IIC 38: Seeing the Signs of Shame in Yourself and Others

Dr. Peter Malinoski takes us deeper into recognizing the signs of shame in ourselves and others, and how shame manifests in unusual ways.

[00:00:12] 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 our present day, in this time of crisis, all grounded in a Catholic worldview. We are going beyond mere resilience to rising up to the challenges of our current times 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 foundations for the spiritual life, all about overcoming psychological obstacles to being loved and to loving. Thank you for being here with me. This is episode 38 and it’s released on October 19th, 2020. It’s titled Seeing the Signs of Shame in Yourself and Others. Seeing the Signs of Shame in Yourself and Others. We are going to understand together much more deeply the nature of shame. We’re going to understand where shame comes from. We’re going to understand how shame manifests itself inside of us, and we’re going to understand more about how we express shame and how others express shame, which could be totally different than how we do it. We are focusing today on learning more about shame, and particularly on recognizing shame, recognizing shame in ourselves, recognizing shame in others, becoming better able to detect it.

[00:02:11] Remember, part of the dynamics of shame is that shame wants to remain hidden, unobserved, unrecognized for what it is. Shame is tricky. It’s slippery. It loves to camouflage itself. It loves to distract. So it’s tricky and we need help to really be able to recognize it. That’s what I’m offering you today. We are in a series of episodes about shame. In future episodes, we’re going to get to how shame affects our spiritual lives. And we’re also going to focus on how to heal from shame, how to break out of the vicious shame cycles in which we find ourselves just spinning. Some of you know exactly what I mean. Let’s start by circling back. We’re going to review what we learned about shame in the last episode. And then we’re going to add real depth and nuance as we expand upon what we covered in the last episode, episode 37. So what what do we know? Shame is the primary problem that we have in the natural realm. I’m firmly convinced of this after almost 20 years of being a practicing psychologist full-time. Shame is the number one problem in the natural realm. Shame gives birth to so many secondary problems. We often tend to focus on the secondary problems, the problems that are further downstream, and so we don’t get to the root. We don’t get to the shame. Now in today’s talk, like in the last episode, I’m going to draw heavily from Kathy Steele, Suzette Boon, and Onno van der Hart.

[00:04:04] These are trauma clinicians. They’re researchers. They are theoreticians who have worked with real clinical populations, real people with real problems with shame. They’re not just academicians. I’m also going to be drawing from Richard Schwartz and Regina Goulding, from their book Mosaic Mind. Richard Schwartz is the originator of Internal Family Systems therapy. That’s a particular form of therapy that I’m trained in and that I particularly advocate, that I particularly love to work with. I’m going to encourage you to be really open to learning about shame, really open to what’s in the last episode and what’s in this episode and the episodes to come in this series on shame. This can be really challenging. I’m also going to say take what suits you. Take what is helpful to you. You can slow way down. If something in these podcast episodes is really activating for you, slow it down. You know, make sure that you’re staying in a place that’s safe and consider psychotherapy. Souls and Hearts, we have a course called A Catholics Guide to Choosing a Therapist. Check that out if you think that some of this may really be helped in individual psychotherapy, in marital therapy, or in group therapy. Here’s the deal. If you can resolve your dysfunctional shame, chronic shame, unhealthy shame, if you can resolve that dysfunctional shame, if you can have a deep sense of being lovable and being loved by God, by others, by yourself, you’ve solved most of your psychological issues on the natural level.

