Guilt and Shame
What if the private emotions of guilt and shame
became a public matter?
Episode transcript:
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome back to Stories of Emotional Granularity.
It’s June, and that means it’s Pride Month, but this year, the people who have the power to shape American society right now seem determined to replace pride with shame.
So often, when people talk about emotions, it sounds abstract. Emotions are felt on the inside, after all. They’re subjective and individual. So, why don’t we keep this private world private? Why don’t we just keep our emotions to ourselves?
There are many possible responses to that question, but today I want to focus on one idea in particular: There are some emotions that are not strictly private. These emotions cross the boundary between the feelings of an individual person and the society within which that person lives.
Today, we are going to explore two such emotions: Guilt and shame.
Consider the case of Savannah Hauk.
Savannah Hauk:
I am a biological male, and unfortunately, I have to label myself in this way in order to describe who I am, a biological male, assigned male at birth. I am dual gender, which in my specific case means that I have a periodic feminine expression to match with my gender identity. So in 85 percent of my life, my day, I am male, and then for the other 10 to 15 percent of my life, I am presenting as female in a very binary way, even though I am considered non-binary. I advocate. I write books. I do TED talks. I do workshops, all as Savannah, which is kind of ironic because it seems like for somebody who has 15 percent of my life, she definitely takes over a lot more of my actual energy. So, that's pretty astounding. But I do have a day job, so now my male side gets to bring the money and pay the taxes, so it works out pretty good.
In 1996, years after I was born, there was this whole other origin of me stepping into the name Savannah, stepping into the heels of Savannah, putting on the wig, putting on the clothes, going out to the clubs with people that love me and who could protect me and serve as surrogates to shepherd me along. And here I am, going clubbing in Manhattan in the nineties, which was a huge step for me as well.
Jonathan Cook:
Savannah Hauk is female, but Savannah Hauk is just one identity held by a person who identifies as male 85 percent of the time. Savannah Hauk is one aspect of a person who identifies as dual gender.
This is not the typical way for Americans to articulate their identities, but then, there are many ways to be an American. There is diversity within our nation.
That’s a word we’re not supposed to use anymore. Diversity is now something that we’re supposed to hide, as if there’s only one way to be an American, as if difference is something we should feel ashamed of.
Shame is an emotion that exists where individuality and social expectations meet. Savannah describes how she began to feel shame when her girlfriend asked her to conform to social norms about the expression of gender.
Savannah Hauk:
I could hide myself away for the rest of my life and never leave my house. I mean, I could tell you my girlfriend was like, “Why can't you just do it at home? Why do you have to go out? Why can't you be safe and sound where I could protect you here, behind closed doors?” For me, that was just another way to be shamed. You know, for me, it's like I am a person. This is who I am as a person.
So, in order in order to be okay, I'm supposed to just be okay in private and not okay in real life. So, a lot of people think that same thing. It's like, Well, why can't you just do it in private so we don't have to see you? Like, because I'm an individual and I'm a human being, I'm a spirit. I'm an actual person in the world. So, to just tell me I can't go out because what may happen to me just means that there's still a perception or something wrong with me. So, for me to walk out that door can be terrifying has been terrifying, but I've overcome that by just repetition.
For me, she wasn't trying to shame me. She wasn't trying to say I was imperfect or something wrong with me. She was just looking out to protect me in general. Now, I perceived it as, “I don't want you going out because I don't want to be embarrassed by you or I don't want people seeing you. I don't want people hurting you.” All those kind of ideas were forming in my head. But then I realized, no, I need to get out. So, I had overcome somebody else's perception of what may happen in order for me to do what I needed to do for myself.
Shame-wise, I've lived my entire life knowing I was different, knowing that I wasn't the cultural norm. And with everything I've seen in the news, seen in entertainment, read in the papers from learned from my parents, heard from my parents. Everything from the age of like seven to now continues to tell me that there is something wrong with me at CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) this year. They're talking about the eradication of transgender zone in society that we have to be eradicated, so I guess as long as they can convert us back to normal, we’ll be okay.
Jonathan Cook:
When Savannah was urged to keep herself safe by keeping her identity concealed, the message of protection began to feel like a message of shame. Was Savannah’s girlfriend trying to shame her?
Shame is an interesting emotion, because it exists in the relationships between people. Savannah considers whether her girlfriend tried to shame her, the emotion becomes a verb. When one person shames another, they try to make that person feel ashamed, but more than that, they are attempting to control the outward behavior of that person, using the emotion of shame as a tool of power to enforce social conformity.
Savannah has been confronted by America’s political elites, who are using shame in order to eradicate transgender, dual gender, and other non-conservative gender identities from American society. She expresses how shame often includes fear of punishment, but goes beyond that into a feeling of self-doubt centered around the question: Is there something wrong with who I am?
Savannah responded to the effort to shame her by summoning an affirmation of her own worth. Then, Savannah took that affirmative attitude into her social interactions with others. Accepting herself, she also learned to accept others, cultivating empathy for people who were different from her.
