19. Done with shame
Shame is solitary confinement. You get so embarrassed about feeling ashamed that you don’t tell anyone how much you’re hurting, so no one helps you.
Shame is perverse. It throws you off balance so you say more stupid things and do more stupid things, digging yourself deeper into your misery.
Shame is a killer. It annihilates self-love at the very moment you need it most.
We’re told, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Names do hurt, though. With a broken bone, at least you get sympathy. With shame all you get is lonely. Bones heal, but a shame attack might go on forever, like when you bury it alive inside yourself and keep it there until the day you die.
But if shame is so bad for us, how did it ever evolve to become one of the fundamental affects that run our emotional lives? This makes no survival sense—unless we go back to our beginnings.
Darwin called shame a social emotion because it’s your social group that shames you. In hunter-gatherer days, if you did something your band disapproved of, they would deliver their judgment in the form of shaming. And it was utterly painful. Why? Because your life was at stake. If you did not stay aligned with your band, if you got yourself kicked out solo into the wilderness, your chances of survival would plummet.
So shame was good for us as individuals and as a species. Given that we humans are self-centered, competitive creatures, and given that the discipline of cooperation demanded by our life in small groups did not come easily to us, we needed help to stay in tune with each other. Shame was our tuning fork. It poked us anytime we got off-key.
Imagine for a moment that you and I are back in prehistory living in a hunter-gatherer band, and one of our young guys is out of synch. Maybe he’s taking more than his fair share of the food, or lazing about when there’s work to be done, or getting a swelled head, or pushing people around. His behavior is disruptive and setting a bad precedent. We can’t afford to let it slide, we have to take action. So we tease him, put him down, make him the butt of pointed jokes. In short, we shame him.
We’re not trying to hurt him. Quite the contrary. Our underlying message, if we were to put it into words, which we wouldn’t, would go something like this: “We’ve known you since you were born. We love you. It’s unthinkable that we would lose you. Please don’t make us push you away. We’re scared for you. You’ve taken the first step on the road that could lead to expulsion. Please don’t go down that road. Don’t do that to yourself. Don’t do that to us. You’re a good hunter. We need you. We know this shaming is painful for you, but how could we live with ourselves if we didn’t do everything we can to try to get you back on track?”
Shame was originally a matter of love, not assault. It was a matter of restoration, not destruction. It was used to prevent tragedy, not create it.
But that was then and this is now. We’re not living in a world of disciplined, small-band cooperation anymore. We’re living in a megasociety that runs on exploitation, attack, and despair. We’ve changed our way of life and along with it, we’ve changed shame. We’ve weaponized it.
Picture, for a minute, an odious guy writing an evil book called How to Become a Masterful Exploiter in Four Easy Steps. Shame would play the starring role. Here’s what he’d teach his readers. First, shut down your feelings. Do that so when you make decisions which will hurt other people, you won’t have to suffer sympathetic pain.
Second, crank up the shame machine. Maybe you’ve got several hundred employees in your company and they’re struggling along on poverty wages while you enjoy astounding luxury. You have to control those people so they don’t rebel. What do you do? You inject shame: “You people are lazy, incompetent, and of poor character, and therefore you deserve to be treated badly. You’re nobodies, so just shut up and do what I tell you.”
Third, get your targets to internalize your shaming. That will make them submissive on their own, so you won’t need to hire enforcers. And since force does not come cheap, this is good for the bottom line.
Finally, the one thing you must always guard against is any chance your exploitees might find their fight. You’ll want to keep pumping in the shame so they’ll constantly be treading water in a sea of despair. People with robust self-love are dangerous to exploiters.
Such a book would be despicable, of course, but that’s not why it wouldn’t sell. Exploiters wouldn’t buy it because they already know all this stuff. Shame is such an easy weapon to use, it doesn’t require special training.
And it can be deadly. Say Tina is a fourteen-year-old girl who gets attacked day after day at school, maybe for something about herself she can’t change, maybe for something she chooses not to change, or maybe for no reason at all except the bullies need a target and she’s handy.
The bullies have to separate her from her friends, and it takes no effort to do that. When they attack Tina, bystanders get scared because of the implied threat: If you push back against us, or if, god forbid, you stand up for Tina, we’ll target you just like we’re targeting her, only worse. We’ll teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.
For teens, belonging to a circle of friends is desperately important. To have everyone putting you down, smirking at you, and keeping their distance while they all seem so happy together is unbearably painful. The word “bullying” doesn’t begin to capture the cruelty of a coordinated attack. It’s a social death. And that’s why suicide can actually begin to make sense.
