What do you think of when you think of shame? Ask anyone and watch their face–watch them wince, bite their lip, eyes darting as the brain scans for memories, looking for the ones that are safe to admit to, rejecting the ones that are better kept hidden. For most of us, shame is a deeply personal feeling, one connected to especially painful emotions; it’s like a viciously strong yet gutless, shivering creature skulking in dark corners, spreading its slime, tormenting our psyche night and day, making us sick as it feeds on our conscience. Its breath is foul, its tearing claws are sharp and long. You’ll find that few will answer right away, our instinct says shame is best kept hidden and secret. But most of us know it; human beings can feel shame as early as 18 months of age, almost no one is immune. Most of us have felt it many times over, we’ve all heard its rustling in those dark corners, seen its claws, its naked-mole-rat yellow teeth.
When I ask people about shame the answers range from talking about sexual mishaps (even reading about sex makes people ashamed--more on that in another post!), career blunders to religious hangups to feeling ashamed because of perceived lack of competence. Although most shame happens in private, shame always requires a witness although for most of us it’s enough to just imagine this witness and their judgment (for that reason, feeling terrible about disappointing your dead grandfather is absolutely possible). In order for shame to exist, the person must be aware of having broken some social norm–a norm that must be perceived as important to this person, a norm whose breaking would cause serious psychological discomfort and possibly other, binding consequences.
Or simpler, shame is “getting your pants pulled down in public,” as offered by my 13-year-old son, summing up in the perfect way the essence of shame–being exposed and ridiculed while at your most vulnerable, no longer in control of what happens to you.
Does this mean that the antidote to shaming is gaining control?
In order to write about shame (and unshaming) I needed to ask myself what was my pants-pulled-down-in-public moment, the biggest (greatest? worst?) shame I’ve experienced. What is the one thing that instantly comes to mind obliterating all the other shameful things in my life, the event or situation that makes me cringe when I think about it?
I came up with two instances. Both make me cringe–one more than the other–but in a surprising (to me) twist, one of them was an event independent of my doing, where shame was imposed on me.
At the age of 31 I gave birth to a baby boy. Shortly thereafter, I relapsed into my addiction to alcohol and took care of my son for a year while drinking almost on a daily basis.
This is the worst (not the greatest) private shame that I had experienced because it was objectively morally wrong–even if I side with the idea that being addicted was my response to trauma and therefore not my fault. Even with that caveat, the truth is I drank and repeatedly endangered my son’s life. I didn’t mean to or even want to but I did it.
And then once I got sober, I went and wrote about it. My decision to make “what should be kept private” –to quote one journalist– public led to the (second) biggest shame of my life, a situation where my character was repeatedly assassinated in the media because I wrote about my worst shame and refused to apologize for writing about it.
Here, I will examine shame further-my own, yours, the concept of it but how it specifically functions in the realm of mental health and sexuality-two most taboo topics we still don't talk enough about. So I will talk. Please subscribe and add to the conversation!