National Campaign Against Youth Violence
First distributed December 2000, current revision June 2001
The Name of the Game is Shame
Donald L. Nathanson, M.D.
Executive Director, The Silvan S. Tomkins Institute
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Jefferson Medical College
One relatively trivial example will set the stage for my more general thesis: In the Draft version of the Council's report (Executive Summary section IV, item D), the observation that adolescent violence peaks between 3:00 and 4:00 PM is used as a reasonable justification for the establishment of programmed after-school activities. Ignored is a fascinating piece of classical endocrinology: the adrenal gland is known to "rest" both 3:00-4:00 AM and 3:00-4:00 PM each day in every human in every time zone, causing a significant decrease in the blood level of cortisone and other adrenal steroids during this period. Cortisone suppresses fever, and if any infectious process is latent it will be revealed when there is less cortisone to hide evidence of it. This is why we physicians take the temperature of hospitalized patients and ask mothers to take a sick child's temperature at this time in the afternoon. But cortisone also has something to do with the state of bodily "energy," and during that diurnal phase we tend to feel weak. Some centuries ago the British introduced "High Tea" as a sucrose and caffeine load during that phase, just as many of us now tend to snack at this time; furthermore, we all know from personal experience that around 3 AM we "hit the wall" and find it almost impossible to continue a bull session no matter how interesting. A certain amount of cocaine and amphetamine use occurs during the night part of this diurnal variation in blood cortisol levels. Am I the only adult who remembers that mom laid out milk and cookies when I came home from school between 3:00 and 4:00 PM? Almost all of us become "irritable" during the night or day instance of this diurnal episode, and I suspect that after-school activities work best to limit adolescent dangerousness when they include cookies and/or the conventional soft drinks that contain sucrose and caffeine. This is sheer biology and needs to be recognized as such if only to maximize the effectiveness of our after-school programs. With that sort of observation as a base, I'd like to increase the complexity of my argument.
Observations: 1) I find it fascinating that Galtung's concept of "structural violence," the factors of poverty and class injustice that predispose to individual violence, although intuitively correct is rarely parsed. We know there is an association between bad treatment of people and bad behavior, but we rarely ask why this should be almost as if it were incorrect to study the obvious. 2) We know that teens use alcohol far more than adults, but rarely ask why they drink and why alcohol acts as a "disinhibitor" of violence. 3) Although the rise in the amount and severity of violent action depicted in the media parallels the incivility of modern life, discussion has been limited to legalistic concepts of direct causality much as in the debate about cigarettes and cancer. Although movies and television shows do not order children to behave badly and cannot therefore be accorded legal responsibility for specific acts of violence, the association of such shows with the structure and form of violent behavior is obvious. Just a few years ago, two British children pistol whipped to death a toddler; I don't really believe that this form of attack was their independent creative discovery and suspect that they had seen something like it on television. I hope you will find useful my (below stated) information about such matters. 4) The age at which children demonstrate secondary sexual characteristics (in females, the development of breasts, pubic and axillary hair, the onset of menstruation and fertility; in males, the development of pubic and axillary hair, sperm count adequate to fertilize an egg) has dropped steadily over the past 50 years. Although pregnancy in a 9 year old was registered in textbooks when I was a 1960s endocrinologist, it is too common to warrant more than a passing comment these days. The average age of first intercourse was about 18 when I was a boy, and is now nearing 11 in some populations. Although some observers attribute this phenomenon of early female sexual maturity to the presence of estrogenic compounds throughout our biosphere (DDT is an estrogen as well as an insecticide, which is why so many alligators can't reproduce), an additional line of reasoning places responsibility on the astonishingly rapid rise in the number, type, and power of sexual images available to today's youth. The parts of the brain that set in motion sexual maturation are linked to the same parts of the brain responsible for intense emotion. 5) Despite that street drugs are associated with many forms of behavior that perturb society, only a small fraction of those who use these drugs commit acts that are truly bad for others. Street drugs (and indeed all prescription psychotropic drugs) are taken to modify emotional experience, a fact that is generally ignored.
