Wholehearted Living

Nowadays, we hear a lot about ‘wholehearted’ living — about vulnerable connection and living an authentic life. But you may be asking yourself: what does that actually mean? Let’s look to one of the leading experts on vulnerability and wholehearted living — Brené Brown (PhD, LMSW) — for some answers.

I read The Gifts of Imperfection: Your Guide to a Wholehearted Life a few years ago, and I have referenced it many times since. What I love about Brown’s writing is that it is grounded in research and brings clarity to topics that are often not spoken about such as shame and vulnerability. And she does it with humour and kindness.

Wholehearted Living Defined

Brown defines wholehearted living as:

Engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, ‘No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough’. It’s going to bed at night thinking, ‘Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging’.

Brown noticed something in her research around wholehearted living: those research subjects who felt a deep sense of love and belonging were the ones who believed in their worthiness for love and belonging. These people embraced who they are, rather than hustling for worthiness through performing, perfecting, pleasing, and proving. But how do we embrace our authentic selves, imperfect as we are? First, let’s look at what gets in the way of us living and loving with our whole hearts.

The Pain of Shame

Brown suggests that shame is the fear of being unlovable — the ‘total opposite’ of owning our story and feeling worthy. She defines it as ‘the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging’. I love this quote: ‘shame needs three things to grow out of control in our lives: secrecy, silence, and judgement’. Brown describes three different strategies people use to deal with shame:

    1. Moving away. Withdrawing, hiding, silencing ourselves, and keeping secrets.
    2. Moving toward. Seeking to appease and please.
    3. Moving against. Trying to gain power over others by being aggressive and using shame to fight shame.

Maybe you identify with a couple or all of the strategies above. I want to offer a gentle reminder here that we do the best with the information we have; as we learn more, we do better. Please be kind to yourself as you learn about shame and how you have dealt with those painful feelings in the past or present. Let’s take a minute to reflect on Brown’s words: ‘Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging’. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how to cultivate shame resilience.

Cultivating Shame Resilience

Brown noticed four common elements for those people who have high levels of shame resilience:

    1. They understand shame and recognize what messages and expectations trigger shame for them.
    2. They practice critical awareness by reality-checking the messages and expectations that tell us that being imperfect means being inadequate.
    3. They reach out and share their stories with people they trust.
    4. They speak shame — they use the word shame, they talk about how they’re feeling, and they ask for what they need.

Brown invites us to kick-start our shame resilience and story-claiming by asking ourselves these questions when feeling shame:

    1. Who do you become when you’re backed into that shame corner?
    2. How do you protect yourself?
    3. Who do you call to work through the mean-nasties (attack) or the cry-n-hides (hide) or the people-pleasing (pretend)?
    4. What’s the most courageous thing you could do for yourself when you feel small and hurt?

Authenticity & Self-Compassion

Brown’s book lays out 10 ‘guideposts’ that help us cultivate a wholehearted life. These are the common themes she discovered when interviewing people living wholehearted lives. For brevity sake, I am going to share the first two: authenticity and self-compassion.

Brown defines authenticity as ‘the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are’. She argues that being vulnerable is a risk we have to take if we want to experience connection — to ourselves and to others.

How do we choose authenticity? Brown suggests we:

  • cultivate the courage to be imperfect, to set boundaries, and to allow ourselves to be vulnerable.
  • exercise the compassion that comes from knowing that we are all made of strength and struggle.
  • nurture the connection and sense of belonging that can only happen when we believe we are enough.

Brown shares the three elements of self-compassion:

    1. Self-kindness. Being warm and understanding towards ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate, rather than ignoring our pain or flagellating ourselves with self-criticism.
    2. Common humanity. Recognizes that suffering and feelings of personal inadequacy are part of the shared human experience — something we all go through rather than something that happens to ‘me’ alone.
    3. Mindfulness. Taking a balanced approach to negative emotions so that feelings are neither suppressed nor exaggerated. We cannot ignore our pain and feel compassion for it at the same time. Mindfulness requires that we not ‘over identify’ with thoughts and feelings, so that we are caught up and swept away be negativity.

That our common humanity is an element of Brown’s definition for self-compassion really resonates for me. Indeed, being imperfect and making mistakes is part and parcel of being human. When I really let that sink in, I feel a sense of comfort and peace. It helps me to claim my story — the good parts, and the hard parts.

I hope you learned something new in this blog post — perhaps some tools to cultivate your shame resilience, or how to choose authenticity and practice self-compassion. How does it feel to contemplate being enough? Being worthy of love and connection? As Brown says ‘No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough’.

Want to Learn More?

I highly recommend checking out Brené Brown’s website and her book The Gifts of Imperfection: Your Guide to a Wholehearted Life.

Reference

Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection: Your Guide to a Wholehearted Life. Hazelden Publishing.

Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash

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