Author’s Note (December 2025):
This essay was first drafted in March 2025, during the height of the Israeli military assault on Gaza. Since then, the situation has only worsened. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, famine has taken hold in Gaza, and international human rights organizations have increasingly used the language of genocide. Brené Brown has, contrary to earlier reports, made public statements regarding the “war”. However, these statements not only fail to address the crisis with the clarity and moral weight it demands, but they also underscore the core argument of this piece: that the framework she promotes is fundamentally inadequate when confronted with systemic violence, colonial domination, and genocide. This essay is written for mental health professionals, educators, and engaged general readers, particularly those invested in trauma-informed practice, ethical public discourse, and the intersection of psychology with social justice. Readers should leave with a critical understanding of how frameworks, such as Brené Brown’s, may fall short when confronted with systemic violence and collective trauma, and why integrating political analysis into practices of empathy and vulnerability is a moral imperative.
Brené Brown and the Betrayal of Her Own Teachings: Speaking Without Saying Anything
For many, Brené Brown has become a kind of cultural touchstone for understanding vulnerability, shame, and the courage to live authentically. Her books have sold millions of copies, her TED talks have gone viral, and her research on emotional life has shaped how people think about connection and belonging. But when confronted with mass violence, ethnic cleansing, and what leading experts have now identified as genocidal acts in Gaza, Brown has demonstrated a failure that is not merely personal. It is paradigmatic. Her words, and more pointedly her omissions, reveal the limits of a psychological framework that centers individual healing while leaving systemic injustice unnamed and unchallenged.
When Brown finally released her essay “Not Looking Away” (2024), it was after weeks of criticism for her silence. In the essay, she attempts to express empathy for both Israelis and Palestinians, calling for peace and condemning violence in general terms. She states that she sees “God fully in the faces of Palestinians and Israelis alike” and emphasizes shared humanity. On the surface, this might appear compassionate. But it is precisely this kind of carefully balanced, morally ambiguous language that constitutes a betrayal of her own teachings.
If vulnerability is about showing up and being seen, then why does Brown refuse to name what she is seeing? If courage means speaking the truth of our hearts, why is her public voice so cautious and vague in the face of atrocity? Her statement avoids naming Israel as the perpetrator of structural violence and avoids acknowledging the immense asymmetry between occupier and occupied. In doing so, Brown’s words serve to soften and depoliticize the horror, casting the genocide in Gaza as a mutual tragedy rather than a deliberate and historic process of settler-colonial elimination (Pappé, 2006).
There is a deep contradiction at play here. The very researcher who has built a career on the importance of truth-telling, on standing in the discomfort of hard emotions, retreats into generalities when the discomfort stems from political power. Her framework, which has helped many people navigate interpersonal trauma, seems to collapse entirely when faced with collective trauma, particularly trauma inflicted by a state power aligned with Western geopolitical interests.
Lara Sheehi (2022) argues that psychology has long operated in service of empire. Under the guise of neutrality, psychologists and thought leaders have too often reinforced the status quo. Sheehi critiques the weaponization of “clinical objectivity” to justify disengagement from political struggle, especially when it involves the suffering of colonized people. Brown’s refusal to center the reality of Palestinians, even as she discusses her own spiritual anguish over witnessing violence, exemplifies the very phenomenon Sheehi describes. Her brand of therapeutic empathy becomes an instrument of erasure. To address this limitation, trauma-informed practitioners can name and address the power structures, such as colonialism, racism, and state violence, that shape collective trauma, rather than focusing only on individual emotional responses.
Silence in the face of state violence is not neutral. But neither is vague speech that avoids moral clarity. What Brown has offered is not the courage of vulnerability, but the comfort of palatable sadness. She gives her audience the tools to feel without the tools to act. She creates space for sorrow but not for solidarity. Solidarity requires more than empathy. Practitioners and public figures should model moral clarity by identifying those responsible for systemic harm and supporting those most affected through advocacy and action.
