Most people know Brené Brown's work on shame through her talks and books about vulnerability. Fewer have read the research underneath it, and it says something worth sitting with.
The web
In her grounded theory study of women and shame, Brown described shame as feeling trapped in a web of layered, conflicting expectations about who you’re supposed to be (Brown, 2006). Her sample was women. The web shows up for a lot of other people too.
Her model of shame resilience has four parts:
Recognizing your vulnerability to shame
Reaching out
Speaking shame
Critical awareness: seeing the social forces behind the expectations
That last piece tends to get lost. In its popular form, shame resilience can sound like a personal project. Be more vulnerable. Talk about it. Connect. All good advice. But it skips the question critical awareness asks: who wrote the expectations in the first place?
Who holds the strings
Devon Price takes that question further. In Unlearning Shame, he describes systemic shame as the self-blame people absorb when society holds individuals responsible for problems systems created (Price, 2024). His proposed antidote is expansive recognition: seeing your place in the larger social picture and knowing your struggles are shared.
For neurodivergent people, this lands hard. School rewards sitting still. Workplaces reward eye contact, small talk, and steady output. Healthcare frames differences as deficits. When an ND person can't meet those standards, the shame feels personal. The standard itself rarely gets questioned.
Therapy is an institution too
We like to think of therapy as the place people heal from systems. But our field writes plenty of rules of its own:
No-show policies
Homework framed as compliance
Intake forms built around deficits
“Resistance” as a label for clients who don’t engage the way we expected
Each one can quietly hand shame to a client for not fitting a system built around a different brain. Looking for that is part of our job.
What this means clinically
Shame work with ND clients can hold two questions at once:
What happened, and how do you feel about it?
Whose rule did you break, and was it fair?
The second question doesn’t excuse real harm. It separates shame that points to something worth repairing from shame that was handed over by a system that never fit. Both feel real. Only one is the client’s to carry.
What to do differently
- Name structural sources of shame out loud in session, alongside personal ones.
- When a client says "I'm just lazy" or "I'm too much," ask where they first heard it.
- Audit your own policies for rules that punish neurodivergence.
- Pair shame resilience skills with critical awareness, the part of Brown's model that looks outward.
- Work on your own understanding of how systems of oppression instill shame to benefit the systems.
The question underneath
Brown’s web was never just a picture of how shame feels. It’s a map of where shame comes from. Somebody spun those threads. Schools did. Workplaces did. Medicine did. Sometimes we did.
Your ND clients have spent years believing they got tangled because something was wrong with them. Helping them see the threads, and who’s holding them, won’t make the shame vanish. It does shrink it. “I’m broken” becomes “This was never built for me.”
That shift is where real resilience starts. Being more vulnerable inside a system that shames you only goes so far. Seeing the system clearly is what lets people stop blaming themselves for it.
So next time a client brings you shame, ask both questions. Then ask one more, of yourself: which of these rules did I write?
References
Brown, B. (2006). Shame resilience theory: A grounded theory study on women and shame. Families in Society, 87(1), 43-52. https://doi.org/10.1606/1044-3894.3483
Price, D. (2024). Unlearning shame: How we can reject self-blame culture and reclaim our power. Harmony.