ACTING OUT: A RESULT OF GUILT AND SHAME

A few nights ago I was looking for illustrations for something or other I was writing and — as happens every once in a while — I ran across something that stunned me.  It wasn’t one of those pay-for-tattling websites, but just an ordinary newspaper story about a man from Browning, respected and educated, from a good family, a grandfather, a ceremonialist, elected to a responsible role in the community, who had a son who “made it” on one of those legendary athletic scholarships.  Here were his mug shots from an incident in one of the state’s bigger cities.  Evidently he had flashed some people in a coffee kiosk and the mall security grabbed him.

Long ago I was his teacher.  The last time I saw him I sat next to him at the funeral of a respected elder.  Of course the consequences of the exposure were a domino chain: loss of respect, loss of role.  I don’t know how his wife reacted but she’s not a weak woman.  Shame? Or guilt?  For what?
  

Women around here, whatever color, are often caught embezzling.  Usually they say they want money for their families.  But men occasionally do unaccountable defiant but self-destructive things, stuff a junior high kid would do, and though there’s often alcohol or drugs involved, they are stupid acts — maybe self-hating.  Shame, guilt . . . frustration, overwhelmed by everything.

It took me a long time to understand that Native Americans feel so very ashamed that they could not defend themselves from the Euro-invaders.  They weren’t equipped, they didn’t understand what was happening, and Euro-disease wiped out many.  There is no justification for holding them accountable and yet they feel that way.  For generations now.

It’s not so different from young Jews who feel that a Chosen People ought to have been able to find a way to prevail over Hitler, a way to explain or escape or even offer some kind of accommodation, the way England did at first.  Maybe you remember how Americans tried to shame the French not so long ago, because that nation criticized the invasion of Iraq.  They renamed “French” fries to be “American” fries and they tied the whole thing to the German capture of France in WWII, claiming that the French didn’t fight.

It’s like family crackups that the children feel they caused, that they ought to be able to fix, so when they can't, they leave home, hoping that will make it all settle down.  This is never real and most people never get it resolved because they can’t see past blaming.  Often the blaming is so clever, so accurately aimed at a soft spot, that the one who takes the blame punishes themselves, clear to the point of death, taking desperate chances to prove that they are brave or else maybe giving up.  

Especially women can sink into depression, a terrible burden on their right to live, always trying to propitiate the mysterious gods who made them inevitably come up short.  Stockton links this to the suicide of Virginia Wolff, probably accurately.  She never could satisfy her father, whose standards were impossible anyway.  He caused her to be ashamed of her beauty, her talent, her intelligence.

Those young Indians who finally refused to take the blame were in the cities, talking to defiant Blacks, but defiance and blame only perpetuate stigma.  It becomes a rebound weapon against themselves.  A tool for their enemies.  When Bob Scriver’s museum burned, the FBI was quick to say it was AIM that did it, which only pushed the fear and rage up higher.  No one looked at the structure of society and how it traps stigmatized young men; the same thing happened in Ireland.  Plenty of evidence, many strong theories, individuals who saw clearly.  But the little worm of debasement ate into them like toxoplasmosis making rats love the smell of cat pee.

Blacks have a different context.  They were not victims of invaders that they failed to repel — rather they were captured, chained, taken across the sea to a different country, and kept enslaved by a strong cultural consensus and brute force.  Ever read “Mandingo”?  Slaves were penetrated and boiled into soup.

Down deep in many Native Americans is the idea that they might be able to restore their tribe to its former power.  Whites make noble angels of them, and they kind of believe it.  Casinos with all their glamour and clatter of money sort of appeal to that.  I suspect that Englishmen — and certainly Scots — have that same wish to reconstruct past glory.  It’s unreal and finally makes them angry.

My first impulse is to go have coffee with this man and try to understand what happened, why he was so out of character.  But I suspect that he was IN character, that something festering had broken loose and burst constraints.  When I try to imagine how he would react if I tried to talk to him, I see that there is no way he could believe that my intentions were good and he probably doesn’t have that much insight into himself anyway.  It might take a sweat lodge with wise older men.  But where are they?  HE was supposed to be them.  

I don’t think a Western style therapist would be any help because they all work from theory and NOT experience.  Not many have experienced being mocked, excluded, and shunned.  Maybe that’s why the most effective analysts are often Jewish.  “Jimmy P” has nothing on the reality of being “Indian” and I’m not going by the movie — I’ve read the book carefully several times.  “Winter in the Blood” is closer.