Whenever I see another story in the news about a bullied teen who’s taken her own life, there’s an instant when I want to go back in time and grab her by the shoulders and shake her and say, “Don’t kill yourself. Kill your tormentors.” And then I imagine her doing that deed, and the news anchors reporting on it, tsk-tsking, even though you can tell they’re so happy to be in front of the cameras with a juicy drama. And just for an instant, I would want to cheer for her, “Good for you! They deserved it!”
It’s the same feeling I get when I go to one of those Hollywood pay-back movies. The hero’s family is brutally murdered by a drug-running biker gang, and he feels bitterly ashamed because he couldn’t protect them, which gives him permission to go after the bad guys with righteous, raging, no-limit violence. We humans have evolved to thrill to stories of bloody retribution.
But of course this is all crazy talk because homicide is no answer. It only feeds despair. The real problem is we’ve abandoned our kids to a death culture. And should we be ashamed of ourselves for that? Please, no, I don’t want anyone to suffer shame. It’s become way too dangerous. I want us to get together and fight shame and teach our kids how to fight it by organizing against it.
And to do this not just for the sake of the victims, but for the sake of the bystanders who later wish they had intervened, and for the sake of the bullies, too. What if ten years down the road, a bully who attacked other kids with gusto all through high school suddenly wakes up to the damage he did? Now he has to live with those terrible memories for the rest of his life. If I had my wish, no child would ever again pick up shame to use it as a weapon.
I grew up in a Calvinist church community where shame was not a side dish but the main course. Few people in the church actually knew much about John Calvin, the founder of our theological lineage, and few could have explained his ideas in detail, but four hundred years after his heyday as a minister in Geneva, he was present in our lives as a ghostly guiding force.
The five key points of his wretched teachings, when reduced to an acronym, spell TULIP—Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, and Perseverance of the saints. Top billing was given to “total depravity” which is original sin taken to the extreme. The conventional concept of original sin allowed for some small innate potential for goodness but Calvin’s condemnation of humanity was “total.” And if we’re utterly depraved, if that’s the way God made us, then how could we not live in total shame?
“Unconditional election” means that long before your birth, God had already chosen you or he hadn’t. In the moment you came out of the womb you were already saved or damned. You were expected to do good works all your life but they wouldn’t make any difference to your fate, like whether you got into heaven or not. Your destiny was predetermined, and there was nothing you could do about it. Which is why we called this predestination. But I call it preposterous.
The last three items—atonement, grace, and perseverance—simply mean that whoever God has chosen, he will look after, granting them grace, bringing them through to their heavenly home, no matter what they do in their lives on this Earth. And what about the unelected? If you haven’t been chosen, even if you’ve given your heart and your life wholly to Christ, then to hell with you. Literally.
That’s not the end of it, though. There’s one more thing about us Calvinists. We’re competitive. Members of other denominations were only sinners, but we were totally depraved. Beat that, suckers! But how long can anyone live under such a punishing regime before rebelling? Depravity was too hard a gospel. So we imagined there was a loophole for us, a secret God was keeping but we divined it anyway—all loyal Calvinists are actually elected. We took pride in denigrating ourselves as the miserable worst while living from the utter conviction that we were the righteous best. Such a very human thing, to compensate for shame with arrogance.
And maybe you can tell I’m a little bitter. Actually, I’m a lot bitter, but more sad than bitter. Where was love in all of this? How was love supposed to survive such a vicious system?
And worse, Calvinism is the perfect theology for anyone who wants to be an exploiter, because if you believe you’re one of God’s chosen and have a lock on heaven, then it doesn’t matter how much you abuse people. You’ve got a free pass. Despite all the brimstone talk about hell in the minister’s sermons, you never doubt that at the end of your life God will sweep you up on the wings of his grace and deliver you into the bliss of unending, unearned reward.
Where does shame start? On the outside with our social group. Where does it end up? Inside us. And the more we internalize shame the better it works its magic, or in our day, its damage.
We can think of shame as a social reflex. Consider the survival value of the reflex arcs in our nervous system. They allow our motor neurons to act superfast. Our big brains give us remarkable intellectual powers, but sometimes they’re dangerously slow. Touch a hot stove and the nerve impulse from your finger goes up to a reflex center in your spinal cord, which instantly sends a signal back to your finger to remove itself from the stove. We don’t have to wait for the impulse to go all the way up to the brain to get processed through that complex network and get sent all the way back down. Reflexes give us the blessing of speed.
