Gloria spent thirty years of marriage to a man she loved before coming to terms with the abortion she had had as a teenager—but had never revealed to her husband. Not until she found herself on the brink of a psychiatric implosion did she begin to consider her history. It is standard practice for me to inquire in the very first session with patients about their sexual history, or if they have endured any significant sexual, physical or emotional trauma as they understand it. Despite this, it was not until I had been seeing Gloria for about two months that she was finally able to tell her story, as if she had been unaware of it at the time of our first encounter. As the veterans of Alcoholics Anonymous report, we are only as sick as the secrets we keep. And shame is committed to keeping us sick.
Caught in the Loop
We recognize early and often that shame tends to be self-reinforcing. When we experience shame, we tend to turn away from others because the prospect of being seen or known by another carries the anticipation of shame being intensified or reactivated. However, the very act of turning away, while temporarily protecting and relieving us from our feeling (and the gaze of the "other"), ironically simultaneously reinforces the very shame we are attempting to avoid. Notably, we do not necessarily realize this to be happening—we're just trying to survive the moment. But indeed this dance between hiding and feeling shame itself becomes a tightening of the noose. We feel shame, and then feel shame for feeling shame. It begets itself.
Athletic and attractive, no one would have suspected it of her at first glance. Nancy had been bingeing and purging for the better part of fifteen years. She had kept it a secret rather effectively from the time she was a teenager until she was into her first year of marriage. When her husband, Mark, first discovered it, he immediately suggested they both seek professional help, but she stonewalled. He was stunned at this skeleton in her closet, given how well he thought they had worked at being honest in their communication heading into marriage. Now he simply felt helpless to do anything about it. Every time he raised his concern, Nancy firmly, and sometimes harshly, redirected the conversation, indicating that the very act of talking about it unleashed an unbearable torrent of shame, which made it impossible for her to even look at him. And so she turned away. Away from Mark, away from the immediacy of the sensation of shame and toward the very behaviors that would only increase the burden of shame she carried over time. Every time this cycle repeated itself, every time she attempted to deflect her shame by turning, she revolved into an ever more tightly spun spool of that which she was hoping to avoid becoming.
Divide and Conquer
Isolation and disconnection are natural consequences of hiding and resisting reengagement. With enough reinforcement of the features we have thus far considered, we see how the outcome is the separation of people from one another. In any of the previous examples, relational disintegration is obvious. But this isolation is not limited to that between people. For as we will see in chapter two, the fundamental neurobiology of the experience of shame disintegrates different neural networks and their corresponding functions within each individual brain, isolating them, causing the mind to be decreasingly flexible in its capacity to adapt to its environment. In order for us to flourish, we need to be able to connect with others, but this connection is deeply rooted in our ongoing work to increase the degree of connection we experience within our own minds. As Daniel Siegel and others have pointed out, this process of intra- and interpersonal integration is a dance that depends on the fluid movement between the work of the individual and that of a community.[1] I need the community in order for my mind to be integrated, and with a more integrated mind I will be more able to work toward a more integrated community, which reinforces the cycle. Shame both actively dismantles and further prohibits this process of integration, leading to disconnection between mental processes within an individual's mind as well as between individual members within a community.
As a child and adolescent Helen had never considered her family to be broken. It never struck her as odd that her older brother, Jack, consistently received attention from her parents (especially her mother) that she did not. She simply attributed it to the fact that he had been the golden boy of their local school and church community; his reward was well-deserved. Her parents were quick to publicly shower accolades on him but offered nary a mention of her. This pattern continued into adulthood; even when Helen and Jack were married and had children of their own, Jack's children received particular affection, which Helen's did not. Her response was simply to work harder to gain her parents' affirmation, now for her children as much as for herself.
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