David McElroy

For several days now, the U.S. government has been doing its best Chicken Little impersonation — even though we still don’t know exactly where the sky is falling or how it’s supposed to be a big deal.

ABC News quotes a source who says the government doesn’t know an “exact target” for an attack, but then the source admits to not having a clue: “We do not know whether they mean an embassy, an airbase, an aircraft, trains,” the source said.

In other words, the sky is falling, but we have no idea what we’re warning people about. Or where it might happened. Or what might happen.

U.S. senators and congressmen sounded grim but vague when they made the rounds of television talk shows on Sunday. U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) said the danger is “the most serious threat that I’ve seen in the last several years.” Rep. Michael T. McCaul (R-Texas) said, “And I must say this is probably one of the most specific and credible threats I’ve seen perhaps since 9/11. And that’s why everybody is taking this so seriously.”

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I made a mistake Wednesday afternoon. I have a friend who’s gotten married and moved to the other side of Birmingham, so I’m keeping an eye on her nearby house while it’s on the market. When she gets word that a real estate agent is coming to show the place, I go over and make sure everything is clean and ready for showing. If it’s hot inside and there’s enough time, I turn on the air conditioning.

Wednesday afternoon, she called to tell me someone was coming in about an hour. I dropped by the house to check things out. The place didn’t seem especially hot and there were also a couple of ceiling fans running. Since the people would be there within about an hour, I left the air set on 79. It didn’t seem warm enough inside to warrant turning on the air for a 10-minute walkthrough, especially with ceiling fans running. I thought about it, but it didn’t seem like a big deal.

When my friend got feedback from the showing agent Thursday morning, the only specific complaint was that the house was hot and stuffy since the air was set on 79. Most normal people would have simply seen the complaint as unreasonable for the context. At worst, a normal person would have thought, “Oh, I guess I should have turned the air on. I’ll do that next time.”

For me, it was enough to set off horrible feelings of failure and shame. Seriously. It was enough to make me feel as though I’d messed up and would cause my friend to lose the sale. This wasn’t a cognitive process. It was all about deep feelings of being a bad person — of feeling shame.

I’m a perfectionist. I’ve only admitted that in the past four or five years. People had accused me all of my adult life of being a perfectionist, but I’d denied it. And I was certain I wasn’t. If I were a perfectionist, everything I did would be perfect. Right? Instead, I could look at various parts of my life and see how I let some things be anything but perfect.

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As soon as Brené Brown started talking about shame, she had my attention. I had been told that Brown was talking about vulnerability and connection to others, but to get there, she started in a much uglier place — one I could identify with.

Brown is a researcher in social work at the University of Houston. In a 20-minute TED talk she gave a few years ago, she talked about her research into love and human connection — and those things inevitably lead to vulnerability, authenticity and (for some of us) shame.

I had been told that her talk was about human connection — and how her work had convinced her that’s why we’re living this life — so I was curious what she had to say about it. It was easy to see it as interesting academic research when I first heard about it. What I got from listening was far more than academic. (I’ve embedded Brown’s TED talk at the bottom of this article, and I hope you’ll take the time to listen to her.)

Brown said her research showed that shame and fear are the things that keep connections from happening. We don’t connect when we feel shame about ourselves — and we’re afraid that others won’t see us as good enough if they see who we really are. That’s the part where she really had my attention.

I grew up in a family where shame was a common thing. I grew up feeling as though I could never be good enough. No matter what I did, I didn’t feel as though I was loved and accepted for who I was. There was always another hoop to jump through — emotionally — in order to be “good enough.” And I could never jump through enough hoops. My father would swear today that I imagined it all, but both of my sisters grew up feeling the same way. We’ve carried it into our adult lives and it’s reflected itself in different negative ways for all three of us.

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