Translator: Ken Harvey Reviewer: Denise RQ
About 23 years ago,
I left a very successful corporate career in manufacturing management
and decided to study psychology.
Some people thought I was crazy.
In the graduate program that I went to,
they encouraged us very strongly
to excavate every nook and cranny of our psyche.
And as I did that,
I arrived at a poignant and rather painful awareness,
that as a third generation German American,
I carried significant cultural shame related to the Holocaust.
Let me explain.
I was born in Freiburg, Germany,
to a German mother and an American father.
We lived in Europe for 16 years,
and I spent 10 years of those in Germany.
I went to Army schools, spoke English of course,
and identified primarily as American, but I spoke German fluently,
played with German kids after school all the time,
and spent a lot of time with my German relatives.
In fact, I was extremely close to my German grandmother, Omi.
So, back to college.
When I studied engineering, I also studied German literature,
and even though I was back in the States,
it ignited my love for Germany again.
And so I made a promise to myself that if I ever had kids,
I wanted to make sure to expose them to my German heritage.
My daughter Marie was born 12 years later,
and when she was just a babe, six months old,
we started one of many trips to Germany.
So, back to the grad school experience.
As I learned, or tried to learn more
about my family's World War II experience,
my questions were met with silence.
It was clear that I was in taboo territory.
But slowly, the more I probed and asked,
I started hearing harrowing stories
from my mother, my aunt, and other relatives
of what it was like to grow up in war-torn Germany.
They were children at the time.
Then, to my surprise, I learned that my grandfather,
who didn't survive the war, had in fact fought in Hitler's army.
That had been held as a secret the entire time I grew up,
so it was really quite shocking to me, and I have to say,
it really challenged my image of my family and my grandfather.
At about that time, I was nearing the end of my coursework,
and my dissertation adviser thought it would be really cool
if I researched cultural shame.
Well, I wasn't thrilled with the idea,
but I thought perhaps I should.
But secretly, in the background,
I was actually coming up with a second topic.
The very day I was supposed to commit to my topic,
my daughter Marie, who was a second grader at the time,
walked through the door, burst into tears.
I asked her what was wrong, and she said,
"Mom, they told me on the playground that Omi is a Nazi."
And I knew that at that point, she did not know what Nazi meant,
but what was evident was that she knew it was a bad thing,
and that she, being German-identified
and having a grandmother who was German,
was bad also simply by association.
I was heartbroken,
and it became very, very clear to me in that moment:
I had no other choice than to research cultural shame.
I have to tell you that the experience was excruciating.
I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
My family wondered what I was trying to prove.
My friends chastised me
for paying any attention to the evil perpetrator population.
I heard comments like, "I'm never stepping foot in that country."
"Those Germans are still dangerous."
And of course, I took all that personally.
At the very same time, however, that period--
it took about two years of working on that dissertation
and researching with my participants,
was the most transformative process I have ever been through.
One thing it did is it helped me come to terms
with cultural culpability and personal accountability.
I got to the place of being able to embrace
what's beautiful about that culture
and own what was horrific about the past.
I also really got to a place
of having an incredible sense of humility,
and felt more open, more fallible, and quite frankly,
somewhat freed from the stranglehold of cultural shame.
When I finished with my dissertation, you might imagine,
I was looking forward to putting shame behind me.
And we moved up to Snohomish County,
and I started my consulting and coaching practice,
and now, 12 years later, what I have to say to you is
I think that unacknowledged and unprocessed shame
wreaks havoc everywhere.
I see the effects of it in families.
I see it in workplaces where it infects the work culture.
I see it create hostility in communities.
It's present everywhere.
So what I'd like to do today is spend the rest of the time
talking about the transformative power of shame.
First of all, shame is an inevitable part of the human experience.
We're not supposed to prevent it, or avoid it, or overcome it
so that we don't have it in our lives anymore.
We wish that were true, but it's not.
The second thing is, because shame is such a toxic experience,
we have an automatic defense mechanism to resist it,
and often we don't even know that it's happening for us.
The third thing is that shame truly has a transformative potential.
It feels toxic, but what it does for us
is it helps us develop capacities like humility, compassion,
integrity, and dignity.
In order for that to happen,
we just need to decide to work with it.
Silvan Tomkins was a psychologist in the 1960s.
His work has been largely ignored.
And he discovered that shame is an inevitable part
of our emotional DNA.
It's part of being human,
and there's no way to cause ourselves not to have the experience.
What he also discovered was that it happens involuntarily.
So you might get a criticism from somebody
and then have what I call a shame attack.
There's no way to make that not happen.
It's going to happen.
Tomkins called this "shame affect"
- and I mean with an A, not an E -
the biological part of the shame experience.
So it's what happens in our bodies in fractions of a second
before we even know what has hit us.
The other thing that Tomkins discovered
was that children - this is the amazing thing -
that infants actually experience shame.
They don't have words yet, and they know shame.
He studied children all across the globe
and saw this happen in children that were just weeks old.
So you might think of this as babies come into the world
knowing how to do shame.
When shame is at its worst,
when we have closer to a humiliation experience,
it really does make us feel fundamentally defective.
We're worthless; we don't deserve to exist on the planet.
And most of the time,
people just want to kind of sink into the ground and disappear from view.
So now to the second point, the whole idea that we resist shame.
