{"id":1959,"date":"2015-03-19T14:35:52","date_gmt":"2015-03-19T22:35:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=1959"},"modified":"2015-03-19T14:35:52","modified_gmt":"2015-03-19T22:35:52","slug":"shame-an-underestimated-dynamic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/?p=1959","title":{"rendered":"Shame: An Underestimated Dynamic"},"content":{"rendered":"

I think shame should be recognized as being as toxic as lead or scaring kids with descriptions of hell. And many medical conditions have a \u201cfinal common pathway,\u201d a certain rash, headache, fever. I think shame and guilt—they overlap in many ways, although some differences might be discerned—also generate a kind of shrinkage, a somato-psychic shrinkage at a very deep level. Activities such as Sheila Rubin\u2019s \u201cHealing Shame<\/a>\u201d workshops are in some ways only the figurative \u201ctip of the iceberg.\u201d In other systems, Eric Berne, a best-selling psychiatrist and author of \u201cGames People Play\u201d in the mid-1960s wrote also about strokes. He said that lack of acknowledgments\u2014strokes\u2014figuratively \u201cshrinks the spinal cord.\u201d I might suggest that while not physically \u201cshrinking\u201d anatomical structures, emotional stresses such as shame does have some physical corollaries at a microscopic or biochemical level. <\/p>\n

There are dynamics we don\u2019t know about yet. For example, in mid-19th century London, vitamin deficiency diseases were common. In Dickens’ story, A Christmas Carol that little kid with the crutches, Tiny Tim, probably had severe Vitamin D deficiency, also known as rickets\u2014although people didn’t know about vitamin deficiency diseases back then\u2014or for that matter, vitamins.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s another analogy: Many people age 60 a half-century ago had enough gum disease to justify removal of most or all teeth and replace them with false teeth. From the 1940s through the 1970s Dr. Charles C. Bass discovered the major cause of gum disease were plaques of layers of bacteria that secreted inflammatory chemicals. Bass campaigned to introduce flossing, \u201cplaque control<\/a>\u201d and since the late 1970s that form of preventive dentistry has increasingly caught on. With flossing the problem of pyorrhea, chronic gum infection, is gradually disappearing. However, the point to note is that not knowing there was anything better, relatively \u201chealthy\u201d also had false teeth! How many other people who seem healthy today will be recognized as low-grade \u201csick\u201d in fifty years?<\/p>\n

Sheila Rubin\u2019s workshops are mixtures of drama therapy, other arts therapy, human potential groups for people who are otherwise considered reasonably healthy. These workshops do more than ameliorate shame. They help relatively healthy people to thrive. And indeed, I suspect that most seemingly healthy people harbor inner \u201cinfections\u201d of unresolved shame, and when more people join in seeking self-forgiveness and encouragement, this will become recognized as just a good thing for folks to do\u2014like flossing teeth. It isn\u2019t \u201ctherapy\u201d\u2014or it can be, but it doesn\u2019t have to be thought of in only that fashion.<\/p>\n

I would venture to say that like plaque control, every time we screw up even in a minor way, we experience a wounding of shame, no matter how passing. I\u2019d suggest that that this wounding is generally not acknowledged by others, often not be oneself, and yet the emotional hardening or even counter-phobic dynamic of pathological narcissism is driven by shame.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I think shame should be recognized as being as toxic as lead or scaring kids with descriptions of hell. And many medical conditions have a \u201cfinal common pathway,\u201d a certain rash, headache, fever. I think shame and guilt—they overlap in many ways, although some differences might be discerned—also generate a kind of shrinkage, a somato-psychic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychodrama","category-literacy","category-psychotherapy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1959"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1959"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1959\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1960,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1959\/revisions\/1960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}