[00:05:46] Period. Full stop. If you resolve shame, you resolve basically all the rest of it, because you’ve gotten to the root. That’s how serious this is. That’s why I’m spending so much time on shame. So what we learned in episode 37 is that shame has five primary dimensions, five main dimensions. Shame is a primary emotion. That’s first. Second, shame is a bodily reaction, a physiological reaction. Third, shame is a signal to us. It’s got a function for us. It’s got a way that it helps us. That’s third. Fourth, shame is an internal self-judgment, a way we evaluate ourselves. That’s fourth. And fifth, shame is a verb. It’s an action, right? As in shaming somebody else. So we’re going to review those briefly. And we’re going to expand a lot more on them today. And we’re going to add also the behavioral expressions of shame. These behavioral expressions of shame are not shame itself, but they are intimately linked with shame, and they are some of the best indicators of unrecognized, unacknowledged shame. We’re really going to look at behavioral expressions of shame. How is shame manifested? How is it shown? How is it demonstrated so that we can start making inferences about shame within us and how we might be able to enter into other people’s phenomenological worlds, you know, and be able to understand when they’re experiencing shame, to become more proficient at understanding them helps us to be able to love them.

[00:07:41] That’s really important. Shame is much more than most people assume. We tend to have very limited, very primitive understandings of shame. We understand it in very unidimensional ways. In fact, many of us don’t like to think about shame at all. We want to avoid it. So let’s review the five dimensions of shame. Let’s start with the first one. Shame is a primary emotion, a primary emotion. Here we are in heartset, where our heart is. Primary emotions are those emotions that we feel first as a first response to a situation. They are unthought. They are instinctive. They are emotions that rise up spontaneously first, right? So let’s get a little more nuanced with this. Just because you’re not feeling shame in the moment doesn’t mean it’s not there. Just because you’re not feeling shame right now does not mean that shame is not active in you. Let’s consider anger first, because this may be a little easier, right? Consider how a wave of anger feels. You’re feeling normal, fine. And then something happens. You know, for example, somebody cuts you off on the freeway, right? And then there’s this intense anger, this rage, and then it passes. The anger goes away again. That’s how we typically think about these emotional experiences.

[00:09:17] That’s how we make sense of them. But that’s not how it is. This idea that anger or shame, that they just come in a wave, you’re fine. Then the anger or shame comes in a big wave and then it blows over. That’s a dangerous illusion. That’s a falsehood. That’s a pipe dream. The anger just didn’t come and go, boom, just like that. And you know this at some level, you already know this at some level, right? 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. Why did I fume and fuss for so long about being cut off? Why did I become so sad when I heard about a friend’s second cousin who died, somebody I don’t even know? Well, let’s take this into shame now, right? It feels like it wasn’t there. And then you get a little bit of a negative review from your boss, right? And there shame is in all its intensity. And it seems like you’re just trying to hold it together for the rest of your performance review. And then the shame passes and you’re not feeling it anymore. It just feels like it goes away. If I don’t feel it, it’s not there. Seems reasonable, right? But what if, just what if that wasn’t what really happened? What if you had the same amount of shame within you the whole time? It was just latent.

[00:11:04] It was just outside of your awareness, the shame just hiding, just outside of your awareness. And rather than the shame coming and then going like a wave. What if it was your awareness of your shame that changed? What if at first you were just disconnected from your shame? You were just out of touch with it. Then your defenses were overrun temporarily, 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. That’s a whole different ballgame, right? So let’s just say that you were disconnected from unresolved shame. How would that look? I’m going to make the argument that a high level of shame or anger or anxiety can endure within us and be intensely felt only on the rare occasions when our defenses open up, when they dilate, and when we can see and feel the shame, the anger, the fear, whatever it is. In other words, all that emotion generally resides in the unconscious, including shame, just resides in the unconscious. It’s outside of our awareness, except for when it pierces through our coping mechanisms, our defenses. Let’s talk a little bit more about the unconscious. The term unconscious was coined by the 18th century German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling, and Schelling suggests that there are two principles in us.

[00:12:49] He believes there’s this unconscious dark principle and a conscious principle. The whole concept of the unconscious was later introduced into the English speaking world by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Right at the end of the 18th century, right at the beginning of the 19th century. Coleridge loved to read the 18th century German idealists who were really struggling with this whole experience of what was going on in the mind, and how could it be that we don’t have access to everything. But then Freud came in and he has this model of the mind being like an iceberg, an iceberg, 10% of it is above water. You can see it. That corresponds to our conscious awareness. And then the rest of it’s below the water line. That’s the unconscious. The part that’s below the water is also the part that causes a lot of trouble. It’s the part that sinks ships and so forth. It’s not the part that you can see. It’s the part that’s below the water that you can’t see that causes the problem. We tend to believe in North America that the unconscious really doesn’t exist. We kind of think that what you see is what you get. It’s just what’s above the water, right? There’s not a lot below the water. It’s just what’s above the water. We tend to look at it that way because what’s below the water is unseen for a reason.

