Latest / Dear Nina: Conversations About Friendship / #163 - Shame and Friendship: What We Hide, What We Share (Melissa Petro)

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#163 - Shame and Friendship: What We Hide, What We Share (Melissa Petro) · Dear Nina: Conversations About Friendship

0:00
[SPEAKER_01]: When we have a friend who's just not sitting quite right with themselves and somehow it's being projected on to us we feel competition or envy we feel put down rather than connecting there's a disconnection and oftentimes it's some unresolved or unacknowledged feelings of inadequacy within one or both people.
0:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Dernina Conversations About Friendship.
0:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Today we are talking about the place that shame has in friendships, the place that it has in keeping a deep secret and deciding when and how to reveal that secret.
0:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Melissa Petro is the author of Shame on You, how to be a woman in the age of mortification.
0:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a really interesting story.
0:46
[SPEAKER_00]: A piece of her past is what brought her to this topic of shame.
0:49
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a well-researched book, but it's also part memoir.
0:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I want Melissa to tell you in her words, why she is so focused on shame.
0:57
[SPEAKER_00]: She has a chapter on friendship in the end, but
1:00
[SPEAKER_00]: There's information woven throughout about where shame fits into our relationships.
1:06
[SPEAKER_00]: We talk a little bit about the concept of oversharing, but we actually don't get that much into even that word because it's sort of just a given in Melissa's story that sharing is going to be part of her friendships.
1:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I did do an entire episode on the idea of oversharing, undersharing,
1:22
[SPEAKER_00]: to discuss information, two of them actually, but they all came from a different angle and they're really great on this topic too.
1:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't want to repeat all of that and I let Melissa really tell her story more in this one.
1:33
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you're interested in those, at episode 95, that was called overtalking, undertalking, and lessons for friendship in the art of storytelling.
1:42
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was a little bit more about the amount of time you're talking on a friendship.
1:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was with Michaela Bly,
1:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And then way back, in episode four, such an early one with Christy Tape, an author I really love.
1:56
[SPEAKER_00]: She wrote group and she wrote the book BFF, but it was after group, which was about group therapy and just about her story in general.
2:03
[SPEAKER_00]: That episode number four is called revealing too much too soon.
2:07
[SPEAKER_00]: But in this episode with Melissa, we take a bit of a different angle with the assumption that you are going to share your story or that
2:15
[SPEAKER_00]: really makes sense too that there are a lot of good reasons not to withhold very deep secrets from people that you're hoping to be close to.
2:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's just get to it.
2:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I want you to hear from Melissa herself.
2:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, Melissa.
2:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Deer Nina.
2:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for having me.
2:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I really appreciate you being here for kind of a potentially heavy topic, but I know that we will ride the wave of the ups and downs on the topic of shame resilience.
2:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, yeah people think it's super dark, heavy, the deepest darkest, but I think when you have some experience like I do talking about shame and not just me, but I've come across lots of people, shame resilient folks who are just carrying it as lightly as it deserves to be,
2:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Before we get into your story, can I read you my favorite quote from your book?
3:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
3:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Who would love that?
3:03
[SPEAKER_00]: This is way towards the end page 248 in one of the final chapters and there's so many quotes by the way I could have read a million different things to you from your book but I chose this one.
3:12
[SPEAKER_00]: You wrote, while shame is an impediment to friendship losing her shame saves the way to closer relationships.
3:18
[SPEAKER_00]: As sensitivities about our own perceived and adequacy soften the more we see strangers as friends.
3:25
[SPEAKER_00]: before we really get into that quote, what getting rid of shame can do to friendships.
3:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we need to hear about your particular story.
3:33
[SPEAKER_00]: What this book is about, at least the front end of it.
3:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I mean, for a very, very long time, this book was just a memoir, and it was just what happened to me.
3:43
[SPEAKER_01]: At 19 years old, I made a choice that just seemed perplexing.
3:49
[SPEAKER_01]: At the time, I was living as a student of broad in Wohaka, Mexico, and I ran out of money.
3:55
[SPEAKER_01]: The job that I had been working for college credit kind of felt through.
3:58
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was bored and free of the entanglement that a teenager or young adult experiences when they're at home and then they go out into the world.
4:09
[SPEAKER_01]: So I made a decision to start working at a stroke club.
