New Paradigm Training Institute
To Shame or Not To Shame is Not the Question
We expect to help participants:
· understand typical developmental processes of children and how shame is part of these processes
· appreciate the power of words
· comprehend the impact attitudes of superiority can have in anger and aggression
· explore some protectors and antidotes to shame
· refine and build their appreciation for the connections among discipline, punishment, shame, anger and aggression
Shame as a Developmental Process
It can be helpful for educators to understand and appreciate information about typical developmental processes children experience and how the development of healthy shame is a part of these processes. When educators have a clearer understanding of these developmental processes and their roles in them, they are better equipped to understand their students and the degrees to which they may have experienced the normal processes of developing healthy shame that occurred when they were very young. This understanding can also help teachers nurture healthier forms of shame and guilt in children while avoiding exacerbating toxic shame and unhealthy guilt. Educators might even have opportunities to pass this information on to parents and caregivers.
According to researcher Eric Erikson, the psychosocial task for children ages 15 months to three years is to strike a balance between autonomy and shame and doubt. These are the months when children are involved in a variety of explorations, physical, emotional and relational. As parents, caregivers and others respond to children’s efforts to explore, including their exploration of power and control, children may experience intense episodes of anger, including temper tantrums. When parents, caregivers and others can respond in healthy ways as children explore their worlds, providing firm but compassionate limits, children can learn about boundaries and can begin experiencing healthy shame that tells them they are not all-powerful or all-wise. At the same time children can remain confident that those caring for them will not abandon them physically or emotionally, will continue to love them, protect them and guide them as they explore and practice new skills that promote autonomy.
If these caregivers are unable to provide firm but compassionate limits, if they withdraw their love when children explore, test and have tantrums, either through shaming disapproval, punishment and/or abandonment, the foundations for toxic shame are laid.
While the inner drive to explore demands that children test their limits and experiment with their world, if they simultaneously are criticized and condemned for behaviors that are beyond their control, they make decisions that can translate into core beliefs regarding their rights and worth. Deep down they feel ashamed for their efforts to become autonomous.
When someone experiences and expresses healthy shame, he or she may feel sad, disappointed and vulnerable. He or she may want to withdraw or perhaps try again. When someone experiences a more toxic shame, he or she is deeply saddened, may be overwhelmed with feelings of helplessness and failure, may activate beliefs of total inadequacy and/or unworthiness and have them reaffirmed and strengthened. As a result he or she may shut down or lash out, which in our previous session we learned is one of the responses to shame.
Erikson states that in the next stage of development, children have the task of finding a balance between initiative and guilt. Just as shame can be toxic or healthy, guilt also can be toxic or healthy. (Each of these can be placed on a continuum that defines the degree to which each is healthy or toxic.) In Healing the Shame That Binds You Bradshaw states: “Healthy guilt is the emotional core of our conscience. It is emotion which results from behaving in a manner contrary to our beliefs and values. Guilt presupposes internalized rules and develops later than shame.... Guilt is developmentally more mature than shame. Guilt does not reflect directly upon one’s identity or diminish one’s sense of personal worth. It flows from an integrated set of values.” [p. 17] Unhealthy guilt occurs when someone takes unfair responsibility for something or someone.
People can simultaneously experience both shame and guilt in a particular circumstance, either healthy shame and healthy guilt, healthy shame and unhealthy guilt, toxic shame and toxic guilt or while unlikely, toxic shame and healthy guilt.
For example, if a parent loses control and screams at her young child for throwing his food all over the floor, she might feel ashamed because she knows very young children are not capable of understanding cause-and-effect and they do not appreciate that messes take time to clean up and therefore frustrate a parent. Healthy shame might tell her that all parents have moments when they feel pushed over the edge so while this is not acceptable behavior, it is understandable. She then might be able to quickly recover, soothe her upset child and quickly regain her composure and calmness. She might know that she needs to take a break, call a friend or take the baby for a walk because she can see that she is overly stressed and not able to put her child’s normal behaviors into a healthy perspective.
On the other hand toxic shame might make her feel that she is a horrible, incompetent parent who does not deserve to have this beautiful child. Her behaviors may prove to her that she cannot manage parenthood. She might also switch things around to fan the fuel of her anger, thinking that the baby is purposely out to get her, is misbehaving in order to get her attention, and deserves to be yelled at even more.
This mother might experience guilty feelings if the focus is the contrast of her values of being responsible for the emotional health of her child contrasted with behaviors that are emotionally damaging to her child. Healthy guilt for compromising her values might inspire her to learn better responses for handling similar situations and even ways to prevent such situations from occurring in the future. Toxic guilt might overwhelm her with a sense of unfair responsibility for creating an environment in which her child could misbehave and she might put unfair pressure on herself to create a totally safe environment so that future episodes do not occur.
Chances are in this example that there might be blends of shame and guilt. The degrees to which each is more or less toxic is primarily determined by inner, core beliefs that may have origins in early childhood messages.
In his book Preventing Violence Gilligan notes that “... punishment simultaneously intensifies feelings of shame and relieves feelings of guilt.” In working with educators, parents, caregivers and even children, it can be helpful for them to understand that when children or adults feel ashamed, being punished only adds to that shame. Conversely when children or adults feel guilty, they appreciate punishment because it can absolve them of that guilt.