Savannah Hauk:
When does self-love become narcissism? So those type of things, it's like you have to be empathetic, sympathetic. You have to see other worldviews. Just because I don't agree with somebody who doesn't believe that I should exist does not mean I hate you as a person. People's hate is not about you. It's about them. So, in that way of like, if you want to shoulder that burden, then you're going to be in a really positive, self-confident, self-loving place that you can have pride in yourself without worrying about what other people think. You can love yourself without worrying about being shamed by them. You know, you just become your own person in a much more full one hundred percent way.
Jonathan Cook:
It isn’t easy to stand up against shame, to affirm one’s own identity in the face of social pressure to change. Shame is a powerful tool of social control.
Meet Mark Steven Porro, whose identity as an American was made possible by an act of shaming that took place halfway around the world.
Mark Steven Porro:
I had the acting bug. I caught the acting bug. We were all performers in the ballet as kids. My mother loved the arts, and I retired from ballet around ten years old, and then I got into doing some modeling when I was designing and then I did commercials and then I decided to move out to Hollywood to kind of give up my design career and moved out to Hollywood and did that for 28 years, and then started various other adventures.
Then, everything changed in 2011 when my mother almost passed. So then, I decided to get up and move back to my childhood home and take care of her. So that's the subject of the memoir.
Jonathan Cook:
Mark found out about the shame that shaped his family’s identity when he traveled with his father to explore their ancestral roots in a small village in Italy.
Mark Steven Porro:
My father, my grandfather came from Italy when he was around ten years old, from a little village in southern Italy, up in the mountains, and we knew very little about that because he didn't teach any of his kids Italian. He wanted to become an American, and that was it.
I found out his father, the original guy, was the mayor of this village, and we heard he was run out of town for committing adultery as the mayor with his married secretary. I don't know how we heard this story, but that was something that I said, always hung around our neck like an albatross.
And so, I said well, I want to know more about my family. So, I planned a trip and my dad, for his 80th birthday, I asked him to come with me.
We found out that the mayor and his secretary were having an affair back in the 18-somethings. Everybody knew about it, and it was bringing shame to the village, and then the region started knowing about it and more shame to the village, but they were afraid of this mayor. And so, one day, a brave man stormed into that office and said, "You two, stop this affair or leave this village."
Jonathan Cook:
It’s fascinating to me how Mark describes the feeling of shame as something that his ancestor was able to impose upon an entire village of people. His grandfather, the mayor of that village, didn’t feel shame alone. He didn’t even just share that shame with the secretary he was having an affair with.
The mayor and the secretary brought shame to the village, and the entire village felt it. The mayor bowed to the pressure of this collective shame, which was so powerful that it propelled him all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, transforming his family from Italians into Americans.
Mark’s description of his family’s transformation suggests that shame isn’t just something we feel on the inside. It’s a socially-established emotion, a kind of collective disequilibrium. When his grandfather had a sexual affair with his secretary, he defied social conventions, and that defiance threatened the emotional integrity of the whole community.
Understood from this perspective, shame is a feeling that exists when a person does something that does not fit into the framework that is dominant in society. Shame seems like an emotional tension that exists between nonconformists and the rest of society. It’s a sort of uncomfortable discrepancy between what society as a whole claims to be and what individuals within that society actually are, or actually do. The feeling of shame persists, collectively, until the discrepancy is resolved. This can take place through the elimination of nonconformist behaviors and identities, or through the transformation of society so that it accepts behaviors and identities that once were considered shameful.
Mark Steven Porro’s family moved to another continent because their village society was unwilling to change. For as long as Mark’s grandfather remained in that village, the entire community would live in shame, and so, he had to go.
Sometimes, however, the shameful tension between what is and what is supposed to be exists within the mind of an individual. Regina Lark specializes in the resolution of that kind of shame, as a professional organizer.
Regina Lark:
I have a company. I'm a professional organizer. I have a declutter and organize company, and we hear that a lot: "I'm just lazy." Like, well, there's probably some deeper underlying reasons why you're not able to activate. Let's explore those. How do you feel about the task at hand?
Here’s the connection: My doctorate is in women's history. When I left the academy and started this work, I felt that I was leaving all of that behind. You take everything with you, as it turns out. And so, I'm working in women's spaces. It's mostly women who are calling me. Professional women between the ages of forty and seventy. And I hear their self-talk: Shame, guilt, anxiety, depression. I can't do it all. I don't know if you'll understand this reference: There's not enough Calgon on the planet.
Jonathan Cook:
In her work as a professional organizer, Regina has noticed that sometimes, shame is a cycle. Shame can prevent people from dealing with the very things they feel ashamed of.
Regina Lark:
It absolutely depends on the circumstances of the transition. If it's not a good divorce, if it's, if you're an older adult and you're downsizing now into an assisted living community, people see that as kind of the end of the road. So, it just keeps emotion on top of emotion on top of emotion. What I'm tasked with is helping them let go of that, which they have a lot of stories about. Which they believe truly that they love, and which they truly believe they're going to need someday. What I have discovered is that a lot of what's going on there is the holding on and having and being challenged by letting it go, holding on, can't let it go, and what about what I have observed because of the words that are being used is that folks aren't letting go of that which they may need someday.
