SHAME IN ALL OF ITS DIMENSIONS

Imagine a continuum. Let’s name it, “Feeling bad about something” continuum. On it we can locate a range of emotions. This continuum of feeling bad due to having done something wrong ranges from not feeling bad at all to feeling bad about everything constantly. At one end would be the inability to feel bad about anything you did or failed to do. Here we have the realm of the psychopath and the sociopath. It’s as if they have no conscience regarding their actions and their effect on others.

Beyond that is the troubling emotion of “feeling bad” that something didn’t go as planned, expected, or desired. Now you feel disappointed. Further along the continuum is embarrassment. After that comes shame. Then toward the left of the continuum, guilt. Beyond guilt is an over-exaggerated sense of being guilty, a guiltiness, an over-conscientiousness, usually driven by being overly- responsible and wanting to please everybody.

What is common to all of these is that something occurred that is not desired. You or someone else did something that should not have occurred. But what? And in what area of life? When you do something you should not have according to social mores, and someone sees you, then you feel embarrassment. It is in the eyes of others that you experience embarrassment (e.g., burp, see toilet paper attached to your pants, fail to say ‘Thank You,’ fart, etc.). You committed a social blunder of some sort. But it is a minor thing. If it is a humiliation, it is a small thing. If you were by yourself, you would not feel embarrassment. You might simply laugh at yourself or desperately looked around to see if anyone saw the blunder!

If the offending activity is a bigger flaw, you may feel shame. Even when you are alone and by yourself, you would still feel shame. You broke a more significant cultural rule or etiquette, and you feel ashamed of yourself for having done so. Here you have not done anything that is necessarily illegal or immoral. You have only broken society’s rules (e.g., you had a wardrobe malfunction, you cursed at someone then noticed that a whole group of people heard you). You have shown a personal shortcoming or you have done an impropriety. In the face of others, you feel it as a humiliating disgrace that affects your reputation. It’s your social self that feels shame.

Guilt occurs when you do something immoral. Guilt is the appropriate emotion for when you have broken God’s rules, or rules that every society depend on as the foundation for society. “Do not steal, abuse, kill, lie, etc.” In guilt, the violation is much more serious than what was violated that elicited shame or embarrassment. Now you have done something truly wrong, something that brings censure, reproach, punishment, etc.

All of these are the emotions of conscience. When you are conscientious about yourself, your behaviors, their effects on others, and right and wrong, then your conscience lets you know when you have, at some level, and in some way, done something wrong. Embarrassment helps you think about others and the impact of your actions on others. Shame informs you when you actions may violate a cultural value, a mores of your community and enables you to do what is recognized as respectful and honorable. Guilt informs you when your behaviors are hurting and violating someone else and destructive to human relationships.

Brene Brown, The Power of Vulnerability, has invented another kind of shame, one she calls “toxic shame.” She defines it as “an intensely painful feeling of being unworthy of love or esteem.” Now there are several problems with this. First, this is not “shame” in its normal sense at all, but a self- judgmnet regarding one’s self-worth. It is the state wherein a person judges oneself assuming that self-esteem is conditional, and if you or someone else disapproves of you—you lose your value or worth. The so-called “toxic shame” actually has nothing to do with true shame (e.g., having violated a cultural value). Instead it is toxic because it violates the premise that all human beings are valuable and worthwhile, a Somebody, because we were born human.

Shame itself is actually a valuable emotion as it alerts us to when the way we talk or act is no longer respectful or honoring to the people that we live among. Good shame is when you rightly feel bad when what you say or how you treat other people fails to live up to what good decent and respectful people would do.

Albert Ellis, A Guide to Rational Living, describes intolerant shame as the essence of much human disturbance. It has this effect because a person “demands” that one absolutely “should not” and “must not” err at all! An impossible demand! That’s unhealthy shame. Then there is healthy shame.

“When you do something that you and your culture consider ‘wrong,’ ‘immoral,’ or ‘stupid,’ and when others witness your ‘badness,’ you wish that you hadn’t acted ‘foolishly’ and you almost immediately feel healthily sorry and regretful and try to correct your ways. Great!” (p. 231)