Sunday 18th October
Who Decides What's Shameful?
It's been a few weeks since the last Sunday Letter, and I'm very glad to be back writing.
Before the break, we'd been looking at the various ways humans try to protect themselves from shame. We explored self-monitoring, overthinking, self-criticism, certainty-seeking, and even some of the ways shame changes how we physically present ourselves to other people.
But there's a question sitting underneath all of this that I think deserves considerably more attention.
Who decided what we needed protecting from in the first place?
Throughout this series, I've used examples of people worrying about appearing selfish, incompetent, difficult, immoral, demanding or inadequate. We've considered how those concerns can become organised into fairly elaborate methods of preventing an unwanted evaluation.
But why is being considered selfish so threatening in some environments? Why might expressing anger be perfectly acceptable for one person and deeply shameful for another? Why do some families place enormous importance on achievement and ‘standing out’, while others are more concerned with obedience, modesty, reputation or fulfilling particular family roles? And what happens when somebody doesn't meet those expectations?
One of the limitations of discussing shame predominantly as a self-conscious emotion is that we can end up concentrating on the person experiencing it. We become interested in their appraisals, their sensitivity to criticism, their internal standards and the strategies they've developed to manage them.
All useful things to understand, but shame doesn't develop in a social vacuum.
It helps here to distinguish between feeling ashamed, being shamed, and experiencing social sanctions. Feeling ashamed refers to the internal emotional experience. Being shamed involves other people communicating that something about us is considered unacceptable or disgraceful. Social sanctions are the consequences attached to violating a group's expectations: exclusion, loss of status, or reduced access to relationships, opportunities and resources. These experiences can overlap, but they aren't interchangeable.
Someone can feel ashamed without anyone explicitly shaming them. They can be shamed without accepting that judgement, and they can stop feeling ashamed of something while still facing very real penalties for it. That last possibility becomes particularly important when we move from examining an individual's emotional life to examining the communities and institutions around them.
Sociologists have been interested in this for a very long time. Erving Goffman's work on stigma, for example, examined how particular attributes become socially discrediting. His interest wasn't simply in whether somebody felt badly about themselves, but in the relationship between an attribute and the expectations of the social world in which that person was living. An attribute that is unremarkable in one context may become deeply discrediting in another.
This is where shame becomes considerably more complicated than an individual believing something negative about themselves.
Imagine growing up in a family where being a good daughter means being agreeable, accommodating and never bringing unnecessary difficulty into the home. You might be praised for being mature, considerate and exceptionally easy to raise. Other people may admire how little you ask for.
There may be genuine affection in those relationships, too. These expectations don't necessarily arrive through cruelty or explicit humiliation. However, over time, you might learn that disagreement creates tension, that expressing anger is disrespectful, or that pursuing something your family disapproves of threatens your standing within it. Eventually, you may find yourself feeling uncomfortable about having needs that other people appear perfectly entitled to have.
We could approach this clinically by exploring your beliefs about being selfish or difficult. We might consider your inner-critic, your tendency to accommodate others, or the discomfort you experience when asserting yourself. But those beliefs didn't simply appear one afternoon.
They were learned within a particular set of relationships, expectations and consequences (and if the expectations remain active, changing your relationship with them may have real social costs).
I think that last point is particularly important.
Psychological work can sometimes make questioning an internalised standard sound like a fairly private exercise. Identify the belief, examine whether you agree with it, and begin behaving in accordance with your own values.
But what happens when the people around you still endorse the standard?
What happens when disagreeing with it threatens a relationship, your reputation, financial security, participation in a community, or the sense of belonging you've had for most of your life?
The difficulty may extend well beyond being overly concerned with what other people think. There may be something quite real at stake. This is also why I think we need to be careful about treating shame as though it is inherently evidence of an unreasonable social demand.
Communities need norms. Families, workplaces and societies develop expectations about how people should behave towards one another, and some of those expectations serve important purposes.
We probably want people to experience some discomfort when they have been cruel, exploited somebody, or seriously neglected a responsibility. The possibility of social disapproval can discourage behaviour that harms other people, even when nobody is watching.
In that sense, shame can participate in the regulation of behaviour, though the fact that a norm regulates behaviour tells us very little about whether the norm itself is fair.
A community can discourage cruelty through social disapproval. It can also discourage people from expressing an identity, challenging an authority figure, leaving an unhappy marriage, or departing from expectations about gender, sexuality, religion or family life.
Both involve social regulation, but they are not morally equivalent. And, of course, the distinction cannot be settled simply by measuring how much shame somebody experiences.
This is one reason I find Goffman's work useful alongside psychological accounts of shame. Stigma draws our attention to the way social groups establish categories of people and attach different expectations, credibility and social value to them.
Some people can depart from a norm with relatively little consequence, yet others may find that the same departure threatens their acceptance, opportunities or standing. Even within the same community, the rules may not be applied equally.
A person in a position of authority may be described as assertive where somebody with less power is described as difficult. An expression of anger might be understood as justified in one person and unacceptable in another. The same behaviour can be interpreted differently depending on who is doing it.
There is also something interesting about how little explicit instruction is required for these standards to become established.
Children learn what is admirable, embarrassing, respectable or unacceptable through much more than direct correction. They notice what adults praise, what gets laughed at, what people speak about quietly, whose behaviour is excused, and whose mistakes become family stories.
I think we need to resist the temptation to describe this as though social influence ends once a standard becomes internal.
Who has the authority to establish a standard?
Whose behaviour is scrutinised most closely?
What happens when somebody refuses to comply?
And who benefits when people begin monitoring themselves?
I don't think these questions mean we should abandon individual psychology. People living within the same family or community can respond very differently to its expectations, and personal history, temperament, relationships and experiences will still matter.
But if we only examine what happens inside the person, we risk overlooking the environment that helped make a particular evaluation so consequential in the first place.
Before we ask somebody to become less ashamed, more confident, less self-critical or more willing to ‘take up space’, it may be worth understanding what taking up that space actually means in the world they inhabit.
As always, stay curious,
Shoni
Dr Shoni Marshall-Edwards
Clinical Psychologist · AHPRA PSY0004030165
Alba Psychology · Online · Australia and New Zealand