A Paradigm Shift
Very briefly, I will outline the changes that have taken place in our understanding of emotion over the past 25 or more years, but that have not yet entered into consideration by the social sciences most of you represent. Primary neurophysiological and neuropsychological research by Tomkins, Panksepp, Edelman, LeDoux, Ekman, Stern, and many others have forced recognition of the fact that underlying the complex and highly variable emotions we as adults experience more or less constantly is a rather small and fixed set of physiological mechanisms. Although I favor one specific set of the theories that have devolved from this work, I believe nothing I will say here is very much at odds with the themes involved. As Executive Director of the Silvan S. Tomkins Institute in Philadelphia, I have integrated the work of Tomkins with modern neurobiology and psychopharmacology, and also developed a system of psychotherapy that (to the best of our knowledge) ignores no aspect of contemporary science. Our work with couples, families, communities disorganized by crime, and entire school systems also derives from this set of theories. I apologize for the brief lesson in affect physiology and affect psychology that follows, but it is necessary if we are to understand the modern epidemic of incivility, sexual excess, loss of order and authority in school, and violence.
Let's define some terms: 1) We use the term "affect" to represent any of the nine families of physiological mechanisms that underlie all emotion. The affects are a group of highly patterned muscular and circulatory actions primarily displayed as "facial expressions" but also as certain odors, postures, and vocalizations. It is the evolved role of the affect system to add meaning to information derived from other systems. 2) When we accept or pay attention to the affect that has been triggered by one of the mechanisms I'll describe below, it becomes what we conventionally call a "feeling." 3) The combination of an affect with our memory of previous experiences of that affect is given the formal name of an "emotion"; I've suggested that affect is always biology, whereas emotion always represents biography. Each of us has the same nine innate affects, but our life experience makes our emotions quite different. In order for any of us to really know the other person we have to know something about the history of that individual's affective life. 4) Just as each time an affect is triggered we delve into memory to check our previous experiences of that affect, we can spend a variable amount of time reliving these past experiences brought to consciousness as "associations" to that affect. When we get stuck in those reminiscences, a "mood" is brought into play because rather than the operation of innate affect, which normally lasts only a second or so, we continue to think of situations that trigger only that one affect. Any fresh source of affect can turn off normal mood, but normal mood can last a long time. 5) Yet there are people who cannot turn off their moods no matter what they do, and if there is no psychological reason for them to remain preoccupied with the history of their affects, it often turns out that there is something wrong with the biology of their affect mechanisms. These "disorders of mood" are what the psychiatrist treats with medication; the purpose of psychiatric medication is not to produce a constant experience of any affect (that's why people take recreational or street drugs), but to return the affect system to its normal plasticity or capacity for immediate shift to whatever might need attention.
The Innate Affects
What, then are these innate affects, and what do they "mean"? Each affect is set in motion not by a perception as such, but by the way information enters the central nervous system. Thus, the range of affective experience characterized by the range from surprise to startle (in the affect theory of Tomkins called surprise-startle) is triggered by any stimulus that has a sudden onset and a sudden offset, like a pistol shot, hand clap, or automotive backfire. The function of this particular affect is as a reset button for the affect system; it cancels anything we had been thinking about or concentrating on at the moment and prepares us for what might come next. The affect is expressed by raised eyebrows, a blink, and the lip formation with sudden intake of breath we come to imitate as the vocalization "OH!" As you can see in the example of the very sudden and brief character of the affect surprise-startle, each innate affect is both an analogue of its stimulus characteristics and (in that an affect calls attention to its triggering stimulus) an amplifier of that stimulus. In general, affects are expressed on the display board of the face long before they are experienced anywhere else; innate affect is seen clearly on the face of an infant much too young to have "perceived" anything in the way we normally consider necessary for the formation of an adult emotion. Again, the evolved function of each affect is to call our attention to its triggering stimulus.
A stimulus that involves information that comes into the system as "too much, too fast" triggers affect over the range from fear to terror (fear-terror), with blanched cheeks, furrowed brow, stiff body, face and eyes averted from the now frightening stimulus; pulse and respiration will increase to an unpleasant speed. Any stimulus that enters the system at an optimally rising gradient, as in the pleasant situation we call novel, triggers the affect interest-excitement, characterized by the facial display of "track, look, listen" with the characteristic frown of interest (or what we sometimes call "deep thought"), slightly open mouth, head tilted a bit to the side (we laugh when we see this in dogs, but it is the same affect even though we don't have a tail to wag as part of the affect display.) Any time a stimulus of any sort decreases in intensity and/or frequency, this decreasing gradient of stimulation triggers the affect enjoyment-joy, with mouth widened, the corners of the lips turned slightly up, eyes shining, and the general look of pleasure. If the decreasing gradient is rather rapid, a laugh is triggered; in general, this is the mechanism responsible for the pleasant feeling of contentment.
