38 Seeing the Signs of Shame in Yourself and Others

Oct 19, 2020

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Intro: Welcome to the podcast Coronavirus Crisis: Carpe Diem!, where by God’s grace, you and I rise up and embrace the possibilities and opportunities for spiritual and psychological growth in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resilience, to rising up to the challenges of this pandemic and becoming even healthier in the natural and the spiritual realms than we were before. I’m clinical psychologist Peter Malinoski and I am here with you, to be your host and guide. This podcast is part of Souls and Hearts, our online outreach at soulsandhearts.com, which is all about shoring up our natural foundation for the spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving.
1. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 38, released on October 19, 2020
2. and it is titled: Seeing the signs of shame in yourself and others.
3. We are going to understand much more deeply the nature of shame, where shame comes from and how it manifests itself inside of us, and how it is expressed.
4. We are focusing today on learning more about shame and recognizing it -- recognizing it in ourselves and in others, becoming better able to detect it.
5. Remember parts of the dynamics of shame include shame remaining hidden, unobserved, unrecognized for what it is. Shame is tricky, it's slippery, it loves to camouflage itself.
6. We are in a series of episodes about shame. In future episodes we will get to how shame affects our spiritual lives and we will also focus on how to heal from shame, how to break out of the vicious shame cycles in which we find ourselves spinning.
So Let's start by Circling back -- review of shame from the last session and then adding some real depth and nuance as we review and expand upon what we covered in the last episode, Episode 37.
Shame is:
1. The primary problem we have in the natural realm
2. That gives birth to so many secondary problems -- we tend to focus on the secondary problems, the problems that are further downstream -- so we are not getting to the root.
3. Drawing heavily from Kathy Steele, Suzette Boon, and Otto van Der Hart -- trauma clinicians and researchers who have worked with real clinical population, real people, not just academicians.
4. Also drawing from Richard Schwartz and Regina Goulding -- Mosaic Mind.
  1. Be open to really learning about this
    1. this can be challenging
  2. 1. take what suits you -- can slow way down. If this is really activating for you, consider psychotherapy -- Souls and Hearts course on how to choose a therapist.
  4. If you can resolve your dysfunctional shame -- have a deep sense of being lovable and loved, by God, others and yourself, you've solved most of your psychological issues on the natural level.
  5. Shame has five dimensions: shame is a primary emotion, shame is a bodily reaction, shame is a signal to us, shame is an internal self-judgement, and shame is an action -- a verb (review).
  6. Adding today behavioral expression of shame
    1. These behavioral expressions of shame are not shame itself, but they are intimately linked with shame and some of the best indicators of unrecognized shame.
5. Shame is more than most people assume. We tend to have very limited, very primitive understandings of shame -- very unidimensional.
6. Let's review the five dimensions of shame.
7. Shame is a primary emotion -- heartset
  1. Primary emotions are those that we feel first, as a first response to a situation. They are unthinking, instinctive, emotions that rise up spontaneously
8. 1. More nuanced. Just because you're not feeling shame in the moment does not mean that it's not there.
    1. Consider how a wave of anger feels. You feel normal, fine, then something happens and there is this intense anger or even rage, and then it passes, the anger goes away again. That how we typically think of these emotional experience. That how we make sense of them. But that's not how it is. That is a dangerous illusion. A falsehood. A pipe dream. The anger didn't just come and go, just like that. And you know this at some level, because sometimes you ask yourself -- why am I so angry about that little thing, why did something so minor just set me off? The emotional reaction is disproportionate to the trivial event.
    2. A wave of shame -- feels like it wasn't there, and then something happened, like a negative review from your boss it was there in all its intensity and you're just trying to hold it together through the rest of your performance review, and then the shame passes and you're not feeling it anymore. If I don't feel it, it's not there. Seems reasonable, right?
    3. But what if, what if that wasn't what really happened. What if the same amount of shame was within you the whole time -- it was just latent, outside of awareness. And rather than the shame coming and then going, what if it was your awareness of your shame and anger that changed. What if you at first where disconnected from your shame out of touch with it. Then your defenses were overrun and you were overwhelmed with shame, and then your defenses were able to come back online and you no longer felt the shame. What if the intense shame was there the whole time? That's a whole different model Let's say that you were disconnected from unresolved shame.
    4. A high level of shame or anger can endure within us and be intensely felt only on rare occasions when our defenses open up, when they dilate and we can see and feel the shame or anger. In other words, all that anger or shame generally resides in the unconscious.
    5. Unconscious
      1. The term was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling --
        Schelling suggests that there are two principles in us: “an unconscious, dark principle and a conscious principle”
        later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1797, who read the 18th century German idealists.
    6. 1. Freud. Unconscious Mind is like an iceberg 10% above the water -- visible -- that is consciousness -- what we are aware of in the moment. The vast majority of the iceberg is below the water, outside awareness -- what you sense is what you get.
    8. In North America, we largely don't act as if we believe in the unconscious.
    9. I think all of us, because of original sin, the sins of others, our own personal sins, the fallen world we live in and our fallen natures -- we have deep reservoirs of shame. We know we need redemption. We can sense it at a primal level, and we have ways of distracting ourselves from that reality, from defending ourselves from that reality.
    10. Richard Schwartz on parts -- we are not just single unitary personalities Understanding Parts
      1. Separate mental systems each with their own
        
        Emotions
      2. Expressive style
      3. Abilities
      4. Roles in the system of the person
      5. God images