something to consider this week. But first here’s some more music
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It’s funny what can trigger a memory. My almost five-year-old daughter got her first set of bunk beds from the Three Kings and the other day I was playing in her room and we decided to cuddle up together in the bottom bunk. Lying on the pillow, looking up at the slats from the bed above, that wood smell of new furniture, took me back to my own childhood bedroom and my own bottom bunk in the room I shared with my older brother.
I had this intense memory of looking up at those wooden slats, as a young kid, worrying. It was bedtime in the summer almost time for school to return, the light in our bedroom was beautiful, the sun hadn’t quite given up and neither had the summer break, but I think I could sense everything changing. I’m not sure what grade it was, probably 2nd or 3rd, but all I can remember is deep concern about being stupid. I remembered looking at those slats and thinking “What if there is something my teachers haven’t taught me that I’m supposed to know?” What if I was missing something? What if I wasn’t prepared or ready for this new grade, for life after elementary school? And I don’t remember consciously doing this but at some point in elementary school, I decided that the way I talked, my accent, was not ok. Something was wrong with me.
Lying in my own kid's bunk bed this week, made me remember being 8 years old and feeling what I now can name, as shame. Brene Brown (and by the way I am going to cite her work a lot in this episode because her research on shame is incredible, there is a link in the show notes to her latest book) She defines shame as: “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”
I somehow had gotten the idea as a kid that I was flawed. That there was something wrong with me. If you were my therapist you might ask, did someone make fun of your accent? Did someone tell you you were stupid? And as far as I can remember, no.
And speaking of therapists, let me go no further before I say…I am not one. Like I tell my coaching clients, I am a doctor…of the oboe. So the knowledge I share here is for solidarity purposes and not to diagnose or treat. So let this empower you to find someone who is trained and ready to help you deal with your shame.
As I look back on my training in the arts, my relationship with myself, and my journey towards creative joy…a common hurdle I run into is shame-upon-shame-upon-shame, it keeps coming up. This pit in my stomach that I am not good enough, not thin enough, not smart enough. Not that my actions need to be different or that I need to improve but I am somehow WRONG. I believe shame affects artists in ways that aren’t talked about enough. We so often equate or work with our identity and so when someone criticizes your work, which they are known to do if ever you share it, then, of course, you feel shame. The work we create is so often deeply personal.
And flash forward 30 years and you can find me lying awake in my grown-up bed worrying, still.
And so this year enough is enough. I am taking action.
Along with anti-hustle and resonance, my final word of the year is shame-resilience. And it turns out that through Brene Brown’s research, she offers us the 4 steps of shame resilience and so I offer them to you, each with a vignette from the life of an artist. Some of them real, some of them me, and some of them are conglomerations of people I coach or know. Because first and foremost, more than any steps, we need to know we are not alone. When someone says something is flawed about your art, of course, we are tempted to believe the lie that something is wrong with us. So 4 steps for being resilient to shame, per Brene Brown, brought to an artist life by me:
So #1:
Locker Room Trigger Point
Claire, my dancer friend who you met at the beginning of this episode, eventually found the words to say that the locker room talk of those women at the gym that morning had triggered her. It took her back to the way dancers chatted before and after class. It brought back all the feelings of needing to look a certain way. To be a certain size. To take up less space. And all of it came rushing back: the shame she felt for quitting, the way she believed she’d failed. The anger she felt for her teachers and parents for not only not seeing her eating disorder and pill addiction, but sometimes subtly and other times explicitly praising her for getting into shape. And yet, she longed to move her body again. And so, Claire’s shame resilience comes from recognizing shame for what it is–the lie that she’s not enough or that she’s too much–and each thing big and small that triggers those feelings. To see the trigger as a reminder of something that needs healing. So after the gym, she calls me. Or another friend or support person who can help her bring the shame out of the locker room and into the light.