When a stimulus is relatively constant and above a certain level of density, it triggers the affect distress-anguish, with sobbing (obviously an analogue of constant density stimulation because of its constant characteristic), the corners of the lips characteristically turned down, arched eyebrows, and flailing limbs. Any stimulus that is both constant and much higher density than that required to trigger distress becomes a trigger for anger-rage, with the roar of anger, reddened cheeks, flailing limbs, and a characteristic steady state of muscular tension. These six innate mechanisms are triggered by nothing more than the densities and gradients of neural stimulation. It is only after an affect has been triggered that we are motivated to pay attention to whatever triggered it. I have described these innate affects as something like a bank of spotlights, each of a different "color," each flicked on by a different mechanism, each calling our attention to its triggering stimulus and thus making us use our best neocortical thinking apparatus in a style controlled by that affect. In the infant, a constant density stimulus like hunger or cold or fatigue or loneliness or mild pain will always trigger sobbing for which the mothering caregiver will have to decode the triggering cause from other data. Affect highlights the source, brings it into consciousness, and allows our best attempt for solution of the problem represented. No stimulus can possibly get our attention until and unless it triggers an affect, and affect is the only doorway to consciousness. Finally, despite that an older psychology claimed that each stimulus is followed by a response (what has been called Stimulus-Response Pairs), no stimulus can achieve a response of any kind unless it first triggers an affect. Life really is a matter of stimulus-affect-response sequences, and any time we need to figure out behavior that seems strange or dangerous to us, we must first learn what affect preceded it. Although we tend to say that children model their "behavior" on what they see at home, it is the affect part of the stimulus-affect-response sequence that needs our attention rather than the response behavior as such.
There are three other innate mechanisms that have evolved from other sources but have become incorporated into the affect system: bad odors quite naturally trigger an innate mechanism as the result of which the upper lip is raised, the nose wrinkled, the head drawn back and away from the offending odor, and the sound "eeoo" emitted; for this instrument Tomkins coined the name dissmell. Dissmell comes to involve any situation in which we reject something before sampling, and therefore is the affect underlying prejudice; coupled with anger it becomes the sneer of contempt. For some chemical substance that affects the taste buds outside a predetermined range of possibilities, the lower lip is automatically pushed out and downward, the tongue and head thrust forward, and the sound "yucch" emitted; this is the affect disgust. Disgust is the affect of rejection after taking something into our system, and when coupled with the affect of anger becomes the predominant emotionality seen in divorce. The final innate mechanism involved in the human emotion system is responsible for the shame family of emotions. The physiological mechanism is triggered only when we have been in the throes of one of the two positive affects (the only ones that feel good), interest-excitement or enjoyment-joy. As I mentioned above, an affect is both analogous to its trigger and calls attention to that trigger. Thus, whenever anything interrupts one of these two pleasant types of feeling, the interruption itself is amplified as an affective reaction through which the head and neck slump, the eyes droop and are turned away, the upper body goes limp, the face (and sometimes neck and upper chest) become red, and all communication with the other person is lost for a moment. The mechanism produces what I have called a "cognitive shock," honoring comments by sages such as Darwin and Sartre that no one can think clearly in the moment of shame. Almost everything we call "hurt feelings" comes from this affect mechanism. It is the quintessential affect of feeling shorn from the herd, of being alone and rejected. As if that weren't bad enough, this feeling of rejection comes to join with the affective experiences of self-dissmell and self-disgust to make shame truly awful in some situations. Most likely the experience of shame is toxic in direct relation to the intensity of those latter components.
