- So every one of us is born with a capacity for shame.
What's interesting that even a lot of psychopaths
and narcissistic people also have a capacity for shame.
They just react to it in a very funky way
that gets them thrown in jail.
In other words, probably one-half of 1% of people
on the planet are psychopathic in a way
that they actually don't even feel shame.
But half of psychopaths, they do feel shame.
You know, they just react strangely. Same with narcissists.
But we're all, so we're all born with this capacity
and that's because it has served us in evolution.
So Charles Darwin said, "There can be no doubt
"that the tribe, including many members
"who are always ready to give aid to each other
"and to sacrifice themselves for the common good,
"would be victorious over other tribes."
In other words, in order to survive
in our earlier evolution, we needed
to stick together as a group.
And when somebody diverged from that group,
it was a danger to the group and those people.
And what a group would need to do is to actually,
you know, harm somebody to bring them back in.
But shame actually caught, feels really harmful.
It feels so terrible that when people break the rules,
they know they break the rules, they will feel so terrible
that they will then try to get back
into the good graces of the tribe.
And so this is how shame works.
Shame is actually is functional in the old days
to bring us back into the group.
Today, basically shame refers to a kind of violation
of the standards or rules of the group.
Unfortunately, a lot of group rules
are really unjust and arbitrary.
And so when we deviate from the rules
and feel terrible shame, it doesn't,
it's actually not useful.
But this is where it comes from.
This is shame is, that's you could say the template.
But when we have been consistently negatively treated,
that predisposition that we have
to feel shame becomes harmful.
Developmentally, we see that babies as early as two
and a half or three months old, if a mother
looks at a child like all of a sudden, it's like this,
unflinchingly, that's called the still face experiment.
Children do three things.
They get sad, they get angry, and they also show signs
of shame, which means they slump in the chair,
they turn their eyes downward or they avert their gaze.
So shame is triggered by a loss of connection
and it starts really early.
Physiologically, shame triggers the bodily threat response
because at one point in our evolution,
it really was a threat.
And so all the same things happen in our bodies
as if we were physically threatened.
So there's increases in cortisol,
pro-inflammatory cytokines.
And short term, if we're actually in danger,
these hormones are really good because they help us
to deal with danger.
But long term, if we're being triggered again and again
and again by insults to our sense of self
and these threat responses in our body
are getting activated again and again,
this actually decreases our physical functioning.
It leads to depression, heart disease,
and all kinds of things.
And neurologically, we also know that shame
is associated with, when we feel shame,
this part of the brain gets really active
because shame is so hard to regulate
that people in the activate their executive cortex
more intensively but they don't necessarily
down-regulate the amygdala, which is the part of us
that responds to danger.
So it creates a struggle for the brain.
What you need to know is that in the general population,
shame is a short-term state and it's not a problem.
However, it can become a trait.
And when that happens, it negatively impacts our lives.
And as I said, when shame is a trait,
it is because of how we have been treated by others.
And that means how we've been treated
in our family of origin.
So children, for example, when they're under stress,
they will reach out to a caregiver.
And ideally the caregiver will provide kindness
and compassion, comfort, sooth, do all those things.
And then everything is well.
However, when children reach out and their caregivers
are unresponsive, they are, sometimes they even attack
the children for reaching out, all that gets internalized.
And that gets internalized as shame,
which is I'm not good enough, right?
And so and also this is the case if the person experiences
like severe neglect or trauma, definitely in childhood.
Definitely, they will conclude something
is wrong with me, okay?
So we learn shame through our relationship
with primary caregivers.
And also what we find is that shame
is especially associated with trauma.
So when a person has a trauma memory that becomes central
to the personality, I'm sorry, a shame memory
that becomes central to the personality,
it becomes traumatic.
Similarly, trauma can lead to shame because of how people
blame themselves for what happened to them, okay?
And lastly, before we take our break,
I'd like to just take a look at culture a little bit.
So shame is not only learned in our family.
It's also learned in our culture.
And this is because we do not stop seeking approval
when we leave the home.
And all cultures favor certain groups and identities
and also oppress other groups and identities.
This is part of culture.
And cultural shame can be learned through words or actions.
They could be microaggressions.
They could be macroaggressions.
But over time, patterns of discrimination and oppression
are internalized and have a weathering effect
on the human mind and body.
So I think as mindfulness teachers,
it's really helpful to, I presume you've done a bunch
of this in your training but we really need to get
a good sense of what are our core identities
and what are also some of our sub-identities
and what identities do we have that are kind of visible
and what identities do we have that are not so visible
and how did the culture treat them?
Sometimes our identities are a benefit,
they have benefited us, and sometimes our identities
have limited us.