When we internalize the rules of our culture, we’re internalizing the triggers of shame so we can apply those rules instantly and make social decisions faster than the speed of thought. It’s a case of do unto yourself before others do unto you. The quick-trigger of shame stops you before you do something that would make the group target you. For example, you’re in your small band and you’re really hungry and you reach out your hand to try to sneak an extra portion of today’s meager kill. Instantly, you’re zapped with a shock of NO! Then thinking starts to catch up with the shock: “Don’t! That’s a mistake. If you get caught, you’ll become a target. And you really don’t want that.”
You might feel a bit of self-criticism that you were tempted to do wrong, you might feel a bit rattled, but the group would have no idea how close a call you just had.
The speed of shame, when it acts like a reflex, is one of the things that makes you a trusted member of your group. By contrast, an outsider unfamiliar with the ways of your culture, would be clumsy. He’d lag a beat behind everyone else. He’d have to consult the tribal book of rules, so to speak, for proper behavior each time before he acted. He’d have to stop and think things through, and his very slowness would mark him as an outsider.
Darwin was struck by the blushing reaction which often accompanies shame. He wondered if it was limited to his own culture, so he sent letters to naturalists and missionaries around the world asking if, in their local populations, they saw shame accompanied by blushing. They did, so Darwin concluded that blushing was universal and had a relational purpose. If your band shamed you, they meant business, and they didn’t want to hear a bunch of BS excuses from you in response. If you blushed, that was proof that your group did, in fact, matter to you, that they were getting through to you and their shaming had gotten inside you where it can be most effective, because blushing is an automatic physiological response. It’s not an act of will. You can’t fake it.
The most important internalization of shame is, of course, the inner critic. Pretty much everyone will tell you they have one, and they’ll describe it as something like this, “A mean character inside who nags me and hammers me and kills my joy.” And what is this but shame personified? Some self-help authors call it the “inner protector.” In our hunter-gatherer days our critic did protect us because it was limited and situational. It would tell us, “What you’re about to do, don’t. Listen to me and be safe.”
But now, in our death culture, the inner critic has gone ontological. It doesn’t warn you against doing something stupid, instead it insists you are stupid and you areunlovable and you are hopeless. It doesn’t correct you, it takes possession of you to take you down.
Over the years, I tried every different strategy to put a stop to my critic. I tried bargaining with it: “Hey, let’s look at this rationally. When you pressure me and scare me, you throw me off balance and I actually do worse, so how about toning it down?” But the inner critic is driven by fear, so reasoning doesn’t work.
I tried begging: “Please, please, please, stop hurting me.” But that only proved I was too weak to take care of myself and therefore needed even bigger doses of its “help.”
I tried counterattacking: “You’re a bully! I hate you! Shut up and leave me alone!” But that meant I was playing its game on its turf where it had the home-field advantage. It was far better at attack than I was at counterattack, so it always won.
And finally I tried “taming” my inner critic, as a popular self-help book tells us to do, but what a wretched thing to keep as a pet.
One Sunday afternoon, I went over to the university library where there are 1.4 million volumes in the underground stacks. I took out twelve weighty tomes about shame, not one of them an easy reading, pop-psych thing, and brought them home. I started paging through one and then another, back and forth, randomly, getting lost in the different perspectives, getting frustrated, then angry, because whatever I was looking for still eluded me.
Suddenly, there was a whisper inside my anger: “I do not believe in shame.” Then it got louder: “I do not believe in it.” Then it got fierce, “I stone-cold do not believe in it. I do not believe in shaming little children. I do not believe in breaking their spirits. I do not believe in shaming loved ones. I do not believe in breaking their hearts. I do not even believe in shaming my enemies, because that only makes them meaner. Shame, you have been the devil in my life, you have been my despair, you have no heart left in you, so I’m done with you, crazy done with you.”
This was my turning point. And what was I doing? I was taking a moral stand against shame.
And what could shame say back to me? In that blessed moment, it was speechless.
If you have a fierce inner critic, don’t you need an even fiercer inner fighter? Here was mine showing up.
But then what about criticism? Should we rule it out because it sometimes makes us feel shame? That would be a mistake because we all need to be able to see ourselves critically in order to develop ourselves morally. But we don’t need to get our criticism from critics, inner or outer.
I’m thinking now of an evening when I met up with Ginny at a café after work. As I sat down I saw there were tears starting in her eyes.
“What is it?”
“You know Mona?”
“Jeez, yes, what did she do now?”
“After the coalition meeting yesterday, she followed me out to the street and blasted me: ‘You talk too much, you always talk too much, why do you always talk so much? I’m tired of hearing you talk, everybody’s tired of hearing you. You should stop talking so much.’ ”
“And?”
“I felt crushed. Because part of me knows what she said is true. I do talk too much. So I guess I should thank her for telling me.”