[00:14:13] There are psychologically motivated reasons that we don’t see what’s below the water. I think all of us, because of original sin, the sins of others, our own personal sins, the fallen world that we live in and our fallen natures, we all have deep reservoirs of shame. We know we need redemption. We can sense it at a primal level, and we have ways of distancing ourself from that reality. We have ways of defending ourselves from awareness of that reality, but we know at some level that it’s there. Now, I want to introduce to you a way of thinking of the human person that was introduced to me by Richard Schwartz in Internal Family Systems. Richard Schwartz makes the argument that we’re not single unitary personalities. We’re not these monolithic, homogeneous personalities. In fact, we actually have a system within us, a system that has what he calls parts. And parts are separate mental systems within us that each have their own emotions. They have their own expressive styles. They have their own abilities. They all have their own roles within the person. We can think of them as our modes of operating, or we can think of them as ego states, or we can think of them as like sub personalities. Some people are familiar with John Bradshaw’s inner child. You know, a part might be like an inner child.

[00:15:58] And what happens is that when we experience attachment injuries, when we experience relational wounds, when we experience traumas, these parts get forced into extreme roles to protect us from being overwhelmed. And that could be with rage or despair or sadness or shame. And parts also get trapped back in time. They can experience time very differently than other parts within us, right? So, for example, if a Vietnam veteran is walking along the road in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1977, after the Vietnam War ended and hears a car backfire, he may have a part that knows that he’s back on the battlefield, and he may jump into a ditch because that part took over in order to protect him in desperate situations. For all intents and purposes, to that part, it feels like he’s back on the battlefield. And when you look at what happens from brain imaging studies in situations in which, like these traumatic flashbacks happen, the frontal cortex goes offline. It goes dark, right? No brain activity in the frontal cortex or very low levels. That leaves the parietal cortex, the basal ganglia, the cerebellum, and the hippocampus to try to figure out time. Well, without the frontal cortex, that’s very difficult for them to do. The brain can’t assess time perception very well. And so you can see that there are psychological and neurological correlates to these parts. Parts become burdened with certain experiences and they contain those experiences so that the rest of us are not overwhelmed by that.

[00:17:51] So the rest of the system is not overwhelmed by shame, by anger, by despair, by any intense emotion, fear, whatever it may happen to be. So these exiled parts, I’m arguing that they function in some ways, like modern lepers, like modern tax collectors, that carry the burdens within our system, the burdens of trauma, so that we can make it through the day. Now, these parts are threatening to the system because of the intensity of the emotion that they carry, the intensity of the experience that they carry. And so they’re exiled by other parts, by protector parts that are protecting the system from the intensity that the exiled parts carry. Our internal systems get organized to hide our shame in the unconscious, along with anything else that’s too threatening to be in conscious awareness. If we didn’t have a way to manage that shame, it would continually overwhelm us. And that’s true for also rage or fear or despair. So we’re going way beyond where we went last time, to understanding that shame is contained by certain parts of us that have that function now in our system, and those parts are generally outside of our awareness until they, like, rise up. We’ve already talked about how shame is an emotion, and we got into much more about how that emotion is managed in our system.

