Header image: KF in Dall-E
Also: On Ireland’s “malignant shame” by Dr. Garret O’Connor, former Director, Betty Ford Clinic
https://www.mixcloud.com/rt%C3%A9-radio1specials/michael-littleton-memorial-lecture-2010/
- Although cultural anthropologists once confidently labeled ours a “guilt culture,” in which shame does not play a significant role, many psychologists now believe that shame is the preeminent cause of emotional distress in our time, a by-product, some contend, of social changes and childrearing practices that have made us unusually insecure about who we are.
- One moment you are a decent, acceptable, self-possessed human being, and the next you are cast into confusion, your identity in disarray.
- In the past the capacity to experience shame was valued. To be capable of shame meant to be modest, as opposed to exhibitionistic or grandiose, to have character, nobility, honor, discretion. It meant to be respectful of social standards, of the boundaries of others, of one’s own limitations. And, finally, it meant to be respectful of one’s need for privacy.
- The math professor has no trouble brushing off the shame that attends his intrusion into the young woman s privacy. The abandonment of civility can be seen as evidence of masculine confidence.
- “Normal shame,” Scheff says, “is just like breathing air: it’s necessary. Personalities and civilizations coexist, even thrive, with normal shame. But unacknowledged shame is a pathogen. It kills.”
The need to keep [shame] repressed often drives people toward perfectionism, withdrawal, diffidence, ombativeness.
- If you run from shame, he says, you may successfully avoid the humiliation you fear, “but you constantly sense this anxiety within yourself and you know you cannot escape it—it follows you like a shadow.”
- Shame of this sort can be understood as a wound in the self. It is frequently instilled at a delicate age, as a result of the internalization of a contemptuous voice, usually parental. [“low pain threshold”]
Guilt Is About Transgression; Shame Is About the Self
- Except for the thoughts that are associated with them, shame and guilt are similar (perhaps even identical) and easily confused. The same experience can arouse both guilt and shame, or guilt in one person and shame in another, based on their psychological and cultural makeup.
- In psychoanalytic literature the pathological potential of shame has long been overshadowed by a kind of reverence for guilt.
If guilt is about behavior that has harmed others, shame is about not being good enough. To be ashamed is to expect rejection, not so much because of what one has done as because of what one is.
- Pathological shame is an irrational sense of defectiveness, a feeling not of having crossed to the wrong side of the boundary but of having been born there.
- I no longer do any of my therapy without immediately assessing, the minute a person calls me on the phone or walks in the door, how they are experiencing the potential humiliation of being in a relationship with me where they have to admit that they are vulnerable and have to look to me as a person who might help to solve their problems.”
- The Recovery Movement one of AA’s main functions seemed to be the management of shame. People are deeply ashamed of themselves for drinking. It implies desperation and weakness of character and is freighted with memories of degradation. But speak of your shameful habit before people who are sworn not to judge, who will welcome you, praise you, offer you friendship for coming out, who are just as tainted by the stigma themselves, and somehow the habit doesn’t seem so shameful anymore…Suddenly the defect that you’ve experienced as a private scourge becomes a shared problem.
- John Bradshaw: Healing the Shame That Binds You (1988); toxic shame
- Bradshaw [“a modern evangelist of emotional education”], who defines much of his work as “healing the inner child,”
- Not only has the word virtually disappeared from common usage but everywhere one looks dishonorable, indecent, and frightfully “liberated” people openly violate the standards that shame once guarded.
Existential shame arises from suddenly seeing yourself as you really are—
- Because ours is officially a classless society, the blue-collar families described by Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb in their 1972 classic, The Hidden Injuries of Class, feel they have nobody to blame for their condition but themselves.
- Although it also reflects on the self, situational shame is usually a passing shame experience that arises from rejection, humiliation, allowing one’s boundaries to be infringed, or violation of a social norm.
- As the sociologist Norbert Elias showed in his 1939 masterpiece The Civilizing Process, the niceties of Western society have all been instilled and enforced through (situational) shame.
Hester Prynne is the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter.
- Narcissistic shame is more than a bad memory. It never fully goes away. To “have shame” in this sense means to be burdened with a festering negative self-portrait against which one is repeatedly trying to defend.
the rapacious id, the practical ego, the moralistic superego
- Despite the social upheavals of pre-1914 Europe, society was still stable enough, families, churches, and communities still strong enough, and values and standards still commanding enough to give people a solid sense of who they were and what was expected of them.
- in the post-medieval centuries what I’ve called situational shame spread rapidly, taming and civilizing the medieval passions, as a freer, more mobile society demanded that people be able to demonstrate to the world of strangers that they had their sexual and aggressive impulses on a leash. [KF: reverted, through “freedom”, to base, unconstrained, impulses?
- THESIS: And that’s what I would argue—that gradually, circuitously, as traditional, hierarchical, religious society has given way to a world shaped by the freedoms, insecurities, and loneliness of modernity, an important psychological change has taken place: guilt, class shame, situational shame, and the fear of authority have in varying degrees grown less powerful. They are no longer the chief forces around which inner controls are organized. Narcissistic shame has taken up the slack.
re: “incomplete- disgust face”; We think we have moved to a higher plane because we don’t punish the kids, when in fact we may be humiliating them instead.”
- Like other developmental psychologists, Lewis sees the use of global negative evaluation as tending to instill shame. But too much global positive evaluation may be risky as well, for it trains children to think globally, to make their selves the issue in whatever they do, and thus to be prone to both grandiosity and self-contempt, the Scylla and Charybdis of narcissistic disorders.
- In any family the ways in which differences get worked out tell the child a lot about his rights, his dignity, his worth…“Basically,” Basch says of such early experiences, “shame is often the response to emotion that is not being dealt with effectively.”