Trainer can share that we are going to show some video clips from the Discovery Health Channel’s The Baby Human series that provide some examples of children experiencing shame and one of its counterparts, pride. Trainer can share that we think that participants will find them self-explanatory and yet compelling.
After showing the video clips, trainers can invite participants to share their observations and comments.
Appreciating the Power of Words
In Preventing Violence Gilligan states that one of the key principles for preventing violence is to “... give people a chance to talk, remembering that the only alternative to action -- including violent action -- is words.” [p. 123] When educators can provide opportunities for students and even parents, caregivers and other adults with whom they interact to share their stories and verbalize their feelings, many positive outcomes that can lessen feelings of anger and potential aggressive behaviors can occur:
· Trust and safety can be promoted in the relationship between the parties.
· The other person receives the educator’s respect, which can serve as an antidote to violence.
· The other person may experience release and relief from being allowed to express feelings and being invited to simultaneously process and become clearer.
· As the other person becomes clearer, he or she may be able to appreciate the perspectives of others, and may be better able to replace distorted trigger thinking with healthier, fairer and more accurate replacement thoughts.
In The Explosive Child, Greene notes that children may experience explosive episodes because of their struggles with language skills. Language skills set the stage for many forms of thinking, including reflecting, self-regulating, goal setting, problem-solving, and managing emotions. When parents, caregivers and educators help children build their vocabularies, including feeling words as well as the ability to accurately describe situations (i.e. not use distorted thinking), when they teach them effective strategic processes for addressing and resolving problems, they empower them to achieve more self-control, which in turn reduces the need to express frustrations and shame through aggressive behavior and raises a child’s sense of confidence and willingness to put effort into managing his or her emotions.
The Role Attitudes of Superiority Can Have in Anger and Aggression
It can be helpful for educators to appreciate the ways attitudes of superiority can impact the degrees to which they can impose shame on those they believe are inferior.
As soon as someone decides that another person or group of people is somehow inferior to him or her and therefore he or she is somehow superior, a dynamic enters the relationship that can very easily promote shame, along with oppression, disrespect and the potential to neglect or abuse the inferior person or people. To the person who puts himself or herself in a superior role, the inferior person or people can be annoying and aggravating simply because they are so inferior. Because they are “less than”, it is okay to allow anger to escalate to aggression because that other person or those people do not deserve to be treated respectfully.
Assuming someone or a group of people is inferior is different from understanding that people can be different from each other. Programs that focus on respecting diversity have become popular as a way to encourage people to be respectful of differences.
As long as there is authentic respect for differences, one person or group is less likely to impose shameful attitudes onto another person or group.
Beliefs about superiority and inferiority may often be grounded in shame-based beliefs. If I do not believe I have much worth and therefore am shame-based, at least if I can feel I am somehow better than someone else, I may relieve some of the pain of my shame through knowing someone is lower than I am. I can feel entitled to mock, diminish, disrespect or disregard whomever I determine to be even less valuable than I perceive myself to be. This attitude and the accompanying disrespectful, humiliating behaviors temporarily allows me to feel superior, relieving some of my own shame-based sense of inferiority.
According to Clemes and Bean, a sense of power is one of the four essential components of a person’s self-esteem. When that power is claimed in healthy ways, a person is able to simultaneously respect that others deserve fair degrees of power as much as he or she does, that power can be fairly shared based on each person’s rights and needs.
If someone is more or less desperate to achieve a sense of power because he or she has low self-esteem and simultaneously does not believe he or she deserves that power or perhaps does not know how to gain it in healthy and respectful ways, finding another person or group of people over whom he or she can feel superior can artificially provide a sense of power. With this comes the right to disempower that person or group of people in the false belief that taking power from them is legitimate and also provides a way to transfer it to the person with low self-esteem.
Typically at a surface level bullies believe they are superior to other children or one isolated child, often because they deep down struggle with feelings of inferiority and shame. Through their abilities to inflict fear and shame onto others they can temporarily reduce some of their own feelings of inferiority and underlying shame.
Adults can bully other adults or children in the same ways, treating them as disrespectfully and disdainfully, finding ways to dominate, sabotage, intimidate and diminish their rights, all of which can result in feelings of shame, which in turn can lead to aggressive, violent behaviors as a way to retaliate and temporarily lessen feelings of shame.
When someone deep down knows he or she is being unfair, it can increase his or her own sense of shame, which now needs to be covered up even more, often accomplished by finding ways to reinforce superior beliefs and the resulting disrespectful behaviors.
When Children are Considered Inferior Beings
It can be a helpful perspective for educators to appreciate that adults sometimes believe children are inferior beings, often because they are not only physically less capable, but also because they are immature on so many other levels, incapable of matching abilities with adults. Sometimes at some deep level, adults believe children are not worthy of respectful treatment because of this inferior status.
The belief that children are inferior beings can be part of a family’s belief system and can connect with family legacies that dictate how children are treated. Other community or societal systems may also perpetuate this belief that children are less than fully human, resulting in an acceptance of and even expectations that children should be put down, put in their place, forced to comply, and are deserving of shame-filled messages because they inherently do not deserve to be treated with respect.