Before you start

This is a short book. You can read it in two or three evenings.

It has two subjects, and I think they're really one. The first is what to do with the shame other people have put on you, including the old kind that arrived in childhood and never left. The second is how to stop doing the same thing to the people around you. Most books treat these as separate problems with separate readers, the wounded on one shelf and the ones who wound on another. My view is that they're usually the same person on different days, and that the second habit grows out of the first.

So the book asks you to read from both positions, and some chapters will be more comfortable than others. If you came here because of what was done to you, the chapters on what you do to others may sting. If you came because you heard yourself say something to your child that you swore you'd never say, the early chapters may look like a detour. You'll need them by chapter 5.

Most of the book examines beliefs. "They had a point about me." "Being hard on myself is what keeps me going." "It worked on me." "I'm only being honest." These beliefs keep shaming alive, in your head and in your house, and each of them is partly reasonable. I'll try to treat each one fairly. The practical chapter is number 10, and it comes after the beliefs that would otherwise have undermined it.

You don't have to wait for chapter 10. If you catch a cruel sentence on its way out tonight, keep it in. Nothing later in the book depends on you saying it.

A word about a word. "Toxic shame" is a phrase from the self-help shelves, and I'll mostly avoid it because I think a plainer distinction does the job better. The distinction is between feeling bad about something you did and feeling bad about what you are. Nearly everything in this book rests on it, and chapter 2 sets it out.

A few chapters ask you to check a claim against your own memory. Please do those. You have decades of evidence about how shame has worked in your life, and it's better evidence than mine.