My first blog, All Emotions are Beneficial, Even Shame explains that shame helps us because it signals that a painful rift or discord has opened up between us and someone we care about and that we need to restore that connection. What is more damaging is what we feel, think and do or say instead of pursuing what has led to our experience. Shame happens when an interesting and enjoyable experience has suddenly stopped, and an awkward and empty moment occurs instead. What we do to fill up that uncomfortable moment can be categorized as the compass of shame1 and diagrammed below.
Shame moments can get included in our habit patterns along with our normal responses of withdrawal, attack-self, avoidance and attack-other. Yet even then, many of these habits can have both healthy and unhealthy consequences. For besides hurting us and others they can also promote useful actions and valuable character development. And most importantly these patterns can alert us to seek their source in a prior moment of social discord. I will begin by exploring the ways withdrawal and attack-self affect us and how we can shift to looking beyond them.
Withdrawal
Withdrawal is the most commonly known response to shame, as an urge to hide from view. It is felt as shyness when approaching people we don’t know well and becomes more intense when they are also very attractive to us, whether through social status, celebrity, or beauty. Since shame arises when excitement is impeded and held in limbo, attraction, whether sexual or not, triggers shyness when men feel it but don’t express it. It’s a common male experience that “the prettier the woman, the more timid I feel.” It’s like “Newton’s laws” of motion applied to emotion.2
When shame makes us confused and we lose our balance, we reach for something familiar to hold onto. It’s our own shelter inside of us, a reassuring connection in the moment. There are Introverted and extraverted ways to get this shelter. An introvert will hunker down, maybe virtually curl up, and reach for some comfort in food, video or a digital device. An extravert might talk to somebody, either real or virtual.
I usually turn inside for solace, and I remember last July in the Trinity Alps when I was privately communing face-to-blades with some quiet lovable grass on the ground next to a trail. I’d just passed out from heatstroke, grazed a rock with my head on the way down, and then tried to walk but felt too weak. My partner Marsha went for help to get me the last quarter mile to the river and across it to the roadhead campground.
In a few minutes a youngish couple showed up, obviously fit, and stood looking down on me with my nose in the grass. “How are you doing?” said the woman taking charge. I choked up, ashamed to be so helpless. I said my heart wasn’t working right. I was a retired psychology professor, specializing in love and emotions. She asked me if I could walk. I said I’d try.
While she went to get my pack, the man stood on the trail, saying that he didn’t know much about heart problems. When she got back I got up. Then she asked me something about emotions. That got me to put on my professor hat, and I slowly began to walk. With her as guide and audience I got to the river, which was only six inches deep. So I actually walked across it without a hitch. By drawing me back into my arena of personal competence, she aced the whole rescue operation. She switched on my avoidance response to shame, an approach teen girls learn to draw boys out and bypass shyness in conversations.
Withdrawing personally from a shame scene is a natural approach to recovering from the shock of it all. It can give us time to think up ways to respond to an unfamiliar situation so we feel okay. Our results and try-outs can then become a go-to path for other strange moments. Even when one doesn’t know what to say to strangers, one can just identify oneself and start professing, as I did, or admit to being nonprofessional, as the other guy did.
The general key to pivoting from helpless self-sheltering to beneficial action is reflection: What has happened to bring me to where I am now instead of where I want to be? And what connection have I lost? If I focus on the events that led to my shame moment, I can begin to work toward repairing the rift between myself and others. Even if I can’t patch things up yet, I can admit that I feel bad. That’s a place to start.
Attack Self.
If I don’t use my withdrawal to consider ways to work out what triggered my shame moment, I might sink instead into attack self: What did I do wrong? Why am I not strong? Seeking out our faults can lead to improving our social skills, as it typically has for girls who’ve regretted and probed their presumed mistakes since toddlerhood3. But for men to build up similar relationship repair skills to women’s, they’d need to talk to each other about their failures the way women do. Habits of male competition, including “kidding” (play-shaming) block our trust in boyhood.
In this isolation, self-criticism of our faults can load up so much depression, self-hatred and even fear of seen in our mistakes that we’d rather be drunk, unconscious, or even dead. It is this dread that others might see our ugly thoughts and deeds that leads some people to suicide. And men are far more likely than women to die from suicide because they don’t want to wake up later to someone looking down at them and knowing they tried suicide and failed.
Recovering from Attack-Self.
This attack-self web we spin from shame becomes more unbearable the more we wrap it around us. But there is a way to cope with this terrible state: Welcome the light of curiosity into the darkness of self-hatred and fear, so the light and the dark states can balance each other. Our curiosity can reward us for new understanding of a shame scene, another version of the “Newton’s laws” of emotion.2
If your own curiosity doesn’t shine enough to lighten your heavy thoughts, tell your story to someone else. For what seems dire to you may not seem as bad to someone else, especially if they like you, so their positive feelings can lift up yours. They can be friends, counselors, teachers, or group-mates who like helping each other make lemonade out of life’s lemons. In other words, if you can’t bring up enlightening emotion from inside yourself you can rest assured that someone else can and would really like to help you do it.
Though our warlike culture has put armored straitjackets on American boys, some grown-up men have been working to expand masculinity through new perspectives in traditional places, like boy scouts, religious groups, military training, alcoholics anonymous and men’s groups. But to get serious at repairing our relations we need to keep track of our shame moments, and even start talking to each other and to women about our unexplored histories of social clumsiness.
We’ll explore avoidance and attack-other in another blog. The key to emerging from the pit of attack-self is this: Rarely is the fault for what’s gone wrong in a connection either all ours or all on the other side. It’s a fault line that has opened up between the two sides, with both sides’ compass of shame involved. Expressing that it’s there can transform humiliation into humility.
1.Nathanson, DL (1992). Shame and pride: Affect, sex, and the birth of the self. New York: WW Norton, p 312.
- These are not Newton’s laws but Silvan S. Tomkins’ explanations of the delicate balance between excitement and joy on one side and shame on the other. Tomkins, SS (2008). Affect, imagery, consciousness. New York: Springer, pp159f.
- Olesker W (1990). Sex differences during the early separation-individuation process. J Am Psychoanalytic Assoc 38(2), 325-346.
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Previously Published on Love and Power Institute and is republished on Medium.
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