Because it is such a punishing experience,
and we are very creative human beings,
we've developed an unconscious defense mechanism
that essentially says "no" to shame.
So it may happen and unfold in our bodies just in seconds,
and we don't even notice that it happens,
and automatically the defense mechanism kicks in.
It works like a charm.
Donald Nathanson was a psychiatrist, in more recent history,
and he came up with a model that he called the "compass of shame"
that shows us the four different maneuvers
that we might use so that we don't have to have the experience.
I think of this as "shame resistance".
So when we withdraw, what we do is we detach.
We detach emotionally; we detach physically.
I have a very well-developed withdrawal response.
If I feel criticized by my husband, he says I retreat into silence.
He's absolutely correct.
The avoid response is one where we want to disengage
and not have to experience the sting of shame,
and most of us do that by numbing.
So, you know, fantasy football, TV,
chocolate, alcohol, retail therapy.
There are many, many ways for us to numb ourselves
and avoid the shame experience.
A third mode he called "attack self",
and that's basically when we condemn ourselves.
We become our own worst enemy, and we do a lot of self-criticism.
I think of that as bullying turned inward.
And then finally, we go to the "attack other" mode.
And that one is fortified by anger
and it's one in which we feel really self-justified
in kind of externalizing the shame and pinning it onto someone else.
So when we see someone be overtly defensive,
when we see them justify their behavior,
or when we see them kind of doing the "blame-and-shame" game,
blaming other people,
they're caught in the "attack other" mode.
So, I've had a lot of experience with this compass,
and so I want to tell you a story
that will tell you just how quickly it unfolds.
It was about eight years ago, shortly after moving here,
and my consulting business was young, and I developed a proposal
for a manufacturing organization that I was really proud of.
It was very, very in depth,
and it would have launched my work to the next level.
So, I emailed it in,
and didn't hear back for seven long months.
Well, that gave the self-attack part of me an awful lot of time
to dream up all of the reasons they had rejected me.
Then one day, I'm sitting at my computer
in the comfort of my home office - I think I was in my jammies -
and an email comes through, and it's from "Steve".
And he writes, "Sorry for the delay; we're so ready to move forward.
"We can't wait to get started."
Well, I want to do a happy dance; I almost fell off my chair.
And I was so excited
I really didn't know what to do with myself.
So I thought, "I'm going to call -- I'm going to email my husband."
He was out of town.
And so I craft this very giddy, "You won't believe what happened,"
kind of unprofessional email, and I even say,
"They finally got their act together."
(Laughter)
And then I hit "Send".
(Laughter)
Well, what I still didn't realize was
I had hit "Reply", not "Forward".
So you can imagine.
I convinced myself in about three nanoseconds
that I was a failure, my consulting practice was over,
and I might as well just tell them I'm not available.
(Laughter)
So you might think from my story that shame resistance is the problem.
Well, what I'd like to tell you is that when we are aware of it,
it is actually part of the solution,
because when we know we're kind of stuck
in that kind of mode of thinking and operating,
it tells us we've had a shame attack, and then we can do something about it.
What I have learned is even when the last thing in the world
I want to do is to turn toward the shame experience
and work it through, that is actually the answer.
And what we need to do, and what I did in that case is,
as much as I dreaded it, I called John,
I relayed the story, I experienced shame all over again.
My husband, he was very patient, empathized quite a bit, then he said,
"You know, he may not have even read the email,"
and then finally he reminded me that running away from this opportunity
was not the only option.
Whoops, I've clicked too far ahead.
This would be shame moment.
(Laughter)
But I'm still standing.
So what I have learned is that when we're aware of a shame attack,
when we can notice it,
when we can realize we're in the compass of shame,
when we're resisting, we have a choice.
And that choice can be the most productive thing that we do.
What happens is we learn how to move through shame attacks
more quickly and productively; they don't keep us down as long.
The second thing is we learn to reach out for support faster
so that we don't isolate
as long as shame causes us to do.
And third, and this is really important,
we develop compassion for ourselves, and it's so much easier
to forgive ourselves for, quote unquote, "being human".
I think one of the most important things I've learned about working through shame
is that it is putting a nail in the fantasy
that perfection is the minimum standard.
By the way
(Applause)
if you happen to be wondering what happened with Steve,
I called him back.
He answered the phone.
I don't think he had read the email.
He was so happy to hear from me, and long story short, he hired me,
and eight years later, we are still doing incredible work together.
(Applause)
So I liken this process
- and I'm going to try to find that slide because it's such a good one -
I liken this process to doing what the alchemists did in the Middle Ages.
They tried to turn base metals, impure metals,
and transform them into gold.
And so they, in essence, were turning dung into gold.
And when we work with shame
and really commit to doing it as a lifelong process,
we are opening ourselves up to this mysterious process
that has the potential to transform us.
The writer Flannery O'Connor wrote
that the first product of self-knowledge is humility.
What's so interesting is "human," "humility," and "humiliation"
share the same Latin root.
So a way to think about the shame experience
in a transformative way
is to realize that it offers us a priceless gift.
It helps us develop capacities for compassion, integrity,
humility, and dignity.
It helps us engage more fully in life
instead of running from situations that are difficult,
and I believe it helps us bring our best selves forward.
So what I want to leave you with is,
I think when we face and embrace shame,
we create our future, one shame moment at a time.
Thank you.
(Applause)