Alienation and Hidden Shame: Social-Emotional Causes of Conflict
by Thomas J. Scheff (July 2011)
- 1. The imagination of our appearance to the other person
2. The imagination of his judgment of that appearance
Alienation in Modern Societies
Though neither Cooley nor Goffman name the kind of civilization they analyzed, it is clearly the current one, a modern, rather than a traditional society. Perhaps modernity gives rise to the single focus on shame. If relationships in modern societies are examined closely, most tend toward alienation, and therefore to the ubiquity of shame.
Modern societies are built on a base of individualism, the encouragement to go it alone, no matter the cost to relationships. Persons learn to act as if they were complete in themselves and independent of others. This feature has constructive sides, but it has at least two destructive ones: alienation and the hiding of shame. Before continuing with this point, it will be necessary to discuss the meaning of key emotion terms.
An emphasis on rationality is one of two key institutions of modern societies. The other is the suppression of the social-emotional world in favor of thought and behavior. One of the many outcomes of this suppression is that emotion vocabularies in modern languages are ambiguous and misleading, in order to hide alienation. For example, in the English language, love is defined so broadly that is often used to hide disconnection (Women Who Love too Much). There are also many ambiguities, confusions and obfuscations in the meanings of both shame and pride.
Pride and ShameIndividualism also causes confusion over shame, but it is considerably more complex than the mere confounding of opposites that occurs with pride. The primary confusion is the practice of leaving out the social component that arises from the looking glass self: viewing ourselves negatively because we are viewed that way by another person or persons.
Alienation in Discourse: Automation of the Ego
The dogma of individualism is probably a part of the answer. But there may also be, in addition to conscious dogma, a much more compelling and hidden reason also, one that evolved out of dialogue. In modern societies, individuals in conversation have come to expect exceedingly quick responses to each other and are apt to be unforgiving about repetition.
Role-taking in conversation appears to occur at lightning speed, so fast that it disappears from consciousness at an early age. How could we not know we are role-taking? Children learn so early and so well that they forget they are doing it. The more adept they become, the quicker the movement back in forth, learning through practice to reduce silences in conversation to near zero. A study of recorded conversations (Wilson and Zimmerman 1986) can help us understand how the forgetting is possible.
Self and Ego
Automatized responses might call on an inner library of hundreds or even thousands of stock words, phrases, or sentences, rather than exploring all possibilities. Our inner observer, the deep self, is capable of providing a unique response to each unique situation. But such a response would require giving the other person undivided attention in order to understand their full meaning. Suppose the minimum processing in the other four channels necessary for an exact response would take at least a full minute. In taking a minute, you would be slowing down your response time by a thousand fold (60/.06 seconds).
However, it may not be possible for most people to slow down their responses even if they want to. The ego can be viewed as a machine, composed largely of ready-made elements. Ego responses, therefore, are usually as much or more about self than other or the situation. This idea implies a deep alienation arising out of discourse. Even intimates, to the extent that their discourse arises from mechanized responses, would usually find it difficult to fully understand each other.
No doubt most responses are more complex. They probably involve some on-the-spot construction, but still are partially tangential. Most people seem to have a line they take with particular people and situations that persist, regardless of changes in the other person or situation. My father, for example, took an authoritative line with my mother, brother and I, and we took a submissive line with him, even after my brother and I were out of his direct influence. Knowing ahead what to expect from the other person, and from ourselves, even approximately, would be considerable help in keeping silences near zero.
There are several studies of traditional societies that suggest that their discourse is not only different from that of modern societies, but might be taken as opposite to it. Here I will discuss one of them, the study of discourse by aborigines in Australia by Liberman (1985). [I am indebted to Wayne Mellinger for calling this study to my attention.] Although he does not measure the structure of silences directly, it is clear from his comments and the examples of discourse in groups that the pace is much, much slower than in modern societies, and much more oriented toward mutual understanding than individual expression (p. 19 ad passim).
Having compared modern and traditional dialogue in terms of alienation and solidarity, we can now move to emotion management in modernity.
