A Letter To The President by Donald Nathanson, April 20, 1999

What follows is a copy of a letter I sent this evening to President Clinton:

20 April 1999

William Jefferson Clinton
President, The United States of America
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

After your kind words to those affected by the horror in Littleton, Colorado, you refused the Press Corps' attempt to bait you into offering a hastily conceived solution to the growing problem of violence by children. Panels of experts have presented neither a satisfactory explanation of explosive behavior nor any plan for its resolution. Save for truisms like "things may get worse before they get better," and "old-fashioned remedies" that haven't worked in decades, those who most need a new marching cry, new ways of conceptualizing, and new techniques for the remediation of conflict are left helpless in the face of a steadily worsening situation.

Yet one remark attributed to a Littleton student suggests the answer: In response to her question "Why are you shooting people?" her classmate said "Because we didn't like the way everybody treated us last week." In my field, this killing rage is understood as a response to shame, and unless addressed as such, can lead to a life of estrangement, drug addiction, and crime.

In a series of books and scholarly papers, I have explicated the nature of shame in ways that both explain what is happening in our schools and provide a simple and easily applied remedy. When shamed, we respond in one of only four ways: 1) we can withdraw from the eyes of those before whom we have been exposed; 2) when this withdrawal causes too painful a sense of isolation and abandonment, we can demean ourselves in order to be made safe by otherwise dangerous people; 3) when the feeling of shame is too painful to bear, we can draw attention to something about which we are proud or use drugs like alcohol, cocaine, and the amphetamines to wash the feeling away; and 4) if there is nothing we can do by our own hand or mind to raise our self esteem, we tend to reduce the self-esteem of anybody available. I call these the Withdrawal, Attack Self, Avoidance, and Attack Other poles of the compass of shame. All this is detailed in my 1992 book for WW Norton, Shame and Pride; Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self.

As a psychiatrist, I deal often with adults who suffer varying degrees of emotional pain from issues at each pole of the compass, and watch their suffering decrease rapidly and dramatically as they come to understand the compass. In my work with the restorative justice movement, I have shown that chronic unidentified shame shears people from their community and makes it easier for them to act against their fellow citizens. Most important for the crisis brought to national attention in Littleton, one member of my Institute—a schoolteacher in upstate Pennsylvania—teaches grade school children about the compass and has watched them become increasingly immune to the kind of anger that concerns us here.

Sometimes it takes a new language to approach a problem. I have developed a language that explains the problem of juvenile violence in an entirely novel manner, prepared a method for the solution of the problem, and am willing to assist in its implementation.

Sincerely,

Donald L. Nathanson, M.D.
Executive Director
The Silvan S. Tomkins Institute

Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior
Jefferson Medical College

Join Donald Nathanson and others in a discussion of this topic.