Good Inside: An Anti-Shame Anthem to Connect with and Return to Our Best Selves

I had a complicated childhood, and like so many other vulnerable children, past and present, I had a parent who could not love me well, who certainly did not believe I was good inside, and who felt it was appropriate to tell me so on most days of my first two decades.

It took me decades to heal that wound.

I do not want my kids to wait until they are thirty-six years old to absorb this message, and I do not want your kiddos to wait either. So I wrote this song.

I know I’m good inside and that you are good inside, and I’ve verified it from multiple sources.

 

1. 1. Our sacred text. We were made in the divine image, and our creator said it was very good. Member?

1. 1. Dr. Becky Kennedy.

1. 1. My life experience, finally.

The Yom Kippur I could not return

On Yom Kippur in 2020 I was stuck in every direction at once, and I mean that literally: I was in lockdown, I had lost my job, I had three little kids, and a desperate desire for a divorce.

I couldn’t go to services, so I designed myself an audio experience of liturgical pieces and podcasts. I wound up spending the entire day with Brené Brown, her podcasts and her books, hours and hours of it, and she opened my eyes to courage, shame, and vulnerability in ways I had never considered. I finally had words for something I had always felt and could never name, which is that deep shame had demolished my self-worth, and that the demolition had eroded my capacity to connect to the divine and left me unable to recognize my own divine spark. Here was the day designed for return, cue We Return by Elana Arian and Noah Aronson playing in my head, and I could not return, because I could not see the self I was supposed to be returning toward.

Many more self-help books and podcasts, ongoing work with my therapist, and a few rounds of EMDR later, I came up with a tune that I hope can help vaccinate against that kind of bottom.

It was a turning point.

Between Brené Brown, Dr. Becky Kennedy, and Dr. Lisa Miller, I found a path toward reflection and repair for myself. I realized that I was capable, and I started to creep toward more confident, even though the voices in my head and in my home loudly combated me.

I left my husband a few months later, rebranded, and built a business doing work I love. Once I believed I was good inside, I was capable again.

I couldn’t access that goodness when I was in isolation, in pain, and in an unhealthy relationship.

The belief came first, and everything after it followed

I believed it my whole childhood, and then I went to the wrong college, and then I married the wrong person, and there were innumerable consequences spread across decades that all trace back to the same foundational problem, which is that I did not believe I was good inside and so I kept making choices that matched.

That is why I ended up writing a song about it, because a belief like that does not announce itself at the moment you are picking a college or a spouse, it just sits underneath and quietly steers.

Does this person need a new skill, or a change to their environment?

That question is an incredibly useful framework Dr. Becky Kennedy has given us, and I ask it constantly now, about the kiddos in front of me in personal and professional settings.

Here is how she gets you there. Picture a kid who is flailing in a pool.

Are you angry at that kid? Probably not. Is that kid going to get grounded for flailing? Probably not. In that situation it is very clear that she either needs a new skill, which is learning how to swim, or she needs a different environment, which might mean floaties, or the shallow end, or not being in the pool right now. Those are the two scenarios.

And she says we need to approach all of parenting and all of education exactly like that.

So when something is not going the way anybody hoped, the question I reach for is whether this person is missing a skill nobody has taught them yet, or whether the room around them needs to change. It works on four-year-olds, on my teenagers, on staff, and on me at five in the afternoon.

Her book Good Inside is on my list of 10 books every songleader should read, and if you have not gotten to it yet, please do.

Guilt helps us do better, and shame stops us

This is the distinction from Brené Brown that I use more than any other, and she is unusually plain about it.

Guilt, she says, is “adaptive and helpful,” and she describes it as “holding something we’ve done or failed to do up against our values and feeling psychological discomfort.” That is a person measuring an action against who they want to be, which is exactly the work we are hoping to teach.

Shame she treats completely differently. She defines it as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging,” and she is blunt about what it produces: “I don’t believe shame is helpful or productive. In fact, I think shame is much more likely to be the source of destructive, hurtful behavior than the solution or cure.”

Read those two side by side, because the difference between I did a bad thing and I am a bad thing is the whole ballgame, and almost none of us can reliably tell which one we have just been handed, at any age.

It also lines up with what any of us can watch happen in a classroom. Reflection asks a person to look straight at something they did and stay in the room while they look, and that is guilt doing its job. If instead you believe the problem is you, then looking only confirms the verdict, so you stop looking, and without reflection there is no repair.

Separating who you are from what you did

Dr. Becky says this about herself before she says it about anybody’s kid.

In The Single Most Important Parenting Strategy she describes snapping at her son over dinner, and then walking herself back with this: “Self-repair means separating your identity, who you are, from your behavior, what you did.”