[00:19:34] But shame is also a judgment. Shame is a judgment of who I am, a critical perspective of myself, a very negative perception of myself that corresponds to mindset, how we think about ourselves. A judgment about who I really am from the perspective of a critical, rejecting external person. I look at myself through the eyes of my critical, angry or disappointed mom, or my dad or my daycare worker or my teacher or some other caregiver. And we internalize that perception of us, that criticism of us. We take it inside. And now a part of us plays the role of the external critical person. This part of me says the exact same things, or communicates the exact same message that the important other person communicates to me. Could be that I’m a burden. I’m too needy. I’m too dependent. I bring other people down. I make other people suffer. I don’t deserve attention or care. Could be the message that alcohol, TV, and the newspaper are more important than I am. Whatever, whatever the message was that the important other person, the attachment figure, gave me, that I internalize. Even though that may have happened decades ago, it’s no longer the case. It’s no longer accurate, it no longer applies. I may no longer be 4 or 8 years old. But these judgments are held by these parts of me that are trying to protect me from my own shame.

[00:21:13] These protectors are protecting me from a shame-filled heartset. These critical evaluations, these shaming statements, are held by judging parts of me that are trying to protect me. They’re trying to protect me from the overwhelming emotion that exiled parts are carrying that corresponds to the shame. Right. And so, because the emotional dimensions of shame are so threatening, parts get banished, they’re driven out of awareness into exile in the unconscious. But they’re not gone. They’re just silenced for the moment. All right. So we have shame as an emotion, shame as a judgment. Now we’re going to go on to shame as a bodily reaction. Shame involves automatic involuntary bodily responses. And Charles Darwin actually was among the first to discuss this in a systematic way in his 1872 book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. And Darwin described shame in the following bodily reactions: blushing, which is vasodilation in the face, confusion of mind, downcast eyes, slack posture, lowered head, and crying. Those were the bodily responses that he attributed to shame. When exiled parts that are burdened with shame break through into conscious awareness, they can overwhelm us with their distress and then take over our bodies. This is like in the Pixar movie Inside Out, where that very thin purple Fear character takes over the control panel and dominates everything in the main character, Riley. What happens is that shame can take us out of the window of tolerance, which is the zone of optimal arousal in which the person is able to function most effectively.

[00:23:13] When we’re feeling intense shame, we get yanked out of this window of tolerance that can lead us above the level of tolerance into hyper-arousal. This is where our sympathetic nervous system revs us up, gets us into fight or flight mode. Heart starts racing, breathing quickens, pupils dilate, blood rushes to our arms and legs, the face can flush red, and we get ready to defend ourselves and attack or to run away. That’s the fight or flight. Or shame can take us down below the window of tolerance into hypo-arousal, where the parasympathetic nervous system shuts us down. We go into a freeze response like a deer in the headlights. That’s when we disengage socially. We numb out. We shut down. We may dissociate. We lower our head, we break off eye contact and we start to curl up. We tighten up our muscles. We try to make our body smaller, less visible. We’ve got that feeling of ice water in the veins. You know what I’m talking about. Many of you do. That cold, freezing sensation, the fluttering in the belly, sometimes like butterflies. These bodily reactions are not under voluntary control. Have you ever tried not to blush? Yeah. How well did that work? Right. What probably happened is you had even more vasodilation and turned even redder.

[00:24:33] It made it worse when you tried to stop it. Even though you were trying so hard to play it cool, you just kept getting redder and redder. That led to a more intense shame response. So we have shame as an emotion, shame as a judgment, shame as a bodily reaction. And we’re moving on to shame as a signal. Now here’s where we get into the adaptive functions of shame. This often gets missed. It’s sort of like the upside of shame. Shame is a signal that there’s a lack of attunement, or that there’s a really serious threat in one of our important relationships, a relationship that we need. So shame can function as this social threat detector. It signals us to modify or avoid behaviors that will cause us to be rejected by those we need. So the shame signal leads to the shame response. The shame response inhibits emotions, thoughts, sensations, beliefs, and behaviors that are perceived as unacceptable to powerful others who we need. Shame signaling, therefore, is a survival mechanism. It helps to save us from potential terrible consequences. Ever been in church where there’s a big family with lots of little kids, and they’re all perfectly dressed and they’re all perfectly behaved, and the parents are beaming in responses to getting compliments on the church steps after Mass about their little angels, so well behaved? Yeah. That always creeps me out when I see it, because I wonder if the parents put the fear of God into those children to keep them so still, so unnaturally still throughout a 60 minute or a 90 minute Mass.