I think it's very subjective to why they brought me in, what they were hoping to accomplish. I know that there are some folks that feel shame having waited so long. They're shamed. They say they keep piles and piles of shame on them for being in that space, and then they put even more shame: Why did I wait so long?
Jonathan Cook:
Regina describes the way that shame can result from difficult transitions. When a person moves from one identity to another, the change isn’t always something that they wanted. At other times, there is conflict involved, both within a person’s mind and with other people who have expectations that aren’t compatible with the new identity as it develops. Rules that once applied no longer do, but it’s difficult to let them go, just as it’s difficult to let go of possessions that no longer suit us.
Shame can grow in layers around our identities, as we create masks to shield ourselves from the scrutiny of others. When these masks become a habit, we feel a kind of self-alienation, as the way we present ourselves to the world becomes ever more distant from our own identities. We hide ourselves for so long that simply being ourselves comes to feel shameful.
Most masks aren’t literally worn on our faces, of course. People deploy masks of shame in the language they use as well. Euphemisms are one such kind of mask, turns of phrase that we use to prevent people from facing socially challenging realities directly.
Author Karol Ruth Silverstein describes the difficulty in negotiating the language that people use to refer to her disability.
Karol Ruth Silverstein
Yeah, it's interesting because there's a lot of, there's a definite movement from coming from my community and those outside our community are sort of giving us pushback about the words that we use to describe ourselves, which is frustrating.
So, yes, disabled, disability. That is the word, those are the words I use, and in fact, when I share my pronouns, which are she/her, I have added disabled to that.
And the reason for that is I see the practice of sharing pronouns, it’s about identity, but it's also like a heads up when you when you're referring to me, these are the pronouns that you should use.
These are the pronouns that are authentic to my experience, and I've had even some of my good friends sort of stumble, not really knowing, what word you use to describe my physical condition.
And so, I put disabled she/her/disabled in there because I'm letting people know, this is the word that I use. This is how I identify, and when you refer to me, this is the word that I feel most comfortable with your using, so please, please go ahead and do that.
So, I am aware that I may be sort of doing guilty of a little bit of cultural appropriation because sharing pronouns is supposed to be about pronouns and gender and gender identity. But I just do it as a heads up and say, this is how I identify, and so far, I haven't gotten too much pushback on that.
There's a lot of confusion because there are this endless supply of euphemisms for disabled that really have come out of, I believe, the able-bodied community in an effort to show allyship and to be compassionate and to not marginalize or insult people's disabilities.
And even the person first language is this effort to be allied with disabled people, but in this day and age, what they don't realize is that it continues to marginalize us and enhance the stigma rather than doing away with it and sort of going against the stigma that to be disabled is less than or not as good as. And so, we're trying to re-educate the able-bodied community and it's a little slow going.
The “differently abled” is a big one that we're really, really pushing backwards against. I'm in this private Facebook group of disabled kidlit writers, and I put a question out there to them, you know, to that community. How do you guys feel about this term? Unsurprisingly, the response was pretty negative, but they had some really interesting things to say to sort of highlight why they don't like the term.
One that I really appreciated and that I use when I publicly speak, you know, this theory is that when someone says “differently abled” or “for all abilities”, what they really mean, it's code for disabled or inclusive of disabled people. “This event is for all abilities,” it means it's accessible to disabled people.
One of the people who responded said, gave an example of like an Olympic athlete like Simone Biles. She can do with her body things that most of the humans on the planet cannot do, but no one would refer to her as “differently abled”, even though the denotation might fit. You know, she is differently abled. She is able to do things with her body that most other human beings are not able to do, but no one would refer to her as differently able because differently able is code for disabled.
So, my community is just saying, just say disabled. Just say disabled. It's not a bad word. There is a whole movement on Twitter, hashtag say the word. We are sort of tired of being separated out in in that way.
There's a great essay on Medium about how person first terminology isolates disabled people, and that was the other movement: Oh, don't say disabled, say person with a disability.
I would never refer to my gay friends as a person with homosexual sexuality. Like, I would not say he's a person who is a male attracted to another man, because he's gay, you know, he's homosexual, whatever it's a part of his identity. It's not all that he is, but it is an essential part of who he is.
And so, this wonderful essay on Medium says that when we use identity first for almost every community imaginable, except for disabled people, what it does is isolate us further, discourage us from identifying as disabled and connecting with other people who identify as disabled. It just sets us in a separate group to a very, very damaging effect.
Jonathan Cook:
Karol is disabled. She wants us to acknowledge that, not to dance around the subject and pretend that it’s not true, or that we don’t notice. She knows that people notice, and she wants them to be straightforward and acknowledge her disability.
People might avoid the subject of another person’s disability, thinking that by doing so, they are being kind, but when that avoidance becomes awkward and elaborate, it becomes a signal that the disability is something that should not be talked about. The disability becomes a taboo, and the implication is that it’s something to feel ashamed of.
