THE FACES OF SHAME
“There’s this girl at work,” began Casey, “who blushes and turns away every time you look at her. Everybody notices it. And she’s real pretty, too. I almost think that she’s prettier than she can handle.” Embarrassed himself at the apparent irrationality of that statement (after all, isn’t she in control of how pretty she looks?), he paused for a moment to check my face to see if I thought he was being silly. I nodded, and he continued. “I mean, she’s so pretty that you can’t help looking at her. But every time somebody does look at her, she runs away and can’t talk for a couple of minutes.”
Let’s not speculate why this young woman experiences shame when noticed. There are lots of possible reasons, all of them interesting, none of them really important right now. All I want is for you to recognize that shame can be expressed by a gesture—sudden withdrawal of the face from the view of others—accompanied by the autonomic display of blushing and a brief period of apparent confusion. It is neither subtle nor suggestive. Seen in infant or adult, this is the plain, unvarnished, undisguised face of innate affect.
Casey himself demonstrated another form of shame recently. Walking into a session with his usual friendly and polite greeting, he seemed thereafter somewhat remote and inaccessible. None of his statements carried any affective tonality; everything he said, notwithstanding its content, was courteous, pleasant, and lifeless. Some minutes later he broke into his description of a hockey game to mention, as if in passing, that he had goofed at work, but with so little emphasis that when (a few seconds later) he resumed his description of the game I did not think further about it. He was unfailingly pleasant, steadfastly and resolutely proper. Everything he said was clear, cogent, well-phrased. Paradoxically, despite the apparent clarity of his statements, I felt the session becoming more and more vague and unfocused. It was turning out to be one of the most boring psychotherapy sessions I had ever endured.
There are lots of procedures a therapist can follow in such a situation. Usually we call attention to those words or phrases used by the patient that seem to carry a lot of emotion, using displayed affect as a guide to hidden meaning. But in this session every one of his statements seemed just like every other—there was no evident emotion. It was clear that Casey really did want psychotherapy, really wanted to work on some issue that contained intense emotion, but was somehow prevented from discussing it more directly. Sometimes the clue comes from how the therapist feels during the interaction. In this case, I had the weird feeling that I was a Roman Catholic priest receiving confession from a dutiful boy whose behavior was too good to be true.
No matter what I said, he responded only by pausing or nodding politely. I had never seen him so emotionally constricted. Since he wasn’t giving me any more clues, I decided to use my own emotional reaction as a guide. Perhaps feeling like a priest in a confessional was a serviceable empathic response to something going on in Casey. Maybe this is how he felt about me—that he had been forced by custom to attend confession when there was a lot he wanted to keep private.
After a moment of hesitation, I conveyed that idea to him. He chuckled briefly at the idea of his Jewish psychiatrist feeling like a priest, and then turned away. I took that gesture as a hint that I was on the right track and pressed further. What might have happened to change our interaction from its more usual free-spirited interchange to this constrained and limited form of discourse? Had he perhaps suffered some insult so severe that the resulting shame had rendered him essentially speechless? Casey mentioned the incident at work I had ignored earlier, and said it had been “pretty difficult” for him.
Even knowing what had happened did not make the session suddenly work well. Although Casey wanted to tell me what had happened to him, the very forces that had made him so uncharacteristically dull and restricted now conspired to prevent him from finding words for his experience. So much was he forced to resist the process of self-revelation that we “joked” occasionally that it seemed “like pulling teeth.”
The error itself was simple to understand. From a list of possible entries he had told the computer the wrong interest rate around which a huge list of client bills was then calculated. Swiftly the implacable automata of the business world churned out stacks of paper stuffed automatically into envelopes with immediately metered postage, stopped from programmed delivery to the post office and thence to clients by only the merest of coincidences. Was it a small error, an understandable error, an important error, or an unforgivable error? Had he himself caught the blunder before it came to anybody’s attention, Casey’s emotional reaction might have been the mixture of fear and relief we all experience when escaping danger. But the boner was spotted when the maximum number of people might find out about it. And it was detected by the rival who stood to profit most from Casey’s reduction in public esteem.
