Shame Matters

Attachment and Relational Perspectives for Psychotherapists

Orit Badouk Epstein, Orit Badouk Epstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000450927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the 2022 Gradiva® Award for Best Edited Book!

Understanding shame as a relational problem, Shame Matters explores how people, with support, can gradually move away from the relentless cycle of shame and find new and more satisfying ways of relating.

Orit Badouk Epstein brings together experts from across the world to explore different aspects of shame from an attachment perspective. The impact of racism and socio-economic factors on the development and experience of shame are discussed and illustrated with clinical narratives. Drawing upon the experience of infant researchers, trauma experts and therapists using somatic interventions, Shame Matters explores and develops understanding of the shameful deflations encountered in the consulting room and describes how new and empowered ways of relating can be nurtured. The book also details attachment-informed research into the experience of shame and outlines how it can be applied to clinical practice.

Shame Matters will be an invaluable companion for psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, counsellors, social workers, nurses, and others in the helping professions.

Chapter 1

Shame as a behavioral system

Its links to attachment, defense, and dysregulation

Judith Solomon

DOI: 10.4324/9781003175612-2

Shame is the silent, unacknowledged companion to attachment and caregiving. At least, until now, it certainly was under-appreciated and unacknowledged by me. In the last twenty or thirty years, a great deal has been written about the experience of shame in the context of clinical phenomena and trauma. Erikson (1980), Kohut (1971), Lewis (1987), and contemporary thinkers about the infant-parent relationship such as Schore (1994) and De Young (2015) all have argued that shame originates in perturbations in the early parent-child relationship. Yet, despite my background as a comparative psychologist, attachment researcher, and child-parent psychotherapist, and before embarking on the preparation for this chapter, I was largely unaware of the inevitability of shame as a constituent of attachment relationships. I am not alone. There seems to be very little research examining the links between shame and attachment security in young children (see the work by Lewis for an exception, e.g., Lewis et al., 1989).¹

I do not think that this gap in attachment studies is merely due to the fact that shame behavior does not appear until the second year of life, after the attachment system has already consolidated. It seems to manifest around the second birthday, at about the time the child is capable of awareness of himself as a person, or as the expression goes “an object” in the mind of another, and begins to comprehend that he is not achieving some standard or expectation that the child perceives his parents or others to value (Lewis et al., 1989). Perhaps, it is not surprising, given the late development of shame, that in John Bowlby’s published writing, the word “shame” rarely appears—there isn’t a single entry for the word “shame” in the index of any of the Bowlby trilogy—1969, 1973, 1980.² Bowlby clearly understood, however, the importance of shame in the development of relationship-related pathology. In his important essay On knowing what you are not supposed to know and feeling what you are not supposed to feel (1988) in which he considers the contradictory mental or representational models of their attachments that children develop he wrote:

The scenes and experiences that tend to become shut off, though often continuing to be extremely influential in affecting thought, feeling, and behaviour, fall into at least three distinct categories: (a) those that parents wish their children not to know about; (b) those in which parents have treated children in ways the children find too unbearable to think about; (c) those in which children have done, or perhaps thought, things about which they feel unbearably guilty or ashamed.

(Bowlby, 1988, p. 114). (Author’s emphasis in italics.)

Here we see that Bowlby clearly pointed to shame as a potential catalyst in the “onset” of segregated systems, which I and my colleague, Carol George (Solomon & George, 1999) as well as Giovanni Liotti (2004), and others have equated with dissociative processes. Thinking about dissociation as a product of shame leads directly to relational trauma, which we know from many other sources to be strongly associated with shame. Nevertheless, it seems to be the case that attachment research has not given due weight to—or made clear enough—the role of shame in attachment phenomena. I hope to begin to remedy this in this chapter.

My goals are, first, to consider the ways in which Bowlby’s ethologically informed methods can shed light on our understanding of the experience of shame, that is, to explore how what I propose to call the shame behavioral system compares to Bowlby’s description of the attachment behavioral system. This will help us clarify the nature of this complex state. Second, I want to highlight the prevalence of shame in normative and at-risk attachment-caregiver relationships.

I’d like to begin by applying Bowlby’s general ethological approach and control systems model to the phenomenon of shame. I do not mean necessarily to suggest that the mind is, as it were, a collection of behavioral systems, but I have always found this aspect of Bowlby’s analysis of attachment behavior to be a helpful heuristic, at least. At a minimum, it provides an intellectual structure. It focuses our attention on what should be the key elements in our understanding. Additionally, by its nature, it helps us to disentangle the normative from the pathological varieties of the behavior under consideration. This is because in a homeostatic or well-regulated system, such as the mind apparently has evolved to be, we can expect that there will also have evolved neurophysiological and behavioral adaptations or strategies resulting in individual differences, types, or processes that facilitate a flexible accommodation to variations in the natural or social environment. From these, we can also derive the variants that characterize strain or pathology in the system. What I am assuming here, of course, is that shame, like attachment, is a product of natural selection—this was once a controversial view but now is no longer (Gilbert and Andrews, 1998)—and may, perhaps, be understood to function analogously to the attachment system.