She tells herself two things are true. “I’m not proud of my latest behavior and my latest behavior doesn’t define me.” And then the line that stopped me the first time I heard it: “Even as I struggle on the outside, I remain good inside.”

She lands it as, in her words, “a good parent, identity, who was having a hard time, behavior,” which is a sentence I could have written, because I have a whole other song about people having a hard time rather than giving you one.

Our tradition got there a few thousand years earlier

When we talk about sin in Judaism we are talking about missing the mark. Cheyt. Somebody aimed at a target and did not hit it.

So maybe he needed to stand closer, or maybe his bow was made badly, or maybe he needs a good deal more practice than he has had so far. Nobody looks at that guy and questions his character.

Which is skill or environment again, arriving from a completely different direction.

Why kids end up saying it to themselves

Here is the part that worries me most, which is that kids do not only receive these messages, they take over delivery, and they do it fast.

They also learn it from plenty of grown-ups. I hear adults model this out loud constantly, in front of children, narrating their own mistakes with I’m such an idiot and I can’t do anything right, and the kiddos in earshot are taking notes on how a person is supposed to talk to herself.

Dr. Becky names the voice exactly. “Something’s wrong with me. I’m unlovable. I make bad things happen.”

And she explains why a child would ever choose that, which I had never understood until I heard it. She cites Ronald Fairbairn, who wrote that for a child, it is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the devil. So a kiddo left alone after something distressing will take the badness onto herself, because carrying it is the price of getting to keep believing that the grown-ups and the world around her are safe and good. It is the most loyal thing a small person can do, and it is devastating.

Then, as she puts it, “while self-blame works for us in childhood, we all know it works against us in adulthood.” Those same three sentences turn into the core fears of an enormous number of grown people, and she is direct that they are “the childhood stories we wrote when we were left alone following distressing events that went unrepaired.”

I read that and recognized my own operating manual, roughly thirty years after it was written.

I desperately want to vaccinate our kiddos against a life believing they are less than good

I did not want my kids waiting decades for this the way I did, desperately did not want it, which is what sent me looking at what I could actually do rather than just feel badly about what I had missed.

Within my sphere of influence, it turns out I am uniquely qualified for one very particular job.

I understand how melody makes meaning stick, how the brain encodes and retrieves. I know how to use zipper songs to invite engagement, and I know how to build groups through responsive musical exchanges, see Shir Chadash. And I understand, from the inside and not from a book, what it does to a person to practice recognizing the behaviors that are not in alignment with who you want to be, while your capacity to do otherwise gets affirmed.

Good Inside is a zipper song, so the room writes half of it

Good Inside gets re-created every time it is shared. The A part is the chorus, and the B part is the zipper, where the prompt is a challenging behavior. Somebody sings even if I and fills in the blank, and the whole room answers you are good inside. The behavior is different every pass and the answer never changes.

I take the first turn myself, and I never require anyone to speak aloud, because I do not want to put a single person on the spot.

That is the slide I use when I teach it, and you are welcome to take a copy for your own room.

An operating system for refuting the environment

I wrote this song to install something a person can call on when they need it, and sadly we know that not all people and environments will recognize the brilliance of the children we know and love.

All of us end up in non-optimal environments, regularly, and I do not only mean the ones that make the news. It might be a hard classroom, or a bad year, or a boss or a coach or a partner, or a voice in your own head that has been running unchallenged since you were about seven. At some point nearly everybody needs a way to refute what their environment is telling them about who they are, and most of us go hunting for that tool at the exact moment we are least equipped to find it.

So I want this sitting in a kiddo’s brain body long before the day they need it, as a melody already sung a hundred times on ordinary afternoons when nothing at all was wrong, so that it is simply there on the day something goes wrong.

Connecting with and returning to our best selves

Teshuvah means turning back, not becoming somebody new, but returning to a self you have already been. So the whole season rests on a claim we almost never say out loud, that there was a good self there to begin with and it is worth walking back toward.

That claim is on the first page of our sacred text, where we are made in the divine image and our creator looks at all of it and calls it tov me’od, very good.

So before we ask anybody to look at where the arrow landed, we hand them back the archer.

We can’t always tell who needs this message the most

About one in seven children in the United States experienced abuse or neglect in the past year, and the CDC notes that figure is likely an undercount because so much goes unreported. In the 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, 61.5% of high school students said a parent or other adult in their home had insulted them or put them down, which was the most commonly reported adverse childhood experience of all of them.

I read those numbers, and then I look at a circle of kiddos sitting on a carpet in front of me, and I do the math, and I do not love the math.

This song is for every one of them, and it is especially for the ones carrying something, and we do not get to know which ones those are. I admire Dr. Becky enormously, and it is a literal dream of mine that this song lands on her radar and that she might consider sharing it with kiddos.

Good Inside is streaming now, find “Dr. Emily” wherever you stream.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgy3EsIYaKo