The Gift of Shame – Introduction

My book, The Gift of Shame, was written to explore the importance of shame in normal development and human functioning. Today’s blog is the first two pages of the Introduction (you can download all of The Gift of Shame for free here.)

Introduction

The afternoon sun is shining on a peaceful, Southern California suburban scene in 1950. John is fourteen months old and just starting to walk. He and his mother, Jennifer, are sitting on the front lawn when she hears the kitchen phone ring. “It must be Kelly.” Her younger sister Kelly is two weeks past her due date. Looking at John playing happily with his blocks she thinks, “He’s happy, I’ll run and get the phone,” and dashes in to pick up. As his mother runs up the little walkway, John sees the sun glittering from a broken wine bottle lying on the other side of the street. He struggles unsteadily to his feet and starts off toward the shiny green glass. He doesn’t see the three ten-year-old boys on Schwinn bicycles racing around the corner or the eight-inch concrete curb. Jennifer emerges from the front door to see John teetering unsteadily in pursuit of the broken bottle, just about to go off the curb into the path of the speeding bikes: “John, stop right now!” John instantly freezes at the sound of her disapproving voice, and turns toward her. Anger and fear make her face look like a stranger. His shoulders and neck suddenly lose strength, the eager excitement at the sparkly glass fades from his blushing face, and John looks down in shame. He begins to cry as Jennifer runs to him, sweeps him up, and looks into his eyes with love and relief. In ten seconds, John’s shame is gone as he smiles and points at the broken glass.

Shame has gotten such a bad reputation that it’s a wonder it still gets to be an emotion.1 John (like most of the characters in this book) is an amalgam of people I’ve known and worked with over the years, and he is going through what most of us experience at around fourteen months. What would have happened to John if Jennifer’s look of disapproval hadn’t stimulated his autonomic nervous system to instantly shift from happy sympathetic arousal to painful parasympathetic collapse? He would have tumbled off the curb into the street, risking injury or death from the multiple hazards just seconds away. It is no coincidence that the capacities to walk, be aware of our need for a caregiver to help us emotionally self-regulate, and experience shame all come on-line at around fourteen months. Our ancestral hunter-gatherer tribes needed toddlers who could be frozen at a distance with disapproving glances; glances that could stop them on the cliff’s edge, could keep them from wandering off into the forest, or could immobilize them if there was a lion in the grass. Children that could be frozen and instructed with a disapproving glance had a tremendous adaptive advantage and would be less likely to die young.

The process of parental disapproval and approval imprinting knowledge into offspring’s neural circuits is true for all mammals when they are the equivalent of human toddlers. Young mammalian nervous systems are hyperaroused and primed to explore immediate environments, but can be cued to immobilizing shame by a disapproving signal from a primary caregiver.

Human development involves the added elements of being able to internalize and elaborate these processes through symbolic language and self-directed consciousness. Three-year-old human brains have expanding capacities for language, memory, and a sense of the future. This is when guilt shows up, where we can feel ashamed of what we did in the past or might do in the future. We have grown to internalize both interpersonal standards of thought and behavior and the critical glance and tone, which we now habitually direct at ourselves when cued in certain ways. Like most of the shame family of emotions (other common examples are humiliation, chagrin, mortification, a sense of failure, extreme shyness, and embarrassment), guilt has often gotten a pretty bad rap, but it certainly motivates humans to be true to their inner sense of what’s right and wrong.