[00:26:16] There’s an inhibitory function of shame, right? If that happened, those kids may not want to displease God. They don’t want to displease their parents. Their parents may have parts that are very overinvested in the public impressions their family makes on the parish community. They may be really bound up in the optics and the impression management. And so there’s a huge cost to getting that behavior out of little kids in church. Shame. It clues us in to what we need to do to get the attachment resources that we need to survive. That’s the function, right? So we have shame as an emotion, shame as a judgment, shame as a bodily reaction, a physiological reaction, shame as a signal that has a particular function to protect us and to help us survive. And now we’re going to talk about shame as an action, right? Shame is something that we can do, right, in the verb shaming, right? Shaming is an action that’s intended to cause somebody else to feel inadequate, worthless, unlovable, a loser, whatever, for being or doing something that the shamer doesn’t want, right? That the shamer finds wrong, finds undesirable or threatening. And shame is a quick way to control another person, particularly those who are in dependent positions.

[00:27:36] It’s really, really easy to shame children, and it’s also a quick way for us to control ourselves. Most of us have parts of us that are in the role of a shamer. And that role is to anticipate consequences. Let me give you an example of this. And we talked about in the last episode, the example of, you know, I’ll give you something to cry about. I’m going to give you another one. Let’s say that there’s a rambunctious boy on Saturday morning getting all wrapped up in the cartoons, right, starting to make noise, laughing really loud, and his hungover mother appears like a specter of doom at the top of the stairs, cusses him out in a terrible voice, telling him to shut up and let her sleep. Right. If a part of that boy takes on the shaming function of the mother, and whenever he notices that he’s starting to get boisterous, if that shaming part tells him to shut up and be good and not disturb mom. Stop being such a noisy pain in the butt. He can save himself the verbal backlash and even worse from his alcoholic mother. It’s a way that that boy has a part that helps him to regulate, to save himself from terrible consequences, to help him through an extremely difficult situation. Those are the five things. We’ll review very quickly once again. Shame is an emotion. Shame is a judgment.

[00:29:12] Shame is a physiological reaction, a body reaction. Shame is a signal that has a particular protective function. And shame as an action. Now we’re going to move on to the qualities of shame. Shame is hidden. Shame is hidden from others. Shame is often hidden from therapists. Clients do not just come in and show you their shame. In fact, that’s something that often takes a lot of work to really get to. Shame is hidden from the self. Shame is hidden in the unconscious. It’s carried by our exiled parts who are like the lepers. It’s not allowed into the community of ourselves. It’s not allowed into our systems because there’s a fear of contagion of shame, of shame taking over. Shame inhibits positive reactions. If shame is really prominent, we have a hard time playing. We have a hard time being childlike. We have a hard time having a sense of awe, of wonder. We miss out on being little. We’re going to get into how shame is expressed. We’re going into the behavioral expressions of shame. This is what you need to look for in yourself and others. These are the clues that shame is lurking, hidden, even if you don’t feel it in conscious awareness. There’s lots of reasons why we don’t feel our shame. Most of them have to do with a sense of danger, a sense of it being unsafe. Now, shame is hard to measure. I’ve noticed over my career that the more important a phenomenon is, the harder it is to quantify, the harder it is to measure.

[00:30:49] And since shame is so vitally important, it goes without saying that it’s going to be hard to measure. But we’re going to try. In the Journal of Child and Family Studies in 2017, Canadian researchers Kalee De France, Dianna Lanteigne, Jenny Glozman, and Tom Hollenstein, all Canadians actually, wrote an article called, A New Measure for the Expression of Shame: The Shame Code. And the first part of that article is a review of all the literature on measuring or assessing shame. Shame is predominantly been measured by self-report questionnaires, which typically capture trait shame or shame proneness, and it relies on the subjects really understanding that they have shame. It can only capture shame that’s in conscious awareness. It’s unable to capture the experience of shame as it occurs, and it also doesn’t capture shame as it’s observed by others. Shame does not have a single canonical facial expression, but there are some facial and behavioral expressions that are indicative of experiencing shame, that have been identified in the professional literature. And we’ll go through those now. The first is a shrunken or compressed posture that includes body tension, shoulders dropping, a lowered head, kind of that hangdog look. And these submissive displays can be seen as social signals of appeasement. They’re meant to reduce conflict. They’re meant to avoid scrutiny.