I have identified the eight categories of experience in which shame affect will be triggered - save for the situation in which a biological glitch makes us feel shame on a more or less constant basis even when nothing has happened to trigger the affect, any moment of shame may be traced to one of these categories. (It is worth noting that Prozac, Zoloft, and all the other members of the class of medications called the SSRIs have become so essential a part of our culture because they ameliorate the type of chronic shame caused by one of these errors in the metabolism of neurotransmitter function.) The list of categories is both simple and obvious: Matters of size, strength, ability, skill; Dependence/Independence; Competition; Sense of self; Personal Attractiveness; Sexuality; Issues of seeing and being seen; Wishes and fears about closeness. Failure in any of these areas triggers shame, just as success brings on a moment of pride. These matters are significant at the level of the individual, our interpersonal relationships, group, or society. Furthermore, an individual who has felt deep shame at failure in one category is likely to seek success in another so that a moment of pride can (for a moment) eradicate a more chronic sense of shame. It is for this reason that I view as triggers for shame everything that Galtung and others have described as structural factors in the normalization or institutionalization of violence. It remains for me to explain the link between shame and violence, for what we psychiatrists call shame rage or humiliation fury.
A moment ago I stated that the affect system is like a bank of spotlights, each of which is turned on by its highly specific trigger, but which turns off as soon as we begin to process whatever it had illuminated. For one reason or another, we vary in our ability or skill for attention to what any affect shows us. Some of us have been raised in families that punish children for expressing one or another affect, others have grown up with depressed parents who can't react optimally to our affective expression in childhood and thus restrict our ability to process affective data, and still others have some sort of biological glitch that makes it difficult to experience or to stop experiencing one or another affect. The problem with affect recognition and the work of processing what affect shows us is compounded when parents are physically or emotionally unavailable, when some affect (like terror) stalks home or neighborhood constantly, when drugs and alcohol interfere with parental ability to help children process affective information, when undereducated parents themselves are too young to understand their responsibility in these matters. Since the function of all street drugs is to manage affect that is considered unbearable, and since chronic drug use literally prevents one from learning how to handle that affect, the drug epidemic is a self reinforcing system that must addict or habituate a population to drugs as management for what sometimes is no more than a normal range of affect. Everything we do to help young children recognize and process their affects helps them become more competent adults. All of the programs I've designed and initiated involve such training in the definition, explication, and management of these innate affects.
The Compass of Shame
But when we ignore what shame affect is trying to show us, when something happens in one of the eight categories described above but we don't know how to process the reason for the impediment to the continuation of the positive affect of excitement or joy that had been going on just a moment ago, something happens to our mind that is quite unique and powerful. It is to this matter that I have devoted the past 20 years of my research and clinical attention. 
There are four possible patterns of reaction we may exhibit when we ignore the spotlight of shame affect, and for graphic purposes I have grouped them as the four poles of a compass. At the North pole of the compass lies a library of scripted actions of withdrawal, of hiding from the eyes of those before whom we have felt shamed. The withdrawal pole houses behavior at its most mild like the little kid who hides behind mommy's leg when a stranger comes to the door, or the way we act "depressed" when we feel defeated. It is this form of shame that can impede the normal excitement that accompanies sexual arousal, resulting often in impotence and frigidity. Withdrawal behavior ranges from mild shyness to terribly pathological depression.
By the way: the more you know about the nine families of innate affect, the less likely are you to think of "depression" as a specific illness! The persistent experience of any one of the six negative affects is described by most people as "depression," whether a matter of ongoing fear-terror, distress-anguish, anger-rage, dissmell, disgust, or shame-humiliation. This is the easiest way to understand why no single treatment for "depression" can work in all cases, and no single medication can return every afflicted person from the steady experience of every negative affect. Each affect has its own biology, often its own set of facilitating neurotransmitters, making psychopharmacology more scientific directly in relation to the physician's understanding of the affect system. But now back to our experience of the adult form of shame:
When we withdraw rather than deal forthrightly with shame, we are by definition very much alone. Those who fear abandonment dislike this kind of reaction to shame and often move to the attack self pole, a library of behavior in which by making themselves subservient to a more powerful person they guarantee that they will not be alone. By demeaning themselves, by placing themselves in a dependent relationship with another person, they avoid helplessness at the expense of a variable degree of damage to their self esteem and often their physical being. The litany of behavior we consider masochistic derives from this kind of decision, although healthy normal deference is a milder form of such action.
