The excruciating loneliness fostered by toxic shame is dehumanizing. As a person isolates more and more, he loses the benefit of human feedback. He loses the mirroring eyes of others. Erik Erikson has demonstrated clearly that identity formation is always a social process. He defines identity as “an inner sense of sameness and continuity which is matched by the mirroring eyes of at least one significant other.” (Bradshaw,119) As each new shaming experience takes place, a new verbal imprint and visual image attach to the already existing ones forming collages of shaming memories. (Bradshaw,12)
Relationships, be they with friends, family members or co-workers, have the potential for interdependence rather than dependency or rigid autonomy. You no longer need to go through life in one up/one down relationships. With just your changes, relationships will have a greater opportunity to be based on mutual support because you are engaging from a position of self-responsibility. …You are being true to you (Black, 132).
Changes in small places also affect the global system, not through incrementalism, but because every small system participates in an unbroken wholeness. Activities in one part of the whole create effects that appear in distant places. Because of these unseen connections there is potential value in working anywhere in the system. We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. I have learned that in this exquisitely connected world, it’s never a question of “critical mass.” It’s always about critical connections (Wheatley, 45).
I have met the enemy and he is us. (Pogo)
Shame is not an easy state of being to write about. But having gotten over that hump, it gets to be almost fun because of what I experience when shame is outed. Once shame is exposed to the light of day, he loses power. When other people tell me their stories, their families, their situations, their history, I begin to feel less and less vulnerable and “small.”
I know this because I recently audited a graduate level course on writing scholarly personal narratives. SPNs are a form of scholarship generated through self-inquiries that make universalizable connections through the power of personal story. What’s real for you and I are the parts of my life that dance with the parts of yours. In that complimentary and reciprocal movement lays a special form of truth. It is the place where we connect our shared narratives. It is the place of highest experiential validity. It is why I write this memoir.
Strategy One: Externalizing Dr. Shame
Early in the course, I led off with a highly personalized story about my experience of shame and its connection to my inability to write scholarly tracts. I shared a guided fantasy I’d written about walking through a darkened room, lined with benches. At the opposite end of the room was my writing table. On the benches were my colleagues. I was trying to get to my writing table and had to walk a gauntlet of criticism to get there. These people on the benches were real people in my life, colleagues whose everyday behavior gave Dr. Shame ample reason to keep my pen from the publication paper. It was deeply heartfelt stuff and though I got through it, my voice gave away how deeply embarrassed I was at this academic impotence.
Externalizing Shame
As the evening wound down, at least a third of my captured audience approached me directly and shared if not the actuality of their situations, the depth of their own feelings of shame. Several went on to say they were emboldened by what I had shared to take more active control over their feelings of despair and loneliness and insignificance. My writing proved to be an inspiration to take on the struggle. It was on my walk home that same evening that I first put form and substance to these feelings. I morphed my gut level feelings of shame to an external presence I call Dr. Shame. I actually started to talk with him. I told him what had happened and how I was feeling pretty good, given my usual despair when he knocked at my psychic door. Dr. Shame doesn’t like to be shared. Sharing bares his secret power to the world. The more people know about my Dr. Shame, the less power he seems to have over me. When I share Dr. Shame, the dialogue means that other human beings’ voices are involved in the outing and I am less alienated from others and from myself. When I share Dr. Shame, his power over me lessens. Like so many other events in my life, this discovery is not unique to me. I used to take that to be a mark of insufficiency. Now I take it as an affirmation of insight. John Bradshaw calls this process “confronting and changing your inner voices.” Just maybe I’m not the only person in the world with these feelings. Hell, if all these other people feel shame too, maybe the shame I feel needn’t be so overwhelming nor make me so abnormal! Perhaps this is a different place of time and space, a place where 1+1 = a half. Instead of two people who feel shame means that shame is twice as powerful, I think the equation may be quite the opposite. Dr. Shame’s power has been reduced by half because each of us realizes we aren’t isolated and alone or in quite the despair we’d previously imagined.