Have I sketched in adequate detail the reasons for his humiliation? There is yet more. Casey is young, handsome, single, well-liked, and the youngest of eight brothers—all of whom work in the business founded by their father. Understandably, the women of this firm see themselves at considerable competitive disadvantage relative to those eight heirs apparent. Casey’s error was discovered by the woman most senior in his office, the person who feels most thoroughly stigmatized and perhaps victimized by her gender. The broadcast and dissemination of his goof were revenge so sweet that, these many months later, she still smiles knowingly at him whenever they pass in the halls.
Excruciating. Who wouldn’t be humiliated in such a situation? But I introduce Casey to demonstrate another, quite specific facet of shame, one that derives clearly from the innate mechanisms discussed in the preceding chapter. The very deadness that characterized Casey’s verbal output was a clue to the presence of shame. Shame affect operates to reduce interest–excitement and enjoyment–joy, the affects that make us vital, lively, charming, fun, interesting, enjoyable, exciting, charismatic, thrilling, inspiring, and appealing. If you wonder why someone lacks vitality, look first for nearness to shame.
These two stories illustrate something else. You will notice that not once did I mention the inner experience of shame. I avoided any discussion of how Casey felt when his error was discovered, or how he feels each time his supervisor reminds him of this incident, or how it influences his ability to work and flirt with his colleagues. Similarly, I avoided any mention of the inner world, the private feelings of the young woman whose beauty brings more attention than she can handle. What I depicted might be called the visible expressions of shame affect acting as an innate attenuator circuit. These are the places where we outsiders can see the affect at work.
Next, we need to consider how it feels to have an attenuator, a limiting device that you can’t control, one that simply takes over when you least expect. From what we have presented about the nature of shame as an affect that limits the expression of other affects, it should be clear that shame can interfere with any human activity. But what is the inner experience or, more properly, what is the range of inner experiences that accompany the action of this attenuator? Recall Sartre’s comment that shame “runs through me from head to foot without any discursive preparation.” No matter how often we have been shamed, the attenuator event is still relatively unexpected.
All this is from the standpoint of an adult, a fully-grown person prowling about the planet in pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, a mature human in acceptably good command of his or her faculties. Equally interesting is the problem of what it is like to grow up with a limiting device you can’t control. I know more about my daily experience as an adult than I can possibly remember about the earliest years after birth. As a mature adult I have come to accept the pattern of powers and limitations typical of the complex system that I recognize as me, the system we call “the self.” I can walk, read, work, earn, eat, and type at such-and-such a pace; I have come to understand and accept the limits of my ability to store and recall information; there is just so much that I can get done on a particular day; and I know all this from experience. I know when I am happy, I know when I am excited, I know when I am aroused, and I know when I am embarrassed.
Each of these intricate combinations of affects, cognitions, and drives has been experienced by my adult self so often that it has some sort of “name,” some label that allows assignment to its proper compartment of my mind. By now, it is rare that anything feels entirely new; everything pretty much resembles something else. It was not thus when I was a child.
Observe, for a moment, the household cat. As a kitten, it lives in a world of constant novelty, to which it responds with curiosity, the playful interest we find so charming. The older it gets, the more our pet sleeps. This is not a mere reduction in activity consequent to bodily aging but the loss of novelty precluding the activation of interest–excitement. Even an ancient feline will act like a kitten in the presence of a totally new stimulus, as (for instance) when it is released into new surroundings. But it is a wise and sedentary old cat because it recognizes what it has already learned and wastes little energy on the process of “discovering” what it already knows.
Like the kitten, the human infant is similarly occupied by novelty. Early enough in development, every adventure is novel—it has not occurred prior to this moment. (True, what has been initiated with interest may be terminated by any negative affect. But new situations normally trigger interest.) By forming associative linkages between each experience and the affect that accompanies it, the baby builds from nothing an increasingly extensive lexicon of emotion. Although we see evidence of the operation of each innate affect from birth, it is obvious that as we age affective experiences take on new realms of meaning. Sometimes a baby is scared by a situation that would not upset the more worldly and experienced toddler. Sometimes the child has neither back ground nor equipment to comprehend and thus experience danger as might an adult. But, occasionally, what frightens a newborn may yet threaten a toddler, strike fear into the heart of an adolescent, or terrify an adult.