4:13
[SPEAKER_01]: And it really solved my money problem, but it created a lot of other, I don't want to say problems, but a lot of confusion that set me on a journey to kind of make sense of how I had done something that presumably decent women would pause before making that choice.
4:38
[SPEAKER_01]: In great part because I had started writing about the experiences and made meaning of that decision and, you know, whether it fit into my life after I had stopped working in the industry, I became a public school teacher.
4:51
[SPEAKER_00]: And how old were you at that point?
4:52
[SPEAKER_00]: I probably could do them now.
4:53
[SPEAKER_01]: But it was like what six years later, I was 19 when I started.
4:57
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not the math because I was like 30.
4:59
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, I was like, you probably had to get a degree.
5:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was writing.
5:03
[SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, I was around 30.
5:04
[SPEAKER_01]: When I became a public school teacher, I became a teacher through the New York City Teaching Fellows Program.
5:09
[SPEAKER_01]: They take people from.
5:11
[SPEAKER_01]: alternative careers and put them in New York City's struggling classrooms.
5:16
[SPEAKER_01]: By then I had a degree in Creative Nonfiction and I was working on a memoir about my experiences in the industry.
5:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I had started publishing little short pieces because that's what they tell you to do.
5:27
[SPEAKER_01]: I published a piece on the Huffington Post right around when Craigslist got shut down.
5:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So when did the Huff Post piece come out?
5:34
[SPEAKER_01]: It's like 2007.
5:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, no, that seems early years because I started having stuff on Huffington hosts maybe four years after that.
5:42
[SPEAKER_01]: So they you were really early right between where there was a moment where people were publishing it themselves.
5:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, like it was a blog and then there was a moment where there were editors.
5:53
[SPEAKER_00]: now they're back to editors.
5:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, but it was right on that line, but I never met my editor.
5:58
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know who approved my pitch, but I had pitched the essay and it was a 700 word op-ed in defense of an individual's right to sell sex and criticism of the censoring of that section because they had shut down the erotic services section on Craigslist.
6:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I put up ads and I answered ads.
6:18
[SPEAKER_01]: That worked for me until it didn't.
6:20
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I stopped.
6:21
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a lot more accessible and autonomous than working for an agency or a manager.
6:30
[SPEAKER_01]: I was able to just get in and out of the industry.
6:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's what I wrote in that 700 word article.
6:37
[SPEAKER_01]: And as I said, I was trying to be a writer.
6:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I was a writer.
6:40
[SPEAKER_01]: So I put my name on it.
6:41
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was super proud, because there was my bi-line right next to Hillary Clinton.
6:46
[SPEAKER_01]: 27 days later, the New York Post showed up on the steps of the school where I taught because I had become by then a public school teacher and put me on the cover of the New York Post Bronx teacher admits I'm an ex-hooker.
7:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, what a headline.
7:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's one of the tame ones.
7:04
[SPEAKER_01]: There were many headlines for the next three, four, it felt like forever, months, months and months of headlines in different publications, not just the New York Post.
7:14
[SPEAKER_01]: The New York Post was particularly cruel.
7:16
[SPEAKER_01]: They called me a prostate teacher and an attention whore.
7:19
[SPEAKER_01]: All of these nasty caricatures.
7:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, have lines everywhere.
7:23
[SPEAKER_01]: It was really chaotic.
7:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is before you got married.
7:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I just trying to give context.
7:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah, no, I was...
7:31
[SPEAKER_01]: single, just getting sober.
7:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I got sober when I was 27, so I was four-year sober when this happened.
7:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Public school teaching.
7:39
[SPEAKER_01]: As I needed a real job, I had a degree in creative non-fiction.
7:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I did want to be a writer, but I know as so many writers they have jobs.
7:46
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it wasn't some strategic move as some headlines.
7:50
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought, you know, it was like some sort of power, grab, or I was
7:54
[SPEAKER_01]: creating publicity for my memoir, none of that was true.
7:57
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just leaving naive and idealistic publishing a little piece and then being relentlessly humiliated because the world just could not conceive of a woman with experiences in the sex trades admitting that publicly and now also being a teacher.
8:16
[SPEAKER_01]: It's funny because the main character
8:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Happens now, every day there's the main character online, and it moves on so quickly.
