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This is the area where our faculty posts its thoughts about today's world and its effects on all of us.

There are two current entries. One is authored Alexis Johnson, PhD., who delves into the types and dynamics of shame. The other is authored by Judith Sarah Schmidt, PhD., and deals with the the work of the therapist in bringing authentic hope to people who have difficulty finding it.

To access either article, just click on its title:

Shame and the Capacity for Self-Reflection

Hope and Resilience

Also, be sure to check our Archives for past articles you may not have seen.

(Printable version of this article)

Shame and the Capacity for Self-Reflection

by Alexis Johnson, Ph.D.

"Only in an open, nonjudgmental space can we acknowledge what we are feeling. Only in an open space where we’re not all caught up in our own version of reality can we see and hear and feel who others really are, which allows us to be with them and communicate with them properly."

- Pema Chodron

     Life in all of its forms requires a rhythm of expansion and contraction. Psychologically speaking, shame is a contraction signifying being inferior or not good enough in one’s core being. When we experience shame, our innate, explorative, and creative life force is inhibited. Shame curtails our desire and capacity for personal growth, inhibits our spontaneous interpersonal creativity, and mitigates our innate urge to learn and expand our consciousness. It is a powerful and underestimated force in the development of personality. We often fail to recognize shame as a root cause of severe inhibition or the source of ongoing depression.

     Shame, or humiliation, is among the most negative and disruptive of feelings. The experience fragments our going-on-being, our sense of self in all its various aspects. When we feel shame, our body language, learning capacity, and communication significantly change.

• Shame is in the body. We lower our eyes and break off our gaze. We bow our heads and droop our shoulders. We become clumsy or un-coordinated.
• Shame controls our perceptions. We become unable to see or hear what is going on around us.
• Shame interferes with thinking. When we feel shame we automatically defend in various ways. By trying to get away from this noxious feeling, we can’t think, can’t problem solve, and certainly can’t be creative.
• Shame interrupts emotions and emotional communication, limiting intimacy and empathy. Shame can interfere with anything and everything from the joy of sex to the joy of ideas.
• Shame interrupts spiritual connection and well-being for when in shame, I have lost my sense of wholeness and possibility.

     Shame is a far more powerful inhibitor of action than guilt. Most of us develop a moral code that both allows us to live within the rules and, occasionally, to break them. We will risk the guilt of rule-breaking under certain circumstances. But shame, the loss of face, never leaves us as an inhibitor of action. Shame is purely subjectiv, and its punishment is a swift internal fall. Even the most powerful greatly fear this fall, this loss of face.

Positive and Negative Shame

     We use the word shame to describe the negative experience of being ashamed and the positive experience of having the capacity to feel shame in the appropriate setting. While negative shame elicits a swift, painful contraction, positive shame protects my proper boundary around privacy and the sense of what needs to remain hidden. Some of us want a great deal of privacy around specific experiences such as sexuality, finances, and illness. But we also might want privacy around birth and death, love and prayer. Shame in this sense indicates we are vulnerable, and being vulnerable is part of being human. A healthy sense of shame guards the separate, private self with its boundaries and prevents intrusion and merger. It is part of integrity.

     The word ‘awe’ gives a spiritual dimension to positive shame. When in awe, we transcend ourselves and face mystery. Awe opens us to the power and potential of uncertainty. We feel awe whenever we have a spiritual opening, whether in the grandeur of nature or a religious ritual. We know both our smallness and our place in the cosmos.

     Shame, in both its positive and negative sense, forces us go inside, teaches us to be self-reflective. In that sense, it creates depth in us. It enlarges our sense of humanity. The Jungians often use the idea of creating soul – soul is not a given; rather it is through suffering and learning that we become whole human beings.

Collective Shame

     Much of world history involves cycles of shame and revenge at the collective level. When defeat is mythologized and includes a strong shame element, revenge is the ‘best’ option. I was astonished to learn that part of the motive for the Serbian aggression against the Muslims in Kosevo was an event that happened 800 years ago. We of the United States are currently involved in a war in Iraq to avenge what happened to us on 9/11/01. Ideologically, we are totally committed to staying the only super-power; sharing power is humiliating from that point of view.

Dynamics

     The capacity for shame begins in early infancy. Infants live in a world of discontinuity. What is happening now is all that has ever happened. So when the baby-as-body experiences shame affect, he falls into an incompetent, incomplete sense of self. Phenomenologically, there is a ‘me’ being excited or interested in someone or something, and then that ‘me’ is thwarted. The failure experience disorganizes the baby-as-body and he becomes uncoordinated and momentarily unable to achieve his goal. Because he has not learned sequencing nor understands time, he experiences two different "me’s". There is a me that is excited and curious – good. And there is a me that is contracted and collapsed – bad. Over time and if he is soothed through his frustrations, his sense of self will organize these two discrete experiences into one "me".

     We need to understand these roots in early childhood if we are to help ourselves and others through the pain of shame into a more whole sense of self. As helpers, we must find our own specific ways of making shame-based clients feel safe. Some clients need a lot of space, silence, and patience to grapple with what is going on inside and come up with their own words. Other clients need very active engagement, lots of dialogue and aliveness, or else the therapist is experienced as too far away and as not caring. We know that, for growth to happen, the client must be willing to look inside, deeply experience what he is feeling, and share those experiences with the therapist or healer.

     To become self-reflective in this way is very scary if one expects to meet some internal form of shaming, like emptiness or badness. If the helper confirms this expectation by offering shaming feedback, no matter how accurate, it will take a long time for the shame-based client to risk sharing again, if ever. An opportunity for wholeness has been lost.