There are, however, many people who act in neither of these ways, but from the avoidance pole of the Compass simply try to make the feeling go away without paying attention to the scene illuminated by the spotlight. Many drugs work at this locus, for shame is soluble in alcohol and boiled away by cocaine and the amphetamines. Every time our group works with a patient who is addicted to these substances, matters of disavowed shame turn out to be of the greatest importance. Other actions housed at the avoidance pole include ceaseless competition so as to be better at something than somebody, the constant search for excitement in thrills or danger, the psychology of machismo, the use of sexual activity as a hedge against the feeling of inadequacy, or the purchase of goods and services that literally wrap a shame damaged self in gold. Since the biology of adolescence is characterized by rampant increase in the degree and intensity of sexual arousal, and since but a small fraction of an adolescent's sexual wishes can be granted, this period of development is fraught with more shame than any other. The resulting shame crisis is often handled by resort to alcohol for its ability to reduce the toxicity of any moment of shame, despite that the drug also reduces the shame-as-discretion necessary to forestall violent, illegal, or other socially undesirable action.
Finally, for those who can do nothing by their own mind or hand to raise their own self esteem when shame hits, there is the attack other library of scripts through which they can work to reduce the self esteem of anyone else who happens to be available. At this pole of the Compass, anything that brings shame can be defined arbitrarily as insulting disrespect that "must" be handled by compensatory attack lest the individual suffer further shame. Attack other behavior includes insults, verbal or physical attack, bullying of any kind, sexual sadism, or anything that seems to prevent the momentary sense of inferiority by (for the moment) feeling bigger and better than the other guy. Sadly, to the extent that any individual hones the skills associated with attack other behavior, severe limitations are placed on the ability to negotiate, moderate, love, and nurture. Although actions taken at each pole of the Compass of Shame vary over a range from mild and quite ordinary to severe and quite pathological/dangerous, the more skill one develops in the techniques associated with any of these libraries of defensive behavior, the more one is limited in emotional growth.
In general, people who can't deal with shame tend to cluster at two loci of the Compass of Shame: the withdrawal and attack self poles, or the avoidance and attack other poles. Already you can see so much of the problem we face in the study of youth violence. It isn't the Freudian drive called aggression that operates out of control in our young people or other impulses they haven't learned to curtail, but shame expressed at the attack other and avoidance poles of the Compass. Drug and alcohol use is not adolescent carelessness but a defense against unavoidable sequences of acute shame superimposed on chronic shame. Sexual excess or sexual carelessness is a defense against shame, not meaningless play with what feels good. Early pregnancy sometimes reflects the belief of a young girl that she can take pride in her ability to make a baby despite that she has no way to protect or rear that child. It is for this reason that I titled my contribution "The Name of the Game is Shame," for this one family of emotions is central to everything that concerns our work. So completely do I believe this that I suggest this phrase as a slogan that can be used in a campaign analogous to "Squash it" and the Designated Driver programs.
There is one further theme that needs brief explication: why should these defenses against shame be so important now? Why does the average young person seem so shameless these days? Why is the danger associated with shame so much worse than at any other time in our history? Why does school represent danger rather than sanctuary? Important clues to these issues exist in one little known aspect of the history of Western culture.
A Brief History of Shame Management
Careful review of a great number of literary and historical sources reveals that although during classical Greek and Roman times shame was managed by behavior at the withdrawal and attack self poles of the Compass, after the fall of the Roman empire there was a steady shift toward the same sort of violence and societal dangerousness we see today. The Middle Ages were characterized by bawdy behavior (it was not unusual for couples to have sexual intercourse in full view of others); public nudity (entire families might walk through town naked on their way to the communal baths); violence (simply bumping into someone in the town square might occasion a fight to the death), and toward the end of the period, raucously bawdy dress (men wore a codpiece, a cloth covered wooden device carved in the shape of an erect penis);. Whoever coveted what you owned might simply walk into your home and take it, for there was no police force to protect individual property and rights. The system of government and courts we take for granted did not exist, and Europe was made of small fiefdoms ruled by whoever was strong enough to muster a local army.
All this changed after 1530, when the philosopher Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote a little book on good behavior in small boys; essentially, Erasmus told kids that they should be too embarrassed to behave in certain ways. Today we look at this book and wonder how it started a revolution in mores - it is almost embarrassing to see what he had to tell little boys not to do. His book went through over 150 printings in the next century or so, but the ideas in it really took off when Archbishop Giovanni Della Casa rewrote it in 1558 for both boys and girls as The Galatea. The Galatea has gone through several hundred printings and is still read in parochial schools throughout Europe and the Americas. For the first time in several centuries, shame came to work not as a trigger for behavior at the avoidance and attack other poles, but to contain and control behavior at the withdrawal and attack self poles of the Compass. If these two books did not "cause" the change, they certainly caught the wave and became its emblem.