8:24
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't really latch on to characters the way we used to.
8:28
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't create the sort of uctimum, but at that time, it was not uncommon that they would find a woman.
8:37
[SPEAKER_01]: to sort of cut your eyes and then villain eyes and just mock and ridicule and write a story and just create content around that person's image.
8:48
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a really good point about how the new cycle has changed, because with the time you're speaking of is before TikTok.
8:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And while we had the internet, obviously, we had Facebook, but really in a much more bare way.
9:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't even think there was Instagram.
9:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I wouldn't even had internet in my house.
9:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
9:05
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't what it is now.
9:06
[SPEAKER_00]: No, not even close.
9:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The cycles go so quickly now.
9:09
[SPEAKER_01]: So it's hard to impress upon people that I was in the news.
9:12
[SPEAKER_01]: I was on CNN.
9:13
[SPEAKER_01]: Really guys.
9:15
[SPEAKER_00]: And what happened at school then?
9:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I was immediately removed.
9:18
[SPEAKER_01]: I got a phone call the night before the paper ran the headline informing me that I was to report to the administrative buildings instead of the classroom.
9:26
[SPEAKER_01]: So I never went back to my school.
9:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I had been teaching there for three years.
9:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I taught art and creative writing to grades K through five.
9:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw every class one day a week.
9:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I saw 300 kids in a week.
9:39
[SPEAKER_01]: We did project-based learning.
9:40
[SPEAKER_01]: I basically got to do whatever I wanted because I was the art teacher.
9:43
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a film.
9:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So moving to a friendship, it's an interesting dynamic because then later when you start forming relationships, friendships post-teaching like people who maybe didn't know about the article at all years go on.
9:55
[SPEAKER_00]: A venture that news cycle of course does move on like to your point, maybe it's not the next day like it would be nowadays, but eventually it moves on to the next thing, the next big juicy headline.
10:05
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're meeting new people, how do you decide whether to be like,
10:13
[SPEAKER_01]: So fast forward 10 years or whatever I'm a stay at home mom with two kids married, living in the suburbs, and I still have that story.
10:21
[SPEAKER_01]: You guys all moved on, but I'm the hooker teacher in my heart and brain.
10:25
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm talking about it right now, right?
10:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I'm going to talk about this for the rest of my life because it impacted me so profoundly.
10:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Fortunately, I can alchemize it into something beautiful.
10:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
10:35
[SPEAKER_01]: That source of shame, but for a very long time, I felt profoundly ambivalent.
10:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Especially because I didn't get a book, it wasn't positive attention, it was just the thing that happened to me, that I kind of carried around.
10:47
[SPEAKER_01]: Then you have to walk into spaces and introduce yourself.
10:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Especially as a mom, there's an expectation of who you're going to be and and I didn't feel like the truth of me fit that expectation.
10:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember one day I was at a farmer's market with a fellow mom, and it came up.
11:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes people would Google me because I'm a writer, by then.
11:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes I might tell someone, is a huge part of your story.
11:13
[SPEAKER_00]: You said six years.
11:14
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like that's,
11:15
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it would come out in this little, like, at that time.
11:18
[SPEAKER_01]: It was very much like, can this person hear this?
11:21
[SPEAKER_01]: The friend I was with just received it so neutrally.
11:24
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's really what you want to do when you come out.
11:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've since learned that we kind of all carry around that thing, that we don't, you know, maybe we spent time in a mental health facility or maybe we have addiction in our past or maybe, you know, our parents had this stigmatizing experience or, you know, whatever,
11:44
[SPEAKER_01]: thing is that you carry.
11:46
[SPEAKER_01]: In the book, I named it's conceivable stigmatized identity that thing that you can kind of hide.
11:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever it is, when you carry that, it can really weigh us down.
11:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to say that expression again, conceivable.
11:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Say it again.
11:58
[SPEAKER_00]: It's good.
11:58
[SPEAKER_01]: You stigmatized identity.
12:00
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
12:01
[SPEAKER_01]: When I discovered that that was like a thing, I was so liberating.
12:04
[SPEAKER_01]: It's any kind of stigma that you've analyzed.
12:07
[SPEAKER_01]: This is indicative of something about me.
