But isn’t a little bit of shame a good thing?
I had an interesting back and forth about shame with a friend of a friend on Facebook.
They said:
"Is shame an altogether bad thing? If I were to lie or cheat or steal, for example, I think I SHOULD rightly feel ashamed of those behaviors. I'm sure we can all think of and name public figures that we believe act shamelessly (or shamefully) on a routine basis. I'm pretty sure only sociopaths *never* feel shame."
I responded:
What you are speaking of is guilt. Guilt is what someone experiences when they've done something that is out of alignment with their values. It's also a legality. Someone can be declared guilty of, for example, stealing food from a store. They might not feel guilty if, for example, their kids were starving and they had no money. In other words, guilt is "I did something bad and now I can course-correct" and shame is "I am bad at my core and there's no coming back from how bad I am."
And while it appears that sociopaths (and narcissists) never feel shame, my sense is that they are full of shame and have buried it so deeply and created a shield to protect themselves from the intense pain of it. We are physiologically wired to experience shame because shame served us at one time (when we lived in caves) and I believe we are evolving out of that need. Just like we no longer need an appendix in the same way we did when we lived in caves, but we still have them.
Shaming others tends to not end well for the shamer or the person being shamed. We are learning that accountability without shaming is much more effective in regards to our humanity."
They said:
Interesting analysis. My first reaction, though, is to say that in my mind, "guilt" is internal. It's when *I* feel bad about myself. It's when, as you say, I realize that I've done something that's out of alignment with *my own* values.
My sense of the word "shame" is much more outward facing. It's when I feel bad about how *others* see me. As I'm typing this, I recall as a pre-schooler being in a drugstore with my mother and seeing a mint green, cellophane-wrapped, candy cigar on the floor in one of the aisles. I'd always been told that food that landed on the floor had to be thrown away, that it was no good anymore. So I picked it up and put it in my pocket.
Once we'd gotten outside and Ma saw what I had, she accused me of "stealing," hauled my little butt back into the store, and made me confess what I had done and give it back. As you can imagine, I was mortified. In my mind and according to what I'd been taught up to that point, I didn't think I'd done anything wrong. I felt no guilt. But I was horribly ashamed that someone else would think me a thief, and especially to have to "accuse myself" in front of them.
Jonathan Haidt wrote something similar in "The Righteous Mind," that there's something very primal about being concerned with one's reputation and that there was a survival advantage at one point to being well regarded by one's community. He posits that natural selection predisposes us to care about how we're perceived by others.
I replied:
Your pre-school story is such a great example of the mechanism of shame:
#1 humans are physiologically wired to experience shame...
#2 one aspect of the nature of babies/young children is that everything that happens is because of them (this is a normal, natural thing, not an egocentric, "not everything is about you" thing). So when something bad or scary or overwhelming happens, it's "safer" for the child to internalize "it's a me problem" because if it's "mom or dad or caretaker problem then I'm really screwed." This happens on a nervous system level not on a logical level.
#3 if not disabused of the idea that it's because the child is bad, a problem, shame internalization keeps getting reinforced.
#4 in order to continue to be taken care of (stay close to resources) the child continues to believe there's something wrong with them (and we see this happening in particularly neglectful and abusive situations).
#5 those who control resources, controlled the child, thus reinforcing the shame...until it becomes "just who I am."
Getting back to your story...you learned that it's not okay to steal (an action) based on your mother's values and our country's laws. And here's the interesting part, you didn't think you were stealing, which makes what I am about to say interesting:
On a nervous system level (meaning she wasn't aware of it), your mother felt shame ("What will people think if I have a son who steals? They will think I am a bad mother and if I am a bad mother my husband may divorce me and I will have nothing and I will die").
Again, there's no nuance on the nervous system level. The incredible discomfort of that...the fear...had her offload that on to you...makes sense. She was triggered, as we say now.
She didn't have the capacity to slow things down and ask you a question about how you got the gum and why. This isn't her fault.
My theory is that we no longer need to be shamed in order to be "good people" and that "bad people" act out because they are full of shame that they are unaware of and that isn't their's to begin with. That's putting it very simplistically.
