Eventually it all became too much. During one family reunion when the conversation again turned naturally to all that Jack had been accomplishing at his work, and then moved to his son's new interest in baseball, Helen, longing to be seen, offered how delighted she had been at her daughter's interest in lacrosse. She might as well have been speaking to an empty chair. Her mother, ignoring Helen's comment, asked what position Jack's son liked to play. No one was prepared for what happened next.
It began with the slinging of a plate of food and the breaking of a wine glass. Her tirade erupted and continued for ten uninterrupted minutes, with forty years of neglect and hurt spewing over anyone within earshot and sightline. It only stopped when the emotional ammunition chamber was empty. She and her husband left without waiting for a response from her brother or parents. Predictably, in the aftermath and attempted cleanup of the brouhaha, her parents said nothing about the past forty years or the role they played in it. They only had words for the last ten minutes Helen spent at the reunion and all of the trouble she had caused. They expected her to make things right, and especially with her brother. Of course.
Helen's story reflects how the shame of emotional neglect, even and perhaps particularly because of how unremarkable it seemed in the early years of her life, led to her feeling isolated and cut off from her family. Eventually this led to an event in which the whole system was disintegrating. Given shame's intention to provoke the process of isolation, neither Helen nor her family system had the wherewithal to repair the toxic rupture.
In all these features of shame, emotion is at the heart of the matter; judgment is actively in play. In their hiding, people become disconnected from each other and within their own minds, and the process tends to snowball, caught in a self-perpetuating loop. Is there hope for us? Fortunately, there remains one response to shame that can begin to point us in the right direction.
Our Counterintuitive Conflict
With little effort we can get a sense of how the essential feeling of shame would lead to judging, hiding, reinforcement and isolation. It is not so straightforward to see that exposure is the very thing that shame requires for healing. Given how compelled we feel to turn away, strike inward at ourselves or strike out at others in response to shame, it is not our intuition to then quickly turn toward the other as a means to resolve the problem. When we are in the middle of a shame storm, it feels virtually impossible to turn again to see the face of someone, even someone we might otherwise feel safe with. It is as if our only refuge is in our isolation; the prospect of exposing what we feel activates our anticipation of further shame.
The work required to overcome the inertia of shame and turn in a posture of vulnerability toward someone else can initially feel overwhelming. Later, we will consider tactics for beginning this process in earnest. But it is helpful to remember that part of shame's power lies in its ability to isolate, both within and between minds. The very thing that has the power to heal this emotional nausea is the reunion of those parts of us that have been separated
The school system in which Jordan had grown up prided itself in the number of gifted and talented programs it provided for elementary and middle school children, and then the number of AP courses it offered its high school students. What had started out as an attempt to provide more opportunity for students, however, eventually devolved into a cauldron of pressure and anxiety for students and parents alike. Instead of providing an opportunity for expanding curiosity and deepening character, teachers wound up being caught in the same vortex, feeling the pressure to train their students to score well on AP exams so they could get in the best colleges. No longer was school and the learning it represented joy-filled. Instead it had become a factory of worry. Worry that was fueled by shame. The institutional shame that the school and all of its parts—test scores, students, teachers and administrators—carried was subtle but palpable. All driven by the fear that no matter how many graduating seniors were admitted to Ivy League universities, they would eventually be judged and found wanting.
By the time Jordan had finished graduate school and had begun his work as a high school English teacher, he wanted life for his students to be different from what it had been for him. And so he began inviting his students to a local coffee shop gathering once a month after school for conversations about what it was like to be in their place in life. They talked about a range of topics, but eventually the discussion turned to how much pressure they felt and how worried they were about their performance, not only in his class but in just about everything they were engaged in. They described how alone they felt in their worry. Life for them wasn't very joyful, but they figured this was the price they had to pay to get into the right college so they could find the right job so they could make the right amount of money so they could start the whole process over again with their own kids. But of significance was that some students spoke of how hard, even embarrassing, it was to admit to the weight they were under. They described how they believed they should simply be able to survive this pressure cooker, and to complain that something wasn't right about it would make them seem weak. They felt vulnerable talking about it openly, even with Jordan and their friends in what was for them a relatively safe venue.
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