Shame, A Double Edged Sword
An infant is born and without the benefit of shame, would be a rampant narcissist when it grew up. The positive side of shame comes from the minimal size of the toddler to the large size of others around them. This produces fear of annihilation → shame is the product. As the toddler goes through the oral anal and phallic stages of development, shame is carried along with these stages as a normal evolution and are the natural ground for dealing with shame as we develop through adolescence and young adult years. Finding trust (unconditional love) from an “other” is necessary to develop acceptance of the “self” and to serve as a pattern for intimate relations in the future. If this occurs, and it most always does, it comes from the mother figure (mf).
As an example, children at the age their hands are coordinated enough to reach their genitals, they will start touching their genitals because our nerve endings in both the man’s glans penis and the clitoris, it is a pleasant feeling, even at the age of eighteen months or so. At age five years or more, some parents will become concerned that this is naughty or nasty and some will slap their hands or in other ways tell them not to do it aggressively. This will probably be seen from the child’s view as punishment and thought of as a shameful act. Many books on parenting will tell parents the proper way to deal with this behavior, will be to say this is private behavior, don’t do this in public, only do this when you are alone. Hopefully this is less shame provoking, but there is some civilizing parental action produced by. It could be seen as being accepting, which is important by having boundaries that some things should only be shared with a very few. This in my opinion leads to, there are rules that if you break them with one or two people, this leads to trust and intimacy which are deeper and more important in your future life.
This initial unconditional love, initial trusting, initial mf, does not have to be our mother but most often is. This relationship is usually our initial security figure in our life. There are those who say that one can be too secure and that life needs also to be exciting. That may be a flight of fancy but often father figures (ff) produce the element of excitement in our being. Although these are not hard and fast rules, we are way to complicated for it to be this simple, however in an oversimplified scheme, the ff represents competition for the security figure mf, and brings out our aggression in both male and female offspring.
Let me point out that I have an overly-simplified understanding of Freud’s theories and Neo-Freudian theories, however, that does not stop me from saying what I think. Freud emphasized triadic relationships between mother and father, while the Neo-Freudians concentrated on the individual and the mf. I particularly liked an over-simplified Harry Stack Sullivan, of life being a balance between balance and security, security being the most important but too boring without some excitement.
As the saying goes, anything that has the power to do good, has the power to do bad and shame is no different. Without shame, in 2020, the world would look a lot different. We would have evolved with aggression being much more predominant in people’s alignments with each other. White makes right would still be the dominant governing system. It would be interesting to see what animals, those that aren’t monogamous, would do better.
It seems to me, there are two opposing powers within each of us. A desire to belong and to be unique. A desire to be unique, we are competitive and want to outdo others. We want to have more, be more, do more, etc. As opposed to, we want to belong to each other, we don’t want to be alone and as the human race evolves, we develop mirror neurons. The usual example is, when we see someone yawn, we feel like yawning ourselves. It is often seen in chimpanzees in the zoo, so we are not the first animals to have them. As striving to be unique would push us to do some acts that would push people to want to avoid us, these things might be considered shameful. So if we found a way to hide them early on, we could optimize our approach to belonging and being unique at the same time and shame training would be ideal for helping us to learn these lessons.
We can see from the current political atmosphere that often if a celebrity made a slip talking about a minority in an unpleasant way in the past, it could cost them their job in the present.
