PROTECTIVE WAYS TO AVOID SHAME

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Shame is a powerful affect that threatens a person's self-esteem. The feeling of shame can become unbearable at a conscious level, because the psyche chooses psychological defenses that can dull it.

A widely used protection against shame is rage. Some angry people see the world as a place where other people try to shame them. They are forced to spend most of their energy to defend themselves against an apparent attack. They have no time to enjoy life. Filled with rage, a person often succeeds in keeping their distance from others. Thus, he protects himself from shame. The cost of using this protection is the loss of contact with others. This can trigger a spiral of shame: when others avoid contact, the ashamed person feels that something is wrong with him, no one wants to deal with him. Feeling even more defective, the person becomes even more angry.

Negation is perhaps the most effective defense against any uncomfortable feeling or fact. The need to deny shame may be the only reason many people are not even aware of this feeling. The essence of denial is to keep the threatening feeling from being realized. Denial is especially effective with shame, as it threatens central identity. Few people are strong and confident enough to face the threat of their basic identity with ease; denial serves as its protection when it can be destroyed by shame.

Physical withdrawal is the most direct way to avoid the affect of shame. People can make attempts of "geographical escape", moving from city to city, moving from one organization to another. Each time a person gets a chance to start all over again - new acquaintances before suspicions arise can benefit him and "treat" him with respect and trust.

Physical grooming can be much more elegant than literal getaway. A person who avoids eye contact modulates the contact distance he can tolerate now. Likewise, a child who is spinning while the parent is scolding him, turning from side to side, adapts and tries to minimize the feeling of shame. Parents who, seeing such evasions and interpreting them as disobedience, demand: “When I talk to that one, look into my eyes,” significantly increase the child's shame, since now he is deprived of protection in the form of partial withdrawal.

Leaving may become habitual. When this happens, a person begins to run away from those aspects of life that are especially dangerous, from those aspects of it that threaten with shame. The ability to be aloof from other people develops. Some ashamed people are perceived as emotionally unavailable by friends and family, while in reality they are afraid to approach them due to fear of rejection and abandonment. They are convinced that others can see their shortcomings up close, and therefore they can only be safe if they distance themselves.

Invisibility is another way to fulfill the need to escape from shame. Ashamed people are accustomed to the fact that being seen means experiencing humiliation, in their attempts to protect themselves from such feelings, they come to the conclusion that the safest position for them is to be “invisible” Such people have the art of blending into the background. They simply refuse to draw attention to themselves, preferring life behind the scenes. These people have done everything to avoid attention, including cutting off all paths to receive positive attention, and thus their chances of gaining experience of self-pride are minimal. They remain confident that something is wrong with them and continue to lurk in the background.

Another defense against shame is to do everything flawlessly, i.e. perfectionism … Chronically ashamed people often experience an irrational fear of failure. This is because mistakes cannot be accepted by them as part of the daily life of normal people. Shame-sensitive people tend to interpret any failure, even a minor mistake, as proof of their failure and inferiority. Each mistake reminds a person of so many mistakes made in the past that his own defectiveness becomes obvious to him. A chronically ashamed person believes that there is no human place in him, that he is obliged to avoid relaxation so that no one can see his true essence. Such people cannot afford to be "average" because they do not accept the concept of "average"; whatever they can imagine is gorgeous or terrible. The ashamed perfectionist lives permanently with the fear of impending failure and subsequent shame.

Perfectionists have such a marginal ability to endure shame that they spend enormous amounts of energy avoiding it. The behavior of the ashamed perfectionist delays the onset of inner shame. Each of their success only intensifies the need for new success, so as not to feel like a “cheater”. The central problem is that the ashamed person considers himself incompetent.

The ashamed perfectionist may be only partially aware of the dynamics described above. When perfectionism is combined with denial, a person can only vaguely sense their deeply hidden weakness. He may consider his behavior to be correct and unable to understand that he lacks the ability to enjoy a less stressful existence.

The next way to avoid shame is to become arrogant.… Arrogance is the attempt of the ashamed person to exalt himself. The arrogant person maneuvers outwardly by projecting his shame in order to keep his sense of self-worth in an inflated state. He can despise everyone around him, looking at them as unworthy, weak and, in one way or another, flawed. He swells with his supposed prowess and talent. An arrogant deeply ashamed person found a way to feel good by transferring his own shame to the rest of the world, expecting others to treat him with great respect and even awe. The shame is so unbearable that it turns into shamelessness and shamelessness, behind which is hidden the very "roundabout shame", hiding behind a protective barrier of arrogance. An arrogant, ashamed person builds a wall between himself and other people, insisting that they only pay attention to this wall, and not to the real person behind it, who is deeply ashamed and weak. Such a person requires reverence, admiration and awe before his majestic person. Arrogance, combined with denial, provides a complete inability to realize the discrepancy between the built image and the real state of affairs.

Closely associated with arrogant defense defensive exhibitionism (lat. exhibeo - to exhibit, to show), however paradoxical it may seem. The person using this protection seems, in essence, shameless. Variants of such behavior range from too original attire and uttering "shocking" about oneself speeches to sexual promiscuity. What these options have in common is that the person ignores social rules about decency and modesty.

All children go through a period when they want to be the center of attention, but are afraid of being rejected and abandoned. Shame develops out of this tension between the need to be seen and the danger of being seen to be attacked. Exhibitionism resolves this conflict in a special way. A person on an unconscious level decides that he is safe only by being in the spotlight. His central fear becomes ignorance of others, and therefore he does everything possible to be constantly in sight. Bogged down in a narcissistic quagmire, he is unable to find another place for himself, if this place is not the center of the universe.