12:10
[SPEAKER_01]: That's something that this happened or that
12:14
[SPEAKER_01]: The short word for that is shame, I mean, right?
12:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, right, you really think that, you know, it can be that it's not only on my different, but I'm a little inferior.
12:22
[SPEAKER_01]: So I had the sex work passed, but I also had survived mass media humiliations.
12:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So right, it's sort of a, yeah, double thing.
12:29
[SPEAKER_01]: So when I would come out, sometimes people who super titillated by it, that happened a lot when I was dating.
12:35
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I was wondering about that too, right, but even women, people look at you different.
12:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes you can see their kind of, they have some aversion to it, or they're disgusted.
12:44
[SPEAKER_01]: I can see disgust, or they feel sorry for you.
12:47
[SPEAKER_01]: That's not the correct response, or they experience it usually.
12:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I want to hear what that exactly looks like.
12:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a really good advice to a listener, someone on the receiving end of somebody's news.
12:58
[SPEAKER_01]: It's hard.
12:59
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not even gonna lie like I receive it neutrally all the time when someone confesses their deepest darkest secrets to me, which happens often given a
13:09
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I jokingly call myself the shameless bird in the beginning of the book because it's really true.
13:14
[SPEAKER_01]: People come out to me all the time.
13:16
[SPEAKER_01]: They want to be unburdened.
13:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Assume all the receptive neutral space.
13:22
[SPEAKER_01]: So I do try to hold that receptive neutral space.
13:25
[SPEAKER_01]: But we're all conditioned to be entertained by someone's dirty laundry.
13:30
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're titillated or, you know, we all have our own.
13:33
[SPEAKER_01]: We bring our baggage to everything.
13:39
[SPEAKER_01]: It really takes sometimes a sort of intention and a focus really looking into somebody's eyes while they're talking or reading their body rather than kind of getting in your head about what they're saying and your own judgments about it really just trying to stay with their physical body while they're telling you.
13:59
[SPEAKER_01]: If there's any chance you're going to have judgments about something and oftentimes it's so natural because we really don't have any judgments And that's what happened that day with that friend at the farmers market.
14:08
[SPEAKER_01]: It was like I'm sorry that happened to you She was familiar with the publication and then we moved on talked about something else So that is really a beautiful way to kind of become intimate with someone She was immediately closer in my eyes to me.
14:23
[SPEAKER_01]: She was someone I wanted to be around more
14:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the moving on is really an underrated piece of a conversation like that because I assume like you said, we all have our stuff we reveal and once you've done it, you don't want to only talk about that.
14:34
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't want that to be the only thing that, um, because I don't just mean moving on literally in that one conversation, although that too.
14:40
[SPEAKER_00]: But I mean, even in future conversations with that person, we shouldn't feel like we always have to talk about that thing.
14:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Because like there's sharing, I think, and then there's potentially
14:53
[SPEAKER_00]: your past or whatever it is, you want to reveal it.
14:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It is tricky these things.
14:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So I wanted to have you on to dice up these different things, oversharing versus sharing, but the moving on piece, like I'm saying, that only focusing on your past or your thing that happened to not just you, Melissa, you, anyone who's in that position.
15:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
15:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you really want a friendship to be reciprocal.
15:15
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't want to feel like you're educating someone.
15:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
15:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Sometimes I would find myself in that role and anyone with one of these presumably shameful identities can probably relate.
15:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I had a producer once saying, you know, I've never been a sex worker, but I can completely relate.
15:31
[SPEAKER_01]: I was a breast cancer survivor.
15:33
[SPEAKER_01]: And people would just look at me differently.
15:35
[SPEAKER_01]: They had questions.
15:37
[SPEAKER_01]: I became that.
15:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I was that in their eyes.
15:40
[SPEAKER_01]: And like, I don't want to be that in your eyes.
15:42
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever it is, I'm not just that.
15:44
[SPEAKER_01]: None of us are just that.
15:46
[SPEAKER_01]: But we have to be able to see our friends for the, you know, in the big, broadest, most nuanced ways.
15:53
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's oftentimes why I wouldn't disclose that information until we got to know each other a little better so that they could see I was also this and also that.
16:03
[SPEAKER_01]: I end also this, which is the, you know, the theme that might be potentially shameful.