So many changes in society followed in sequence. The entire concept of authority became important for the first time since the fall of Rome, and we began to follow leaders completely differently. Recently I lectured at the University of Uppsala, founded in 1477, and was taken to lunch in the building that had once been the student jail. Rowdy and violent student behavior had been the norm, but began to calm all over Europe as this change in the psychology of shame took hold. By 1700 it became uncouth to carve a leg of mutton at the table, and fashionable people completed the preparation of food in the kitchen. Excretion of bodily wastes was first segregated from public view and later into gender specific rooms. Tribal behavior was replaced by the formation of nation states, leading to the formation of global empires as the concept of centralized leadership seemed increasingly reasonable. Social and political control was taken over by centralized authority and containment of affect display both by mores that defined convention and a legal system that enforced them. Sexuality came so much under the sway of shame that by the mid-19th century, when Freud was born, the power and ubiquity of sexual shame and guilt was so extraordinary that he could focus an entire psychology on that particular aspect of human function. Although elsewhere I have written about this at length, I ask you to accept for our immediate purposes this rough sketch of the relation between affect management and the nature of the society that existed at the beginning of the 20th century.
Many sorts of technology came into being during the century just passed, and each of them seems to have altered our relation to shame. Freud understood quite well that we were restricted by our inability to discuss openly our sexual feelings, ideas, troubles, or wishes. Reared in the dualistic philosophy of his era, he tried (as mentioned above) to explain everything he saw on the basis of one type of force fighting against another. Although he knew that we experienced a wide range of emotions, Freud compressed all the unpleasant emotions under the rubric of "anxiety," and all the pleasant emotions as subsets or analogues of successful sexual experience. Anger alone he attributed to the "death drive" that fought what he saw as a "life drive" responsible for sexuality. Through a psychoanalytic technique that maximized shame to bring out what had earlier been contained by shame, he picked apart the system of sexual control that had been so important a part of the society into which he had been born. Later in the century, pharmacological research provided contraceptive control that allowed women safety from unwanted pregnancy, ushering in a period and type of universal sexual freedom perhaps unique in human history. Other pharmacological discoveries allowed control of negative affect in ways previously unknown. A revolution in the sources and management of energy allowed universal production and distribution of electricity, and the manufacture of lighting devices that brightened rooms and streets so there was little difference between night and day and therefore a significant and growing decrease in the sense of privacy. Photographic equipment allowed the universal distribution of images of the naked human body, and with telephoto lenses and film that worked in low light reduced even further the sense of privacy. A society that once kept itself entirely under wraps now learned to pose for public view. Television and movies allowed universal distribution of images that showed and therefore legitimized the new permissiveness, demonstrated clearly the visible differences between rich and poor, by exhibition in massive public display normalized violent response to shame ("Go ahead. Make my day."), and through VCR technology allowed people to study any sequence of affect and response until thoroughly internalized. Changes in the legal system undid the control of any minority by a ruling party, and for the first time in centuries it became safe to express pride in one's racial or tribal heritage and peel off the traces of shaming imperial domination. Although the beginning of this revolution in the management of shame can be traced to the start of the 20th century, my research suggests that it avalanched between 1960 and 2000.
A bicycle enthusiast tells me that his group, which often travels 50-75 miles through the countryside in a day's outing, often sees couples engaged publically in sexual intercourse. Nudity has become normal beach attire and is taken for granted in our movies and televised entertainment. Men and women share toilet facilities in many public buildings. Violence at a level seen only during the Middle Ages has become normalized and institutionalized as such television spectacles as the WWF, professional football, and survival shows that celebrate explosive deadly behavior. A population that dressed in accordance with codes strictly enforced by custom that declared it shameful to exceed certain limits has shucked all restraint and dresses as it wishes. It would appear to the naive observer that shame no longer controls public or private behavior; much ink has been used to describe our culture as shameless. The changes documented here are so huge, have come on us so swiftly, and caused so much of a shift in the management of one affect that they have largely been invisible.
