MessageThankyou Anne Marie,
your post reminds me to clarirfy. I am
not saying that to be humble that we need to feel ashamed all the time. I am
simply saying that humility is a natural consequence of a healthy relationship
with shame.
I once had a client who would either go into rage when shamed or become
depressed for a week and take to his bed oversleeping. When the latter happened
it was extremely diffficult for him to even remember the trigger of this toxic
shame. Once he identified the trigger he could deal with that trigger and with
support he could deal with the shame. He would often recover from days of
depression right in front of me in the therapy session.
Later this client began to develop healthy responses to shame:
One day he was driving with his 2 year old son as a passenger. He got
righteously angry at the inconsiderate driving of another driver and began
shouting vigorously, even though the situation had resolved. This upset his
little son who began crying. This shamed my client. The shame took all the wind
out of his anger. He was then able to redirect his energy to calming his son.
On another occasion he was very happy and playful when his wife came home from
work. She was not in a good mood and accused him of trying to annoy her. Again
the shame took the wind out of him. He withdrew for a few minutes and then
returned to his wife and stated calmly that he hadn't been trying to annoy her,
In fact he was in a good and playful mood. She then was able to agree that she
had returned home in a rotten mood. Shame not only helped him to come up with a
good response in terms of content, but also in terms of a calm tone of voice
and in terms of timing i.e. It made him wait.
On both of these occasions a healthy response to shame allowed my client to bow
to the fate of the moment and to respond skilfully. This is how humility can
arise spontaneously out of a healthy response to shame.
hasta la vista
Chris Walsh
An Australian Constellation Website:
www.constellationflow.com
----- Original Message -----
From: Anne Marie Field
To: ConstellationTalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, 2 June 2004 10:04 PM
Subject: RE: [ConstellationTalk] Forgiving versus Bowing
Dear Chris and Sarah,
Having read both posts and also Donald Nathanson's works, I understood what
what you (Chris) were saying in making the distinction about toxic shame and
for want of a better descriptor, " clean " shame. My issue is more with the
term humility. Does it not mean from it's root, feet on the ground or grounded
in reality or knowing ones strengths and limitations? Maybe that is associated
with shame as described by Nathanson. The head dropping and eyes lowering of
the infant when he first sees and recognises his own image in the mirror. The
shame is meant to be about a recognition of himself as seen by others, and of
whihc until the first moment he recognises himself he was not aware. Maybe
humility is that too. A kind of self conscious recognition of or limitaions
especially as perceived by others.I suppose in the case of the constellations
you speak about the bowing may signify both????? I do not really get how it
signifies humility though. As you point out Chris common usage of the word
shame is toxic shame. Is that not so true about all the so-called negative
emotions? Does it not stem from the Descartian error to which Domasio refers?
Regards
Anne Marie
-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Walsh [mailto:chrisjwalsh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] ;
Sent: Tuesday, 1 June 2004 7:25 PM
To: ConstellationTalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ConstellationTalk] Forgiving versus Bowing
Dear Sarah,
the way you talk about shame suggests you are
talking about toxic shame. ("she has been .... ignored, scrubbed out, deleted")
That is common usage, but it removes us from the biology of the emotion. It
creates an articificial boundary between shame, discernment and humility. That
artificial boundary then actually keeps us bound in toxic shame, by not
allowing us to take what is good and useful from it. In fact our concept of
shame is so embedded in toxicity that it is actually painful and shameful for
most of us to admit that we feel ashamed or even embarrassed about something.
That means that much of the time our shame remains outside of our awareness,
which makes it even more difficult to deal with. That is a terrible position as
toxic shame is debilitating.
I believe that the understanding of shame is the key to discovering genuine
humility and with that the ability to fully receive support when it is offered.
This includes the ability to fully receive the gift of our life from our
parents. It is can free us from the elements of toxic shame that most of us
have embedded in our personalities, at least to some degree.
The understanding I present here is based on the works of Sylvan Tomkins
and Donald Nathanson. They describe the biology of emotions which can be
observed in preverbal infants. These early emotional responses, which they call
"affects" include anger, fear, distress, joy, excitement, disgust, surprise and
shame. They are all brief like Hellinger's primary emotions and they all have
recognisable biological responses. They all have biological survival value. So
to recapitulate my prior post:
Shame arises when there is an interruption to something that interests or
excites us. Remember the sense of deflation when you mistime trying to join in
an interesting conversation. That feeling is what I am talking about here. It
has the survival value of forcing us to withdraw our energy and then hopefully
to reassess the situation skilfully.
So shame has recognizable physical manifestations, some of which we can see
when they appear both in constellations and in life in general. Most obviously
when we are in the grip of shame we slump our head and shoulders and find it
difficult to make eye contact. This slumping is caused by an involuntary loss
of muscle tone. This same loss of tone makes us uncoordinated and clumsy. Often
we go red in the face. All these physical components can be observed in
infants.
Also our thought processes become foggy. Donald Nathanson calls this
cognitive shock. We usually feel like we want to disappear down a hole as
opposed to the desire to run away that can occur with the emotion of fear.