#2. Understanding the Box
Jane is a horn player, the other day we were on a zoom call talking about creative recovery and she was asked, “What brought you to this group?” And Jane quipped, “As a female brass player, entrenched the classical music world, I am here as an act of espacing the box, the box we all feel stuffed into. I’ve been crammed into one all my life, and I want everyone to know that there is plenty of room outside the box. The second step to shame resilience is to be critically aware of shame…what it looks like, how it feels, but also why it exists, how it functions, and who-what-where it impacts. The practice of critical awareness is the second step to being shame resilient. And so climbing out of the shame spiral, whatever other boxes the world might put you in as an artist, but also looking around and becoming aware, critically aware, of exactly how the box was used to make you feel shame and why. Unpacking the box if you will with a trusted therapist, with those that love and support you. And take it from Jane, life outside the box is pretty great.
#3. Grabbing the Rope
I met Sam on the internet, it was her social media poems that got me. Her words always felt like she was handing me a rope and saying “here, grab on.” We became friends when we wound up in a coaching certification course together and coached each other weekly for 12 weeks. After that ended, whenever I have a hard day and feel that familiar weight of shame on my shoulders, It is her name that I type into my phone. It’s almost like one of those confession booths in the catholic tradition, “Sam, I feel shame. It has been 2 weeks since my last shame spiral.” And she listens as I say some version of the words: “I feel ugly, unloveable, and incredibly idiotic.” And almost always she’ll say back, “Now Merideth, that isn’t the voice of God.” And being a Christian myself, having lots of feelings about religious shame specifically, having felt like God was shaming me pretty much all my life, Sam’s words pull me out of my pit of shame every time. Wherever you are on the religious or spiritual spectrum, I imagine you have once believed or been shamed by someone who believed that shame is the way to motivate people. Allow me to remind you what Sam taught me. God doesn’t shame God’s children, that is something people do. It’s not inevitable or deserved or the only way you’ll learn your lesson, it’s not who you are or who you always will be. It is the shame that tells us we are worthless and rejected. And so step three of being shame resilient is finding a friend with a good strong rope to pull you out, by reminding that you are inherently, eternally, no matter what, loved and lovable. Connection sets us free from the bonds of shame, it allows us to climb to freedom, and we cannot do that alone.
#4. Say it with me now
Oil painter anna finishes about one painting a year. She came to me for coaching for a self-prescribed problem of paralyzing perfectionism. (how’s that for alliteration?!) We worked on ways for releasing the shame that was woven into her process, but I kept feeling like there was something she wasn’t saying. Finally in the third session, she shared that she’d never finished art school. “And I have no good reason why either,” she confessed. “I just couldn’t hack it. I stopped going to class, disappeared without a trace, and started binging. I didn’t even clean out my stuff from the studio.” After she told me, I think she was waiting for me to be horrified or judgemental. But of course, I wasn’t. I felt deep compassion and empathy. We sat together there looking at what she called the most shameful part of her life. After some silence, she said, “So it’s almost like every painting I start represents art school now. And the fact that I can’t finish it, it confirms all my fears, I am and always will be a quitter.” Friends the last step to shame resilience is speaking shame out loud. And so that’s what we did with Anna. We wrote some statements, that she believed with her logical mind were true, but couldn’t believe with her heart just yet. She practiced saying them until she believed them: “I am not my mistakes.” Say it with me now “I am not my mistakes.” And notice being shame resilient does not mean denying the part you played in things not going right or mistakes you’ve made or even very real guilt you feel about something. The goal is not to stop taking responsibility for your actions, to not care, because caring makes us human. The only people who don’t feel guilt or shame are psychopaths. Brene Brown says “If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive." We are not our mistakes. We become resilient to shame, by speaking the truth out loud.
So those 4 steps to shame resiliency were:
—Understand your triggers
—Become critically aware of the anatomy of shame
—Connection
—Speak the truth out loud to yourself and others
This year I am working on my shame resilience, I hope you’ll join me. This work isn’t easy, friends. But it is so, so, good. Turns out Jane is right, life outside the box, or in my case the bottom bunk, it’s pretty great.
I’ll be right back.