In each case the affect is identical, but at each stage of development the individual will bring to the experience of affect a different level of appreciation. So, too, does the experience of shame shift and change during development. Shame affect is triggered throughout life, but the shame family of emotions develops slowly and somewhat differently for all.
The easiest way I can visualize both the changes in the infant’s equipment (including the way the developing brain picks up new abilities) and the way that equipment responds to shame affect is through my appreciation of beginner-level chemistry. To me, solitary things and unitary concepts are like atoms, which, when linked, form combinations like molecules.
Take, for instance, the element chlorine, by itself a noxious (even poisonous) green gas at room temperature. Bubbled through water, chlorine turns into hydrochloric acid. In purified form, the element sodium is a silvery, light, shiny metal. When added to water, sodium combines with it to form the caustic and destructive compound we call lye (sodium hydroxide). Yet sodium and chlorine can combine with each other to make white crystalline sodium chloride—table salt—a chemical necessary for life. Neither element resembles table salt in any way, yet both are necessary for its manufacture. If we combine iron with chlorine we get a green salt called ferric chloride that neither tastes good nor is necessary for life. All chemicals that contain chlorine are alike in that we call them “chlorides,” despite how very different they may be.
Now let’s see what happens if we view shame affect as if it were an element and try to find out what familiar molecules contain it. Some will turn out to be easily recognizable compounds, emotional states we have always understood to be part of the shame family of emotions. Others will look quite strange in the list of shame-related states, for shame affect turns out to be involved in situations that may surprise you. The shame family of emotions is just as complex and varied as the chloride family of chemicals. In the next few chapters I will identify shame in a great many of its assemblages, demonstrate the sequence of events leading to the development of each assembly, and suggest reasons for the differences in power and impact of each resultant emotion.
Over and over I have stated that people differ both in their descriptions and their apparent experience of shame. Who we are is dependent on how we got to be us—each of us is the product of our development. How we experience and identify shame is contingent on the importance to us of the situation in which the attenuator of shame affect is triggered.
For some, shame is a moment when they wish a hole would open up and swallow them; it makes them want to disappear, for they feel at risk of death. Others experience shame as a failure of such proportion that the entire self is suddenly disvalued—now their whole person is worthless and deserving only of exile. “Attacked” by shame, one can estimate the “damage” over a broad compass, from the total destruction of one's self-esteem to the relatively minor devaluation of a superficial attribute. There are those who seem quite capable of “forgetting” or disavowing a moment of embarrassment—they merely go on as if nothing has happened. Women, more likely than men, tend to experience and describe shame in the language of shame. Men, in our society, are taught to experience shame as an excuse or a stimulus for anger and describe shame in the language of insult and threat. For many men, shame triggers immediate rage and fighting, as in the motion picture cliché called the barroom brawl. And at the opposite end of the activity spectrum sit those who withdraw into depression when humiliated. Children giggle when embarrassed, clowns make sport of shame, satirists and sadists use it as a weapon.
As a boy I was warned to guard my wallet when in crowds. “Be especially careful,” said my father, “when somebody announces that there are pickpockets around. Hicks and rubes immediately check to make sure their money is safe. They reach for the pocket where they keep their wallet. And that’s how the thieves know where to look!” Sometimes shame does the same sort of thing. No matter what has caused a moment of embarrassment, there are people who tend to think about what they most want to hide, rather than the actual triggering stimulus. Their inner and outer reactions are guided by whatever else they have hidden. “I feel so fat!” says one of my friends whenever she is embarrassed. Another looks automatically at the zipper of his trousers, as if his genitals—rather than his thoughts—had suddenly been exposed.
How does shame mold character? Some folks are brassy and apparently shameless, others are cautious, still others so frightened at the possibility of humiliation that they become paranoid, withdrawing from human contact lest something be exposed. The mere glint of sex will throw some people into paroxysms of shame, while others bask in sensuality. Why should this be? What can make an unvarying affect, a physiological mechanism, into so diverse a spectrum of experienced emotions? How can shame be at one time only a moment of discomfort related to a single special attribute, and at others a feeling of such destructive force that it represents the dissolution of the self? Why is shame sometimes an earthquake but now and then no more than a giggle?