Karol wanted to break the feeling of taboo around disability. She especially wanted to help young people move past the idea that disabilities should be a source of shame. So, she wrote the book Cursed, a young adult novel about a teenage girl whose chronic illness provokes her to pull back from her social life and school.
Cursed was a successful book. It won the Schneider Family Book Award in 2020. However, the success of Cursed didn’t liberate Karol from the nagging voice of shame. It merely changed the standard of what she could feel ashamed of. After experiencing success with her first book, Karol began to worry that she might be unable to follow up with another success.
Karol Ruth Silverstein:
Just so deeply felt by me is this feeling like I'm a one-hit wonder and I'm never going to do another book, and what will it all matter if I just have that one stupid book?
And the only reason why it got published is because it's like drawn from my own experience and that's the only story of mine that anyone will ever care about.
I have a lot of shame that I might just be a one-hit wonder. And my friends: “You know, like, you won a major reward. You earned out your advance plus three.” I say, “My book only got translated into one foreign language and I see on Facebook, oh, and now my book is in its 27th language.
My one dear friend, who's always sort of nudging me to get out of that negative pride place, he says, “Well, that's one more language than my book got translated to.”
So, I definitely suffer a lot of that sort of, the negative sense of pride and this discomfort at being a one-hit wonder and feeling less than and feeling like I don't matter enough, and that that somehow is an admonishment of my worth as a human being.
Jonathan Cook:
Karol’s experience of shame after success reveals a difficult truth: We can’t simply achieve our way out of shame. Achieving success helps, of course, but it doesn’t make us immune from shame. Even after they overcome self-doubt, people tend to find new sources of shame.
It may be that shame is an inevitable part of the human condition. Perhaps that’s why people blame themselves for things that have happened to them, things that they bear no responsibility for.
Consider the case of Adam Baruh.
Adam Baruh
I'm Adam Baruh. I'm kind of a serial entrepreneur. For the last six years, I've been running a consulting agency called SuiteCentric, which is a NetSuite solution provider and implementer. My career over the last seventeen years has really been kind of focused around the NetSuite platform. Then in 2021, kind of following a very kind of personal self-awareness, discovery kind of that was dealing with a lot of anxiety and some mental health issues, and just running my company and the stress and anxiety behind that, I kind of had a journey of self-discovery and got into, out of that, kind of manifested a podcast that I started hosting called The Change, which is about servant leadership and mental health in business.
I got divorced from my older kids' mother back in, I think it was '09 or 2010, and I still was feeling this profound guilt from doing that and kind of watching how my older kids were still kind of suffering from some things. That divorce, I could still see how it was manifesting in their lives. I felt guilty for that. Kristen asked a really simple question. She goes, "Well, do you think you feel guilt or do you think you feel shame?" Honestly, I didn't know. I said, "Kristen, what's the difference? I don't think I understand what the difference is." I’m definitely paraphrasing her, but she said something to the effect of, guilt is something you feel terrible about and it's not pretty or fun, but shame is where belief systems get created. Your identity system gets created. It's profoundly different just in terms of who you are when you have something that you feel shameful for.
It's super quiet in the house. Everybody's asleep, and like, right when I turned off the TV, that earlier conversation kind of came back into my mind. I'm like, shame, guilt. Is there something I feel shameful for in my life?
When I was six years old, my parents were fresh off their divorce, and my mom would have this babysitter come over, this teenage boy. He would come over, and as soon as my mom left, this guy would lock me in my mom's walk-in closet, barricade the door, and the light switch was on the outside of the closet, shut off the light. So, it's pitch black dark in there. I could right now, I could feel the terror. I could remember that terror that I had of being locked in that closet. And, you know, I was like, oh, well, I mean, one thing I'll say is I never blacked out that memory. It wasn't something I didn't remember. I always remembered it happened. I never really spoke about it, thought about it. I mean, and in terms of speaking about it, I never talked to my ex-wife about any of these events that I'm about to tell you. I just never thought that they had any relevance in my life whatsoever.
Well, now here I am as a 46 year-old, like having claustrophobic anxiety attacks. My nervous system, the seeds were planted in that experience for what resulted then, forty years later, in these claustrophobic anxiety attacks. Where the shame came from was one of the times that I finally was let out of the closet, this kid had invited a bunch of his little teenage friends over and they would they would party while it was locked in the closet and be doing pretty hardcore drugs and stuff like that. I remember as a six year-old finally being let out of the closet and seeing these kids passed out with needles around rubber hoses around their arms, as a six year-old. Right? Then anyways, one of the times I was let out and I was molested. So, that's where the shame came from. The whole story of my life came, and just like a lightning bolt to my mind, I was like, oh, my god. Like, literally, all of my negative self-talk. I mean, I blamed myself for what happened. I don't know why. I mean, the way that I kind of rationalize it now is probably it gave me agency over what happened. I felt that, by feeling that I was to blame for it, gave me power. It gave me agency over what happened, to avoid this, like, out of control feeling. I mean, at least that's how I'm kind of rationalizing it now. But clearly, I had no idea about any of that stuff as a six year-old. No six year-old is going to. Clearly I wasn't to blame. I was a victim. I was a victim in what happened. I didn't cause it at all.
