Getting Discomfortable with the Interpersonal Bridge

While studying shame over the last few years, I kept coming across clinical psychologist and shame pioneer Gershen Kaufman’s definition of shame, “The breaking of the interpersonal bridge”. But I never understood what it meant. What is the “interpersonal bridge”? And how does it get broken?

It wasn’t until I started doing my certification courses at the Center for Healing Shame in Berkely that this definition of shame started to make sense to me.

I think the key is understanding the therapeutic concept of “attunement”, which in this case refers to the state of interconnectedness between two (or more) people where there is a sense of appropriate emotional give and take. We are attuned when we really see the other person, understand and empathize with what they are feeling, react appropriately, and vice versa. It’s a kind of moment by moment interplay that creates the sense of mutual connection, care, and respect that we long for as social animals. 

So when we come into attunement with another person, we create an intersubjective interpersonal bridge between us, which feels great. But as soon as that attunement stops, as soon as someone reacts in an unexpected way that thwarts the pleasure we were experiencing and expecting, it breaks that interpersonal bridge. And that break is shame.

In this way, attunement is one of the basic units of connection. It is the building block of the interpersonal bridge. And without it, there is always bound to be shame.