If we’re going to eradicate shame, we must learn to normalize the hard parts of life–the parts that we don’t want to talk about, but we need to.

This morning my wife and I were driving to a doctor’s appointment. It was an appointment related to our fertility journey and starting our family. She said to me, “I would like to film more of this process and share more of this process with people.”

I have to tell you. I had this gut reaction of like, why, why would we do that? Why would we share the details of what we’re going through? She and I have decided to talk more openly about our experience, but I still had this immediate shame-based reaction even though we’ve decided that.

I didn’t let her know because I quickly realized that there’s a reason we need to share openly. There’s a reason we need to normalize conversations about the hard parts of life. It’s so that we don’t feel alone in our trauma (grief, hardship, despair, depression, anxiety, etc.).

There’s something difficult in your life too.

I know you can relate. You’ve probably experienced something excruciating and hard, but you didn’t talk about it. So you felt isolated and alone, and you thought silently to yourself, “Nobody understands what I’m going through. Nobody knows what it’s like to be me.”

Until you heard someone talk about it, and then something shifted inside of you. If felt as though this person understands what you’re going through, and maybe you’re not alone. This is the point. This is why we need to normalize hard conversations around the hard things in authentic and helpful ways for all of humanity. Normalizing these conversations is about learning to share your wounds.

It’s talking about your infertility journey, divorce, heartbreak, what it was like to lose a parent or a child, miscarriages, diseases, losing a job, going through abuse, being alone. You know what is difficult in your life.

It doesn’t matter if what’s hard for you isn’t hard for me because we don’t rank each other’s pain. If you rank your pain against someone else’s pain, stop immediately. What’s hard for someone else might not be hard for you, but what’s hard for you might not be hard for someone else. So instead, let’s learn to have these conversations and make it normal to talk about the parts of life we don’t want to share. When you do, you realize you’re not alone. Some people understand what your going through.

Shame is a real barrier to sharing.

So why are we so unwilling to share the things that are happening? Shame. At a young age, situations teach us to feel shame for any inadequacy or anything that could be perceived as a weakness or thought of as wrong with us. Shame keeps us from normalizing conversations around the hard parts of life.

Shame is so ingrained in every human being on this planet. Whether you realize it or not, you battle shame until you learn to release it. Shame makes us believe that if a situation is more than we can handle, we can’t talk about it because it’s like admitting that something is broken with us.

Shame wants you to think that something is wrong with you. It makes you connect the hard situation with your self-worth. You are not broken, but shame wants you to believe that you are.

If you believe that you’re broken, why would you talk about the situations that make you feel broken? Even though your experience isn’t unique, shame wants you to think it is. So as long as you feel broken, you’ll stay quiet about the things that would benefit other people.

Embrace the full human experience.

You are a human being having the entire human experience, including the beautiful, incredible, amazing moments and the dark, painful, depressing moments. That’s the full spectrum of the human experience.

But somewhere along the way, we’re taught to keep the shadow side of life in the shadows. So instead of talking about it, we just sit around feeling miserable and alone in our pain, grief, and sadness because no one is brave enough to normalize talking about those things.

I’ll go first. My wife and I are trying to start a family, but something isn’t working. So for us, starting a family looks like doctors, appointments, needles, and medical procedures. It looks like me giving my wife painful shots every day, hoping that it works. It involves strangers telling us when to be intimate and when not to. It involves manufacturing hope every month and mustering up the courage to start all over when it didn’t work. It involves smiling as we watch our friends get pregnant. It’s not exciting. It’s not fun. It’s not romantic. It’s not private, but that’s our experience. And millions of couples around the world are experiencing the same thing.

Because we feel like something is broken within us, we don’t talk about it. And so, an isolating situation becomes even more isolating.

But what if shame wasn’t part of the equation? What if we didn’t think that we were broken and would just be free to talk about something that so many other people need to talk about? What if we shared the highs and the lows and the good and dark moments. And in doing that, other people would also be free to talk.

If shame weren’t part of the equation, we would know how to separate the hard situation from the person experiencing the hard situation. You are not your pain, your darkest hour, or your biggest failure.

You are not your darkest day.

You are not broken. You are a human having the whole human experience, which is depressing and devastating some days. Some days it’s isolating and painful, and invasive. Sometimes it’s heartbreaking, but it’s okay to admit that and talk about all of it because you are not your darkest day. You are not your pain. You are not your sadness.

Until we learn to normalize conversations about the shadow side of life, we will keep believing that somehow, because we’re experiencing hard things, we are alone and broken and that no one can ever know.

There is a different way. Let’s learn to normalize the hard conversations so that we can collectively heal our wounds, find sanctuary in one another and understand our worth on a profound level.