My mother’s family were major blamers and ridiculers.  My father’s family is deniers, people who are nice no matter what.  I’ve got both in me.  My strategy has been to think things out, to learn how things work, to explain and justify.  But none of that ever changes the accumulated shame-and-blame feelings.  The feelings just sit there like toads and stare.  Someone said to me, “Why can’t you believe that I love you?”  Well, there’s the answer: a panel of toads, all with their webby little thumbs turned down.

The toads say,  “Why couldn’t you save your marriage?  Why didn’t you finish your doctoral thesis?  Why couldn’t you save your brother from death on the street?  Why haven’t you written a best-seller?  Why didn’t you cure your step-daughter’s cancer?  Why couldn’t you save her daughter from suicide?”  

All this assails me until I have to laugh at such grandiose narcissism.  But that’s not the same as taking on the burden of the loss of an entire culture, the destruction of a continent.  The actual offense of the man in the mug shot — he just pleaded no contest, paid a fine or something — would never have become public if he hadn’t been Native American, but it was a satisfaction to some to once again punish people they stigmatize.

The shrinks call such incidents of disruption in the middle of a lifetime of constructive work “acting out.”  It’s considered a defense mechanism, a way of relieving pressure.  I like the image of a container (hot philosophical concept at the moment) that holds a roiling hot mixture, reacting, getting deeper, until it causes the container to leak — tell things, do things, provoke, make something happen even if it’s bad.

I like that container idea because it offers a way to address the guilt/shame issue that triggers so much frustration.  Two ways, actually:  one is to make the container bigger or stronger, and the other is to stop adding to the heat inside.  Ways to do those include reframing the situation, finding a community that understands, increasing one’s skill level in any way, and others, including the Native American favorite:  laughter at the absurdity of little fool Napi — yourself — trying to save the world.  Well, we DO manage to save little patches here and there.  But some atrocities can never be reconciled.

SHAME VS. GUILT

This "embarrassment" is an illusion.  

Polar bears have nothing to be ashamed of.

Googling reveals lots of material defining “shame” versus “guilt”, mostly explaining that shame is something that is inherent in one’s being (“you should be ashamed of yourself”) sort of like original sin, but guilt is knowing you’ve done something wrong. You've broken the rules.  

Both will estrange a person from any community, because both are factors of culture, categories developed over time and meant to keep people (in the back-and-forth between culture and individual) under control for the good of the community.  Their game is blame, which imposes a stigmata like forcing people to sew a yellow star on their coats or, more drastically, branding the faces of runaway slaves.  it is an excruciating vulnerability affecting one’s worthiness, their sense of love and belonging.  They must always feel they are not good enough.

Dogs feel guilt -- cats do not.

Dogs are social -- cats are not.

If shame is something that the culture imposes on groups and individuals because of their perceived characteristics, like skin color or way of dressing or food choices or — worst of all — poverty; and guilt is something a group or individual sees as a rule broken, a bad behavior, then we express that in the idea that one can love an individual but hate their behavior.  Or sometimes that we hate the individual regardless of his or her appeal because of his or her behavior, especially if they are shameless and refuse to accept their guilt.  Because then what hold does the society have?

Global warming is starving polar bears.

I want to introduce a new factor:  bad things that happen that seem totally unrelated to either shame or guilt, but introduce both in such dynamic quantity that the whole culture gets involved in blame, wanting to sacrifice someone in order to restore order.  Hurricanes, tsunamis, famine, wild fire, and pandemics are natural events, but war, economic inequity, overpopulation are human group overwhelming events.  They are all full of shame and blame, from the New Orleans disaster to the children dying in the streets of our cities.  (You don’t see them because they try to diminish their vulnerability by hiding.)  Attempts to deal with all this seem ineffective.  In fact, even the most innocent and praiseworthy efforts, like providing food to starving people, become corrupted or objectionable.  We are facing helplessness, which makes us scared, which makes us angry, which is of major use for politics.

Queen Elizabeth II

In a time like the present, when the rules of the culture are changing and uncertain, individuals suffer.  Should one be shamed for not being thin, sexy, blonde and sixteen?  Should one feel guilty for wearing a headscarf while not being the Queen of England?  If one is either shamed or guilty, does that mean punishment, debasement, confinement, permitted penetration, exploitative research, is deserved and proper?   BLAME:  a way to discharge pain and shame.  It’s everywhere.  It wins elections.  It’s too scary to react in a sensible way.  Understanding is not a priority anyway — someone yells fire (the president has no birth certificate, vaccination will make your children autistic, drinking coffee will either give you cancer or save you from cancer) and we get so jammed in the exits that no one can escape.