Our Turn to Deal with Shame
Nevertheless, there is just as much shame in our era as in any other. The sources and triggers for shame remain clustered in the eight categories listed above, and the Compass of Shame remains as sturdy as ever. All that has shifted is the societal style of response to shame, from behavior locked at the withdrawal and attack self poles as institutionalized during the early modern period to our current experiment at the avoidance and the attack other poles of the Compass. The risks are huge, for it took more than a thousand years for our society to emerge from the civic dangerousness of the Middle Ages into the relative safety of the early modern period. Unless we do something that makes a difference, apocalyptic views of our future (films like "Mad Max in Thunderdome," "New Jack City," "Blade Runner," the Stallone and Swarzenegger and Willis epics) will become not theatrical exaggerations for the purpose of entertainment but literal predictions of our future.
Behavior at the attack other pole of the Compass of Shame is always learned from sources available in the culture. Even though the First Amendment protects the right of the entertainment industry to depict violent behavior, recourse to such a defense misses the point. The real danger is not so much that people of all stages in their lives and at all points in their emotional development or illnesses can study and learn the techniques demonstrated in filmic violence, but that such violence - from the early days of the barroom brawl as the response to insult in the movie Western - is now taught as a normal and healthy and optimal response to any episode of shame. Whereas in the Western mythos a gun was described as an "equalizer" that made a little guy the physical equal of the big guy, modern technology has provided instrumentality of such destructive force that anyone can quite legally purchase machinery for public and interpersonal destruction, and use it when his or her ability to manage any particular episode of shame has reached its limit. Throughout the material we've studied as part of our work on the NCAYV we see that kids in school take bullying for granted as a normal experience, that it is not the bully but the kids who've been bullied who explode into violence, and that the gulf between the haves and the have-nots is a constant source of shame. That's why poverty can be considered in the language of structural violence - it is a massive trigger for shame, especially in a society characterized by universal distribution of advertising images that make clear what brings shame and what can bring pride.
Redefining the Task of Reducing Youth Violence
What can we as a group do about all of this? Professor Klonsky's wonderful work to make schools smaller fits perfectly into the theories expressed here; a small cohort of students who must live and work together is more likely to handle any negative affect by discussion rather than explosion. His work fulfils everything we know about the metabolism of affect in groups. Professor Anderson's magnificent work on the code of the streets, as well as Dr. Prothrow-Stith's poignant work, demonstrate the pain experienced by an underclass that cannot find pride anywhere save in the avoidance and attack other poles of the Compass of Shame. The infrastructure of America is falling apart, and in this richest era of our history it should be possible to mount an army of men and women who can start their passage into the culture of steady remunerative work that fosters healthy family structure - we can form a corps of workers to rebuild our roads, bridges, reservoirs, public buildings, and the physical structure of our society. That is not the same as free access to the highest level of the tools of our society, but it opens doors now closed to those for whom only the code of the street provides temporary relief from chronic shame.
We can offer slogans analogous to the famous campaigns that made the designated driver a normal part of our lives, and tell an entire public that shame is not a dirty word. The programs I am developing for school systems are called "From Insult to Injury: A Plan to End School Violence," and from this somewhat paradoxical title everybody knows what I'm talking about even if they don't yet know as much about the Compass of Shame as they will soon enough. Our programs teach teachers not only what affects are going on in their students, but how to bring about consensus through easily learned techniques for affect modulation within a community. We teach little kids and big kids about the nature of human emotion much as I described it above, and we teach them about the Compass of Shame in particular so they can develop a healthy immunity to the attack other pole of the Compass. But above all I believe that we should adopt a slogan that links violence, incivility, sexual excess, the dangers of the drug epidemic, and the other matters discussed here: The Name of the Game is Shame.
One of the reasons our schools have become a particular focus for shame related activity/danger is simply that education by its nature focuses our attention on what we don't know and does it while we are in the company of others. No one would attend school if s/he knew everything that was going to be taught. The process of learning always must involve sequences of interest in what is being taught, shame or pride at our efforts to master the material, and some form of ranking as in each class we see who learns most rapidly or thoroughly. In the previous era, when shame was mostly managed by a tendency toward conformity with "the system," the shame associated with lack of knowledge was a powerful stimulus to study and learning. Yet the current and potentially deadly medievalization of modern life turns not knowing into shame that is handled by avoidance and attack other behavior (making the classroom a place of conflict rather than sanctuary), and ranking becomes little more than an ancillary source of shame through invidious comparison to one's fellow students. The best among us increasingly risk attack rather than respect; stalking the famous is an expression of this theme. Intimidation of other students, assault, ridicule, and bullying have no useful explanation outside this understanding of shame psychology. If we're going to bring back the sense of pride in educational accomplishment, we've got to make it safer for kids to do well in school, just as we've got to make it equally safe for kids to do poorly. The very nature of educational shame has pushed our society away from normal classroom education toward the immediately satisfying "field of honor" in sports and the entirely private form of education provided on the Internet. Unless we do something to improve the affective environment of our school system, the educational process will become increasingly dangerous. In a culture where respect for the authority of a teacher is seen as weakness and therefore a trigger for shame, classroom agitation grows ever more normal.
