3.9 Disarming shame
I grew up on shame, immersed in it, and…
It hurt so bad.
I remember when I did something stupid and suffered a shame attack, I felt…
Ashamed of being ashamed.
So then I wouldn’t ask for help. I suffered in silence and that stark loneliness was as bad as the shame itself.
As a child, I submitted to shame because I couldn’t imagine not submitting. But once I got into my twenties, I grew to hate it, especially how…
Shame annihilates self-love just when we need it most.
Still, it was only after I launched myself into my mission to upgrade love that I began to question it in earnest…
Why if it’s so hard on us do we keep shame around?
Why if it hurts so much don’t we humans rebel against it by the millions and tens of millions and even billions?
And…
How did it ever become one of our core affects in the first place?
I realized that if shame, after all these millennia, is still a major force in the life of our species it must have some kind of survival value for us. But what could that be?
Darwin said…
Shame is a social emotion.
It’s not something you feel on your own. Shame gets inside us for sure but its origin is external.
Shame starts with your band or tribe. It’s a function of your social group. It’s part of your relationship with your group.
And it turns out that…
Shame is absolutely necessary for tribal life.
We humans are creatures of DNA, which means we are naturally self–centered and competitive. Meanwhile, we developed a super-cooperative way of life. That’s been the secret of our success. And right there is the central, tug–of–war conflict of humanness, cooperation vs. competition.
How did our ancestors respond?
What they did not do was turn themselves into purely cooperative beings. Instead…
They layered their cooperative way of life onto their competitive nature.
So even though they were fiercely committed to it…
Cooperation was not easy for them. It was not automatic. It took serious discipline.
And they needed a way to…
Enforce that discipline.
Shaming became the key part of their system of enforcement.
Which meant that…
Shame developed as a means of social control.
And why was it so painful? It had to be. It had to be very, very painful, because it was…
A matter of life and death.
If the tribe couldn’t keep itself together in the daily practice of cooperation, it would die out. So shame was not just a minor emotion thrown in with the others for good measure…
Shame was essential to the survival of our tribes.
That’s why it’s so deeply lodged in our genome. Not only was shame a social emotion but it was…
A survival emotion.
Like our other emotions, it was important for the survival of the individual, but crucially, shame was critical for the survival of the tribe, upon which individuals were utterly dependent.
Notice, by contrast, that solo animals don’t have shame. Orangutans, which live solitary lives in the forest, have no need for shame and therefore don’t suffer from it. They don’t live in social groups, so there’s no need for social control.
Throughout most of the long history of our species, when your group shamed you, as counterintuitive as this might sound, it was…
An act of love.
How so?
If you were living in a small tribe and you deviated from the rules, you got shamed. If you were trying to lord it over other people, you got shamed. If you were being selfish, you got shamed.
And the shaming would happen immediately, because if you drifted from the core discipline of the group, you would be putting the group in jeopardy and that was unacceptable.
The mandate was this…
Play by our rules, and if you don’t, if you get lazy or careless or inattentive or lack discipline, we will hound you back into alignment with us.
But the key phrase there is “back into.”
Imagine for a moment that we’re 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.
So we tease him, put him down, make him the butt of pointed jokes. In short, we shame him.
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.
Shaming was so effective because it was part of a complete system of enforcement. If you didn’t respond to shaming you’d be shunned. Which means people would stop speaking to you and interacting with you, which would be…
A social death.
Being shunned by the people of your tribe, the people you spent your whole life with, the people you depended on for everything, was so very painful that people responded to shame quickly. It worked really well.
And the more you internalized the rules and cultural norms of your tribe, the better shame worked, because you learned to control yourself so well that no tribe member had to step in and use shame on you.
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, while the finger is getting burnt. 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 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 your reputation will suffer. 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.
So in summary, when we look at the origin of shame, it’s clear that…
Shame was designed to hurt.
And hurt a lot. But…
It was not designed to hurt you.
It was there to help you.
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 mega–societies that run on exploitation, attack, and despair. We’ve changed our way of life and along with it we’ve changed how shame works.
We’ve…
Weaponized shame.
We’ve taken this ancient element of the human psyche and…
Hijacked it.
It’s now used to diminish people, damage them, and take them down. Just take them down.
That’s how I experienced it in my childhood church. Of course they wanted me to follow their rules, but it was more than that. They used shame to shut me down because they were so shut down themselves they didn’t know how to handle kids being kids.
And now we see children taking children down, and doing their best to inflict maximum damage in the process.