I think there was this implied belief system that came out of that experience when I was six that I would have the dialog in my mind like I'm bad. I'm not worthy. What that ultimately, how it how that manifested is I would always not feel I was worthy of my time taking care of myself. Just as a father, I would just give everything of myself to my kids, my ex-wife, now my current wife, and my businesses. I just never really felt I was worthy or that what I needed really mattered. Things would happen and I'd have just, I would say a lot of like bad things to myself in my mind, when I'd encounter stuff. So, that shame created that belief system. Well, the revelation that I had shattered that belief system. It basically created a new belief system in which I am a bad ass. I am phenomenal.
Jonathan Cook:
Adam’s experiences with shame revealed to him the extent to which our self-assessments are subjective. They’re not data-driven objective models of reality, and they can’t be, because moral worth is inherently subjective. Shame is a story we accept about ourselves. Guilt is as well.
Adam Baruh:
I still think I feel guilty for just not doing the things I needed to do to be a good husband and father for them when they were young. I don't necessarily blame myself at all entirely for the divorce. I mean, it was kind of like a mutual thing, but I just still kind of felt crappy about the fact that it happened. I'm okay that it happened now. I mean, I'm remarried and I'm super in love with my wife, my current wife. We're very happy. It all worked out, and my older kids are very well adjusted now.
I don't think with the divorce there was a lot of shame in there. Really, the shame was wrapped up more in just the trauma from my childhood, but that led me to be a notorious pot smoker. I know that was one thing that my ex-wife really didn't like about me. So, probably that shame and guilt can be tied together, because I felt guilty for being such a such a notorious pot smoker.
Jonathan Cook:
Adam’s reaction to being abused at the age of six is an example of the way that shame reinforces itself, and grows in layers that shift the directions of our lives. Adam felt shame for being abused, and used marijuana to avoid feeling that shame. That marijuana use led to the breakdown of his marriage, which Adam then felt a new layer of shame about.
Was that shame, though, or was it guilt? Shame and guilt are related to each other, but they’re not quite the same. Adam suggests that shame is deeper, or more pervasive than guilt. Guilt is something we feel for doing someone wrong, while shame is a feeling we have that there is something wrong with who we are.
What guilt and shame have in common is a troubled reaction to the more challenging parts of being human. Michael Connelly, as a healthcare executive, has focused on helping people work through feelings of guilt in order to confront the difficult truths about aging and death.
Michael Connelly
I'm a father of three, two boys and a girl, and have four grandkids, and I've been married to my high school sweetheart for forty-seven years. I've been a healthcare CEO for thirty-five years, ranging from a large urban hospital in Chicago to a multi-state health system with like fifty hospitals. I've had the benefit of working in virtually every sector of health care during that time all across the country.
So, whether it's health insurance, whether it's physician practices, whether it's long- term care, whether it's hospice, I've been very passionate about healthcare reform, and in that context, I feel everything I've tried has failed.
Healthcare's gotten worse during my career rather than better. So that's a bit disappointing, so I did a new end run on the issue in retirement, and I've spent the last five years researching and writing a book called The Journey's End, which is really to help people understand how healthcare works and how to use it as they age , and what they need to assume responsibility for if they want to have more say in how they life is managed from a healthcare point of view at the end of life.
Jonathan Cook:
Michael has advocated for healthcare reform, but he’s not ashamed to admit that his efforts have failed. The problems with healthcare aren’t easy to solve, after all, because they’re much more than just technical glitches. They emerge from the widespread denial of the inevitability of aging, illness, and death.
You can ask any doctor, and they will tell you that they have sort of a cynical opinion on this, that you know, you have three or four family members, and the one family member that is least around shows up and wants everything done. Whereas the ones that have been actively involved, taking care of Mom, no, Mom's ready to go, Mom and they get caught in that conflict.
And in fact, I read that ninety percent of ethical issues being looked at in hospitals today are this kind of conflict. What we're dealing with here is opinion. That's why it creates somewhat of an obligation for individuals to share with others what they want, and the problem is, and it kind of goes back to, you know, number one, we're all afraid of dying so we don't like to talk about this.
Nobody wants to sit down with the family and says, okay, this is what I want. But it is incredibly important to do that. And because you free them, it was interesting. I was talking to someone, and this kind of shocked me. They were actually from England, and their mother was dying in England.
And the doctor, you know, either was trying to decide between continuing treatment or not continuing treatment. And he asked the daughter, and she said, I don't want to answer that question. You're asking me to, you know, and I never thought of somebody not wanting to answer the question.
You know, so, I mean, but it makes sense, you know, because that's that by answering the question, they could create their own guilt, and by not answering the question, they don't have guilt. So, the decision becomes the doctor's decision. In fact, one palliative care doctor said, the most important thing patients can do is know what they want, and so that does require some self-reflection.
