What we do for shame

Let’s start here.

Something is said, something happens. Your head and neck slump, your eyes lower or turn away, your upper body goes limp, your  face (and sometimes neck and upper chest) become red, and all communication with the other person is lost for a moment. Cognitive shock.

You are experiencing  shame-humiliation. Nobody can think clearly in that  moment of shame. You might feel as if your head is being severed from your body. The room shrinks. You  are alone and rejected, frozen, incapable,  smashed to pieces inside.

This is how the body experiences mortification, the hanging head, the blush, the wanting to be swallowed up where you stand, to disappear from sight and cease to exist.

What has happened? You have been  rejected. You are told you have failed, You are accused of theft. You are found out. You are told you smell bad.You have scars, you have amputations, you are no longer whole.  Your skin is the wrong colour. You are too poor to have nice clothes, you look cheap or  shabby or old. You are told that everyone thinks you are stupid. You are told that you are unloved or unlovable. You are made to feel you are not sexually attractive. You are told you are  sick or ugly or pathetic. You are told you are  dirty, worthless, useless. You are beaten or  sexually abused and  treated like dirt. You don’t matter. You might as well be invisible.

What happens next?

You  want to forget the shame. You want to  undo what happened. You  decide you will succeed in another area so as to  erase that  shame of failure. You will become famous and  nobody will ever shame you again. You will prove that other person wrong. You will win him or her back. You will make sure he or she suffers as you have suffered. You are filled with shame but also with  shame-rage or shame-fury. You hate the person who  caused you shame, who made you  feel so ashamed of just being you. You hate yourself for being shamed, for being shameful, for being shame-filled. You feel hopeless and defeated and you call this depression.

Let’s talk about escape. How do we make the shame go away? This of course is where alcohol, the fabulous dissolving lubricant, comes in. The smoke-and-mirrors magic of drugs. You  are someone with disavowed shame, and that shame is not felt until you are  told you are an addict or an alcoholic. Which compounds the shame. You want to forget, and  sobriety means remembering all the hard, angry, shameful  stuff.

Other ways to make the shame go away, other escape mechanisms. Unending competitiveness with others, showing you are better than others, you are unique, you are special, you come first. The constant search for  excitement, extreme adventure,dangerous  distractions. Promiscuity,.  If you are a  man you may take refuge in machismo, the  pumped-up exaggeration of being a real man and  physically  dominating other men, demanding submission from the woman in your life, exerting control over your children. The small shamed boy is nowhere to be seen. There is sex addiction and  the mindless pursuit of pleasure. There is over-spending, so you can  make yourself feel luxurious and pretty on the outside, to  mask what it feels like on the inside. What it feels like? Who is it? It is the shamed and disowned you, me, the self.

Let’s talk about attack, making others feel the shame instead of us. We attack others and shame them as we were shamed. We mock our own faults in others. We label them as we were labelled. We bully those we see as weak, we humiliate others sexually, we  hit and batter those who  cannot defend themselves against us. We dismiss those who don’t agree with us. We tease or torment animals, we  act out in sadistic ways, We have sex with people we despise and let them feel our contempt. We laugh at  people who are mentally ill, we mock the disabled. We threaten others with firearms or verbal threats, we  feel a need to see them cower and  cringe.  So long as we are not  arrested or  confronted, this  works for us. We are able to  feel that  the shame is out there, not in here.

And what was once acute shame (that cringe-making agonising moment of shock and  anguish) is now chronic shame, the stain that won’t come out, the tinge of habitual self-loathing. It is what we do to escape or  suppress shame (the avoidance, the withdrawal, the attacking) that  creates  ongoing shame. Our compensatory behaviours and compulsion to humiliate or criticise others make us ashamed of ourselves. We cannot escape the cycle of shamed and shaming behaviour.

Shame can be unlearned. I found this out when I was able to find a safe place in which to  talk about shame in therapy, in a boundaried and caring  environment. In  recovery meetings in  a nearby city, I know of  one long-sober woman who  recommends that men and women who have been sober a couple of years go for  assertiveness training  classes in order to learn affective ways to  recognise, name and challenge patronising behaviour or humiliating put-downs. Many of us didn’t acquire useful social skills in the drinking years or in families where  domestic violence was the norm. There’s a place for owning  past behaviours that harmed or  offended others. There’s also a place for being able to  see the shaming tactics of others, the prejudice or  insults, for what they were, that they had nothing to do with us. For telling the secrets around incest, speaking out against racism, denouncing homophobic prejudice, not blaming the poor for their poverty

Shame-humiliation isn’t the only dynamic (I  don’t want this to sound like a single-issue narrative, as if  locating and overcoming shame was the answer to everything)  and there are many other complexes or  tensions (that hollow rage of the narcissist where grandiosity is the defence against inner emptiness). Yet shame, the patterning and echoing of  shame at many levels and in many contexts, is  something that  can stay with us all our lives and it thrives on secrecy and displacement. Shame out in the  daylight is just another bogeyman.

And it is a cultural practice, this too. The  parent makes a small child ashamed of  playing with herself in the bath, slaps her hands and tells her that the place between her legs is dirty or forbidden. What was innocent and natural becomes forbidden, unnatural, secretive. The urge is still there, the pleasure is still there. But so is shame, the conviction of indecency, that I am a bad little person with a dirty body that doesn’t really belong to me. The shame compounded by the  image of a God who spies on children to see  what they do when nobody is watching. How do you honour a parent who has no concept of honour, who is intent on shaming, who is ashamed?

And there are different cultural approaches. this shaming  is not something hard-wired into  human behaviours or physiology. In Zulu tribal society, sexual play and  exploration is encouraged in children. All too often in Western society we are split from our bodies and  emotions and sexuality in early childhood, even before we can speak. The intrusive prurience of the curious parent. The lack of boundaries in the family that stops an adolescent from  being able to claim privacy. The excessive need of the shamed parent to derive gratification and  unfailing love from the child. What the  son or daughter feels when they read blogs written about them without their  consent, without space to  voice their own truths or  arguments. The voyeurism on Facebook (Stalkerbook) with so many contrived and retouched images, snapshots,  close-ups, so  many comparisons around  vanity or  ugliness or  not-pretty-enough shaming, so much bullying from strangers who sit next to you in class or  who don’t tell you they are  predatory adults.  Moral vacuity in  every area of our waking lives.

There aren’t any easy answers. We talk sometimes in recovery circles about experiencing ‘ego deflation at depth’, a useful  analytic concept in a certain context, but all too often, there is no stable ego, there is only the false self, the  facade  hiding the shamed and deficient not-quite-self. The person who never became. What we encounter in ourselves and others is the depression and rage of the shamed and broken person. Too fat, too  much in debt, too disgusting, too mentally ill, too bipolar, too eating disordered, too dishonest, too hopeless a case. How to touch someone who  believes he is untouchable? How do we embrace in ourselves what we  hate and fear in others?

And behind all the posturing and  vanity there is  only this, a small child covering her face in the darkness and wishing she was dead.

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