These cognitive components are reported consistently by adults. It is easy to
see how these biological responses put a break on our interest. One way shame
becomes toxic, is the shame compounds itself when we feel inadequate because of
the physical clumsiness and the inability to think. Realising we are in the
grip of shame is one way out of this downward spiral.
Sometimes we can elicit the emotions of anger or contempt in ourselves, as
a way of reenergizing ourselves and resisting surrendering to the shame. This
makes us feel less vulnerable but leave us with a lot of tension in our bodies,
especially around the jaw and back of the neck. It also stops the primary
emotion of shame from resolving naturally.
So shame is an unpleasant emotion. It makes us smaller. It makes us bow.
It makes us withdraw energy from something that we may have been overexcited
about. In relation to the recent discussion about forgiveness, we may be
overexcited about looking after our parents or with the false pride that fills
us when we forgive our parents from a position of arrogance. So when we have a
healthy relationship with shame it helps us to slow down when we are
overexcited, it helps us to be more skilful and it helps us to be appropriately
humble.
hasta la vista
Chris Walsh
An Australian Constellation Website:
www.constellationflow.com
----- Original Message -----
From: Sarah Moore
To: ConstellationTalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Tuesday, 1 June 2004 9:47 AM
Subject: Re: [ConstellationTalk] Forgiving versus Bowing
dear chris,
not sure i totally agree with you about your definition of shame here,
although a lot of what you say about it from this definition rings true adn
wise.
for me i understand shame as occurring when there is a percieved ignoring
of the human subjectivity of the person. as a subject a languaged living
breathing subject he or she has been (in 'objective' reality or in 'subjective'
perception (psychological reality)) ignored, scrubbed out, deleted. it may have
survival value in that it is percieved as threatening to the very existence of
the subject and therefore cause so much psychological pain that efforts to
reestablish being are made with varying success.
i feel this is different here from what you describe occurs with bowing
to one's elders or those that precede one in a lineage. far from inducing an
experience which threaten's to wipe out the subject, it affirms through
language as well as through bodily action, his or her place his or her
subjectivity and humanity within the love lineage of the family or system. it
actually contributes to subjectivity rather than detractiing from it. humility
thus is not shame, humility acknowledges other's and ourselves in relation to
them, in love and in place within the family. humility is inclusive of our
humanity as well as of others. hence it is very different imho from shame.
perhaps semantics but i think there is an important distinction here
between what is life and living affirming (humbleness) versus what is life and
living squashing (shame). between what is protective and enhancing of our
subjectivity and place in the world and what is annihalating and dismissive of
it.
best regards to you chris and thanks for the discussion on an important
point. i'm not trying to argue for the sake of it with you over words and
meanings , i feel this is quite vital distinctions here. so please forgive me
if i disagree with you slightly, just on some language rather than the overall
gist of your meaning and intent, which i do indeed agree with.
love to all
sarah
Chris Walsh wrote:
Recently there was a discussion about forgiveness that helped me to
understand this important and difficult issue a little better. Most
contributors agreed that when someone says "I forgive" from a position of
feeling morally superior it is not helpful. As Otteline Lamet pointed out this
is often an attempt to avoid unpleasant feelings, such as rage and deep hurt.
I am very interested in the role of shame in this process. I assume
that Otteline might include shame, among other things, under the heading of the
deep hurt which she states that people are often trying to avoid feeling when
they forgive. This has made me think about how shame is related to the bowing
we often see in constellations. These are some of my initial thoughts on the
subject. I am sure it can be explored much further.
To make myself clear here, I am not talking about the toxic shame that
is a secondary emotion and paralyses people. Rather I am talking about the much
briefer primary emotion. Shame like guilt is not really about being morally
good or bad. It seems this way, because like guilt, shame is used as a means of
socially controlling people's behaviour. In fact shame arises when there is an
interruption to something that interests or excites us. Remember the sense of
deflation when you mistime trying to join in an interesting conversation. That
feeling is what I am talking about here. It has the survival value of forcing
us to withdraw our energy and then hopefully to reassess the situation
skilfully. When it is mild, it feels like discretion. When it is severe it
feels like disgrace. When it is part of a complicated secondary emotion it can
become positively toxic
A key step in dealing with difficulties with parents is the one of
acknowledging parents' fates and maybe bowing in respect to that fate. That
puts parents' behaviour in context. Then we can become aware of the real
forces, the entanglements, that drive our blind love in these situations. This
forgiving in a state of blind love may have been the best we could do until
now. Nonetheless, we realise that our attempt to carry our parents' pain and
fate has really been misguided and inflated. So we feel embarrassed or ashamed.
We become humble So our heads spontaneously start to bow. This is genuine
humility not the humility that any intelligent person can fake if they want to.
Sometimes we can see a bow spontaneously beginning like this in a
representative in a constellation.
As we accept the shame and surrender to it, we can become open to
receiving support. It is then the tender connection with another human being
that allows us to rise out of the bow and out of the shame and reengage with
the world, & with ourselves in a new way. So then the shame has done the job
that it has meant to do. We have now become disentangled from the toxic dance
of blind love. Shame/humility has created space for grace to enter, for love to
enter and for life itself to enter.
hasta la vista
Chris Walsh
An Australian Constellation Website:
www.constellationflow.com
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