Birth is when you come out and you're crying and everybody's laughing, and dying is when you're smiling and everybody else is crying. And so that's sort of, they're crying because they don't want to lose you, and they don't want to accept that you will no longer be around because you are such an important part of their life.
And so, you get kind of wound up in what you want rather than what the patient wants, and if the patient hasn't made clear what they want, then it's pretty easy to follow what you want.
Jonathan Cook:
Michael describes how conflicts in end-of-life medical decisions can emerge from the emotion of guilt. Family members can feel guilty even for acknowledging that someone they love is nearing the end of their life, as if a person can be killed just by talking about their mortality. This isn’t a rational response, but it is an emotionally protective one. People feel better, more capable of getting through the day, by acting as if life goes on forever, as if death is nothing more than a nasty rumor that shouldn’t be granted the dignity of our attention.
The trouble with guilt and shame is that these emotions lead us to conceal parts of our lives that bring us pain. That concealment makes it less likely to receive any help dealing with that pain. How can anyone help us if they can’t see that we’re in distress?
Michael’s response is to try to help people talk about their pain, beginning by speaking the unspeakable truth that death will come for people we love. We are mortal. Inevitably, our lives fall apart, and typically, we have no idea how to deal with that. Admitting our feelings of helplessness in the face our mortality doesn’t solve the problem of death, but at least it enables us to stop treating death as if it’s a dirty little secret.
Nathalie Martinek confronts a different source of shame in her work. She takes on the role of shame in creating toxic working environments.
Nathalie Martinek:
I'm Natalie, Natalie Martinek, and I'm a Canadian who lives in Australia. I'm a former biologist, a systems biologist, and I moved into the world of relational work, because of the things I experienced that intrigued me about human behavior and the patterns that I continued to observe in myself, as well as others, when you're in a specific context, like a workplace team or even an institution or a community, a friend group, family, and recurring patterns that pique my interest as to why people behave the way they do when you would think that they know better .
So, that has intrigued me more than the biological things I was doing, and I've eventually transitioned to understanding and working as a group facilitator, mediator, coach, consultant, to help people understand and myself understand what is it about our relational brain blueprint from how we've been socialized in our families that gets expressed in all our different relationships?
Jonathan Cook:
Nathalie’s work with shame didn’t emerge from her graduate studies. She is a biologist who studied cancer. Instead, Nathalie became curious about shame as a result of her own experience with it in her professional life.
Nathalie Martinek:
People tend to ask me: How did you go from being a cancer biologist or a cellular biologist into this work? Cancer, you know, forms seemingly out of the blue.
So cells, you know, start to behave erratically and replicate too much, form a mass that can become invasive and metastasize around the body, co-opting the functions of the body, like the immune function, and using it to its advantage, and so that then we see something similar in, say, institutions, where you have, you know, the person who's the favorite or the one who seems to get away with everything, slowly turning a group of people against, say, their victim, their target, in a bullying situation, for example.
That's all like something that drew my attention because I'd been the victim of, not victim, I've experienced what it's like to feel neglected, or the negligence. So, it was a different type of abuse where it's like the emotional neglect, after being praised and groomed and recruited into this, team environment, put on a pedestal and then experiencing the downfall and then being, slowly cast out.
And then I also noticed myself what happened to myself in organizational contexts where there's hierarchy and lots of power dynamics, imbalances and power plays, and what I was doing to assimilate into that culture in order to succeed in it, will survive and succeed in it. Again, it's something I intentionally did, but it's what you end up, what ends up happening because you want to succeed, and you see the behaviors that help people get ahead. In the process, you start to suppress your own moral compass or you silence it or ignore it so that you can achieve your goal. But what it does to you is it turns you into somebody else who is again, a replica of the culture itself.
If you're someone who is reflective and is connected to their conscience, it starts to eat away at you and you start to experience moral distress or that's what I experienced. I didn't like who I'd become.
Jonathan Cook:
Too often, professional success doesn’t come from just showing up to work and doing the job with competence. Professional environments are also stages of social competition where emotional manipulation is a tool for some people to get ahead. Nathalie found herself feeling shame for her participation in that manipulative workplace drama, but also discovered how the emotion of shame itself could be used as a tool of manipulation.
Nathalie Martinek:
I guess that brings us to the emotion of shame and its different manifestations. The shame is of, you know, I'm not good enough. I'm worthless. I have no value here. I have no use here, but, what was on top of that was rejection. There's something about me that is no longer likable or acceptable. Now I'm being, you know, excluded or ignored, avoided, marginalized, so the feeling of rejection, along with all these narratives around self-worth or lack thereof, and not good enough and not having any value and, you know, kind of being irrelevant and insignificant.
I think more of a corrupted hierarchy, where people at higher rungs of the hierarchy take advantage of their position and status and the level of power and influence they have to get what they want. From others that are in the lower rungs, as well as laterally and maybe higher up. So, you have a person who's anywhere in the hierarchy, who has a way of meeting their needs for significant self-importance, attention, success, protection, a reputational protection.