This is not an incidental oversight. It is a design flaw in the architecture of her work. Brown’s model of shame is deeply individualistic. Shame is described as an internal feeling that disconnects us from our sense of worth, something to be addressed through personal practices of self-compassion and openness. But what happens when shame is not internal at all, but structural? What happens when shame is not a misplaced personal wound, but a justified moral response to one’s complicity in systemic harm?
bell hooks (2000) reminds us that healing cannot happen in isolation from justice. Love and compassion, when divorced from a material analysis of power, become tools of pacification. Brown’s rhetoric of connection risks doing just that. In her framing, shame is to be overcome through emotional expression, rather than used as a compass pointing toward the need for moral and political reckoning.
Sara Ahmed (2010) critiques the figure of the “angry subject” in liberal discourse. The angry subject disrupts institutional comfort. She is dismissed, silenced, or pathologized. Ahmed explains how happiness and civility are weaponized to maintain power. In a similar vein, Brown’s work rewards those who are emotionally fluent in acceptable ways, those who cry, those who reflect, those who apologize. But those who name, rage, and refuse to comply with emotional decorum are often excluded from the conversation.
This framework cannot hold space for the grief of a mother in Gaza holding the dismembered body of her child. It cannot accommodate the righteous rage of Palestinians who have lost generation after generation to displacement, siege, and massacre. It was never built to. Brown’s therapeutic paradigm is not equipped for genocide. And yet, she continues to apply it, as if the same tools used to navigate workplace dynamics or marital vulnerability can somehow stretch to hold the obliteration of entire neighborhoods.
Let us be clear. The death toll in Gaza is not an abstraction. It is the real-time unfolding of ethnic cleansing, broadcast for all to see. Human rights experts from the United Nations and organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented war crimes. South Africa has brought a case of genocide to the International Court of Justice. The blockade, the starvation, the targeting of hospitals, the erasure of entire families from civil records, these are not unfortunate side effects of war. They are symptoms of a broader political project: the erasure of Palestinian life.
For Brown to frame this as a tragedy experienced by “both sides” is to erase the reality of occupation. It prioritizes emotional safety over moral responsibility. It is to center her discomfort at having to navigate complexity rather than centering the lived experience of those being bombed, starved, and silenced.
Brown’s public statement, though well-meaning in tone, fails precisely where it matters most. It retreats from naming power. It avoids disrupting the comfort of her audience. And in doing so, it reveals the structural limitations of her platform and practice. She did not “stay silent” in the literal sense. But her decision to speak in abstractions, to name grief without naming perpetrators, functions as a form of strategic silence. It is the kind of silence that masquerades as neutrality while enabling further violence.
Gayatri Spivak (1988) writes of the “epistemic violence” that occurs when the voices of the oppressed are not just ignored but actively overwritten. When public intellectuals offer diluted accounts of suffering, they contribute to this violence. They do not just fail to speak; they speak over. In Brown’s case, her choice to uplift her own spiritual process in the aftermath of violence, rather than amplify the voices of those experiencing it directly, enacts this dynamic in real time.
The scholar and activist Frantz Fanon (1963) argued that decolonization is always a violent process, not because the colonized choose violence, but because colonial systems only recognize force. For Fanon, the insistence on civility from the oppressed is a means of suppressing their humanity. In this light, Brown’s appeal to shared pain without shared accountability becomes not a bridge, but a barrier. It denies the colonized their rage and centers the emotions of those who benefit from colonial power.
Spiritual bypassing, a term psychologists use to describe the use of spiritual language to avoid facing painful truths, is deeply present in Brown’s work. In her statement, she leans on references to God, to shared human dignity, to peace. But peace without justice is not peace. It is pacification. As Seraj (2024) notes, when spiritual frameworks are invoked without political clarity, they become tools for obfuscation. They soothe the conscience of the privileged while leaving the oppressed unheard.