“Oh, god, no. Let’s take a step back. Would you call what she did to you an attack?”
“It sure felt like it was.”
“Here’s what I think. It doesn’t matter if a person tells you something true about yourself, if they’re attacking you with that truth that means they’ve turned it into a weapon, and that means you don’t have to accept it from them. If you want to look into whether you talk too much, fine, but what has Mona done to that question?”
“She’s poisoned it. I think about that question and immediately I picture Mona standing there yapping at me, dripping with hate. She makes me feel so hurt I don’t want to dig into this issue even though I need to.”
“That’s how shame works in our time. It shuts us down. It makes things worse.”
“But I think I do need to deal with the talking thing.”
“Okay, but to hell with Mona’s shame attack. If you want to talk about your talking, you get to restart that conversation from scratch. You get to go to someone who cares about you and ask them to help you figure it out.”
“Okay, then I’m coming to you.”
“Cool. So where do you want to start? Want to tell me what you know about yourself and talking?”
“I know I talk a lot when I’m telling stories.”
“And how do people respond?”
“Oh. People listen. They laugh. Sometimes they cry. And sometimes they give me hugs after.”
“Yes, I love your stories, and I know other people love them. So storytelling is not an example of talking too much. It’s an example of talking a lot and it’s just right and it’s welcomed.”
“Okay, but I have this nagging feeling I talk too much with my staff at the office.”
“Like when?”
“Like when I’m telling them how I want them to handle a project. Here we go…I’m feeling shame rise up right now.”
“Then stop and take a deep breath…and another. One thing I know about you is how sincerely you care about people, so picture your good heart. Can you see it?”
“Yes.”
“And now gently turn your caring inward. No rush. Notice your self-love showing up, just a bit at first, then a bit more, then it begins to fill you up.”
“I see me back home as a little girl. Our parents did not listen to us kids. If we needed something, even a simple thing like a notebook for school, we had to ask for it five or six times, then plead for it, and still we might not get it. Wow, it hurts remembering that.”
“And now, being tender with yourself, what do you want to say about talking?”
“Sometimes I do talk too much. But it’s when I’m not trusting people to hear me, so I make very, very, extra special sure to get my point across and, god, that’s got to be annoying.”
“Is that what Mona was pointing to?”
“No, she doesn’t know me well enough to know how I am with my staff. But maybe I do that sometimes at the coalition meetings, maybe I get scared that people are not going to listen, not when I’m telling stories, but when I’m putting out a strategy idea. So Mona…”
“She’s…”
“Irrelevant. Toxic. I really, really don’t need to listen to her. Not about anything ever.”
“But she broke this topic open.”
“Yes, and I can learn something from her attack, but that’s me learning, not her helping me.”
“So if you want to check out this question about you and your staff…”
“I could go to each of them and ask, ‘How often do I overexplain? How often do I keep talking when you already understand what I’m telling you?’ And then listen. Or, I could just cut my instructions to the minimum and test out if my staff get what I’m saying. They’re really bright. I bet they’ll do just fine. Okay, I’m going to do both.”
“As an advocate for yourself?”
“Yes. And here’s why. I don’t want my childhood running me. I really like my staff, all of them, and I want the best possible relationship with them.”
“And what are you noticing right now?”
“The more tender I am with myself, the less shame can hurt me.”
“And…?”
“And that makes me smarter about what I need. And thank you!”
Shame is a tough customer. It doesn’t let go easily. When I declared I was done with it, I really meant it, and I hoped this resolute declaration would be enough. But it wasn’t. There was one more thing I needed—a forthright conversation:
“Inner Critic, do you understand just how much I’ve hated you?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Then let’s talk about your reputation instead. People call you names like bully and jerk. They throw around adjectives like nasty, mean, and vicious. I’ve called you those things myself.”
“But that’s not fair. You should thank me, not hate me.”
“I know.”
“You know?!”
“Yes, I didn’t used to, but I do now. And this brings me to why I wanted to talk with you. I want us to renegotiate our relationship.”
“How?”
“Tell me about yourself. What do you want to say to me that you’ve never said before?”
“I want you to know that when you were a boy I was always your advocate. I only attacked you to make you behave. When you wanted to protest, I made you shut up. When you felt angry, I put the lid on it. When you wanted to go your own way, I harnessed you and held you in check. You were an intense kid, full of passion, so it was not easy to control you, but it had to be done. And it was exhausting. I was on duty 24/7 with no vacation days. I had to make sure you fit into your family no matter what it took. Okay, that’s what I have to say. Now what about you?”