And they do that by others who want to align with them because they get something out of being close or in proximity to that person with more power, perceived power. When you don't have that acceptance, you're not close to the center of power, and in fact, they are not interested in you, they don't show interest in you to draw you in like they've done with everyone else who might be your contemporaries, you start to feel, wow, I don't belong here. I don't. I'm not good enough.
There's something, you know, I'm not of use to them. I'm irrelevant, like there's something about me that is just, I don't fit in here. Not only do I not fit in here, I'm nothing here, like I'm completely irrelevant.
Most of us are responding and reacting to whatever's going on inside us, which gives, you know, which is the insecurity or inadequacy. Again, back to shame, and trying to make sure that I don't feel exposed, that I protect myself. That might mean I have to overpower this other person in order to restore myself sense of comfort and my sense of empowerment again.
Shame is racked with insecurity, inadequacy, insignificance, fear of exclusion, feeling exposed, unprotected. There's so many different aspects of shame.
Jonathan Cook:
In an emotionally healthy professional setting, work is a source of affirmation that doesn’t require competition. In the best case scenario, colleagues don’t need to get ahead by holding other people back. Instead, they support each other, and everybody wins as their shared projects are enhanced through cooperation.
Shame, unfortunately, can spread with alarming speed throughout a corporate body. Nathalie compares shame to a malignant cancer cell, in that it devotes more energy to replicating itself than to promoting a shared sense of vigor. When shame goes metastatic, it destroys organizational coherence, leading individuals to pursue their own needs without regard for the needs of others.
We’re living in a remarkably complex society, however, and that sometimes makes it extremely difficult to tell the difference between selfishness and selflessness. Gone are the days when people could follow straightforward, predictable paths in their professional or personal lives. Social structures such as places of work are becoming less stable, year after year, as Silicon Valley’s tactic of gaining power by “moving fast and breaking things” continues to smash the pillars of trust in social organizations.
Essence Pierce has been dealing with the consequences of the spreading chaos in the working world, although she has solid education and experience.
Essence Pierce:
My name is Essence Pierce. I am a mother of a brilliant seven year-old.
I am a strategic insights leader and I had someone on LinkedIn ask me what that means before. So, what it means is whether you are looking for messaging strategy, for a marketing campaign, sales enablement strategy, or road map planning, this is something that I've worked on in my career for over a decade, as well as, yeah, I love marketing.
I have a master's in integrated marketing, and so I've learned before that I'm more than just insights. I've also done tactical things.
I've always felt like I was one of the rare people who, once I figured out what I wanted to do, that genuinely loved it. The part about the insights that I love is being able to put, I'm very analytical, so I like solving problems.
Collecting a bunch of data from different sources, whether it's competitive intelligence, market intelligence, performance metrics, putting all of, getting things from these disparate places, and putting it together to build a narrative and a strategic direction to me is very powerful.
Jonathan Cook:
Essence is skilled at using data to help businesses to find the strategic direction to build successful marketing programs. Over the last couple of years, however, employment for insights professionals in business has been devastated by the introduction of generative AI tools that provide quick and inexpensive imitations of insights work that are attractive to executives eager to cut costs.
As a result, Essence is now having to use her problem solving abilities to find a new home for her family. Essence is moving with her daughter away from their home in Florida in order to find work in Chicago.
Essence knows that making this change is in the interest of her daughter in the long term. Nonetheless, Essence feels guilty about taking her daughter away from the community she knows and loves.
Essence Pierce:
I don't like change. I say it all the time. People are like, that's crazy because you, you handle it well, but no. Inside, I'm always freaking out about change.
I love our house, you know, I was very proud to become a homeowner when I bought my home, particularly doing it as a single mother. But also, my daughter is going to be sad and she's going to miss her friends, and her school actually had their award ceremony, and I got emotional last night because I was like, oh my gosh, she goes to a very small school. That's one thing, and I'm going to have to put her in public school because I just really don't feel like paying private school up there, at least I want to see what the public school looks like where we're going.
I'm stripping her away from everything that she knows, and so, there's guilt, a lot of guilt with that one. With that one, that's where the guilt comes in as opposed to the shame because it's like, am I being selfish? I know I'm not. I also know that the job market is better out there. I'll have more support. You know, I can travel for work, when I move there.
But, there's still a lot of guilt where it's like, I'm stripping her away from everything that she knows. She's had the same three girls in her class for the last three years since kindergarten. She's been at that school since preschool as well. So, it's just really, it's the mom guilt. That's really the biggest negative feeling in the change, and the change is scary.
Jonathan Cook:
Essence is taking care of her daughter by moving up to Chicago, where she has extended family connections. In the short term, however, the decision to move is causing pain for her daughter. So, Essence is feeling guilty about making the move.
On top of the guilt, Essence feels shame for relying on family to help her navigate the disruption of professional networks caused by the unregulated, unrestrained deployment of generative AI. Essence feels shame for accepting help from family at the very same time she feels guilty for not being able to help her own daughter more.
Essence Pierce:
I think from the broader society, the shame message is really just that you're an adult. Your friends are not your therapist, right? Your family, they're not your therapist. So, you need to figure it out on your own. That’s kind of what I feel that's that society has or the other concept of we all have problems. You know what I mean? You're, why come to me with it?