[00:32:25] Don’t look at me. They say, don’t look at me. I’m not a threat. I’m not competing with you. And they tend to evoke more cooperative behavior from others. They’re associated with less punishing, less punitive response. Shame can also be identified by tension in facial muscles. All right, frowning, turning down the corners of the mouth, tucking the lower lip between the teeth. You know, where you suck in that lower lip. And pursed lips. Those are often indicators of shame. Another one is the false smile. A smile that’s not genuine, that indicates a false expression of positivity. So the key difference between a fake smile and a real smile. A real smile that indicates that the person is really experiencing the emotion has to do with the muscles that wrap around the eyes, the orbicularis oculi. All smiles require that you lift the corners of your mouth. That’s done by the zygomatic major muscles. But a real smile, what’s called a Duchenne smile, that adds the eyes in. The skin around the eyes wrinkles in the crow’s feet by tightening of those orbicularis oculi muscles. But a fake smile often indicates embarrassment. It’s a smile that’s accompanied by averting your gaze. It’s a nervous smile, which is another appeasement behavior. It’s when the individual experiencing the shame attempts to placate the observer and avoid judgment or punitive behavior. That gaze aversion, hiding one’s face, that’s another sign, right? Not looking to fight you.

[00:34:09] I’m not looking to get into a competition with you. I don’t want to escalate conflict. You win. Certain speech patterns, according to De France, Lanteigne, Glozman, Hollenstein, include verbal uncertainty, kind of hemming and hawing in your speech, stammering, long pauses, and also going silent. There’s also a tendency to withdraw, such as disengaging from a potential emotional trigger. Right, withdrawing from situations. Another one is freezing, halting behavior, becoming still, not moving. And the final one is distracting oneself through fidgeting. And what’s fidgeting? Well, fidgeting is defined as the manipulations of one’s own body parts or objects, such actions being peripheral or non-central to ongoing events or tasks. I don’t know if that was very helpful, but that’s a technical definition from Mehrabian and Friedman from 2006. We know what fidgeting is. All right, so let’s review strategies for coping with shame. We named them in the last episode, but we’re going to go into them in more detail in this episode. These are from Nathanson, from his work back in 1992 and 1997, four defensive scripts for avoiding shame. What are they? First, attack the self. Second, attack others. Third, isolate the self. And fourth, avoid inner experience. And we’re going to go into these in much more depth now because this is another way that you can recognize shame in yourself and in other people. These are scripts, these are ways that shame plays out. So in addition to the behavioral manifestations of shame, the behavioral expressions of shame that we just covered, you can pay attention to these scripts.

[00:36:08] You may notice these scripts in yourself. You may notice these scripts in other people. The first one, attack the self. This is where part of you accepts the mindset of shame. It accepts the beliefs of shame that I am inadequate. I’m a loser. I’m stupid. I’m incompetent. I’m fat. It’s easier. It’s safer to turn the anger and disgust inward. And when you mix that anger and disgust, you get contempt. And contempt is the most corrosive emotion in relationships, and that includes our relationships with ourselves. If you want to ruin a relationship, there is nothing that does it faster than a contemptuous attitude. So in attacking the self, the shame is often not felt at all. It’s actually just assumed that I am worthless, no good, evil. It’s not even possible to say I feel ashamed. There’s just the attack on the shame-bearing part and the assumptions of being a loser, or inadequate, or stupid. The cognition is there, but the emotion of shame is not. The thoughts driven by shame are there, the messages are there, but the feelings are not there. Attacking the self. Attacking the self is a way to ward off the intensity of the emotions of that reservoir of shame that’s now bubbling up. Second one, attacking others first. This one is often counterintuitive.