“I hated you but I needed you because you took care of me. You were so disciplined, you kept me from rebelling. You didn’t let me act out my distress, which would have turned my family and my church against me. It was so hard to follow all those rules, but you made sure I followed them. I don’t know what would have happened to me without you. You hurt me so badly, but you made sure I had a home.”
“That I did.”
“You were my enemy and my savior. You had to hurt me to help me. So you see how you drove me crazy?”
“Sorry.”
“I had to pay too big a price to fit in, but I had to pay it because I had to fit in.”
“I want you to know that all those times I hurt you, I never once enjoyed it. I was just doing my job.”
“I get that.”
“So now what?”
“Now we talk evolution.”
“Evolution!?”
“I used to think we were all born with a self-sabotaging element inside us for no good reason other than to make our lives harder. I thought you were inevitable and unchangeable. But that’s not true. We humans invented our inner critics.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Once we became a social group species, we had to learn to live by the rules of our group. Those rules came from the outside but we needed to get them inside us for them to work best. And presto, you were born.”
“So I served as the ambassador for your group?”
“No, you were their enforcer.”
“Serious business, then?”
“Yes, as serious as it gets, because the work inner critics do is absolutely necessary for children, for their survival. But not for us adults, not in our time, because there’s been a drastic change in society.”
“Which is what?”
“In our hunter-gatherer days, it was good for individuals to be an integral, committed part of the group, because the group took care of the individual. It’s true the individual had to sacrifice some of his personality and desires, but the trade-off balanced out okay for him.”
“And now?”
“Look at this modern society we live in. It’s abusive and exploitive. It’s destroying itself. And look at this human species. It’s killing itself. So it makes no sense to look to such a society or such a species for guidance. And if I’m not going to do that, then I don’t need anyone inside me internalizing their mandates. Which means I don’t need you anymore.”
“Ouch.”
“I’ve spent years developing my moral core. I’ve been working hard to replace social shame with my own moral fight. I’m making my own decisions about people and relationships. I’m independent now. I have a soul of my own. I don’t need a substitute soul, an imported societal soul, to manage my decision-making for me. Which again means I don’t need you.”
“So you’re going to obliterate me?”
“No, I’m going to liberate you.”
“What does that mean?”
“I know you only hurt me in service of a greater good. I know you were just doing your job. People make you out to be a villain, but I know you’re a fighter.”
“I am?!”
“You fought for me. You did everything you knew how to do to keep me safe and secure in my family group and my church community. You were just a little kid…”
“That’s right…”
“And I was just a little kid, and we were both scared.”
“Very scared.”
“And we did the best we could. But I’ve come a long way and I’ve stepped up my game and now I want all the fight I can get my hands on. And I want all my horses pulling in the same direction. So, no, I don’t want to get rid of you. But I want you to stop working for those outsiders and work for me instead.”
“Wow, okay, can I really do that?”
“Yes, you can, and here’s why. You’re part of me, so I get to redirect you. As a child, I couldn’t, but as an adult, I can.”
“So does this mean that we’re done with shame attacks? Do we get to live shame-free for the rest of our life?”
“Not hardly.”
“Why not?”
“I wish I could do an exorcism and disappear shame from my life forever. But that’s not how it works. First, because I still have decades of shame memories lodged in my body and sometimes they pop up and grab me from behind and freeze me in my tracks and they feel like electric shocks and they still really hurt.”
“And second?”
“We live in this society that does aggressive shaming. So even though I’m making progress at shutting down my internal attacks, external attackers can still target me.”
“So we’re not out of the woods?”
“No, but things are really different. The stronger my moral core becomes, the less subject I am to attack. And if I no longer have an inner critic attacking me from the inside, then I’ll be able to withstand attacks from outer critics like never before.”
“Why is that?”
“In the past you made me vulnerable to outsiders. Think about it, if you want to attack another person, what’s the most effective way?”
“You piggyback on their inner critic because their inner critic knows them the best and therefore how to hurt them the most.”
“That’s right. You study how they beat themselves up, then amplify that. But if I’m not beating myself up…”
“Then the outer critics don’t have that deep personal vulnerability to work with. They have to go generic which doesn’t hurt as much.”
“And if I have a rock solid moral core that keeps me true to myself…”
“Then it doesn’t matter what the outer critics have to say. They can bombard you with shame attacks, but those attacks can’t get very far inside.”
“And sometimes not inside at all.”
“So if you don’t listen to me anymore, I mean my old self, my attack self, then who do you listen to?”
“The part of me that always loves me enough to fight for me. And this part of me, this fire in me, has taught me how to give shame one hell of a fight. Now I know how to keep shame on the ropes. It can still hurt me, but it can’t own me, not ever again.”