16:07
[SPEAKER_00]: There reminds me of something in your book, I would love for you to address you bring up Renee Brown a lot, which I think is appropriate considering like she is known so much for this field of shame and vulnerability.
16:19
[SPEAKER_00]: You brought up her point about trauma bonding as something to maybe be wary of.
16:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you talk about that a little bit?
16:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this is one of those.
16:26
[SPEAKER_01]: I really wonder because Brenny Brown is a little buttoned up.
16:30
[SPEAKER_01]: She talks about being appropriate and what she won't share if it's too vulnerable.
16:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I wonder if it's not generational also, if she's not just a bit more tight-liped about things, even though she's this shame and empathy expert, she still is more reserved than our generation.
16:46
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the younger generation is even more free.
16:50
[SPEAKER_01]: with the truth of their experience.
16:51
[SPEAKER_01]: And so what we, or what she may consider trauma-bonding, young people are just like that's a conversation over lunch.
17:00
[SPEAKER_01]: He's very much like, you know, that's not intimacy either.
17:02
[SPEAKER_01]: So I'm really of two minds by trauma-bonding.
17:05
[SPEAKER_01]: We mean just rushing out with that thing in our very first five minutes of conversation.
17:10
[SPEAKER_01]: I did that much more when I was still ambivalent about my story and making meaning of it.
17:16
[SPEAKER_01]: I do hold it back more now, but mostly because it's not on my mind as much, it doesn't come up.
17:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Don't obviously when I have a book out, people are like what your book and that's good right.
17:28
[SPEAKER_01]: can't even say that without saying my story.
17:31
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, and I do, I've gone podcasts and I'll never mention the fact that I was a hooker.
17:34
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have to.
17:35
[SPEAKER_01]: There's other ways of introducing myself and my experience that does not make me vulnerable to just true.
17:41
[SPEAKER_00]: You could, I can see, you know, having read the book, how you could.
17:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Talk about the book because there's so much research in it and just discussion of history and Context I think it adds a richness to the reason that you were interested in this topic to have that as part of the story But I get how sometimes it doesn't fit or you don't feel like it or you maybe don't feel controlled with the host or whatever it is
18:02
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's true for all of us, we all have that thing that we could share because we could use our personal self to further whatever we're doing, you know, if it's professionally or whatnot, you know, there's a there's reasons why we disclose information to people for the reader sense, you know, or for the audience sense, and then sometimes we don't have to disclose that in the beginning there was like this urgent need to disclose this thing to like everybody I came across.
18:26
[SPEAKER_01]: And the more comfortable I became with these two stigmatized identities, the other two things that I had survived, sex work, and mass media humiliation.
18:36
[SPEAKER_01]: The more those were understood and resolved in my own self, the less I had to introduce myself in that way.
18:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Then I could introduce myself in all the other ways, and it was just as natural.
18:47
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't like I was withholding something.
18:49
[SPEAKER_01]: It's interesting because now I'm a mom and I guess I can trauma bond as a mom too.
18:53
[SPEAKER_01]: There's so much seemingly shameful, presumably shameful experiences we have every day.
19:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And I do probably bond with mothers over those confessions.
19:06
[SPEAKER_01]: The bad drop-off or the lunch mistakes we make and the lunches that aren't eaten or the shoes that are the wrong size or all the errors that we can condemn ourselves for.
19:17
[SPEAKER_00]: That's true, and it helps you have a sense of humor about that stuff sometimes.
19:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it doesn't feel confessional, it doesn't feel traumatic at all.
19:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Unless I couldn't share it, that's when it starts to feel trauma.
19:30
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's true.
19:30
[SPEAKER_01]: It's pale on the inside, but I don't let anything sit long enough to get stale on traumatic these days.
19:37
[SPEAKER_01]: So, and I do think that's generational.
19:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think there's something to that.
19:40
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't be gotten this from on the conversation, and we have not defined shame resilience.
19:44
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you mean by that when you say building shame resilience?
19:48
[SPEAKER_01]: So, shame resilience is the ability to feel shame, but then to just let it pass through us without that shame impacting the way we see ourselves or impacting our behavior.
19:59
[SPEAKER_01]: We still behave from an emotionally intelligent place where mindful we are our best selves in spite of shame.
