PHENOMENOLOGY OF SHAME

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

With shame, a person's entire consciousness is filled by himself. A person is aware of only himself or only those features that seem to him at the moment inadequate, unworthy, as if something that he was deeply hiding from the eyes of other people suddenly appeared on public display. A person seized with shame confuses words, makes incorrect and ridiculous movements.

A person who experiences shame feels like a despised object that looks like a laughing stock. He feels helpless, inadequate, inability and inability to soberly assess the situation. Shame can provoke sadness, anger, tears and blush on the face, which in turn will only increase shame.

In various descriptions, experiences of shame draw attention to the same characteristics of this emotion. Shame is accompanied by an acute and painful experience of awareness of one's own self and individual features of one's own self, while a person does not think that he has done something bad or wrong, but that he himself is bad and useless. A person seems to himself small, helpless, constrained, naked, stupid, worthless, etc.

A person who is ashamed cannot express their feelings in words. Later, he will find the necessary words and will begin to imagine over and over again what he might have said at the moment when shame left him speechless. Shame makes a person want to hide and run away, or lash out at the one who witnessed his shame.

Phenomenologically, shame is something like an explosion on the contrary, or inwardly, which paralyzes and makes one freeze. Shame is combined with the desire to hide, to "sink into the ground." The phenomenology of shame also contains the temptation to give up one's own identity in order to secure acceptance on the part of the other.

Shame is the deepest and most primitive form of negative self-perception. It is shame that disturbs a person's self-identification, prevents the establishment of contacts with other people, promotes the disintegration of the psyche and plays a central role in the feeling of helplessness. In addition, shame is seen as a key factor that does not allow a person to get out of a state of regression.

A person who experiences shame dreams of hiding in a deep cave and dying, or wanting to be swallowed up by the earth. In a sense, such a person lives with the feeling that the earth has already swallowed him, and he himself has long been “dead,” “frozen,” “immobilized,” unable to function normally and is completely dissociated from his usual self-perception.

Shame can manifest itself in various forms as an inferiority complex, as well as feelings of humiliation and masochism.

Shame is a mandatory symptom of all traumatic disorders and is inextricably linked to trauma, dissociation, and disorganized attachment.

Shame is also dealt with in two different forms. Shame, aimed at social adaptation, and shame, necessary to maintain the integrity of the individual. The following example demonstrates two forms of shame. Being in a team, a person may be afraid to express his opinion, which differs from the opinion of the majority, since it suggests that he may be ridiculed or not taken seriously by his arguments. Having left this collective, left alone with himself, a person can feel an intense feeling of shame for being cowardly and unable to defend his opinion.

In some cases, the person who is ashamed begins to feel ashamed for the shame itself, and then get angry at their own shame. Emotions of this kind feed on themselves.

Excessive shame in a child can be caused by abuse, humiliation and cruelty from others. A child who no one cares about begins to believe that his needs are shameful (for example, it is embarrassing to want to get the attention of others). The shame of a child victim of abuse transforms over time into intense, destructive feelings of humiliation, self-loathing and self-loathing.