Losing Control: Emotion/Alienation LoopsMy own interest in this question began long ago in connection with teaching the social psychology of emotions. When we discussed embarrassment and blushing in the larger classes, there were usually one or two students who complained that their blushing sometimes made them miserable. They explained that when they became aware that they were blushing, they would be further embarrassed about their blushing, no matter the cause of the first blush. Often the same students implied that their blushing about their blush was not only lengthy and painful, but also often seemed out of their control.
This comment by a 20 year old female student provides an example:
With these kinds of observations as background, I was struck by a story told by the noted actor Ian Holm. On one occasion he had muffed his lines, but when he became aware that he was blushing, he blushed more. The more he became embarrassed by his blushing, the more he blushed and the more embarrassed. This process went on, he said, until he ended paralyzed in the fetal position, requiring that he be carried off the stage.
Gilligan is referring not to shame in general, but to a specific kind:
Gilligan states that secret shame is the cause of violence. Secrecy implies the first loop: one is ashamed of being ashamed. Gilligan goes on to describe how secret shame can cause extremes of pain:
The awesome destructive power of secret shame might be explained by a feedback chain. Being ashamed of being ashamed is the first step. The stories about blushing above suggest that such loops can go further, being ashamed, being ashamed of that, and ashamed of that, and so on. Or shame in a loop with anger: angry that one is ashamed, ashamed that one is angry, and round and round. The idea of an unending emotion loop seems to explain how shame, fear, or other emotions might become too powerful to bear and/or control.
The second type is quite different, involving killers with no history of violence whatever, and clearly and quietly premeditated, sometimes during lengthy periods of time. The idea of a type of premeditated violence turns out to be quite important in several ways, but particularly in understanding collective violence.
Anticipation of loss of control and/or unbearable pain might lead people to avoid emotions entirely. This kind of avoidance also may have still another kind of looping effect: emotional backlogs. The more avoidance, the more the bodily buildup of emotional tension. The more backup, the greater the pain that is anticipated, which can lead to an avoidance loop.
Isolation and Feeling TrapsA theory of violence requires a way of explaining the extraordinary, indeed unlimited force and loss of moral and other inhibitions that produces violence in our civilization. In this section, two main kinds of recursive loops will be considered: a social loop of rejection/isolation on the one hand, and a shame loop, a feeling trap (Lewis 1971), on the other.
The idea of a rejection/isolation loop is straightforward. Being or even just feeling rejected by a group leads toward alienation, and the more alienated, the more likely further rejection, a spiral. This process is social rather than psychological, although it is related to shame-based loops, because rejection and isolation are the basic causes of shame.
There is one complexity about isolation that will be considered. Some multiple killings were committed by two persons, not one. We are tempted to say that in these cases, the perpetrators were not completely isolated, since they at least had each other. This issue will be discussed below by considering a second kind of alienation other than isolation, engulfment or fusion. It can be argued that the pairs of killers were just as alienated as the isolated ones, but in the engulfed mode of alienation.
The part played by emotions in violence is more complex. It seems to be based on shame, but the kind of shame that goes unnoticed and unmentioned. Helen B. Lewis, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, used a systematic method (Gottschalk and Glaser 1969) to locate emotion indicators in many transcripts of psychotherapy sessions (Lewis 1971). She found that shame/embarrassment was by far the most frequent emotion, occurring more than all the other emotions combined. Her findings suggest that shame/embarrassment, unlike pride, joy, grief, fear, or anger, was so frequent in the many sessions she studied that it almost always seemed to be unnoticed.
The explanation, it turns out, is not simple. What their work implies is that when shame is kept secret, or unacknowledged, there is little chance that it will be resolved. How is shame ordinarily resolved? Although this question is rarely addressed explicitly, it seems to me that both authors seem to assume that normal shame is resolved through verbal means and through humor. However, in the case of intense humiliation, lengthy verbal or at least cognitive consideration might be needed before any humor can be found in the offending incident.
