My first memory of shame is of a day trip with my aunt-godmother to a tourist island near where we lived in North Queensland, Australia, around 1963, when I was 4 years old. She was unmarried, a career woman, and the type of aunt who doted on her many nieces and nephews. I had not come prepared with swimming togs (bathers) for this adventure, although she brought a towel. So we decided to do a walking tour and some reef walking at the low tide. She was comfortable company, and, as we walked around the small island we came to a deserted beach. I noted to her that I’d like to swim but I didn’t bring any togs (bathers). She simply said, “Don’t worry, no one’s around. You can just go ‘in your birthday suit”. No-one said naked when I was a child. And so I did undress and took to the water.
However, on coming out from my swim I saw that there was another woman, a stranger, sitting on the beach talking to my aunt. Of course in this small seaside community, there were bound to be people who she knew on a day tour themselves. At that moment I felt a sense of exposure and vulnerability. Nonetheless I chose to walk up the beach, past the two women, to the towel, so I could dry off. My memory is vague as to the comment about my nakedness that the stranger made as I approached. In that moment a welling up of shame left me speechless and it took every effort to keep on walking to the towel which I quickly gathered around me, making no attempt to dry off or dress until the stranger had moved on.
I have often had it that this was a bad experience in life. The memory brings with it an echo of the shame from that day. And I have had it that it was a developmental crisis that forged me into a shame-ridden person that I became and limited the assertion of my needs as an adult.
Feeling that I engaged in life with too much shame, I was nonetheless buoyed by the notion put before me by the founder of the Baha’i Faith, Baha’u’llah, that, “Indeed, there existeth in man a faculty which deterreth him from, and guardeth him against, whatever is unworthy and unseemly, and which is known as his sense of shame. This, however, is confined to but a few; all have not possessed and do not possess it.”
Indeed, I notice in my engagement with others, that it was my activities that showed up from a place of shamelessness whether an angry outpouring or a lurid flippantry, that caused hurt to others. I also see that it was only after a period of reflection and growth, sometimes a year or years later, I would find the memory of those actions, now filled me with shame.
The one thing that, however, puzzled me considerably, over the years, was that if anyone spoke to me with assurance about even the most menial thing, as a criticism, I would become fraught with shame and even, unable to immediately take-on the direction from that criticism. It was even impossible for me to talk about what was happening.
Now, as an older, more assured person, I am able to be with my sense of shame in a more even manner. It has, indeed, been salutary to accept that shame is one of our most important sensibilities, and that, actually it was the shamelessness of my own and others actions and speech that is the truly wrong thing. This acknowledgement has enabled me to, eventually, look back at moments of shame, and gain a fuller experience of the moment.
It occurs to me that my four year old person had already learned something of the social proprieties of clothing and nakedness. As a small child it was okay to be naked in front of family members but not in public. I have come to see that shame about nakedness was already there. However I also noticed that shame stands on the emotional cues already provided by family, about what is the right way to act in society and the wrong way to act. These emotional cues become the basis of what are called our values. However it still leaves a question, how is shame activated, and for what benefit?
When we realise that there is no access to shame by looking at it intellectually, we can explore the realms of our emotional make up and the emotional ties to sociability. Our values are really a function of divining a successfully comfortable relationship with our family, then bit by bit the extended society. I personally experience this as emotionally calm yet energetic with those in the relationship.
Whenever our actions disturb that calm energetic feeling we, as seems obvious, feel uncomfortable. One of the discomforts we will tend to feel, is shame. Shame is, in fact, alerting us to that we have stepped away, often by accident or by the unleashing or not unleashing other emotions, that some social gatekeeper has determined to be the right way to act, our values. The discomfort of stepping into actions, even speech or thought, that is outside the prescribed values of our social life, is called dissonance.
By the time we are 3 years old, we are already fully engaged emotionally with the social moors, at least of our family. Shame already exists in a state of low ebb, networking closely in a negative feedback loop with all other emotions especially anxiety. The degree that shame might be amplified will be the degree that social gatekeepers have called other emotional discourse to any event considered shameless. The more distressed or angry the social gatekeeper, the more likely it will raise a sense of shame among the lesser in the social ranks. In a paradoxical turn, the most amplification of shame is likely to be activated by a denigrating response from another. Denigrating responses to others is often socially acceptable by social gatekeepers of themselves but not when returned by lesser ranks. It takes a certain type of social education to have denigrating responses as truly shameful.
I want to make a distinction, here, between shame with the sense of guilt. My experience of guilt is that it is a different affective experience than shame. It is apparent that my sense of shame, while anchored in a learnt experience, acts to mediate my future actions. So even imagining certain acts can bring on a sense of shame. Shame is also activated by any number of actions that my emotional system declares as inadequate to my values. For example, who I am for myself is someone who is a competent person. So whenever someone shows me I have been incompetent at (washing the dishes, assessing a client in my professional life, networking, business success, an intimate relationship et etc) I will feel a sense of shame.
When I look at my affect of guilt, on the other hand, I see a contribution of fear to the shame that as a whole I the experience of having done a social wrong that could attract a social punishment. Social punishments include stygmatisation, exile, imprisonment, physical assault, financial loss, or execution.
I want to leave this commentary by noting that the key to reading all this is without adding or subtracting interpretations of right or wrong about shame. Shame like all emotional affects, just is. The real value of this commentary is to have you looking calmly at your shame and at all other emotional responses you have around shame. Like all emotions they do not point to the truth of anything except their own existence in a situation. And like all emotions, shame can be used as a tool and a guide for growth and development. We often want to clamp down on the discomfort of shame. Don’t do that. Your power as a human being lies in sitting with your shame, until you find a way to either reconcile with your values or formally turn them down, to everyone around you.
There is more required to unfold that topic and that will be for another time.
Owen's Meanderings 