Brené Brown: vulnerability, shame and the seven elements of trust

Who is Brené Brown?

Brené Brown is an American social work researcher, born in 1965 in San Antonio, Texas. She studied at the University of Texas at Austin and earned her doctorate in social work from the University of Houston in 2002. She is now a research professor there and holds a chair at the Graduate College of Social Work. She also teaches management in Austin. So she is neither a clinical psychologist nor a couples therapist: her field is the research interview.

Her method is called grounded theory. You start from long interviews, code what people say line by line, look for the patterns that keep coming back, and let concepts emerge instead of testing a hypothesis set in advance. By her own count, she has done more than a thousand interviews over about twenty years, at first with women, on a subject she almost single-handedly made speakable: shame.

The world discovered her in 2010 through a TEDx talk in Houston, “The Power of Vulnerability,” which became one of the most-watched talks in TED history, and then through a series of books translated into dozens of languages. Why it matters for your relationship: her words for shame, vulnerability and the seven elements of trust have become the everyday vocabulary of many couples talking about what keeps them from showing up as they really are.

The central idea

Shame is the fear of being cut off from connection: the belief that if the other person really saw who I am, they would no longer want me. It pushes you to hide, to attack or to disappear. Its antidote is not self-confidence but vulnerability: taking the risk of showing yourself with no guarantee of being well received. And vulnerability is only possible where trust exists, which, Brown says, is built not through grand gestures but in small moments, repeated again and again, when the other person handles carefully what matters to you.

Key concepts

Shame is not guilt

Brown draws on a distinction established by quantitative research on emotions: guilt says “I did something bad” and pushes you to repair; shame says “I am bad” and pushes you to hide. In a couple, that changes everything: you can apologize for an act, but there is nothing you can do about a whole person. A criticism aimed at the person (“you’re selfish”) produces shame, and so defensiveness or withdrawal; a criticism aimed at the act leaves a door open.

Vulnerability

For Brown, vulnerability is uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. Saying “I love you” first, asking for help, admitting a fear, reaching out physically after an argument, asking a question when you dread the answer. It is not weakness, and it does not mean telling everything to anyone: vulnerability is shared with the people who have earned the right to hear it. Her interviews describe it as the birthplace of intimacy, creativity and courage.

Shame resilience

In her 2006 article, based on interviews with 215 women, Brown describes four resources used by women who get through shame without being crushed by it: recognizing their vulnerability instead of denying it, understanding the context (the social expectations that manufacture shame), reaching out to relationships where they are met with empathy, and talking about their shame instead of keeping quiet. Empathy is the most powerful remedy she found: shame does not survive well when it is told to someone who responds with understanding.

The seven elements of trust (BRAVING)

Her interviews on trust produced seven elements, gathered in the acronym BRAVING. Boundaries: you say what yours are, you respect mine. Reliability: you do what you say you will, not once, every time. Accountability: you own your mistakes and you repair. Vault: what I tell you stays with you, and you don’t share what isn’t yours to share. Integrity: choosing courage over comfort. Non-judgment: we can ask for help without being judged. Generosity: you assume the most generous thing about my intentions, then you check. What this offers a couple: “I don’t trust you anymore” becomes a sentence you can break down, element by element.

The marble jar

An image taken from a story about her daughter: trust fills up like a jar, one marble at a time, each time the other person remembers a name, shows up on time, keeps a secret, notices you’re tired. And it empties the same way. What Brown stresses is that spectacular betrayal is rare; what destroys trust in most couples is disengagement: no longer paying attention, no longer making the effort.

What the research says

Here we need to separate two things: Brené Brown’s own research, and the research on what she talks about.

• Her own work is qualitative. The key publication is the 2006 article in Families in Society, based on 215 interviews with women, which lays out shame resilience theory. She later designed, with two colleagues, a 12-session psychoeducational program called Connections. A pilot with 19 women in treatment for addiction showed improvements in internalized shame and depressive symptoms.
• Her books (from 2007 on) build on the continuation of these interviews, men included, but they are not peer-reviewed publications: they are an author’s syntheses, resting on her method.
• The shame/guilt distinction is, for its part, solidly established by decades of independent quantitative research: guilt is linked to repair and empathy, shame to withdrawal, anger and psychological difficulties.
• An independent grounded theory study (2008, Journal of Counseling Psychology), conducted with 13 adults, describes ways of bouncing back from shame that are very close to Brown’s: reconnecting with others, reframing, self-acceptance.

In short: Brown’s concepts are consistent with the research on shame and guilt, and her own data is rich but qualitative. BRAVING, for its part, has never been validated as a measurement tool.

Limits and criticisms

The first limit is methodological, and she acknowledges it: grounded theory generates concepts, it does not test them. No controlled study has shown that couples who practice vulnerability or BRAVING do better than others. The original samples were exclusively female and American, and the later books, which extend to men, no longer detail the data in the same way.

The second criticism concerns the gap between fame and evidence. Brené Brown has become a brand: talks, podcasts, series, leadership training programs. Her concepts circulate in companies and couples with an authority the scientific literature has not given them. She is also criticized for a very individual and very American view of vulnerability, one that assumes an environment where showing yourself is safe. In a relationship where the other person uses what you confide, vulnerability is not courage, it is a risk.

What remains: a rarely clear vocabulary for talking about shame and trust, and intuitions that are compatible with what quantitative research knows. It is as vocabulary, not as proof, that MyLoveLab uses them.

How MyLoveLab uses it

The Trust and support dimension of the program uses the seven BRAVING elements as a way to read what is happening: when trust wobbles, you look at which brick is affected (reliability? the vault? generosity?) instead of throwing everything out. The shame/guilt distinction is used in the Communication dimension to target the act and never the person. Vulnerability as a condition for closeness runs through the Attachment and Intimacy dimensions: showing yourself, asking, reaching out. The test measures whether you can show yourself as you are without fearing judgment, and whether you can count on the other person.

Further reading

• I Thought It Was Just Me · Book, 2007The first book, and the closest to her research: shame in women and resilience.
• The Gifts of Imperfection (in French: La grâce de l’imperfection) · Book, 2010Ten guideposts for living a wholehearted life, drawn from her interviews.
• Daring Greatly (in French: Le pouvoir de la vulnérabilité) · Book, 2012The central book: vulnerability in life, love, parenting and work.
• Braving the Wilderness (in French: Braver sa nature sauvage) · Book, 2017True belonging and the courage to stand alone; BRAVING applied to yourself.
• Dare to Lead (in French: Oser diriger) · Book, 2018The leadership version, where BRAVING is presented in detail with an inventory.
• Atlas of the Heart · Book, 2021A lexicon of 87 emotions and experiences, including shame, guilt and humiliation.

Frequently asked questions

References

1. Brown, B. (2006). Shame resilience theory: A grounded theory study on women and shame. Families in Society, 87(1), 43-52.
2. Brown, B., Hernandez, V. R. & Villarreal, Y. (2011). Connections: A 12-session psychoeducational shame resilience curriculum. In R. L. Dearing & J. P. Tangney (dir.), Shame in the Therapy Hour. American Psychological Association.
3. Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection. Hazelden.
4. Brown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly. Gotham Books.
5. Brown, B. (2017). Braving the Wilderness. Random House.
6. Brown, B. (2018). Dare to Lead. Random House.
7. Tangney, J. P. & Dearing, R. L. (2002). Shame and Guilt. Guilford Press.
8. Van Vliet, K. J. (2008). Shame and resilience in adulthood: A grounded theory study. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 55(2), 233-245.

See the full bibliography