Love this. As a single, relatively lonely guy, shame-avoidance drives a lot of what I do. Romantically, sure, I'd do almost anything to maintain a veneer of plausible deniability, but also just existing in the world. I feel fine when I'm doing, but have a really hard time being in public without a plan.
Thank you for posting this. It's a very long read so I fear it won't gain much traction, but I think it helped shed light on a malaise that I've felt since adolescence. Therapists and partners have told me I don't practice enough self-love, but to say I self-loathe also felt like a lie. This line in particular crystallized the disparity: "Pathological shame is an irrational sense of defectiveness, a feeling not of having crossed to the wrong side of the boundary but of having been born there." I'll keep this writing in mind as I move forward.
Some of us are able to use shame as a motivator. I am the only individual in my known family that isn’t obese. Everyone on my mothers side and the few I know on my fathers side are all obese. While I was growing up I was told that I too would become obese once “your metabolism slows down.”
Fortunately that hasn’t happened because avoiding potential shame has guided my choices.
I used shame to give up alcohol and tobacco. I used shame to make corrections in my relationship with my wife.
It definitely can be used like that successfully. Generally there's long term impacts of internalized shame like that though, which can bring about lots of anxiety and depression.
I've been trying to find positive reframes for things like that -- "I want to quit smoking because I care about my health and want to take care of my body" vs "I want to quit smoking because otherwise I'm just a fuckup that's going to die of cancer"
(at the very least in this case, "I want to quit smoking because I'm tired of hacking up a lung every morning feeling like I'm going to die", which is more a biological imperative than anything)
Glad you're physically healthier for it, and that you're tending to personal relationships. Please be sure to take care of the mind as well :)
I smoked for ~18 years and I stopped cold turkey by using one simple trick. I associated smoking with an individual that I did not like. This was an individual who had no admirable qualities at all and they smoked.
Whenever I thought of having a smoke, I would instantly think of that individual and asked myself if I wanted to be associated with them by smoking like they do. It did the trick.
I also keep repeating the following to myself:
“Few things say ‘look at me, I’m a complete idiot’ quite like smoking a cigarette.”
I had to be able to respect myself and I absolutely could not respect myself whilst also using tobacco.
[Imposter Syndrome] This is wonderful, thanks for sharing. I'm part way through but came back to up-vote and comment that for this crowd, Shame is probably most often felt with
* Imposter Syndrome in work situations
* social faux pas for the neuro-diverse among us
So my biggest takeaway is: can we get really comfortable with that feeling instead of feeling hurt by it, and use it in a positive way? As @hollywood_court mentioned it must be possible to use that for conscious behaviour changes - choosing to change rather than masking to fit in.
You can certainly tell the age of the article. Shame is talked about every single day, many of these recent movements are based around shame. Hell, I'd say they've perfected it to a point of weaponization, When nobody does anything particularly illegal, they're just socially shamed into obscurity, and if you still like these people, you are shamed as well.
Metaphor? Doesn't matter, I don't think you missed anything. But I only managed about 20%. Seemed about like the normal stuff I read when I took a psych class. Funny, I think that was just about 1992.
Shame seems not to have disappeared. Contemporary culture wars invoke and wield shame effectively, so it’s still there. Perhaps it’s just become unmoored from its traditional groundings?
> Contemporary culture wars invoke and wield shame effectively
I’m not sure that’s true. They certainly attempt to cast shame, but more often than not, they fail to incite it, and fall back to ostracism and excommunication. Could the rise of those latter phenomena be explained by a decline in shame?
If we wanted shame to remain prevalent we should have been better about how we used it. The fact that some of it's predominant uses were to shame perfectly acceptable behaviors like homosexuality and transgenderism is a huge knock on the whole approach.
