Shame, Revisited

I first came to ponder on shame a few years back when I was reading "The 12 Bad Habits That Hold Good People Back: Overcoming the Behavior Patterns That Keep You From Getting Ahead ". There was a paragraph talking about shame that struck me somehow, it goes like "you are guilty of something you did, but you are ashamed of yourself.". It had never occurred to me like this, so I took some time to think about it. I thought I got what the author intends to say there, but probably I did not really, or at least I did not internalize it at that time.

So when I came cross this speech from a Jungian analyst this morning, it grasped my attention right away, and I read it twice and highlighted my favorite lines to make sure I got it this time :).

In a nutshell, at a psycobiology level shame is human's automatic (and painful) mechanism to pull us away from joyment when there is an impediment to our joy. In that sense a little bit of shame does some good in keeping us safe and ethical, i.e., shame has its biology utility from an evolutionary perspective. At a psychoanalysis level, shame is our response to the failure in attaining the ideal self: if we fail to live up to our perfect image, we experience a sense of inferiority, flaw and defeat, then we have the feelings of shame. Since shame is such a painful thing, no wonder we have so many defenses against shame: withdrawal, avoidance, attacking others, or attacking self. Pathological narcissism, fundamentalism(as the defense of the shame of ignorance), rage, envy, are all our defenses against shame, one way or the other. Shame comes with our consciousness, and the healthy way to deal with it is to recognize the dark aspects of our personality, and there is nothing to be ashamed of being ashamed, it's such a universal phenomena and we don't have to spend so much effort to defend or disguise it.

Here is my excerpt of this speech:

...[P]robably everyone who has ever been in front of a group to talk, with the expectation of having something of substance to say, has experienced some degree of stage fright, or performance anxiety. The same holds for any kind of performance-- the audience is listening, and watching. Performance anxiety is practically a universal fear. You know it. What is it we're afraid of? Failure to be sure, but what's that? It's one thing to fail and quite another to screw up somehow and embarrass--no, humiliate--ourselves in front of other people. We're scared of that. We'll look foolish or stupid or be boring, and be ashamed. People will avoid us, shun us and even ridicule us behind our back where we are defenseless, and leave us alone to imagine the worst. Fear of shame, you'll hear it called shame-anxiety, is every bit as potent as the fear of panic. And the wish to avoid the experience of shame is so powerful that just the threat of it evokes enormous effort to prevent its emergence.

In spite of this power, it isn't obvious, a lot of the time, that we're dealing with shame. The word itself comes from a word that means "to cover," that is, to hide. And shame truly is the hidden affect. The parts of ourselves we wish to hide are the shameful parts, and we also wish to hide the fact that we are ashamed. If we can't prevent it, we hide it. In common language when we talk about embarrassment, humiliation, or mortification we are talking about shame. Loss of face, disgrace, and dishonor are close relatives in the family of shame.

...[I] want to make a distinction here between shame and guilt. They may appear together, but they are not quite the same. Guilt comes from violating a rule or standard, committing an offense, a trespass. To feel guilty requires a conscience or superego. Guilt is about what we do; it motivates confession, it deserves punishment, and it is relieved by restitution and forgiveness. Shame is something deeper. It is about who we are; it motivates concealment, it deserves dismemberment, there is no restitution, and it is relieved only by acceptance. One can be guilty and feel guilty without being ashamed, and one can feel shame without feeling guilty or having done anything to feel guilty about. One can do things that bring on shame, but it is what the action means to the actor or about the actor that brings on the affect, rather than the act itself....

Having referred to shame as affect, it will probably help the conversation at this point if I tell you what I mean by "affect." ......Affect is a physiological event occurring involuntarily in the body as a response to stimulus. It results from activity in the limbic system of the brain and not the cerebral cortex, and it is mediated by the autonomic nervous system, not the voluntary motor pathways. That is to say, in psychological language, that the origin of affect is in the unconscious. ....