In many of my classes, I have asked students volunteers to tell the class about the most embarrassing moment in their lives. Invariably some of the volunteers, during the course of their story, become convulsed with laughter. Often these same students tell me afterwards that the public telling touched not only the embarrassment from the particular incident, but also shame from other incidents that apparently was also unresolved, a backlog of shame.
It appears that when shame is not resolved, it can build up a backlog of hidden shame. When there is considerable backlog, then any new incident is felt in itself, but also seems to reactivate the backlog, making the new incident, even if seemingly trivial, extremely painful. Even without the spirals to be described below, backlogs of shame can lead to trouble.
The case of John Silber, as described in Milburn and Conrad (1996), provides an example of the link between suppressed shame and anger in a public setting. Silber is the ex-president of Boston University, and was a powerful conservative force in Massachusetts politics. His approach to political issues is a prime example of the politics of rage. As Milburn and Conrad (1996) suggest, it was an outburst of rage during a TV broadcast on the eve of the election that seemed to cost him the race when he ran for governor.
Emotion Spirals
Some emotion sequences may be recursive to the point that there is no natural limit to their length and intensity. As already indicated, blushers provide an everyday example: some who blush easily tend to become embarrassed that they are blushing, leading to more intense blushing, and so on. This feeling trap would not be a shame/anger spiral, but rather shame/shame: being ashamed that you are ashamed, etc.
It is conceivable that shame spirals could be a predominant cause of violence, with shame/anger playing only a hidden part. This might be the case in killings that are carefully and lengthily premeditated. Shame spirals and shame/anger spirals could be equally involved, as will be discussed below in a consideration of collective violence.
Recursion of Emotions and Alienation in Killers
It has been suggested that recursive thinking is unique to human beings, differentiating their mental processes decisively from other species (Corballis 2007). The theory presented here proposes that recursion of feelings, feeling about feeling, would also differentiate humans from other species, and explain episodes of depression or rage of extraordinary intensity and /or duration.
The degree of shame that a man needs to be experiencing in order to become homicidal is so intense and so painful that it threatens to overwhelm him and bring about the death of the self, cause him to lose his mind, his soul, or his sacred honor.
The model of recursive loops explains how laminations and spirals of shame could lead to pain so unbearable as to feel like one is dying, or losing mind or soul.
AlienationClearly a majority of the cases have involved killers who were male, but female killers are not unknown. A recent school killer, Amy Bishop, a neurobiologist at the U. of Alabama, is another (NY Times, Feb. 13, 2010). In the U. S., overall women represent only a small proportion of killers. Why men? Perhaps men are less likely to acknowledge shame than women, since most men learn early that emotions other than anger are not considered manly.[1] The discussion below of the difficulties in attracting male students into my class on emotions/relationships is relevant.
For the theory to be generally applicable, a further problem needs to be engaged. Why do certain people and groups end up in cybernetic loops of alienation and shame, but not others? Most individuals and groups in modern societies probably fail to fully acknowledge much of their isolation and shame/embarrassment/humiliation. The key may lie in the issue of fullness of acknowledgment.
Lewis (1971) and other shame researchers have considered acknowledgment only as a dichotomy, yes or no. Perhaps even even a slight degree of acknowledgement avoids continuous recursion. Persons and groups that manage to stamp out acknowledgment of shame and alienation would then be on the path of endless recursion, and therefore to withdrawal or violence
Collective ViolenceMultiple killings occur at the collective level also, in the form of gratuitous assaults, genocides and wars. The individual and interpersonal emotion spirals would be the same, but there would also be a recursive process between media and people, as suggested below.
My book on the politics of revenge (1994) proposed that social scientists have been looking in the wrong places. The basic cause of the war, I argued, was not economic or real politic, but social/emotional. The German and French people seem to have been caught up in alienation and shame spirals. The French defeat by the Germans in 1871 led to national desire for vengeance. The French leaders plotted a war for over 40 years, including a secret understanding with Russia for the purpose of defeating the Germans. (For a more recent and broader discussion of emotions, revenge, and conflict, see Frijda 2006, Ch. 7)
Salminen, et al (1999), used an alexithymia scale. They found evidence for emotionlessness in almost twice as many men as women.Continue reading here.