For example, imagine Tina, 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. 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 experienced as 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 takes 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 that instant, I would want to cheer for her, “Good for you! They deserved it!”
It’s the same feeling I get when I watch 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.
These days we say…
Children can be cruel.
A throwaway line which is used to shrug off the damage of modern–day shame attacks. But…
This is something new.
In a small hunter–gatherer band there were only a few children. They played together, learned from each other, and depended on each other. They understood how much they needed each other, both right then as children, but also how they would need each other in the future when they grew up.
No child was motivated to take down another child to destroy him. And the tribe would not have allowed that, because if children were busy trying to destroy each other, the tribe would not have survived.
In hunter–gatherer days…
Your tribe wanted you to be the best you could be.
They wanted you to develop your talents and strengths so you could make your best contribution to the life of the tribe.
The only limitation was that you had to fit into the daily discipline of the tribe.
So maybe you were born with an aggressive personality. This would come in very handy when you needed to fight another tribe. But it wasn’t something that would work in the daily life of the tribe. Which meant you suppressed that part of your personality—until it was needed.
Or maybe you were born with a shy, introverted personality and liked to spend a lot of time alone. That wouldn’t work in an intensely social tribe where togetherness was the norm. So you’d have to ramp up your energy and learn to tolerate more interaction than you would otherwise naturally enjoy.
Tribal shame is hard enough to get free of. Weaponized shame is even harder. The platitudes and techniques promoted by the happy–talk self–help books don’t really help that much. Shame is too deeply rooted in us.
At least that’s how it was for me. So I decided I needed to dig deeper…
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 shaming anyone.”
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.
And then I heard myself say…
“Shame, you have been the devil in my life, you have been my despair, and 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 it say back to me? In this moment…
It was blessedly silent.
And it suddenly struck me…
Why would I accept guidance from a society that’s destroying itself?
And…
Why would I accept guidance from a species that’s killing itself?
I’m so much better off making my own moral decisions. And making them in accord with what I care about—mutual nurturance and mutual advocacy. Where mutual means reaching across divisions.
That’s what I realized about tribal shame, but modern weaponized shame is so much more dangerous.
And we need to defend ourselves against it.
So for example, when you hear that shame voice in your head, talking to you, telling you what to do, and insisting that you do it, you get to stop right there in that moment and ask yourself…
Whose voice is this really?
Who’s telling this voice what to say to me?
And what are their motives?
You get listen deeply and question deeply and ask…
Is this the voice of someone who loves me?
Or…
Is it the voice of someone who hates me and wants to hurt me?
Is it the voice of someone who wants to control me so they can use me?
Look at our modern mega–societies, and the one feature that stands out above all others is…
Mass suffering.
Where does that come from?
Mass exploitation.
And what keeps this system going strong?
Mass shaming.
Shaming of the many by the few to the benefit of the few.
Those with power and privilege claim the right to pass judgment. They claim the position of authority. They say who should be ashamed of what and why. And most grievously…
Who should be ashamed of who they are.
The people at the top understand that exploiting is so much easier if you can get people to internalize shame and…
To shame themselves.
They understand it’s so much cheaper if you can get the people you’re exploiting…
To police themselves.
Because then you don’t need to hire nearly as many people to police them for you, like middle managers, school teachers, and actual police.
Our tribal way of life had its downside. There was constant strife between tribes. But there was something so beautiful about the cooperation within the tribe.
By contrast…
Exploitation is just ugly.
And hateful. And evil.
Our media and education system and our culture delivers destructive messages to major groups…
Women are told to devalue themselves.
People of color are told to think of themselves as unworthy.
Gays and lesbians are told to consider themselves unpardonable.
And it goes on and on. Which is a testament to the innate power of shame that a relatively small number of people can shame the great majority.
And they don’t even have to be very smart to do it, not at the basic level. They don’t need a doctoral degree in shaming to pull this off. Even idiots know how to do shame attacks.
But the people in charge have in fact studied shame and gotten smart about it. They’ve made messages of shame subtle, subliminal, sneaky, and slippery, so they can worm their way past people’s defenses.
That’s the big picture on a mass political level. But it’s a sad fact, that lots and lots of people at all levels of society, learn to use weaponized shame, including against others like themselves, because it’s become a fundamental element of our culture.
One hopeful thing, though, is that more and more people are taking a stand for themselves and deciding on their own what they consider shameful and what not.
They are deciding to…
Feel for themselves and fight for themselves.
