Shame: The Naked Self

Shame!   The Naked Self.
By
 Gary Reece, Ph.D.

My client came into my office and sat in his usual space on the couch.  He was the picture of despondency and hopelessness.  His entire demeanor shouted out that he was in really hurting.  Slumped shoulders, down cast eyes, sitting in silence, he vibrated despair.  After what seemed an eternity he said:  “I despise myself, I am worthless, I am good for nobody, I can’t bear it any longer!”  I was stunned by this sudden change in him from last week’s session to today's.   It was as if there had been a total collapse of the self and he appeared to be drowning in a quagmire of self-loathing.  A novelist I have been reading lately captures the experience with a very eloquent metaphor.  “He stood at the “wooden fence of shame, to drink at the fountain of inspiration.  It was temporary, everything, a purposeless existence, a rite of passage, marking time, wasted years, growing up years.” (Deon Meyer, Dead at Daybreak) This was written of a young man who appeared walled off from himself by this fence of Shame and when it collapsed he was flooded  with very painful feelings of hopelessness, disgust, and self-loathing. This experience was so overwhelming that it almost rendered my client Catatonic.

When the defense collapses and a person becomes overwhelmed with feelings of absolute hopelessness   I struggle to help them find words to articulate and express these feelings.  What I was witnessing was the “collapse of the inner self.”  This collapse was signaled by amplification of the feelings of shame and disgust and by the thoughts of hopelessness and helplessness.  It was also accompanied by an instant dissipation of safety and trust.  This was an eruption of feelings from long ago, disconnected and never felt.

 He was unable to articulate any feeling except disgust and a need to rid himself of these intolerable feelings in that agonizingly long session.  Onesurprising  reaction I had  was the way I felt after he left that day.  A whole host of memories came flooding back.  It seemed to have triggered my own experiences of alienation.
I am sure most of us have at one time or another felt this inner kind of torment or even of terror when we get close to our very raw, naked and exposed self.  I experience it as a piercing of the ego, shame that is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul. It does not seem to matter whether the humiliated one has been shamed by derisive laughter or whether he mocks himself. In either event he feels himself naked, defeated, alienated, lacking in dignity or worth.

This brought back memories of when I was in high school, I was the Geek, the one who was bullied and ridiculed for being too smart and the teacher’s pet.  I had to run a gauntlet every day to get to my classes:  this daily shaming felt as if I was “standing exposed under a powerful microscope where my smallest faults were magnified. These were reinforced by daily abuse from  my father and an lder brother.  Sartre described it “as a shame-triggered crack in the universe.”  Others have described it as though something that we were hiding from everyone is suddenly under a burning light in public view.  Shame throws a flooding light upon the individual who then experiences the compelling desire to disappear from view, an impulse to bury one’s face, or to sink right then and there into the ground.   Another author describes Shame as a sort of internal hemorrhage.

For me as as an adolescent it was a torment to go to school each day.  This caused me to want to crawl into a hole and culminated in feeling that I wanted to run away or that I could die. Instead, I buried myself in books and found a modicum of respite that way.

In the case of my client, the origins of this powerful, corrosive and maiming experience occurred as a relational trauma in the first 2 years of life, a rupture of the maternal bond with his mother.  This relational trauma was so stressful and painful and because it occurred so early, before words,  resides not in consciousness, but remains in implicit memory as a “dissociated state.  Shame!  When this form of early relational trauma is so severe, that it cannot be tolerated by the infant it is defended against by Dissocation:  Allen Schore describes it this way:
   
 Disssociation is a dis-integrator of the conscious subjective experience of a present moment—is a      basic  part of the psychobiology of the human trauma response: a protective activation of altered states of consciousness in a reaction to overwhelming trauma. (Schore, pg. 126)

I have been seeing this young man ever since he was an adolescent.  His family history was a whole host of traumatic occurrences, the “perfect family storm.”  His mother was a fearful, depressed woman.  He was her second child and probably suffered from post partum depression after having him while she had to care for a two year old daughter with serious heart problems requiring multiple hospitalizations and a husband who was a drinking truck driver who was gone a lot.  Not fertile soil for raising a healthy child.  These traumatizing circumstances were continued through my client’s childhood and adolescence in the form of physical abuse, harsh criticism, and his mother’s inaccessible emotional states of anxiety and depression.  He learned from this family dynamic that he was worthless, and that the world had nothing good to offer him: to always expect the worst.  This was indeed, a very  bleak landscape in which to grow up.

The very nature of shame is to hide itself; we hide it from ourselves as well as others.  Shame in our culture is out of fashion, it has gone underground, it has been replaced by more fashionable syndromes like depression and anxiety.  Shame in modern parlance is often masked by “low self-esteem” issues.  One distinguishing feature of Shame is its resistance to change because it is so deeply rooted.  It has been very fashionable in today’s therapy world to use “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” to change such “negative self talk.”  My experience is that this is one sign that Shame is an underground force, a dissociated and unconscious emotion which masquerades as poor self-image. And because of this trying to talk someone out of these thoughts, or change their "negative self-talks" does not work because they are absolutely convinced of their worthlessness.

Many current scholars describe the problem as hiding our shame from others because we want them to be see us favorably and “be blind to what we cannot tolerate seeing.”  Shame is probably the most powerful emotion we are unable to modulate consciously. Much of our own psychology is based on avoidance of Shame and is often unrecognized and untreated. To wit,  my client left the session very depressed, announced to his wife he wanted a divorce, and called and cancelled his next sessions, “he needed a break.”  
It is very difficult to face, let alone feel this devastating level of self-hatred.  It is even more difficult if we are convinced that we are despicable and not worth loving. It is very hard not only for us to look at ourselves but also to expose these feelings to others.  It is particularly hard when the very experience of shame prevents us from looking at ourselves clearly because the primal shame distorts the vision we have of ourselves.

 Shame like so many primal emotions requires careful exploration, slow exposure to examination and a humane, accepting, and supportive environment where we can look at ourselves more compassionately. If we are to do so, we must feel safe, and trusting of the person we let into our inner sanctum, so filled with shame.  Our redemption must come as we see ourselves in a new light as mirrored in the eyes of the compassionate other, one who understands and is willing to experience these horrible states on the boundaries of consciousness.We must find a new perspective in order to soften the glare and restore a sense of hope and worth.

I am confident that my client will return to therapy once he has had a chance to restore his defenses, and have a chance to reflect on what he experienced that day when his deepest pain erupted and overwhelmed him.  It was too much to face all at once. It for him was like walking out of a dark cave into glaring sunshine.  It is difficult to face our deepest fears and torment by ourselves, it is even harder to do it in front of someone else.  In my case, I was fortunate to have a series of healing friendships, corrective emotional experiences and a very compassionate therapist.