A behavioral system is a construct—no one should expect an attachment or caregiving or, now, a shame model to be found in the nervous system any more than one would expect nowadays to find an ego or superego. (We might eventually, however, be able to trace the dynamic pathways of this system in the brain.) In developing a systems model, Bowlby was positing that change in one element of the attachment system necessarily results in corresponding changes in the remaining elements—this is how any system, natural or mechanical, remains responsive to changing circumstances (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Bowlby's model of the attachment behavioral system.

He was also presuming that attachment is organized with respect to a “set-goal” with adaptive importance to the organism, that is, a behavioral or state goal. Finally by conceptualizing attachment as a system, Bowlby was assuming that behavior and internal regulation function in such a way as to achieve approximate homeostasis. As clinicians we are going to be especially interested in what happens when conditions are less than optimal and what happens when the elements of the system are under severe strain, for these are the conditions in which we expect to see a heightened risk for pathological functioning.

Bowlby’s (1969) control system model of attachment enumerates the many behaviors that are associated with the infant’s bond to a particular person and the evolutionary or selective advantages of this bond in the environment in which humans evolved, which Bowlby believed to be physical safety. The set-goal of attachment behavior, that is, the homeostatic sweet spot that the system is designed by natural selection to achieve, is physical contact or proximity with the caregiver. Once this goal is achieved, Bowlby proposed that the system is temporarily at rest, attachment behavior is said to be terminated, and the individual can then turn to other activities, such as play and exploration. Attachment behaviors are activated by particular conditions: when a threat is perceived, when the infant is ill or weak, and when the caregiver is physically unavailable or psychologically absent. Once activated, attachment behaviors bring the infant close to the caregiver or the caregiver close to the infant, which terminates or “down-regulates” the system again. This, in essence, is how Bowlby envisioned the functioning of the attachment system. In the course of development, we know that this system becomes integrated with and regulated at the level of representation.

What would a control systems model of the shame system look like? The formal definition of shame included in the American Heritage Dictionary (2020) is “a painful emotion caused by the belief that one is, or is perceived by others to be, inferior or unworthy of affection or respect because of one’s actions, thoughts, circumstances, or experiences”.

There are also many shades and varieties of shame, as indicated by the many terms we have for it (e.g., embarrassment, humiliation, disgrace, chagrin, loss of face), at least some of which have been operationally or empirically distinguished (Lewis & Ramsey, 2002). These various states have in common a desire to hide or cover one’s face, escape, sink into the ground, and a feeling of being at least temporarily stuck in place. We have all experienced these states and, indeed, there is commonality among artists about how to depict them an example of which is shown in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2 Eve on the Rock, August Rodin, Musée Rodin, Paris.

Two points are worth mentioning here. First, note how natural it is to describe shame behavior—what we do or want to do when in that state—when seeking to capture the experience of shame. This seems to correspond to the wordlessness that characterizes shame states (Lewis, 1987). Perhaps this state of wordlessness is related to the underlying neurophysiology of shame. The experience of shame is controlled, according to Porges (2001) and Schore (1994) by activation of the parasympathetic nervous system through the dorsal vagal nerve. The same evolutionarily ancient motor pathway activates stilling and freezing responses, physical collapse, and immobility—when a frightened individual perceives that neither fight nor flight will lead him away from danger. Thus, shame is associated with a defensive shutting off or shutting down of behavior and thought. The activation of this ancient neural pathway may also account for what we often experience as the quality of automaticity or rapid kindling of shame, the sense that shame responses are sudden, involuntary, with an all-or-none quality. Not surprisingly, shame is accompanied by feelings of helplessness and vulnerability. Significantly, these states—feelings of helplessness and vulnerability—are also among the main activators of the attachment system. This suggests that the experience of shame simultaneously, consciously or unconsciously, activates the attachment system and a desire for proximity to an attachment figure.

There seems to be widespread agreement that shame evolved from behaviors used to regulate social rank and status—that is, the loser’s side of that equation (Gilbert & McGuire, 1998). Within the primate order, though there are species differences in facial expression associated with submission or appeasement, there is commonality in posture—averting the eyes, looking down, turning away, even crouching down. In essence, the submitting animal emits behaviors that are the negation of threat or power displays.

In a troop of monkeys, it is essential that young animals require no training to display submission behaviors to higher ranking members of the troop. There is a clear selective advantage to displaying shame behavior (and possibly experiencing the affect of shame) for the individual’s long-term reproductive fitness. The price of failing to do may be injury, or, even worse, ostracism or exclusion from the group—a fate that sometimes befalls juvenile males who may be harassed by other males and even other females until they actually leave the group (Keltner and Harker, 1998). Although the shame system seems to have evolved originally as part of dominance interactions, it seems clear that the common human meaning of shame—the sense of oneself as bad, unworthy, deserving of contempt—can parallel, amplify, or contradi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Shame as a behavioral system: its links to attachment, defense, and dysregulation
• 2 Caring for the human spirit in pride and shame: a moral conscience seeking kindness from birth
• 3 Primary shame: needing you and the economy of affects
• 4 Attackments: subjugation, shame, and the attachment to painful affects and objects
• 5 Shame and black identity wounding: the legacy of internalised oppression
• 6 Mentalizing shame, shamelessness and Fremdscham (shame by proxy) in groups
• 7 The aggressor within: attachment trauma, segregated systems, and the double face of shame
• 8 Personal and professional reflections: shame and race
• 9 “Suicide Addict”: the sovereignty of shame in the dissociated mind
• Index