One of the most disturbing effects of this kind of moral ambiguity is its impact on bystanders. When people who follow Brown, many of whom are therapists, educators, and community leaders, witness her refusal to name the genocide, they may follow suit. They may interpret her language as a model for how to speak about violence. They may decide that expressing empathy for “both sides” is sufficient. This is how complicity spreads, not through explicit endorsement, but through the quiet modeling of disengagement.
As Muna Kim (2024) argues, those who build careers around healing cannot pretend that neutrality absolves them of responsibility. On the contrary, the larger the platform, the greater the obligation to speak with clarity. This is especially true when that platform has been built by drawing on the language of trauma and recovery. Brown’s books are filled with stories of people learning to reclaim their voices. Yet in the face of genocide, she chooses to soften her voice until it says nothing.
There are alternative models. Scholars and writers such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Lara Sheehi have articulated frameworks that integrate the personal with the political. For Lorde (1984), silence is never neutral. “Your silence will not protect you,” she reminds us. She understood that the refusal to name injustice is itself a form of violence. hooks (2000) insisted that love is not passive. Love requires justice. It requires the willingness to confront systems that harm.
These thinkers offer us a way forward, not by abandoning emotional truth, but by expanding it. They show that vulnerability does not end at the level of the individual psyche. It stretches outward, into our relationships, our communities, our politics. It requires the courage not only to feel but to stand. Not only to grieve, but to resist.
If Brown were to take seriously the ethical implications of her work, she would begin by interrogating the limits of her own framework. She would ask why her model fails to address structural violence. She would reflect on how her brand has been built, whose comfort it protects, and whose pain it excludes. And she would not only name these dynamics privately but address them publicly, with the same rigor she applies to interpersonal shame.
There is no shame in not knowing. But there is profound shame in refusing to learn. There is shame in witnessing genocide and responding with equivocation. There is shame in being a cultural leader who cannot lead when it matters most.
Yet shame, when honestly acknowledged, can become transformative. Michalinos Zembylas (2008) writes about the political potential of collective shame. Rather than pathologizing it, he sees it as a force for justice. When felt in response to real harm, especially harm that is committed in one’s name or with one’s complicity, shame can propel us toward change. It can call us to account.
What would it look like for Brown to engage with that kind of shame? To allow it not to paralyze her, but to guide her into deeper truth? What would it mean for her to center the voices of Palestinians rather than her own emotional process? What would it look like to practice vulnerability not just as a personal journey, but as a collective ethic of resistance?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are demands. They are the moral imperatives of our time. In Gaza, children are being buried beneath rubble. Families are starving. Journalists are being killed. To speak of grief without speaking of this is not empathy. It is evasion.
To truly stand in solidarity is to risk one’s comfort. It is to say the names that the powerful do not want said. It is to witness, to amplify, to mourn, not abstractly, but specifically. Not generically, but politically.
Brené Brown has offered the world many insights. But her failure to name the genocide in Gaza with moral clarity diminishes the integrity of her message. It reveals that the kind of vulnerability she champions may ultimately serve those who already have the privilege of safety. It offers healing only within the bounds of respectability. And in doing so, it leaves those who suffer the most, those deemed too angry, too raw, too political, outside the circle of care.
This is not just a personal failing. It is a collective challenge. It calls us to ask: what kind of healing do we believe in? Healing that smooths over injustice, or healing that disrupts it? Healing that pacifies the privileged, or healing that empowers the oppressed?
We must choose. We must speak.
References
Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Duke University Press.
Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. Grove Press.
hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. William Morrow.
Kim, M. M. (2024, January 15). When empathy is not enough. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com
Lorde, A. (1984). Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Crossing Press.
Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40.
Pappé, I. (2006). The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications.
Seraj, S. (2024, February 10). Spiritual gaslighting and the illusion of neutrality. Retrieved from https://www.abetterforce.com
Sheehi, L. (2022). Psychoanalysis under occupation: Practicing resistance in Palestine. Routledge.
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press.
Zembylas, M. (2008). The politics of trauma, empathy and mourning in the classroom. Critical Studies in Education, 49(3), 295–312.