Anam Cara

The Prison of Shame

Shame is one of the most distressing and humiliating emotions. When you feel ashamed, your dignity is torn and compromised. Shame is a powerful emotion; it somehow penetrates to the core of your soul. There is inevitably a strong social dimension to shame. You feel ashamed because you have acted dishonourably in some way. In some cultures, the very danger of incurring shame seemed to keep people from stepping out of line. When someone did, the tribe cohered into one accusing eye glaring at the offender in disgust and judgement. Such a person was inevitably pushed out to the margins of isolation and horrific emotional reprobation. Shame is a force intended to put one outside all belonging. More often than not, such one-sided conformity and its conventions of judgement are factitious and secretly corrupt. The one who does the forbidden thing becomes the focus for all the anger of those who would love to have done it too, but are afraid of the exclusion and shame.

Conventions that can wield the stick of shame are immensely powerful. It is tragic how much women have endured under such conventions. Thousands of women were burned at the stake on suspicion of being witches. Wouldn’t it be lovely to see a religious leader visit one of these sites and go down on his knees to ask forgiveness from the women of the world for what was done to their sisters in the name of his religion.

Other women were denigrated for being pregnant. The act of bringing a child into the world is how woman works at the creative heart of the Divine; this sacred work became for millions of women a devastating occasion of shame for them and their children. Their characters and reputations were blackened and they were driven out of belonging. The Irish poet and painter Patricia Burke has contributed hugely to the acknowledgement and healing of this wound in Irish culture in her wonderful and devastating play Eclipsed.

We rarely think of the esteem and reputation we enjoy until we are in danger of losing it. This esteem allows us an independent and free space among people. There is no negative intrusion. We can get on with our lives. When you are shamed, the space around you is eviscerated. Now your every move draws negative attention. Hostility and disgust are flung at you. It is impossible from outside even to imagine the humiliation that shame brings. All the natural shelter and support around your presence is taken from you. All the natural imagination with which others have considered the different aspects of your presence stops. Everything about you is telescoped into the single view of this one shameful thing. Everything else is forgotten. A kind of psychological murdering is done. The mystery of your life is reduced to that one thing. You become “a thing of shame.” Shame dehumanizes a person.

In ancient Ireland, words had incredible power. Invocations and curses could set massive events in motion. It is not surprising that poets at that time had great status. It was said that a bard could write an “aor,” a satire about a person that would cause “boils of shame” to rise on his skin. Shame could not effect its punishment without language. The language of shame is lethal. Its words carry no hesitation or doubt. There is no graciousness or light in the language of shame. It is a language spoken without compassion or respect. The word of shame is put on you in a way reminiscent of how farmers used to brand cattle. The brand is to mark you out. You are now owned by your “shameful” deed.

Imagine how shame imprisons those who are on the target list of convention. Imagine the years of silent torment so many gay people have endured, unable to tell their secret. Then, when they declare they are gay, the hostility that rises to assail them. Think of the victims of racism: lovely people who are humiliated and tagged for hostility. The simple fact of their physical presence is sufficient to have a barrage of aggression unleashed on them. The intention of racism is to shame its victims into becoming non-persons.

Beyond its social dimension, shame also has a devastating personal complexity. When a person is sexually abused or raped, she often feels great shame at what happened to her. The strategy of such violence is to make the victim feel guilty and even responsible for what has happened. Sometimes this personal shame makes the victim silent and passive; consequently, the crime never becomes public. In some instances the threat of social shame further strengthens the decision to stay silent. Part of the essential work in healing such lonely wounding is to help the person to see her own innocence and goodness and thus unmask the absolutely unwarranted violence of such intrusion and attack. When a person begins to see this, she often begins to awaken the force of anger within her in relation to what has happened to her. The fire of anger can be magnificent in burning off the false garments of shame.