And to…
Rebel.
And stop listening to people who hate them.
Just like weaponized shame is something new in our human world, new since our hunter–gatherer days, this level of resistance to shame is something even newer. And so beautiful.
Throughout the great majority of our history, our morality was a group morality. But since that’s now failing us, there’s every reason for us as individuals to put in the work to develop our own personal morality.
I’m not talking about following whims or impulses, but about moral decision–making that comes from the deepest place in our hearts. I’m talking about the kind of decision–making people can do when they have done serious moral self–development.
In debates between religionists and atheists, I’ve heard religionists argue that without religion, without God’s rules, everyone would run around doing whatever they pleased.
But if people with solid, loving moral cores are running around doing what they most want to do, that’s a good thing not a bad thing.
There’s always the objection, what if you do something that violates your own moral code, don’t you need to shame yourself till you get back on track?
My answer is absolutely not. I don’t need to force myself or attack myself. Quite the contrary.
When I do something that violates my values, as soon as I realize what I’ve done, I feel sad, I feel upset, and I want to make amends and set things right. I want to get back in alignment with myself. My guide is not external mandates but…
My own personal moral desire.
Which is deeply nurturing and so much better than a shame attack.
Personally what I have found to be the most effective way to oppose shame is to give myself over to…
This mission to upgrade love.
Because it means instead of being reactive to shame, I get to be proactive about upgraded love.
Rather than going mano a mano with shame, instead of butting heads with it, I’m changing the game. I’m pulling a flanking move. Instead of trying to shut shame down and keep the lid on it, I’m pulling the rug out from under it.
Because being on the upgrade journey means that…
I’m doing my own personal moral self–development.
I’m developing my own moral core.
I’m getting better and better at making my own moral decisions.
Ultimately, I’m replacing shame with nurturance. And that means I have no need for shame. Zero. Because I have no need for outside guidance. It’s not that I don’t listen to others and consider what they have to say and learn from them. It’s that I don’t need any group or any one laying their demands on me about how to behave or who to love or what to give my heart to or what my values should be.
So…
Instead of being shame-determined, I’m self-determined.
And I’m so thankful for this. It’s been a long, hard journey, but I’m so glad to have come this far. There’s further I want to go, but if I never got any further this is enough. I’m at peace.
Does this mean that shame is entirely gone from my life? No such luck. Shame is an essential part of the human genome. So the shame function is still there inside me, still angling to do what it does.
The difference is that…
Now I know how to oppose it.
And with each passing day I get better at opposing it. I get better at standing outside it instead of living inside it. So even though shame can still annoy me and aggravate me…
It can’t control me.
Neither the old tribal shame or the new weaponized shame.
But the way shame can still hurt me is through my shame memories.
Old bad memories still grab me from behind. Sometimes it’s like an electric shock. I’m going along having a good day, and for no reason I can divine, suddenly I’m back thirty or forty years ago re-experiencing an incident of shame that I wish I could excise from my brain.
I’m struck by how powerful these old memories can be. I think this is a testament again to the life–and–death nature of shame. There’s something so powerful about shame that sometimes I think it’s semi–traumatic. Or maybe for some people it’s fully traumatic.
But now, being on my journey to upgrade love, when one of these memories attacks me, I don’t submit. I know how to fight it. I’ve come to understand just how much I hate shame, so I fight it with everything I’ve got and in every way I can.
I’ll handle it in different ways, depending on the memory, depending on the mood I’m in that day, but here’s my favorite way to respond…
“Shame, you owned me in my earlier days, but you don’t own me now. And yes, you can still cause me pain. But notice the difference. I don’t let you control me anymore. It feels so good to know that I will never collude with you ever again.
“And something more, that person back then who got shamed, that was not me.
“That was the me my family created, and my church, and my society. That was the me that was desperate for approval and was so off balance that I did stupid thing after stupid thing, and sometimes hurtful things, in my desperation.
“That was not who I wanted to be and I do not identify with him anymore. I’ve finally become the person I longed to be. Who I am now is who I identify as me.
“I’m not begging for approval anymore. I’m on solid ground with myself. I’ve finally come to love myself, on my own, from within myself.
“Shame you are stuck in the past, but mercifully I have moved on. And maybe you can still hurt me when you pierce me with an old memory, but you cannot get me to follow your orders, not even in the smallest thing.
“And even back in those days, when I was such a lost soul, even then…
“I did not deserve to be shamed, I deserved to be helped.”
