- This article first appeared in Deep Transformation Network’s forum. -
Rather than presenting my ideas on this topic in essay form, I'd like to explore these ideas a little as "bullet item" notes. Maybe there will be an essay at some later time. For now, the notes themselves seem worthy of sharing and getting feedback on. I'll express these ideas as affirmative statements, but that doesn't mean I am 100% certain about any of this. I'll just share what seems to me to be the case. And I'd like to hear from you if you disagree... or agree.
Like most psychological concepts, "toxic shame" and "healthy shame" can be understood as existing entirely within individuals, even though these and other psychic conditions also exist within "the social field" -- or the culture -- and not exclusively within individuals.
In many countries with people whose primary and native tongue is English (and many other countries besides), the culture generally understands the psyche as individualized. That is, the weight of emphasis is on the 'interiority' of the individual psyche. This tends to obscure our awareness of the social and cultural nature of psyche, how cultures or societies themselves embody psyche.
Psychologists generally describe "healthy shame" as a temporary, passing condition in which a person feels shame for having done something harmful, immoral, unethical, wrong or bad. Healthy shame says: I did something bad or wrong, and I have shame about that.
Psychologists generally describe "toxic shame" as a chronic condition of feeling and/or believing that one's self is fundamentally flawed, bad, unacceptable, unworthy, etc. Toxic shame says: I am bad, despicable, unworthy, wrong and shameful.
Severe toxic shame tends to obviate a healthy capacity for healthy shame, thus doing harm to one's capacity for empathy, compassion and caring for others. This is where certain kinds of narcissism appears to be emerging out of toxic shame, even when the toxic shame goes consciously unrecognized by the person suffering from it. The toxic shame can be so painful that, in a defensive reaction, it is thrust into the unconscious, even while it profoundly influences one's behaviors.
Healthy shame encourages and supports personal development of many kinds, especially with regard to ethical relating with others (human and other-than-human). It allows us to learn and grow, evolve....
Toxic shame tends to block, obstruct or obviate such personal development around ethics, caring, compassion, empathy.... The one suffering from chronic toxic shame has difficulty entering into healthy, wholesome relations with others.
Politics comes down basically to "decision making in groups". Politics isn't merely the decision-making process itself, in a restrictive and narrow sense. Rather, the domain of politics is the relational field itself -- the entire relational field and culture in which we dwell, and out of which group decisions are made.
We may "have" individual psyches, in some sense, but our individual psyches are situated and contextualized within the "social field" and culture, and the the social field and individual psyche are in a purely relational pattern of relation with one another, such that you cannot segregate one from the other. That's why it is called a "field". (One of Merriam-Webster's many definitions of 'field' is this.: "a complex of forces that serve as causative agents in human behavior.")
It makes sense to understand a whole culture as having a psyche. And it also makes sense to perceive a culture in relation to its relative proportion of toxic versus healthy shame. That's because shame is a field phenomenon within psyche.
I live in the USA, and have never lived anywhere else, so my experience of this culture in the USA is my main contact with culture, experientially.
USA culture seems to me to be deeply entrenched in a collective toxic shame field, which seems to obscure, obstruct and obviate our collective ethical behavior and our personal / social development toward wholesome forms of relating.
This, I think, is why (principally why) it is socially taboo to call others out on behaviors which are harmful -- such as harmful to the climate, to rivers, to the oceans, to life on Earth, ecosystems, the biosphere.
We deflect, thus turning all "politics" into a certain deracinated form of "collective action" which ostensibly doesn't require personal ethical choices in our everyday, ordinary lives. We say things like "this is a collective problem, not a personal one." And we say, "Don't shame individuals for frequently flying to far-away places for vacation / visiting distant family / etc." We discourage "shaming" those who depend overly much on automobiles, or who live in oversized houses, or whatever.
We advocate a politics in which individual responsibilities (response - abilities) are regarded as near irrelevancies. We tell ourselves that the world's ecological and environmental problems are caused by vast systems and that only by politically challenging these vast systems can change be brought about.
What we're not noticing, however, is that these vast systems have zero intention of changing / transforming, and that our most open space for actual transformation is at the microcosmic scale, the immediate local, which is where we can actually make real decisions that count. That matter. And these can be decisions we make ourselves, and don't require forming a committee or writing our congressman..., or taking it to city hall.
We're reluctant to call a spade a spade, because toxic shame lurks everywhere, mostly unacknowledged and un-mentioned. Unmentionable. What appears to be an elephant in the room, however, might well be a species somehow related to a black elephant? I don't know if it is a black turtle or a black lizard.
"The Black Elephant is an unholy union of two boardroom clichés: the Elephant in the Room, the thing which everyone knows is important, but no one will talk about; and the Black Swan, the hard-to-predict event which is outside the realm of normal expectations, but has enormous impact. The Black Elephant is an event which was quite foreseeable, which was in fact an Elephant in the Room, but which, after it happens, everyone will try to pass off as a Black Swan." -- Dougald Hine
We do not talk about the social and cultural psyche much, nor its participation in purveying a field of toxic shame upon us, immersing us in its strange, silent politics.
What creature is this? Why does it hide so very well in plain sight?
Once seen, you cannot un-see it.
It's time for us to grow up, I think. It's time for us to take personal responsibility for our part in the collectivity of humanity. It's time for a bit of healthy shame. And that means we're going to have to take a good hard look -- straight in the eyes -- at the collective phenomenon of coddling the toxic shame in our midst.
Societies grow up when individuals stand up and call a spade by its very own name.
I like this set of relationships, it appeals to my sense of natural justice and an inherent morality. I'm also aware that it describes a kind of paralysis that is at the centre of post modern thought that centres in language, being unable to act. I also identify with the emotional fields described, some thing that John Micheal Greer speaks about in relationship to temple architecture, creating resonating Chambers. Perhaps this is a way to think about this, the toxic shame and subsequent numbness and paralysis is a trauma. We must heal one another, perhaps through a process of gathering smaller groups of friends and/or family. I think this process of acknowledgement can only happen through the face to face, hand to hand contact of the everyday. Circles, or bubbles of care. Respect the sovereignty of every conscious being, act out of love and not of fear, could be principles to begin the process. I feel you may need two handbooks, one for access to the land, and one for the access to healing!
Really interesting. I don't disagree with any of it; not sure I agree either, but it's an interesting theory as to why we are collectively behaving as we are. In the US, one example of the reaction to unconscious shame, I think, is the whole "anti-woke" movement. The bans on certain topics of instruction in classrooms, and certain books, is worded as "anything that might make people feel guilt, shame or anxiety about how people of their race may have behaved in the past" or something along those lines. Seem like an awful lot of white people here were fine with the civil rights movement, but they needed to believe they were not racist. Once there began to be talk of such things as reparations, structural racism, indigenous knowledge, land acknowledgements, this made them uncomfortable, which they resented. ESPECIALLY if they were feeling economically insecure--they really didn't want to hear that they had white privilege and likely wouldn't have what they did have, if they weren't white (and sometimes, straight and male). Most of those pushing the antiwoke thing--or resonating with it anyway-- believe that they are not racist. They don't want to discuss or think about the issues.