John Devine's powerful treatise ("Maximum Security") on the faulty reasoning involved in the shift of responsibility for classroom decorum from teachers to uniformed "school safety officers" exemplifies the failure of any logic that ignores affect in favor of social control. Even passing familiarity with the prison system, truant officers, parole officers, and the law enforcement establishment allows recognition that all of these institutions regulate the behavior of others through techniques that are meant to instill both fear and shame in those they control. Here too, the old solution has become a significant part of the problem and must change if our society is to survive.
Through the work of the Tomkins Institute and its liaison with Ted Wachtel's RealJustice and SaferSanerSchools projects, the ideas represented here have been taught all over the US and Canada. The small schools concept lends itself best to these new methods of affect management within groups because it legislates a community in which no one can really hide from or ignore the bad feelings that emerge during group activity, and provides an environment within which all affect can be metabolized. Furthermore, our group has developed and tested a commercially available psychological instrument called The Internalized Shame Scale (ISS), a 10-minute test through which it can be determined whether any student has developed shame-based psychopathology requiring therapeutic attention. Eventually we will have to make some decision about that 5% of the population of troubled youth who seem to demonstrate signs of treatable psychiatric illness, and we believe that the ISS may be of use in such determination as well as identify those who might easily respond to special counseling with no implication of illness.
Many members of our Council support and have been instrumental in fostering the development of highly successful mentoring programs, in each of which young people are exposed to the affect management styles of highly successful adults. Pollack, Garbarino, Prothrow-Stith, and Guerra point out the benefits of association with those who know how to manage the system. Another force that should be brought to the attention of the public is CityYear, through which young people between 18-21 are brought into close relationships with mentors who teach them how to bring new values back to their own communities. One of the leaders of the Philadelphia regional branch of CityYear has suggested that scholarship aid might be made available to those who enter into such programs. CityYear, supported by different industries in each of its regions, is a prime example of the kind of public-private program our group celebrates.
And yet, such programs are only treatments for local outbreaks of a civic illness, individual manifestations of an epidemic that requires a vaccine rather than an antibiotic. The programs for children from Grades K - 12 that now occupy my professional attention provide exactly what I believe must be done. In ways appropriate to each level of educational ability, using a wide range of formats (videotape, web based help systems, etc.) we will teach kids to identify in self and other each of the nine innate affects, to understand the compass of shame, and to work daily with a teacher in a form of conference through which they hone the skills needed for safety expressing to each other their feelings in order to minimize confusion and maximize the likelihood that interpersonal conflict is the last rather than the first choice for the resolution of shame based discomfort. The program, From Insult to Injury, takes for granted that all children emerge daily from school into the culture outside, and provides training for a wide range of authority figures in our society. Programs to assist clergy, athletic coaches, school administrators, local politicians and legal authorities, parents, and many other groups are now under development. I believe that a generation of children reared in my system will be vaccinated against the virus of violence, and that within 15 years after its implementation, we will see a radical decrease in violence in America.
Apologium
In this contribution it has been my purpose to introduce the new language of affect that more and more is replacing the century old language of the classical drives. I feel that all of the deeply disturbing issues we discuss in our shared work revolve around the issue of shame psychology, and that methods of analysis which ignore such a language and approach will be at best only mildly successful despite how well they fit research framed in that older language. I apologize for the length of this essay, which seeks in these few pages to summarize a lifetime of work on the nature of human emotion and the understanding of shame psychology described herein. Yet there is so much at stake here that I can do no less. I look forward to further discussion of these ideas with any and all of my colleagues.
(References available on request)
Copyright © 1995-2004 Silvan S. Tomkins Institute. All rights reserved.
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