Strategy: Outflanking Dr. Shame
The other action I take with regards to this presence in my life is to consciously talk to him and move him to the sidelines of my life. If externalizing him allows me to gain control over him, moving his influence to a peripheral location allows me to outflank him by taking a power position in the relationship. Because I know Shame to be a way of being, I can’t get rid of him. If I ignore him for a while, get really worn out, allow my anger to get the best of me, Dr. Shame comes right back front and center. Like I said, he’s always quite near. But I can negate his influence and move him aside. He’s much less effective engaging me in his cycle of despair when he’s been placd on the sidelines.
Strategy: Constructing a Positive View from Dr. Shame’s Effects
Besides naming him and outflanking him, I have another strategy for dealing with the ol’ bastard. If you think the first two strategies are a little this side of strange, read on. This strategy has to do with thinking of ways he’s been a positive force in my life. Now there’s an interesting perspective: lemonade from lemons; isn’t that a motivational slogan? How can this SOB be a positive force when so much of his effect on my identity development was clearly destructive? Well, the positive contributions are there. I’ll mention two, both having to do with what I’ve learned about myself as this white guy who grew up in a family with a monkey on its back. First, I know more about what it means to be regarded as “the other.” And second, I know pretty well how to read people in my immediate environment. You might say the alcoholism in my family taught me sensitivity to others that are at the same time, a valuable quality and a double-edged sword.
Experiencing My Own Double Consciousness
When writing about power and privilege, the power is usually attributed to others by non-dominant groups. Women, Latino’s, African-Americans, poor people, non-heterosexuals, the physically and/or mentally challenged, all these groups have at one time or another been “the other.” Because individuals within these groups live and work and breathe in a larger societal context, they have had to develop a perspective on their place or position that is calibrated by how they have come to understand the dominant group’s view of themselves. W.E.B. Dubois’s idea of double consciousness comes close to explaining what I mean by this calibration process. To feel safe in the world, these “other” groups have had to consider the possible effect their action(s) will have on the more powerful referent group before they take that action. In the case of most of these groups, “safe” means saving your life. Read on. With respect to Americans of color, those same people in the black and white snapshot that set in motion the eventual positioning of my commitment to social justice, Dubois noted:
…the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, —a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. http://www.bartleby.com/114/1.html
I too feel this sense of two-ness, of always looking at myself through the eyes of others. For me, the shame and embarrassment that was so much a part of my Self meant I always felt apart, I always wondered how others were considering me, my actions, my behavior, my feelings. Even as a White male. I was supposed to feel power, privilege, control. For Whites, power is equated with economic privilege, an assumed access and ownership and even entitlement to economic and social resources. And within Whites, males accrue even more entitlement. We Whites are the ones who are supposed to be blind to the effects we have on others, “others” being the more oppressed groups in our society. The assumptions we make, what we just naturally expect from others around us, how we project our lives into future success, how we take on our empowerment with scant regard for the consequences of our actions, assuming our view of the world is “the” view of the world, these perspectives and viewpoints are the mantra others put on us. To put a very complicated set of relationships more succinctly, our way is the highway!
And yet my shame made me feel at one with “the other.” For a long time, I saw the world unencumbered by this knowledge of privilege. I fully acknowledge my unconscious life of White privilege and power. I lived life asleep to the reality of my “position.”[i] Even though I was embarked on a career path that declared my efforts as falling within a mission for social justice, I did this within the frame of White privilege. It wasn’t until I distinguished between what it meant to be a partner and what it meant to be an ally vis-à-vis my dichotomous relationship with Blacks that I began to see my privilege blinders. I will talk later on about how long it took me to understand the concept of being an ally to Blacks in their continued efforts to create a just society. I think understanding more fully the role of ally resulted from a better understanding of White Privilege.
Disrupting Privilege, Sort of…
But it is also interesting to me that my ACOA background tweaks this disposition of privilege and this is one of Dr. Shame’s positive contributions to my life. It was as if it turned my supposed sense of privilege inside out. I was the other, and those people I perceived to be in authority, were in fact my masters. Dr. Shame made me painfully conscious of the ways others saw me. I am White, but I grew up feeling anything but privileged. (Emphasis here on “feeling.” In the larger societal picture, I was White and my privilege was absolute. But in my interior world, feeling “privileged” was a joke.) Because we hid so much from others, I learned to behave very much in concert with those in authority. One way of avoiding shame was to be as I expected my mentors wanted me to be. Like DuBois wrote, I had a need to see myself as the dominant culture saw me in order to remain safe in a culture whose rules and expectations of behavior were set by those sober people in authority. My sense of self was fully other-directed. Hence, for example, my despair at Gerry’s comments. Like DuBois, I saw my safety residing in how well I was liked by others, especially those in authority. Learning to live with my father’s random irrationality meant I developed a kind of sixth sense about what was expected of my by this very silent man in power. This is just like the “two-ness” Diaz describes when he writes about his doctoral studies as a Chicano in a predominantly white institution.
