Brene Brown Quotes

And in fact you're not like everyone else: you weren't ashamed just now to confess bad and even ridiculous things about yourself. Who would confess such things nowadays? No one, and people have even stopped feeling any need for self-judgment.

When you bring the darkness to the table, it doesn't rule you or hurt other people, but when we keep it secret, it's dangerous.

We are as sick as our secrets, so I tell everything.

If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in the petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive.

You know the expression, 'You're only as sick as your secrets?' I believe that, and I think I try to have my work live by that to a degree.

Never be ashamed of what or how you feel... just be honest.

If you have an embarrassing story, and it's a source of shame, keeping it in just compounds the shame and turns the story into something poisonous. And if someone knows about it, then it can be used against you.

I have nothing to be ashamed of. And I love to talk about the things that I am ashamed of.

Unless you're ashamed of yourself now and then, you're not honest

Shame cannot survive being spoken. It cannot survive empathy.

Shame derives its power from being unspeakable...If we speak shame, it begins to wither. Just the way exposure to light was deadly for the gremlins, language and story bring light to shame and destroy it.

I almost never cry, and it's something I don't like about myself. I sometimes try and make myself cry. Sometimes, when I'm in pain, I say if I could just cry it would make it so much easier.

Nobody likes to be found out, not even one who has made ruthless confession a part of his profession. Any autobiographer, therefore, at least between the lines, spars with his reader and potential judge.

I spent a lot of my life holding back my cries, and I want to change that because it's not good for me.

I'm very free with all my emotions, whether it's happy, sad, mad, glad, whatever.

There are things to confess that enrich the world, and things that need not be said.

I don't really like being emotional. Public displays of emotion, I don't really do that sort of stuff. I don't know why. I would like to be the type that doesn't worry about that.

I just feel compelled to continue to be transparent. It just really levels the playing field and eradicates the shame that I have, or that one might have, about being human. So I'm going to just keep going.

I'm really out of touch with myself emotionally. I've always had a hard time talking about how I feel.

Concealing what is shameful to you will never lead to anything of value.

The distinctive feature of my family was intolerance of sensitivity and emotion - 'Everything's great, it all has to be great all the time and why do you have to spoil it?' Whereas probably the most fundamental and important thing to me has been defending my right to tell the truth about how I feel.

So many people are like, 'I'm perfect.' I'm so imperfect; that's why I'm able to let everything out and let people see everything. 'Cause I'm just a mess like every other person that's a mess out there.

You've gotta share what's going on in your mind.

You just need to be honest with how you're feeling. But, a lot of women are afraid of it because they think, 'Oh, they are going to take my baby away. They're gonna call me incompetent. I'm going to lose my job. I've got to be tough, it's a man's world.'

I am not racked with self-loathing. Some issues of guilt and shame, but I'm a pretty good guy.