I think that's where a lot of that shame comes from because everybody has this mentality of: “So? Everybody's going through stuff. You're no different. You, you know, you're no special. So, why do I need to put out my energy to help you?”
Some of us are able to learn from it and try to change that narrative, and some of us aren't. I think that outwardly, I don't believe anyone should feel shame for needing help. I think at some point in your life, everyone's going to need it.
It's that inward piece that I struggle with, where it's like, you're not, like, I want to, sometimes I have to tell myself, you're no exception, okay? If it's okay for everybody else, it should be okay for you.
To me, shame is more like embarrassment because I shouldn't be feeling this way or embarrassment because I shouldn't be in this situation. To me, guilt is different because it's like, I feel bad for something that I did.
Like even when I got laid off, there was a lot of shame attached to that, and it makes no sense. Like, what did I do? I know I was a top performer. I got excellent reviews, and this is the story with a lot of us.
I know a lot of people feel that same shame and it doesn't make sense, but it's shame because it's embarrassment that you have. It's almost like you lost status, if that makes sense. So, I think from the emotional piece, it's like, oh, well, these people know that I'm really breaking down, then I'm not going to be, I've lost my status as the strong person.
That's not true. Actually, I think people that are attached to their emotions are very strong people.
Jonathan Cook:
Essence explains the difference between shame and guilt, saying that guilt is how it feels to have done something wrong, while shame is the feeling of being not good enough. This is like the sense of inadequacy that Nathalie Martinek described in a toxic workplace, only now, the shame has spread beyond just one workplace, beyond just one industry, to infect an entire professional marketplace.
It's fascinating to me that the emotional response that Essence has to this society-wide economic crisis is to feel shame. The problem of the unregulated expansion of generative AI transcends individual behavior, but Essence feels responsible for it anyway.
Essence was good at her work, and she’s looking for new professional opportunities every day. She’s applying to jobs. She’s networking. She’s doing everything she can, but there just aren’t many positions available. It’s not her fault, but there’s part of Essence that can’t help feeling that somehow, there’s something wrong with her.
I’ve been talking with a lot of people like Essence, recently. These are well-educated, skilled, experienced people who have been thrown out of work for what their former employers euphemistically call “structural reasons”.
These so-called structural reasons are plain: Large numbers of businesses are experimenting with new ways to make money for their investors while employing fewer people. In the short-term, this tactic looks good. With labor costs dramatically reduced, profits go up, and executives receive ample economic rewards. Business moves on, coasting on the residual value of the hard work contributed by people who have now been left to fend for themselves, competing for a smaller number of jobs.
No one can predict the long-term impact of this strategic shift to AI-first business, because there is no adequate precedent to compare it to. What’s happening right now, however, is that a lot of people are out of work, and tragically, they are blaming themselves as individuals for this macroeconomic trend that they did not cause. They feel shame for being out of work, even though it’s not their fault.
It's not fair, but this is how emotion works. In a world of immense, impersonal forces, it’s easier for people to endure the feelings of guilt and shame than it is to feel out of control. Shame and guilt are no fun, but at least they allow us to hold on to the idea that we have power to determine the destiny of our own lives. If we believe that we have done something wrong, or that we have been not been worthwhile as individuals, we can also believe that a solution is available to us, something that we can do in private, without allowing other people to see our shame and guilt. We can improve ourselves, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, show some grit, and regain a life of dignity just by trying harder. If people accept that their jobs were eliminated because of massive changes in society, it can seem as if there is no solution possible.
Once again, though, we need to remember that no emotional perception provides a complete and accurate representation of reality. That’s what makes it helpful to cultivate a higher resolution of emotional granularity.
The more emotions we recognize within ourselves, the more cognitive tools of response we have to deal with external circumstances. A high level of emotional granularity provides us with alternatives to guilt and shame: Feelings like suspicion, outrage, and resolve. We might move through our disgruntled burnout, despair, and nihilism to become stubborn, surly, get our dudgeon up, and maybe even become rebellious in a feeling of common cause.
All of a sudden, there are large numbers of highly skilled, educated, and experienced white collar workers looking for something to do. What if they were able to shift their emotional perspective away from focusing on their individual feelings of inadequacy and toward a spirit of determination to join with others to address the large-scale problems that have caused them to lose their jobs?
The advent of generative artificial intelligence is an immense social problem, but it is affecting an immense number of people.
When we remain solitary in our emotions, we remain vulnerable. When we can find emotions that connect us to others enduring a similar sort of suffering, we have a new opportunity to build power together, to go beyond simply feeling pain and loss, and start to do something about it.
Cultivating emotional granularity can empower us. Remaining in a condition of coarse emotional awareness, on the other hand, can make it difficult to find solid footing from which to respond to the strange challenges of our time.
Next week, Stories of Emotional Granularity will depart from its typical format to consider one particular kind of trap that low emotional granularity makes us susceptible to: The siren song of AI.