Today’s listener question came from an email I received: Any good responses/tips on social media boundaries and creativity? A constant struggle for me to keep reigned in. When I stay away, my creative mind works so much better. But then I hop on and get a few good things and then get fomo again. Thanks, IG JUNKIE
IG JUNKIE! Yes, social media what a time to be alive, am i right? So yes, I struggle with this too. Taking the shame resilience steps and applying them to this, what if we developed a critical awareness of how social media affects us and name it. Sounds like you do get good things out of it, but it also makes you feel shame around what you feel like you SHOULD be doing or ways you aren’t living up to some arbitrary unnamed expectations. So hone your awareness by asking, what ways does this affect me? What kinds of content do I find helpful and engaging and motivating? Are there ways to filter, unfollow, mute, etc accounts that don’t keep you in the right mindset? And here are your words right back to you…when you stay away your creative mind works so much better. Those are your words. So what are you gaining by staying? And maybe you need to stay to feel some connection to others, or to promote your business, etc. But give social media its rightful place in your life by becoming more critically aware of how it is affecting you, and by naming exactly, with as much clarity and detail as possible, what you want to get from it, then set your expectations and boundaries from that information.
Hope that helps.
Speaking of encouraging and empathetic content, I work hard on my social media to be that kin of account, so if you do find using IG in small doses is good for your creative mind, and you need some connection, you can follow me @ artists for joy. And you can dm me there or click the link or call our voicemail, both of which are in the show notes if you’d like to submit a question for me to answer on the show.
Now for today’s coda
In 1889 Vincent Van Gogh committed himself to an asylum in the south of France to be treated for mental illness. Initially, they confined him to a single chamber while still allowing him to paint using a makeshift studio in the room next door. Eventually, though, he was given run of the hospital grounds and it was there that he found the subject of as many as 15 paintings. The olive trees. In a letter to his brother Theo that he said he was "struggling to catch them…with they’re old and silver, sometimes with bluer in them, sometimes greenish, bronzed, fading white above a soil which is yellow, pink, violet tinted orange.” He went on to say the "rustle of the olive grove has something very secret in it… immense. It is too beautiful for us to dare to paint it." And yet he did dare. He dared 15 times. He painted those trees in every season and time of day. With women among them picking their harvest and the dark alps in the background. He evoked their blowing in the Provence wind, his brush heavy with paint, his signature strokes, one by one working out the pain and shame and melancholy, of his own inner twisty trunk. And painting those trees helped him joy in the sorrow.
So my question for you today is this…how can your creative practice be an act of shame resilience? Those paintings of Van Gogh, from the grounds of the psychiatric hospital, remind us that art helps us heal and sometimes healing looks like drawing the same tree over and over in different lights. Creativity helps us develop a critical awareness of our world, even as we struggle with it. When Van Gogh described those trees you could tell he could truly see them, greenish bronze, fading white soil, yellow pink, and tinted orange. So let us also use our creative practice to give us eyes to see, as we too search for the secret that only the olive groves know. Let your art connect you to others and to something larger than all of us, like Van Gogh’s olive trees remind me that I am not alone in my search for the secret of those rustling trees. May we remember that through our creative work, our place of greatest woundedness and shame can be an invitation to healing for ourselves and others.
That’s it for today’s episode of Artists for Joy. It was created, written, and produced by me, Merideth Hite Estevez. This podcast is free for your listening pleasure, but if you would like to support the work of artists for joy, a woman-led LLC that helps creatives thrive, you can buy me a coffee by clicking the link in the show notes. If you enjoyed the show, could you do us a favor and share it with a friend, or as every podcast host says…leave us a rating and write a review in apple podcasts. Seriously this allows us to serve more artists, so thanks in advance for your help.
Today’s music featured all music of Claude Debussy. Performed by yours truly on oboe, with Jani Parsons on piano, plus Amy Gustafson, Gerluz, and Ariana Falk on cello.
If you are listening to this when it comes out, our next creative cluster starts on February 7, so just a few more days. Grab your spot on our website is artistsforjoy.org/theartistsway or by clicking the link in..guess where…the show notes.
I will be back next week with a bonus musical meditation episode to help us practice our shame resiliency, so make sure you subscribe or follow wherever you listen so you won’t miss an episode. Until next Friday, take good care.
Today’s sounds of joy will hopefully make you laugh out loud as made me. We recently got a snow day and we all got a bit stir-crazy. You can’t see the video so you’ll have to imagine: my husband holding my son on one shoulder against his ear, like one of those oversized boom boxes from the ’90s. Of course, he is never ashamed to drop some rhymes. Enjoy