It is not easy to live life looking at one’s self through the lenses of dominant culture. I discovered that I had been doing this for many years and this realization threw my life into a tailspin of sorts. I did not know how to make sense of it all. For so long I had subconsciously grasped the idea that my ability to understand White standards of measurement would not only grant me success in their world, but also keep me safe. I could cope. … I recall sharing these thoughts and my confusion with a mentor of mine at the university where I study. She listened compassionately and when I was finished calmly asked me, “Where are you in all of this?” I did not have an answer at that time, if anything I became more unsettled because of it. The truth is, I did not know (p. 113).
His reference to his “ability to understand White standards of measurement would not only grant me success in their world, but also keep me safe. I could cope…” describes my primal reaction to authority figures even today. Like Diaz, “it is not easy to live life looking at one’s self through the lenses of dominant culture.” For me, the authority I am able to perceive around me comes from my experiences as an ACOA.
That is why, for as long as I can remember, I’ve always thought about the effects my actions will have on others before I’ve thought about the effects my behavior will have on me. I’m more than likely to be looking over my shoulder as I am to be looking forward to my next step. I feel an outsider to everyone else, even those “others” people would call my own. And the bold new world can stay right where it is, whatever it is, as far as I’m concerned. At least until I can find someone I trust who will take that step forward with me.
So Dubois’ comments about “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity,” that’s what I grew up thinking was going on around me! That every person in town knew our family secret. That everyone knew why Dad didn’t go to parent conferences or band concerts or why he sat alone at his son’s football games. Or that everyone else who saw him above me that night at the Princeton – Colgate basketball game knew exactly what was going on. I’d figured out a condition others knew. They had to. All you had to do was look at him to know something wasn’t quite right. I grew up always wondering what others were thinking and in fact, learned how to use my humor in a way that would deflect the serious query or allow me to sidestep around discomfort. Most Likely To Succeed didn’t come from nothing! I regularly beat others to the punch when it came to discussion with an off-handed remark that would put a group at ease and notch a contribution in my belt. Except for the fact I am not Black of Brown – and I acknowledge that is a huge “except” – the effects of always thinking I was being “measured by others” is painfully familiar to me.
Being Able To Walk In Another’s Shoes
Now, I do not believe I have double consciousness in the same way as my Brown and Black sisters and brothers do nor do I believe it informed the same life or death decision-making matrix for me as it has for them. I am not positioning my struggle as equal to theirs. By no means. There’s a world of difference between getting physically whipped because you misjudged how a glance would be interpreted, and not looking someone in the eye because you are trying to avoid intellectual combat. But I am saying that one strength I developed because of feeling I was an outsider to my own people is that I got very good at thinking about what others were thinking. I got very good at thinking about my own situation from several different perspectives, usually theirs. For Dubois’ people and for Diaz’s people, having double consciousness was survival. For me, having double consciousness was a way to lessen the ongoing feelings of shame. If I could figure out what others were thinking of me, then I would know how and where to gain my place in a group and what I might expect from that group. This was strength, being used for questionable ends, but strength nonetheless.
A Sharpened Intuition
Because I was working so hard to avoid feeling shame, I developed an almost intuitive sensitivity to the feelings of others. I grew up with this well exercised capability of inhabiting other people’s shoes because of my sensitivity to what others were thinking and feeling. I’m a pretty good process guy. I work well in a group, I work well on a team, I play the game well[ii].