     An affirming relationship is crucial as part of the spiritual journey. We are social animals living out our aloneness inside our skin all of our lives. When facing difficult issues like shame or grief, we need appreciative contact. Our defenses were designed to keep us out of such unbearable pain, and they will be softened and set down only within the safety of a relationship that does not re-create the old stories. Then we can take the time and space to be self-reflective, to learn and to grow, and to follow the daimon within.

(Rent the movie Monster’s Ball if you want to see a painful, yet redemptive story of shame at both the personal and collective level.)

(Printable version of this article)

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(Printable version of this article)

Hope and Resilience

by Judith Sarah Schmidt, PhD.

     “Hope is a thing with feathers
that perches in the soul
and sings the tune
without the words
and never stops at all”

--Emily Dickinson          

     The taproot of the capacity for hope can be located in earliest infancy. This root is a wordless, body and sensory centered experience. I think of this as primary hope, which vitalizes all future experience. Primary hope forms on the ground of the mother’s breathing presence. When the newborn is placed on the mother, it moves to the left breast, to the heartbeat, thereby rooting the infant’s body and soul into the spiritual source of life. The beginnings of hope dwell in this cellular knowing that life is an ongoing rhythm, one that returns even when disrupted.

     When things are good enough, a being can rest in its beingness and, without having to do anything, can discover the ground and flow of, the loss and return to, its own rhythm. This discovery of an intimate relation to one’s deep and unique rhythm is the first sense of pattern and meaning in life as it gives shape to a sense of primary reality.

     Whereas hope begins early in life in the connection to the rhythms of the mother, it evolves into the ability to come home to the rhythm of one’s own deep self and to move out toward connection from a centered and centering inner holding space. Rhythmic and resonant connections to others and to one’s inner self are enlivening.

     The capacity to create desired connections with others from the center of one’s inner being, and the capacity to come home to the self, become acts of hope. True hope is an inner centering to the core pulse of aliveness and, as well, a sense that one can flow from this center to create one’s reality.

See the infants and young children in the Romanian orphanages who
sit for endless hours, breath frozen, rocking , holding on to the rhythm
of life until, despairing, they fall into a deadness of devitalization…

Now see the young child who, connected, comes to know that it is fruitful to
have longing. One knows what the belly of this child looks like: a fullness of
breathing flowing easily, rhythmically, out from the source of the child’s being,
a language of being before words. These are the beginnings of primal, authentic
hope.

     In our time when entire nations are suffering, it is important to broaden one’s perspective on the roots of the capacity for hope. It is important to bear witness to just how many mothers of infants and young children are despairing in our world. How can these mothers possibly provide the ground of hope for their children when they themselves have been torn from family, home, country? What web of safety can they offer to their young when they have been ripped away from that web? From the sufferings in the collective, one learns just how fragile and just how resilient the roots of hope can be. The life force will receive light from whatever source it may find: a relative, a nurse, another child, a teacher, the spirit of an ancestor. But enlivening response must come from some quarter. Attention must be paid. Greater understanding of just how critical resonant attachment is to the development of resilience can inform peacemakers, so that they can insist upon creating safe and hope-enhancing havens for the young.

     In one’s work with people, it is of utmost importance to sense the slightest sign of desire stirring in a depressed and hopeless person. This may be nothing more than a fleeting expression crossing the face or a gesture of the hand. Such wordless seeds of hope need to be raised up by the listener, for they hold the potential for new beginnings
.
     For hope to start up again, we may need to listen deeply and at great length to a person’s story. This is a story in quest of a witnessing presence: of a face that can see my story and have me see being seen. In this story telling, desire may arise out of being witnessed. Rhythm may start again, perhaps in the rhythm of tears, in the rhythm of the voice, in the rhythm of the other’s listening self, in the rhythm of the between created in the space of an I-thou.

     If resonant attending is not paid, in place of primal hope, there arises a sense of primal shame. At the core, one does not feel a part of the tribe, walks with head and shoulders bent, falters in footstep, does not look another straight in the eye, dreams of being covered in shit, feels the burning of humiliation of being seen. Primal shame is like the burning of a never-ending hell. Primal hope and primal shame are polarities of creating belonging and enduring the hopelessness of exile.

     There is another kind of hope that is different from primal or authentic hope. I would call this false hope. It is a hope that insists on having restored what has been taken away or being given what was never given. This is a hope that can never be filled, because the past can never be undone. This is a hope that protests and refuses to mourn.

     The helper can become frustrated at the insistence of the client to get what was never given. If the helper can metabolize this sense of frustration, she can hold the space open so that what is hidden behind this fruitless persistence can be uncovered. Often we find a dread of deadness, of primal shame, and a despair of ever starting hope up again. One’s work here is to help the person come to mourning, to the capacity to bear what must be borne in order to begin to hope in a real way for what is possible.

     If one is to help another to enter the journey through the desert of hopelessness, one must come to know one’s inner relationship to hope and hopelessness. If one can bear one’s own journey into the darkness, one can come to another with some trust that the journey will not be foreclosed out of fear, either the helper’s or the journeyer’s. One will have learned deeply in one’s own spiritual center that, in hopelessness, a rhythm can be found, and that out of this rhythm the pearl of hope can be received, precious because it is born out of a wound and bravely wrestled for.

(See Whale Rider: a film weaving threads of individual, collective and ancestral hope.)

(Printable version of this article)