[00:37:44] So stay with me here. This is where one of your protector parts, in order to shield you from your own shame, attacks another person. In attacking the other person, your protector part is saying, I’m not the problem. The other person’s the problem. Anger and disgust are directed away from the self toward blaming and shaming another person. And you do that, your part does that, in order to salvage your own sense of self worth. In doing this, you externalize the shame. You project it onto somebody else, and you are managing to put some distance between you and your own shame. At least that’s how it seems phenomenologically. If the other person is feeling the shame, if the other person is getting overwhelmed by their own shame, then the shame is there. And if the shame is there, well then it can’t be in me. That’s the way that the reasoning goes, right? The other person is inferior. I’m superior. The other person has the shame problem. I don’t have a shame problem. And the shaming parts are driven by shame that they are not aware of. A lot of marital conflict stems from shame and shaming. Lots of it. I would argue that in marriages where there’s high levels of conflict, the primary problem is shame. And it’s the number one issue in aggressive, pushy people who cut others down, bullies, intimidators, tough guys, gaslighters, manipulators. All of these things come from parts of a person who is desperately trying to ward off shame.

[00:39:18] Now, it doesn’t make any of those behaviors okay? It doesn’t make intimidation, all right. Not at all. It doesn’t make what’s sinful, not sinful. But we can get into what’s driving those behaviors, we’re often going to find at the root of them shame, unacknowledged shame. And when somebody is attacking another person, it can be very hard to see that that person is actually suffering from shame. That’s a tremendous way to camouflage, to disguise, to hide our own shame. The first strategy for coping with shame, attack the self. Second strategy for coping with shame, attack another person. The third strategy, isolate. And that is to isolate from others, in which part of you accepts the message of shame, it believes it, and it feels terrible and hides. There’s no desire to be exposed. There’s no desire to be vulnerable. There’s no desire to experience any more ridicule. I don’t want any more shaming. I’m just going to hide like Adam and Eve in Genesis three, after eating the forbidden fruit, often to the bushes, they go to hide. Lots of anxiety and fear here, but you can see how the anxiety and fear are secondary emotions to the shame, which is the primary emotion. The anxiety, the fear, flow from the shame. And so many problematic emotions have shame at the root. They have shame at the core.

[00:40:42] But shame is so tricky. The other emotions seem to be the problem. The anger, the sadness, the fear, the rage, whatever, the despair, that seems to be the problem. Not understanding, not realizing that at the root of it, hiding secretly is shame. What do you do when you’re isolating? You avoid social situations. You limit your relational interactions. You withdraw, and you look at others with dread. Isolation, right. So attacking the self, attacking others, isolating from others. The fourth is avoiding inner experiences. We can do this in a number of ways. One way that many people readily understand is denial. I don’t have a problem with alcohol, when there is no doubt in anybody’s mind except the person who’s in denial that there’s a problem with alcohol. Dissociation, that’s where we disconnect from things. We check out. Numbing, that’s where we just shut down and don’t feel anything. That can actually happen on a very broad scale in certain people. Depersonalization or derealization. This is where we also start to feel like things aren’t real around us, like we’re in some kind of twilight zone. And then heavy attempts to distract ourselves. TV, movies, alcohol, sex, binge eating, obsessions, hyperactivity, manic episodes, incessant humor, or joking, changing the subject when the conversation pulls for looking inward, focusing exclusively on other people, like excessive caregiving with no self-care, compulsive do gooding. These are all ways to help us not get in touch with ourselves.