I have heard comments on my sensitivity over the years. They used to wash over me and I’d briefly relish the comments felt really good, even confirming. Ironically, as I’ve taken more ownership of my thoughts and feelings and been less dependent on what others think of me for my self-image, these compliments mean less. In some ways, I’ve become a more effective colleague because of this. I think I’m a better participant in all kinds of groups because I’m less concerned figuring out what I should say and more focused on saying or doing what I want to say or do. I also realize that this dynamic throughout my life, coupled with my ability to “read” others, may be why small group process holds such fascination for me. I see lots going on when I observe small group interaction. Ultimately, these dynamics fuel why a particular instructional methodology called Complex Instruction holds such intellectual curiosity for me. The premises of intervention are based on an individual’s perceived status within a task-oriented group and I consider these dynamics to be right up my alley. I love collaborating with my students to research these dynamics. I love it when their students do better work in school because my students have learned how to use this powerful methodology. And if I trace it way back, I probably have my Dad to thank for this as well. Hmmm. The irony embedded in this success is worth more than a moment of reflection. Lemonade out of lemons? Indeed.
This intuitive disposition to identify and perhaps even empathize with what it is to be “the other” feeds my passion for social justice and helps me specify what it is about my teaching that is oriented towards equity based learning and social justice initiatives. I better understand my place in difficult conversations in a very different way than I did when I first started to teach at Madison Jr. High. There are the conversations where my friends whose pigmentation and social identities were darker than mine begin to share what it was like to live in that world DuBois and Diaz describe. Sometimes this sharing occurred as humor. Laughter often helps acknowledge and avoid simultaneously the pathos of awful stuff. More often though, the expressions were angry and accusatory. My reaction would be instantaneous and sensory. I knew their “someone else” was me. These conversations had multiple triggers. First, they triggered my White guilt. Then, the guilt would trigger my deeper being of shame invoking the memory loop of thoughts and feelings that were attached to the complicated dynamics of shame that lurked in my cognitive and emotional systems[iii]. I mean, “Come on folks, my only intention is to be a partner with you. I want to struggle with you for the respect and equal treatment that is your birthright as well as mine, to help you out, to march along side you as one of you!” “Why are making me feel so incredibly uncomfortable and awful?” It was way too many years before I realized it was me who was making me feel awful, “me” in the guise of Dr. Shame.
I am now more able to take on that statement and all powerful baggage that comes with it. I understand their expression – the words, the feelings, the anger, the passion – as their reality. I now share that reality in the moment, but as a participant in the moment, and not as the actual agent of cause. It took me years to hear the pain and make the distinctions between where I was causative agent and where I was a participant in a very present conversation. Having said that, being White, I still have to understand that the line between causative agent and in-the-now participant isn’t clean by any means. I know my German and English white forbearers came to this country early – at least the 1700s. They had to be involved in land speculation and theft. They had to be involved in the ethnic cleansing of the day. Perhaps they even owned dark skinned human property in their role as stewards of the nineteenth century New England economy. And today, my quarter acre on Robinson Parkway in Burlington, Vermont was 300 years ago, free and open hunting land for the original peoples who ranged over this beautiful land. My acreage saw part of 30,000 acres appropriated by the Continental Congress and given to Ethan Allen is gratefulness for his service during the revolutionary war. An indebtedness, made good with stolen goods. I am not guilt free here. Just because I cannot trace the actual deeds doesn’t mean I share no responsibility for the historical record that enabled Whites to dispossess Abenaki Native Americans of their homeland and homes or descendents of the African Diaspora of their actual lives. This is the reality we all live in and the sooner we get to a dialogue that acknowledges our historical presence, the sooner we will all be able to move on. Simply put, reconciliation has to be experienced by this nation as a whole for me to move fully beyond my personal association with the lynch mob in that picture. Knowing that now, I have to wake up to my historical complicity and my contemporaneous responsibility. If I’m not doing something specific and effective now that chips away at the social injustice communicated by the image of that mob scene, then I am asleep, and I am most definitely part of the problem.