20:07
[SPEAKER_01]: The opposite of that would be like shame just taking over.
20:10
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't feel it.
20:11
[SPEAKER_01]: We disavow it.
20:12
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't acknowledge the experience.
20:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's sort of it's the ghost in the machine.
20:18
[SPEAKER_01]: It sort of starts to control us and influence us in these insidious ways so that we can keep avoiding having to acknowledge that we feel in any way on worthy or inadequate.
20:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And how do you think that comes out and friendships with other people if you don't reveal?
20:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think we've all experienced that, right?
20:35
[SPEAKER_01]: When we have a friend who's just not sitting quite right with themselves and somehow it's being projected onto us, we feel competition or envy.
20:43
[SPEAKER_01]: We feel put down, rather than connecting, there's a disconnection and often times it's some unresolved or unacknowledged feelings of inadequacy within one or both people.
20:54
[SPEAKER_00]: That's so well said.
20:55
[SPEAKER_00]: You're holding something in about yourself that you are ashamed of, but it's really not even always self-shame.
21:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It's your assumption that the other person is going to judge you for it.
21:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And so then I think you treat them differently without having given them a chance.
21:08
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you do that?
21:09
[SPEAKER_01]: Or it could be?
21:10
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, their house is so much cleaner than mine.
21:12
[SPEAKER_01]: They don't judge me.
21:13
[SPEAKER_01]: They wouldn't care, but I'm judging myself.
21:15
[SPEAKER_01]: They are so much more ex than I am.
21:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm probably
21:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's sort of compare and despair attitude where we don't really realize it's not about them and their house or they've achieved it's really about how I'm measuring myself against my own unachieved ideals and feeling as if I'm falling short.
21:38
[SPEAKER_01]: That's an opportunity whenever we feel triggered by a friend we always then have that opportunity to see what is that feeling of lacking what do I want that I think I don't have and do I want that?
21:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, yes, there is a be careful what you wish for, kind of thing, and it's like a trait little saying, but sometimes you can't have that thing that that person has without also all the other things around it, so if it's like a certain career, for example, like, would you really want to work that many hours, maybe not, maybe things about your lifestyle that you'd have to give up to have that thing.
22:11
[SPEAKER_01]: It's that you don't get to just cherry pack, but the challenge is that for women, especially we're taught to value everything.
22:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you're supposed to have all the things.
22:19
[SPEAKER_01]: You're supposed to have it all.
22:21
[SPEAKER_01]: So you're supposed to have that career and the clean house and the perfect body and you're supposed to be the perfect mother who's always available for your children and you're supposed to have the list goes on.
22:32
[SPEAKER_01]: So when we see someone who has something we want, you think, why don't I have that?
22:36
[SPEAKER_01]: We don't think, oh, because this is where I'm spending my time.
22:39
[SPEAKER_01]: This is what what I'm attending to energetically.
22:42
[SPEAKER_01]: We think we should have more energy.
22:44
[SPEAKER_01]: We should have more time.
22:45
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm lacking something about myself because I don't have what she have.
22:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, only because I'm hyper aware of time.
22:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Is there anything else within your work having to do with friendship and shame that we haven't covered that we should be covering?
23:00
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that friendships can be fraught between women, one because we're taught to fear each other, and we're taught to be so self-critical that we can project those criticisms onto others, but they're also so transformative.
23:16
[SPEAKER_01]: When you find a friend who can see you, and I mean, really see you for who you are, when you feel like you're in love with a girl,
23:24
[SPEAKER_01]: feel see that same friend that I met up with at the farmers market the very first time we were friends I met her at a bookbabies library event and somehow I said I was a stay at home mom and I was like in the pits of despair I hated it.
23:39
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know how I let that reveal itself.
23:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I might not even have said it verbally.
23:43
[SPEAKER_01]: I might have just said, yeah, I'm not working right now.
23:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a home full time.
23:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And she said, oh yeah, me too.
23:49
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought I'd be canning jam, look in this.
23:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Like it was not what she thought and it was not what I thought and I could just, I felt so mirrored in that moment.
23:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And we became friends with sometimes just that one moment.
24:02
[SPEAKER_01]: It was so meaningful.