[00:42:21] And there’s also spiritual bypassing. That’s where we take flight into spiritual practices to avoid dealing with our inner experiences. We might get involved with a lot of prayer, litanies, prayer cards, holy hours, lectio divina, but it has this driven quality to it, a rigidity, and a nearly exclusive outward focus because we are working so hard to keep surfing ahead of a huge wave of some type of internal experience that threatens us. When this avoidance of inner experience works, there’s little or no awareness of shame. There’s little awareness of shameful actions, shameful reactions, little awareness of faults or negative characteristics, because we are successfully keeping shame at bay. I promise you, we will get to how do we work with shame. How do we work with shame in a much more constructive way? How do we do that? It’s coming. I’m going to be giving you strategies for working with shame in upcoming episodes, but we can’t rush it. There’s often a strong impulse to rush through working with shame. We don’t want to do that. We’ll also get into the spiritual impact of shame, soulset. For example, if you have a part who feels unloved and unlovable, how do you think that part would understand God? Would it see God as loving and caring, if its experience is loveless? What about your parts that have been shamed by important others and by other parts of you? How would they see God? How does your internal critic, you know that voice inside you that has that running commentary about your faults and failings, that voice that exacerbates your sense of shame? How does that part see God? What God images do these parts have? How does Satan use your shame against you? Remember, grace perfects nature, right? And it makes sense for Satan to attack at the weak points in your natural foundation.

[00:44:24] We’re going to get into all those issues, as well as the relationship between shame and pride. We’re going to do that all in this Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem podcast, where we harmonize the best of psychology with the truths of the Catholic faith. All right, so here I have an ask. I have a request for you. I want you to let others know about this podcast. I’m going to ask you, who do you know might be suffering from shame? Or who do you know that’s struggling with someone who is experiencing shame or who may not be experiencing shame consciously, but there’s all these behavioral manifestations? Who could benefit from hearing this series on shame here in the Coronavirus Crisis Carpe Diem podcast? Let them know about that. Let them know about what we’re doing here. I’m going to let you know that I am doing a bonus podcast on sex differences and shame, because this is getting really long. I don’t have time to get it in here.

[00:45:23] We’re going to talk about how men and women are different in their experience of shame, and how they’re different in their behavioral expressions of shame. That’s going to be available to our Resilient Catholic Carpe Diem community. If you’re in the community, you’re going to be able to get that in the next couple of days. There’s all kinds of wonderful things going on in the community. For example, we just had a Zoom meeting last week on October 14th. I gave a guided meditation to help you locate a part of you that feels unloved and unlovable, and to reach out to that part with care and gentleness. Got a lot of great feedback on what people were experiencing, people really connecting with parts of themselves, coming to love themselves better. It’s just a beautiful thing to hear. You know, seek and ye shall find. People were able to reach out to those parts of themselves and really be with them. That actually is recorded, the introduction and the meditation sessions are recorded, so that you can have access to that if you join the RCCD community. We’re building a whole library of different exercises and techniques that are helpful to you. So we got all kinds of other things going on. We’re going to have our first office hours, where I will be discussing shame in a Zoom room on October 21st from 7:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time.

[00:46:38] That’s on Wednesday, October 21st. That’s free for RCCD members. We’re going to get into the concepts of this podcast, have a lively question and answer. It’s a place to get questions answered. We don’t get into like clinical material in there, but there’s all kinds of great information that we can get to, and we’re going to record that. We’re going to make it available for our RCCD members that couldn’t make it live. So $25 per month to join the RCCD community. Go ahead, go to soulsandhearts.com/rccd, read all about it. Go ahead and join, because we’re going to temporarily halt admission to the RCCD community on November 3rd, on Election Day. We’re going to close that down. We’re going to close down new members. You can’t come in, because we’re going to be totally revamping the whole community. It’s an amazing time. You’re going to want to be there for that period of transition. Plus, if you join before November 3rd, you can hold that $25 per month for all of 2021 because the prices are going to go up significantly when we reopen the community next year in probably sometime in January or February. And also pray for me, I’m going to really ask for your prayers. Heard a lot of great things about recent podcasts. Keep those prayers up because that really helps sustain me to do this. And I’ll keep praying for you as well. And now let’s invoke our patroness and our patron. Our Lady, our Mother, Undoer of Knots, pray for us. Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.