This is much more that a Black vs. White issue. Situations of preferential treatment are much more complicated than the prejudice and resultant discrimination that is shared between those who claim membership within the socially constructed discrete groupings of Blacks and Whites in America. Discrimination and prejudicial behavior occurs across many shades of color from within those shades of color. Fluwelling, a student personnel professional, a man who like my younger children, is of mixed parentage, writes of intra-racial bigotry with eloquence in Refusing Race: A Personal Journey of Identity Redefinition. He says:
Are our efforts at diversity presenting students with simply a better understanding of the many boxes of identity, in the hopes that they will more easily choose one or two that provide warm shelter in which to continue their slumber? And has my discomfort with diversity been about not fitting into anyone or two boxes, so my head slams on the rim as they try to close the lid? Don’t misunderstand me. I do think there is value to the work that is done on college campuses regarding diversity and identity development. I think what I am saying, however, is that we should concentrate less on helping students decide which prefabricated label fits best, and more on assisting them in the process of waking up. They need to see for themselves the ways in which the lullaby has been helping them sleepwalk through life in roles, and with ideas, that aren’t theirs. They are the dreams of those that came before us (p. 55).
Every one of us along the color spectrum has to look at how we regard those who are lighter and darker than ourselves. And every one of us needs an honest acquaintance either side of our color line to tell us what our behavior communicates about how we are socially positioned and how we are individually positioned vis-à-vis those who stand to the left of us and those who stand to the right of us. Ours is not a journey that will end any time soon. Who we are and how we are seen is as much about who is looking at us as it is about how we actually live and behave. Who we are and how we are seen by others, including “the other” for Andrew and Jake and myself will happen only in ongoing dialogue and education about who we are to each other. That and the willingness to engage in the small activities that honor our interconnectedness.
So yes, I’d like schools to be places where every child is welcomed and encouraged and realized as a thinking, feeling, doing capable learner. This is how I’d remove one strand of racism from the schools. And to some extent, this narrative will show you that’s what I do. But again, it isn’t clean. I always have to consider that doing this work in schools, when so many larger issues exist to frustrate universal social justice, may be the wrong place to make my mark. But I am a solution maker in a racist society. So I work to expose and expunge and teach about manifestations of racism wherever I see them on my job. And yes, some of what I do may come from my blind side and may be seen as racist. But show me and I will work on it. Better yet, show me, and let’s work on it together.
There was a time when I couldn’t image what I could possibly do to make a difference in this world as a White person because my people had perpetrated such horror in the world. I’m not there any more. Shame no longer freezes me in my institutionally racialized tracks and I’m at one with Wheatly when she writes, “…it’s never about critical mass. It’s about critical connections!” The sensitivity and experience gained through my reflection on being an ACOA “other” informed and nudged along this ongoing development of my identity as an adult. Although it sounds gratuitous, the thank you I’m about to make is a first. It is deeply felt, and long coming.
Thank you, Dad.
[i] I am grateful to Andrew Fluwelling for this idea of being asleep and being awake. In Andrew’s view, being asleep is to be living with someone else’s definition of who you are. In his case, life was more complicated than DuBois let on relative to Black America. Andrew’s Dad was White and his Mom is Black. Andrew is of blended parentage. He couldn’t please either Black or White constituencies. His thesis, Refusing Race: A Personal Journey of Identity Redefinition, is a strong and committed personal inquiry into “waking up” and deciding to be who he really is. His only other alternative was to continue to go through life “asleep,” bedeviled by is a priori inabilities to live of up other’s expectations or be whom he thought he was supposed to be. Andrew’s commentaries on parts of my narrative have been helpful beyond belief.
[ii] It is important to acknowledge because of my whiteness, I am “in” even though I feel “out.” Unlike DuBois and Diaz, they were clearly “out” even though they wanted to be seen as “in.” The shifting back and forth between analytical frames that are both societal and personal can be confusing here. I’m trying to acknowledge a parallel structuring of “otherness,” that’s all. I am in no way equating the effects of the apparently similar dynamics involved.
[iii] It is so interesting to have found recent (March 25, 2005) physiological support for what feels so much like crazy behavior to me. Dolcos, LaBar, and Cabeza write that, “recall [of pictures with high emotional content] is associated with a correlated higher activity in both the amygdala – the region of the brain responsible for processing emotional memories – as well as the hippocampus, the main memory-processing center. …One way to interpret our result is that emotion can trigger recollection and vice-versa. …It could be like a loop in which…an emotional cue could trigger recall of the event, which would then loop back to a re-experiencing of the emotion of the event.” This could explain why Dr. Shame never goes away. His searing presence is hard-wired into my information processing system.
From Science Daily, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050323130625.htm