Here is a clue: The mind of the child is not the mind of the adult. Abilities and attributes, all latent and potentially present in the brain and body of the infant, “come on line” in different epochs of development. We take it for granted that every event is stored as a memory linked with the affect that accompanied it, yet we must recognize that the meaning and significance of that memory (its ability to act as an association for later experiences of affect, and therefore as a part of the complex emotionality of shame) will be determined by the special qualities of thinking and the special types of experience characteristic of that era. We can identify certain themes in the progress of the child toward maturity, and an understanding of these vectors will aid considerably our perception of the varied assemblages that include shame affect.
Thus, in order to explain the tremendous variability of the presentations of shame in the adult, the enormous range of subjects about which we may grow embarrassed, and the spectrum of significance to each of us of our shame-based cognitions, it may be helpful to sketch the modern concept of child development. How does the baby differ from the adult, and what happens along the way? What are the changes that take place as newborn becomes baby, baby becomes toddler, toddler a schoolchild, then adolescent, full adult, perhaps spouse and parent, and finally an old and perhaps widowed senior citizen?
The key phrase, of course, is growth and development. We clinicians and teachers tend to use these two important words, expressions that reference the governing forces in this transformation from infancy to adulthood, as if they were a unitary pair. Not so. They represent related but different concepts. By growth we mean increases in size, certain changes in shape, and increases in strength that characterize the movement through time of the infant. Development is the process by which already existing structures change in some manner, altering toward their final function. The tiny infant boy grows into a hulking adult man; by the time his endocrine system has developed to the point where he can sprout a beard, most of his growth has been completed. Girls have achieved their maximum height by the time their endocrine system has developed to the point where they can begin to menstruate. Indeed, manufacture of the hormone responsible for bodily growth is switched off by the process that allows release of the hormones responsible for the development of adult sexual characteristics.
The basic themes of growth and development involve changes in (1) size and strength; (2) dexterity and physical skill; (3) dependence vs. independence; (4) cognitive ability; (5) communication; (6) the sense of self; (7) gender identity and sexuality; and (8) interpersonal skills. Just for a moment, pick any of these eight realms of change and consider the differences between baby and grownup. How tiny and helpless the infant; how stalwart and majestic the adult! How primitive and nonspecific its cry of distress, especially in contrast to the delicacy, nuance, and specificity of complaint available to the adult. No one can detect the gender of a newborn infant without examining its genitals, yet note how clearly gender is signaled by the adult. And so on through the list.
Is it really possible to separate these intertwined vectors of change? Aren't they all immutably connected? Yes, they are linked, but not as solidly as you might believe. Nature distributes its bounty along a bell-shaped curve. The great majority of us grow to the range of height we therefore call normal, while some are midgets and others giants. One can achieve the height of an adult in childhood or become a chronological adult while still partially resembling a child. Usually, age is linked to height, and height thereby associated with other age-determined signs of growth. But occasionally we see ten-year-old boys who are six feet tall, who have adult stature but remain in other respects quite definitely ten years old. The streams of growth and development can run at different rates, suggesting that they are many and separate.
As a matter of fact, we all know people who are big but clumsy, or who have the cognitive equipment of a genius but the interpersonal skills of a toddler, or who demonstrate the dexterity of a watchmaker but the emotional dependence of a tot. If there is a system by which adult attributes are distributed, it is a system with much inequity. There are few guarantees; wish does not control destiny; biology is not a shopper’s world.
Over the next few chapters I will make the case that (unless something interferes with the process) pride is attached to the acquisition of each moiety of normal growth and development and shame is attached to any failures along the way. As each way station on the road to maturity is reached, it soon loses its power to trigger pride; while at all stages in development reminders of one’s previous (and therefore more primitive) status remain capable of activating shame. We will discuss all of the themes mentioned above, suggest the forms of pride and shame associated with movement along each stream, and draft some sort of blueprint from which we can understand the many faces of shame.
In chapter 4 I introduced one simple schema for pride: The child must have a want or a wish; it must be capable of making some sort of plan to suit and serve that need; it must then be capable of taking some action toward a related goal; successful action must be accompanied by (amplified by) either or both of the positive affects interest–excitement or enjoyment–joy, as, say, interest to power the activity and enjoyment to reward it. The entire sequence of wish/ plan/affect/action/affect, the sequence itself, is then recorded as a pattern and labeled as an instance of pride.
