snippets from a 1992 Atlantic Monthly article
Shame forces us in ways that are outside our control to behave destructively to ourselves and to others. – Leon Wumaer (The Mask of Shame). If you run from shame 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.
Because of the pressures in our society to be independent, and the punitive ways this concern can reach a child, people of either sex may grow up with a wounding sense of shame over being needy. They experience their neediness ass a grotesque infantile deformity for which they will be rejected, abandoned, or contemptuously dismissed by others.
The pathogenic shame belief seems to block the creative avenue. It is crippling.
Nothing, apparently, defends against the internal ravages of shame more than the security gained from parental love, especially the sort of sensitive love that sees and appreciates the child for what he or she is and is respectful of the child’s feelings, differences, and peculiarities. Nothing seems to make shame cut more deeply than the lack of that love.
A woman who secretly despises herself for being selfish may feel that she should not take, should not ask, should not calculate in her own behalf, and she may compensate for what she sees as her shameful self-seeking with rigid displays of generosity.
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.
For guilt one can find a solution. One needs to make amends. “What does shame require?” That you be a better person, and not be ugly, and not be stupid, and not have failed? The only thing that suits is at this moment is for you to be nonexistent. That’s what people frequently say. I could crawl through a hole, I could sink through the floor, I could die. It is so acutely painful.
Shame has a contagious quality, because it makes our own shame demons restive. People are ashamed of being ashamed, so we don’t talk about it.
The child’s sense of being someone who counts comes in large part from the parents’ capacity to empathically tune into that child. Without that consistent reassurance the child begins to doubt the value of her efforts to engage, of the love she is trying to give, of her being.
The legacy of a person experience of being wrong as a child, can be to feel poisonously deformed and an unlovable thing. That legacy cannot be overcome so long as the shame remains unconscious and unspoken. Once the shame is spoken to someone who is able to listen and absorb without becoming anxious, something changes. Then a person can view herself from a freer, less tyrannical perspective, able, perhaps for the first time, to feel some sympathy for herself and her predicament. She is able to see that her cruel lack of sympathy for herself is in part what fuels her rages and her desperate need o blame. Gradually she may find that she is able to look at a deeper issue of shame, closer to her core – of feeling as a little girl, unwanted, a piece of excess baggage who constantly had to prove her worth.
Putting shame into words with a trusted companion enables one to step outside it – it no longer seems to permeate one’s entire being -- and allows some self-forgiveness to emerge. But such relationships are not always easy to establish, even in marriage. Many people have difficulty listening to pain without becoming anxious. If a friend confides something shameful he is asking us not to look away; what’s worse, he is provoking us to tune into painful aspects of our own life where shame lays waiting. We may try to escape from the moment by mouthing meaningless encouragements.
The fear of being known in only one aspect, the hesitation to be seen when we’re not ready, the worry about being known by some flawed or undeveloped part instead of being understood as a whole – none of these shame-motivated concerns are shameful.. They are a natural aspect of our need for privacy and for protection from the scrutinizing, judging, and humiliating power of the social world. It’s something like a photograph. If you too quickly expose it all and let it all hang out, you destroy it.