Shame is one of the primary affects... The mechanism for the experience of shame is carried in the genes, and built into the biological organism. It is universal, at least among humans. It is a part of our makeup. Like the other primary affects shame has its characteristic physical expression. The chest sags, the body tends to crumple and sink and is momentarily awkward and discoordinated, the head drops, the gaze is averted, most often downward, blood vessels dilate in the face, and there is a temporary mental disorganization so that one cannot think logically or clearly. Blushing, which results from the dilation of blood vessels in the face, is the hallmark of embarrassment. There is a spectrum of shame. As shame goes, embarrassment is on the mild side, and has been called "skin shame." When we are alone or in an introverted mode, or with another person whose acceptance makes us safe, we may open to a "deep shame" which turns to anguish and sobbing.

Shame is an outer experience. Shame in the presence of other people, gives us the impulse to run away and hide. We don't belong, we don't deserve to be here, we are no good. We are exposed, to be condemned and expelled from the others, be they individuals, groups, or the whole human race. We are cast out, alone, and cut off, and the cause of our dismemberment is our own deficiency or deformity or constitutional inadequacy, perhaps our exhibitionism. This is humiliation--when the shame is most severe and when it has to do with others. There's nothing we can do. When the affect comes suddenly, acutely, as it most often does, it may seem as if the ground has opened up beneath our feet and we have sunk into a hole, if only we could disappear in it....

Shame is an inner experience. It can come when no one else is around. There's a physical sinking sensation that's something like falling into a pool of our own water, like we are dissolving. It comes with the sudden realization that we are not the person we thought we were. We might even be enjoying some good fortune when seemingly out of nowhere comes the knowledge of our unworthiness, this heretofore unthought inner reality. We don't deserve to be here-- who do I think I am? Who did I think I was? There's no one to hide from, nothing to hide from, nowhere to go, and certainly no going back. That person is mortified, dead. Whatever comes next, if anything does, will have to be new.

Such pain. It makes us want to turn away, to stop listening, to leave, to change the subject. We are even ashamed of those who are ashamed and we don't want them around us. It can be a contagious affect. We'll do just about anything to avoid it; like drugs, for example, or replacing shame with rage or turning it into envy. It has been said that for adults, the most common stimulus to rage is humiliation. And when envy focuses on the powerful, intolerable other, possessor of the goods, our attention is drawn away from our weak, inferior selves, holding only shame.

Is it surprising that there are many defenses against shame? Donald Nathanson, the psychiatrist who has written most comprehensively about shame, has grouped the defenses against it into four areas. These areas are withdrawal, avoidance (which can take many different forms), attacking others, and attacking the self. There isn't time to go into these here, but let me just say that if you read his descriptions of defenses against shame you can see in slightly different language, practically all of what psychoanalysts have called the ego defense mechanisms. They are the ways we protect the integrity of our individual point of view and conscious functioning. It makes sense that our psychological defenses against overwhelming anxiety and threats of castration or disintegration would also protect us from overwhelming shame and threats of dismemberment or dissolution. Here's a thought: if you're about to be castrated you are afraid, but if you're already castrated you're ashamed.

We have called shame a "primary affect," and said it is built into the system, our system, and if that is the case then shame surely has some biological utility.....Whenever an impediment to the flow of positive affect occurs, while at the same time the stimulus for the interest or enjoyment continues, the affect program for shame-humiliation is triggered. Shame affect is a highly painful mechanism that operates to pull the organism away from whatever might interest it or make it content. It turns us away from pleasure when the desire for and conditions for pleasure are still present. Triggered by an impediment to positive affect, shame amplifies that impediment to any further positive affect....shame "is a biological system by which the organism controls its affective output so that it will not remain interested or content when it may not be safe to do so.... It protects an organism from its growing avidity for positive affect.".....We should say here that a little shame is good for you--"signal shame" they call it. A whiff of shame alerts us to the danger ahead, allowing us to make the change in attitude or action that will avoid the full affect. It keeps us ethical.

So the biological mechanism for shame is built into the organism. Impediments to pleasure trigger the shame system and then become attached to it in our memory. We then have images attached to shame, which we can call "affect images." A Jungian view would be that the potential for universally common impediments to pleasure, like loss of parent's approval, are already present in the psyche, built in, as archetypes. And the affect images are the conscious manifestations of the archetypal forms. That is to say, when impediments to pleasure trigger shame and an affect image is created, some innate potential of the psyche is being brought to life. The psyche is not just the victim of experience here. Enough of that.