A triangle forms:  shame, guilt, and I’m going to add frustration, being blocked.  Shame and guilt are tools of the predominant culture.  Frustration is what finally will break through to change.  I was surprised when I googled “penetration” that many of the definitions were about knowledge -- getting to the heart of things, I suppose.  Frustration and penetration are individual responses to oppression that trigger evolution, both social and personal.  Aggression, withdrawal, finding allies, artistic expression might also be responses.  “Find a way to cope or die”, is the message to the individual, but the message to the culture is “cut off too many of your people and you no longer exist.”

Black "bottom"

The issue seems to be one of boundaries, often expressed physically by the places people live.  Stockton speaks of "bottoms" where blacks live, because in the South those are the jungly marshy places where diseases lurk.  In Browning the equivalent was called “Moccasin Flats”, built parallel to the school blocks, originally as 1900 log cabins for old people who had been living in scattered tents.  Over the decades the cabins became a jumble of lean-tos, derelict trailers, abandoned cars, and crooked TV antennas.  They were mostly cleared away after the Sixties drive to improve housing.  Highway patrol housing, three modern houses built near the top of Snowshed hill, were jokingly called “Moccasin Heights” and a sign was put up.

Stockton talks a lot about anal focus, which is, of course, about biologically discarding, but in other acts of sex (arousal), hygiene (enemas) or even rectal feeding -- which is to save an infant in Morrison’s book, but in real life done for torture and punishment to the Gitmo captives protesting by fasting.  These are the crossing of boundaries, social as much as physical (sphincters), meant to reduce captives to an infant’s involuntary existence.  Until our culture became so obsessed with medical and enforcement issues that it gave permission to meddle with bodies (coffee enemas, storing contraband in the rectum) no one would ever address these matters.  Even now people worry about smells and feel violated by a colostomy, a third “hole” no one finds attractive.

Cancer and trauma are phenomena that are entwined with shame and guilt and treated with denial or exploitation by the culture.  Our professions (medicine, law and clerical) have become corrupted by this, removing the dignity and solemnity that once marked them as consciously dealing with privileges that affected lives, such as cutting into them (penetration), incarcerating them, or shaping them into institutions.  But "Medicins Sans Frontieres" give new life to the concept of transcending limitations, even those of the culture. Out of the oppression of one big group, comes the transcendence of a small opposing group.

A doctor responding to need.

Some parts of all cultures value this.

All three professions are connected to a writing-based culture where the “pen” is the penetration.  (Laws, Bibles, Prescriptions.)  Writing that deals frankly and vividly with these three categories will often be stigmatized and destroyed as though they were the people instead of the synecdoche (metaphor) for them, only marks on paper.  Even this little discussion of shame and guilt may get me into trouble if it has as much penetration as I hope.

On Medium.com where beginning writers are struggling and even seasoned writers are trying to monetize, I suggested that if there were authors’ discussion groups out there, they ought to devote an evening to discussing two movies:  “Authors Anonymous” and “Pinero.”  The first is not just culture-compliant but culture corrupted and stereotyped, presented as comedy.  The second is a confrontive portrayal of the life of a Puerto Rican man in New York (Newyorican) trapped by racial and nationalistic barriers plus poverty and early trauma.  Drugs, friendship, sex, are there aplenty and will attract people looking for scandal, arousal by misery.  These people ("trolls") are now interested in Medium.com.

If a writer is just writing for profit or good feeling, that’s fine, but maybe they have not earned the respect for dedicated penetration to “truth” as Pinero did.  Or did he?  Did he sell out to self-destruction?  Should he feel ashamed of himself?  Or should we feel guilty that gifted people are destroyed even as they may be leading to evolution that will save us all?

A CHEATER FOR THE NEW PSYCH PARADIGM

Mostly downloaded from the NIMH brainstorming groups:

SUB-CATEGORIES OF THE FEAR DOMAIN 

CALLED “CONSTRUCTS”

Responses to acute threat (Fear): Activation of the brain’s defensive motivational system to promote behaviors that protect the organism from perceived danger. Normal fear involves a pattern of adaptive responses to conditioned or unconditioned threat stimuli (exteroceptive or interoceptive). Fear can involve internal representations and cognitive processing, and can be modulated by a variety of factors.

Responses to potential harm (Anxiety): Activation of a brain system in which harm may potentially occur but is distant, ambiguous, or low/uncertain in probability, characterized by a pattern of responses such as enhanced risk assessment (vigilance). These responses to low imminence threats are qualitatively different than the high imminence threat behaviors that characterize fear.

