The Fetishization of Shame
At a conference on attachment theory, I learned about a method for overcoming relational trauma. An assistant sits in a chair and role-plays as the traumatizer. The therapist instructs the patient to stand over the assistant. Sometimes, to increase the height difference, the patient stands on a stool. While looking down on the imagined traumatizer, the patient revokes their power and asserts his own. The patient sternly tells the traumatizer that he will live a new life outside of the traumatizer’s overwhelming shadow. The therapist runs this exercise repeatedly. The patient’s friends are called in and asked to stand supportively behind the patient. They lay their hands on the patient’s back in a gesture of solidarity. The healing occurs through a form of exposure therapy. The patient turns to face something that they fear, progressively turning more and more until they embrace the avoided object completely. Often, the object is physical like a tight space or a busy highway. In this case, however, the object is more diffuse and important. The patient is healed through exposure to power.
Not long after, I attended a Christian group dedicated to recovery. Members professed their various struggles and “journeys.” I was expecting big issues, especially from the leaders – hard drugs, sex addiction, violence. Instead, they confessed dubious problems. One leader said he was addicted to marijuana…20 years ago. Another shared that she “deals with an addiction to approval.” Her voice was solemn and shaky. The large group broke off into smaller groups and I went to the one for newcomers. The volunteer organizer testified to initially attending the group years ago for alcoholism and said that he goes now for help with “anxiety.”
I left with an intense feeling that I analyzed on the drive home. Something about the weary songs they sang, their quivering voices, and the way they glanced downward while talking disgusted me. The women were worse than the men. They had mastered the practiced frailty that penetrated the whole place. They spoke in a weakly hesitant tone that all-too-perfectly resembled a wounded animal struggling breathlessly to drag itself up a forgotten hill. Their struggle was too visible, particularly given that it was against things like “needing approval.” It was also never-ending with many members seeking and re-seeking “recovery” for increasingly opaque problems. Most of all, what disgusted me was their performative weakness. They denounced shame with eyes cast down and praised inner strength with a voice that a feather could break. In this environment, powerlessness ruled.
Self-help priestess Brené Brown announced in her TED Talk that vulnerability is the most accurate measure of courage. This pernicious lie has pervaded the therapy industry and contributed to society’s collective castration. It’s how joyless women and neurotic men get their revenge. Expressions of power are “toxic masculinity,” the strong are actually “internally weak.” The highest form of life is that of the childless middle-class woman in her late 30s crying softly about her shame in front of a group of painfully sympathetic women. She’s connecting with herself, fully acknowledging and accepting her imperfections with an open heart. Such vulnerability! The human apotheosis! Truly, what could mankind possibly aspire to that would be more courageous than this?
Emphasizing vulnerability in a social setting almost always translates to the fetishization of shame and the worship of weakness. The fundamental principle of nature is hierarchy. There is no egalitarianism in the wild. Unless they are tyrannized by an authoritarian structure, organisms self-organize into a hierarchy. No community is free from competition and the inequality it brings. This applies to ants just as it does to members of a therapeutic community. However, unlike in nature where strength is dominant, weakness – or, more precisely, the appearance of weakness – organizes the hierarchy. The more vulnerable one is, the better she exemplifies the group’s values. So, she pursues vulnerability. She grows more skilled at enacting communal rituals of vulnerability and personifying it through her body language, tone, and language. Others gawk at her apparent self-connectedness and aspire to “do the work,” the inner spiritual work, to become as visibly vulnerable as their queen, who rules through brave tears.
This is the model of so many therapeutic groups today. It fails because it doesn’t provide any skills other than a performative weakness that works exclusively in corrupted self-help communities. Those who hate power, humanity’s HR reps, are attempting to make all spaces operate this way so that they can dominate through stylized powerlessness. They mistake the feeling of rising in this inverted hierarchy for healing and wonder why mental health is declining. They preach empathy but only for the weak for they themselves lack the strength necessary to understand what drives the powerful.
I wish that we could all as a society perform the imaginative exercise I described at the beginning and practice asserting power over those who fetishize shame, revoking their claim to courage and asserting one that comports with nature. They’d look up at us with condescending sympathy and silently console themselves with thoughts of our inner brokenness and disconnectedness. Disgusted by their pity, we’d reject their pathetic vision of human potential and champion the dominating, conquering strength of lions. Healing requires that we connect with natural power, we’d respond to their tears. We overcome shame through strong action, not weak talk. And perhaps, with enough practice, we could really ascend.