As for shame, recall that Tomkins’s theory also requires quite a few pieces of equipment. In order to experience shame the organism must have a sophisticated perceptual apparatus capable of registering minute alterations in stimuli generated both from the environment and from within. The data provided by these sensors must be assembled into patterns that the organism can recognize. There must be machinery capable of storing the patterns so generated, systems permitting the retrieval of this stored data, and procedures for the comparison of these retrieved patterns both with each other and with the new images constantly being formed by current perception. It is only when an impediment is detected which disturbs the expected flow of the affects interest or enjoyment that shame affect is triggered to reduce painfully that preceding positive affect. The resulting amalgam of memory, drive, affect (and anything else capable of being assembled with affect) will be recorded as a pattern and labeled as an instance of shame.
Who has such equipment, who can experience shame and pride? Not fish, turtles, earthworms, birds, insects, or snakes. Each of them has enough brain power to form a few patterns; snakes may even have some of the rudimentary equipment necessary for the equivalent of a few innate affects. None of them has enough to make shame affect. That really isn’t as silly as you might think, for a mechanism protecting an organism from being locked in interest might protect moths from being killed by their fascination with an open flame and other insects from getting stuck and dying in incandescent light fixtures. Dogs, apes, and man certainly can experience shame.
For better or worse, we have evolved into shame. But the qualities of shame depend on the nature of the patterns involved. Human infants demonstrate a rudimentary form of shame based on the rudimentary patterns made available by whatever parts of their equipment are available for use. The more equipment at one’s disposal, the more patterns that can be discerned in the data presented by the organs of perception, and the more these patterns can be stored and retrieved for the purpose of comparison.
How are these patterns formed, and what is the range of knowledge they represent? Experience turns into knowledge only as it gets registered in memory. This is easy enough to accept for the activities of a fully grown or developmentally stable organism. But how is that simple concept affected by the differences in the storage, retrieval, and associative abilities of newborn and adult? Are there patterns specific for, or at least typical of, each era?
Each action we take, each bodily function we use, each effort of psyche or soma helps define us. As I mentioned a moment ago, part of what it means to be an adult is to have a more-or-less defined self. The sense of self changes greatly during development.
From infancy to senescence, as we age and change, each alteration in us must be perceived and understood to the degree possible at that time. Infants, of course, do form patterns—they learn to recognize the patterns that make us caregiving adults uniquely us, and they interact with us on the basis of that information. Similarly, they are learning to recognize themselves by the patterns that define them.
The complexity of these patterns is limited by the level of cognition possible at each stage. But when a new cognitive attribute comes on line, the child's ability to form patterns is enhanced and therefore altered. There are at least two levels of definition associated with developmental changes in cognition: On the one hand, the child now has the ability to perform some new function; on the other, it can recognize itself as the new being defined by these new accomplishments. Both the new ability and the associated new definition of self are patterns that figure into the geometry of shame and pride.
Babies burble, while toddlers talk. The mind that can communicate only in burbles and by the display of affect can handle far less complexity, master fewer patterns, than the mind that can learn and manipulate a vocabulary of words. Yet toddlers have only an elemental sense of grammatical structure. Soon, when they can speak in sentences, they will look down on the monosyllabic toddler as a city dweller looks down on a cave man. And they will do it in the new language appropriate to that phase of development.
The new attributes and abilities that become incorporated into our vocabulary of stored patterns mature into the reference library to which we adults compare any new perception or experience. The name we give to the resulting gestalt, the mixed bag of patterns stored in that reference library, is “the person” or “the self.” The characteristics by which we know each other as persons or selves is the gestalt of our experience with those others—their “personality.” Generally speaking, I experience me as a self, but I experience your personality. Both personalities, yours and mine, have evolved over time.
It is this process of evolution that will now occupy our attention. I will sketch the paths along which the infant journeys—indeed, the paths all of us have traveled to achieve adult status. Each advance will be shown as a nodal point for the definition of pride. Each bit of forward motion makes the preceding attribute into something slightly backward and archaic—the nidus around which can crystallize the later expression of shame.