Responses to sustained threat (Stress): An aversive emotional state caused by prolonged (i.e., weeks to months) exposure to internal and/or external condition(s), state(s), or stimuli that are adaptive to escape or avoid. The exposure may be actual or anticipated; the changes in affect, cognition, physiology, and behavior caused by sustained threat persist in the absence of the threat, and can be differentiated from those changes evoked by acute threat.

Frustrative non-reward: Reactions elicited in response to withdrawal/prevention of reward, i.e., by the inability to obtain positive rewards following repeated or sustained efforts.

Loss: A state of deprivation of a motivationally significant con-specific, object, or situation. Loss may be social or non-social and may include permanent or sustained loss of shelter, behavioral control, status, loved ones, or relationships. The response to loss may be episodic (e.g., grief) or sustained.

Distinctions among Constructs:

Acute threat (a tiger) is distinguished from potential harm by the immediacy and imminence of threat. Acute threat is considered to be a situation where the threat of harm is immediately present. 

Potential harm (walking in jungle), by contrast, is regarded as involving situations where danger might occur, but no immediate threat is present, thus requiring vigilance for threats of low or uncertain probability.

Frustrative non-reward was seen as distinguished from other types of aggression:

Defensive aggression is elicited by a real or perceived threat that leads to a pattern of behaviors directed at terminating the threat. As such, instances of defensive aggression could be considered to belong under the Responses to acute threat Construct.

Offensive (proactive) aggression is elicited by competition over resource acquisition or other positive consequences. This form of aggression often arises from differences in social status and dominance. 

Learned helplessness is an important paradigm that has generated much useful data, the majority agreed that it is not clear whether LH can be distinguished from a more general stress response in humans; thus, there is insufficient evidence currently to support LH as an independent Construct.

Summary of Construct Group Deliberations

. . . the participants discussed the Construct of fear from an evolutionary perspective, detailing the critical adaptive value of fear in normal function and survival . . . 

The participants discussed the diverse set of elicitors and presentations of fear, ranging from innate to conditioned fear stimuli and phasic or sustained fear. Additional complexity was added by discussing fear within a series of continuums, including imminence, severity, and characteristics of the threat. For instance, threatening stimuli can elicit fear responses; however these responses may be modulated by factors such as cognitive processing and prior experience, thus resulting in alterations that introduce related processes such as inhibition and/or extinction.

Distress Construct Group

The workgroup discussed the many specific types of stress or adversity that could be expected to generate different but also overlapping responses (e.g., anxiety, worry, rumination, anhedonia, frustration, sadness, grief). There was some agreement that it was best to avoid having too high a degree of specificity. . . . Although HPA axis activation  (see below) was one of the most frequently nominated elements for the NVS matrix in a pre-workshop survey . . . The HPA axis can therefore be conceptualized as a modulatory system that is invoked by a variety of stimuli and situations and has a variety of effects on cognition and behavior.

Sadness was the most frequently nominated Construct of the pre-workshop survey. . . . The group defined loss as the deprivation of a motivationally significant object or situation. It may be social or nonsocial and may include loss of food, shelter, behavioral control, status rewards, loved ones and relationships. The response to loss may be episodic, in which case it might be called grief, or sustained, in which case it might be called depression. Sadness is evolutionarily conserved and can be studied in non-human primates as a behavior that has the evolutionary purpose of engaging the empathy and support of other members of the same species. 

Elements within the Units of Analysis

When identifying behaviors related to Constructs, participants agreed on the importance of considering not only what organisms do when they are stressed/facing adversity, but also what behaviors they do not perform well anymore as a result of being stressed/facing adversity (e.g., disrupted cognition and over-reliance on habits).

For the task of filling in the matrix elements, the group focused on loss, responses to sustained threat, and frustrative non-reward. 

WHAT’S HPA?  

(From the mystery expert on Wikipedia.  I left the links.)

The hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA or HTPA axis), also known as the limbic–hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis is a complex set of direct influences and feedback interactions among three endocrine glands: the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland (a pea-shaped structure located below the hypothalamus), and the adrenal (also called "suprarenal") glands (small, conical organs on top of the kidneys).

[It] controls reactions to stress and regulates many body processes, including digestion, the immune system, mood and emotions, sexuality and energy storage and expenditure. It is the common mechanism for interactions among glands, hormones, and parts of the midbrain that mediate the general adaptation syndrome (GAS).^[1] While steroids are produced only by vertebrates, the physiological role of the HPA axis and corticosteroids in stress response is so fundamental that analogous systems can be found in invertebrates and monocellular organisms as well.