24:03
[SPEAKER_00]: something about that friendship in your book that is worth mentioning even though it's not really about this topic is I think that particular friend is something so generous which a lot of people don't do which is she included you she introduced you to other people absolutely absolutely she was sort of this conduit into like-minded people and when you have friends who you don't have to hide parts of yourself from you
24:29
[SPEAKER_01]: You know that there's a language you all speak.
24:32
[SPEAKER_01]: There's this feeling of safety that is just so necessary.
24:35
[SPEAKER_01]: So going back to like who I was then, this new stand home mom with a past.
24:41
[SPEAKER_01]: Everyone in that room has their past.
24:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Let go of that.
24:44
[SPEAKER_01]: You're not special and you are special.
24:46
[SPEAKER_01]: We are all special.
24:48
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, so that feeling of safety security, it just meant so much I was able to become my best self which is what friendships good friendships do for us.
25:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I hear from so many people, I have a Facebook group where people write in friendship issues anonymously or under their name and I'd say a comment thread that comes through a lot and I've been answering anonymous questions for 10 years, so patterns of course come up and I'd say a big one is people want this friendship so much.
25:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The friendship you're describing of safety and security and where you really feel like you can be your true self, I mean that's the ideal.
25:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think people struggle to get below the surface, like I hear from a lot of people to cut
25:28
[SPEAKER_00]: that they have friends, but they don't have that friendship.
25:30
[SPEAKER_00]: They have people to do stuff with, but by the way, even that is its own challenge.
25:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes, okay, we get to that part.
25:35
[SPEAKER_00]: You have people to do stuff with how to get to the next level of something I talk about a lot, but I'm curious, and we'll end with this point.
25:43
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you feel it is that you have done to foster that?
25:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And what could others do?
25:48
[SPEAKER_00]: That next level, below the surface.
25:51
[SPEAKER_01]: think it takes being brave and having the courage to be vulnerable.
25:55
[SPEAKER_01]: If you show yourself to someone, there's a good chance they will embrace that and reciprocate, not always.
26:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And I run into a lot of people who don't want one I got and we move on.
26:08
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, same.
26:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you use 100%?
26:11
[SPEAKER_01]: My daughter just started at a very elite private school and I
26:19
[SPEAKER_01]: I probably am unlike some of the families.
26:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Our family is different.
26:24
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a Waldorf school.
26:25
[SPEAKER_01]: They follow the rules.
26:27
[SPEAKER_01]: For reasons we don't.
26:28
[SPEAKER_01]: I felt like an outsider.
26:30
[SPEAKER_01]: And in some ways, I know not everybody wants what I got cooking.
26:34
[SPEAKER_01]: But I found my people because if you look, and you are willing and 100% you and you're paying attention, you'll find your people.
26:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And then those relationships you just have to nourish and they'll grow.
26:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, as I love that and I love that expression, not everybody wants what I'm cooking.
26:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm so true.
26:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Not everybody wants what I'm cooking either and we don't have to feed everybody.
26:57
[SPEAKER_00]: That's okay.
26:57
[SPEAKER_00]: We can do it.
26:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
26:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't.
27:00
[SPEAKER_00]: We could do that metaphor forever.
27:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I could go on and on with that.
27:02
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm so loved having this chance to talk to you, I really enjoyed your book.
27:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Shame on you.
27:07
[SPEAKER_00]: How to be a woman in the age of mortification.
27:10
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll have all of the.
27:12
[SPEAKER_00]: links in the show notes.
27:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Melissa, thank you for visiting with me today.
27:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I end every episode by saying when our friendships are going well, we are happy you're all around and I think your book speaks to that as well.
27:23
[SPEAKER_01]: So much for having me.
27:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And while you're here for just one moment, I love to remind you that you can find me on Instagram at your Nina Friendship.
27:32
[SPEAKER_00]: You can join the Facebook group at GRNINA.
27:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The group where we have lots of conversation, and you can subscribe to my newsletter at dernina.subsaf.com, where I do a lot of posts about what's going on in the show.
27:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I also answered anonymous questions there.
27:46
[SPEAKER_00]: I love to hear from people.
27:48
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is all meant to be a conversation always between me and between you, between your friends.
27:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Share the episodes if they're helping you.
27:56
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, thank you, I will see you next time.
27:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye.