In this month’s Tool, I describe something that can helpful in negotiating shame, that force in everyone’s psyche that points at us with a deep disapproval. It blocks desire and hopes, and the actions connected to them, and can be a heroic project to shift. This tool isn’t meant to take away shame, but to perhaps provide a wedge to make a bit more space between it and you.
[Democracy is coming]
From the homicidal bitchin’
That goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat.
(Leonard Cohen, “Democracy”)
Sarah, 27, who is about to finish graduate school with a PhD in engineering, hates to call her mother…and does so, dutifully, and with dread, every week. Saturday mornings come with a call that her father always picks up. “Hi Dad, how are you?” She’s not close with her father, who has never seemed that interested in her. “Well,” he says, “Retirement is better than not. Doing some golf. Things are going ok,” this being a version of what he always says before, “Oh, here’s your mother. Be well.”
The researcher Brene Brown, who got a dose of youtube attention (link) last year from her TED conference talks, has this great definition of shame: “Shame is the fear of disconnection.” She talks about how shame is the emotion/state that is pervasive throughout our lives, but which is rarely talked about. Even in the psychotherapeutic community, it is much more common to talk about something relatively rare like suicide then something like shame, which is so common and impactful. And yet, without an understanding of shame, and a practiced ability to spot it as an experience, we are invisibly swayed and sculpted by its logic and rules. But-and it’s a big but-that becoming intimate with shame qua shame is a bit like getting to know the sun by staring at it intently. The burning makes it very difficult to hold a steady gaze.