It's easier to understand "impediments to pleasure," I think, if we think of pleasure as being simply the maintenance of a positive feeling in ourself or about ourself, so that an impediment is anything that interrupts the feeling. Over time, in Nathanson's view, the accumulation or repetition of affect images gives conscious cognitive meaning to our affective experience. Let's say you're less than two years old and you like your body and you stroll buck naked into the middle of the living room where your parents are having a party. Oops! Shame on you. Where are your pants? You're not feeling so good anymore. The idea of exposing your genitals in public and the affect of shame are thereby joined, if they weren't already. According to Nathanson, the experience of affect doesn't depend on cognitive appraisal; the cognitive appraisal is the interpretation of the experience. We think it and know what it is after we experience it, if at all. Nathanson says, for instance, that when our desires consistently overreach our ability to fulfill them, "shame produces a sense of an incompetent self." Thus, the affect precedes the sense of self.

Shame. In the title of his 1989 book, Morrison calls it, The Underside of Narcissism . "Shame," he says, "is the principal ubiquitous affect that accompanies and defines" the condition of narcissistic vulnerability. In other words, the more shame you have the more shakey is your sense of self. Shame is about the self. It is "a response to failure in attaining the shape of the ideal self," Morrison says. Such failure might express itself in words like, "My mother didn't admire me. I am not the sort of person I could admire." So, if we are narcissistically vulnerable and if we fail to live up to the image of who we think we ought to be, we experience a sense of inferiority, defeat, flaw or weakness, and then we have the feeling of shame. Put another way, if sustaining the flow of positive affect requires an image of a basically good self (let's say a good enough self), then whatever interferes with that self image will trigger shame. Even healthy people, Morrison says, can experience shame from "microfailures in meeting the aspirations of the relatively cohesive and differentiated ideal self."

So where are we with shame so far? Shame is the primary painful affect of unpleasure that destroys whatever good feeling we may have about ourselves. It can be useful, at least in small amounts. In its full blown forms of humiliation or mortification, it so disrupts our function that the ego is temporarily dissolved and dead. Shame comes with consciousness, particularly self consciousness--self consciousness that is the awareness of our constitutional inadequacy, our essential inferiority, worthlessness and evil. It is the affect of knowing the shadow. It comes with dismemberment, in the sense of being cut off from an essential source of survival, be it mother, clan, community, self, God, or other, and it comes with dismemberment also in the sense of splitting off or repressing the shameful part. Thy right hand hath offended thee, and thou hast cut it off.

...[I] have noticed that people who are just learning psychotherapy or psychoanalysis are more prone to be strong advocates of a single theory than those who are more experienced and initiated. It's awfully hard to know nothing when everybody around you seems to know something, and so you scramble hard to get some structure for your thinking, to learn something that will overcome your ignorance and the shame of it. In this case adopting and defending a single theory is probably a necessary early phase in the learning process. But getting stuck in this phase can be dangerous and ultimately self-defeating.

Like religious fundamentalism, psychoanalytic fundamentalism is a defense against shame. It is my opinion that the historical tendency of schools of psychoanalysis to protect their theoretical beliefs with fundamentalist attitudes reflects the inferiority and megalomania, the shame and grandiosity, of beginning consciousness. It was an early phase in the evolution of our collective learning about ourselves which may now give way to more openness, humility. and broadness of mind.

...[I]n conclusion, I want to say something about accepting shame, and the shameful part of oneself. Recognizing that shame is universally human and that the experience of it does not in fact separate us or make us different from the rest of the people may make it unnecessary to be ashamed of being ashamed. That's a start. When we can recognize and acknowledge that we feel shame we can stop defending against it so hard, and then we have a chance to encounter the shameful part that is the shadow. "Fat chance," some would say. Jung says in "Aion" and I quote: "The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge..." It is not an easy task.