Hiding Shame Based Interactions

Shame gets handed around like a tool. People reach for it when they want someone to bend to their wishes, and it tends to work because of where the reaction lives. Shame fires from the gut. It can slip past the part of your brain that would otherwise step in with a little common sense, which leaves you without the footing to ask what actually set the feeling off. So you don't just feel bad. You feel awful, and guilty on top of it, as if the two words 'shame on you' were meant for you all along.

Victims of abuse know this feeling well. It's often the first thing they carry, and it does something strange: it keeps the anger from pointing where it belongs, at the person who caused the harm. That same shame is usually why they stay quiet. And it doesn't fade on its own. Shame settles in and stays put. About the only thing that moves it is the effort to forget, which is its own kind of burial.

That's the reason you'll hear people say they'd rather not bring it up. They've spent years trying to push it down, and speaking about it feels like an invitation for the whole thing to come back. The situation gets stranger when there were witnesses. Someone else may hold a fragment of what happened, enough to wonder if their own memory is playing tricks, because the person it happened to won't say a word when asked.

Picture the memory being, 'Don't hit him, hit me.' You were in the room, so you have a fair guess about who did the hitting. As the one who remembers, you start to feel a little unhinged, because you seem to be the only person willing to hold onto it. The reply you get is some version of, 'I don't like to think about things like that anymore.' Or, 'I try to forget it.' Or, 'I don't want to bring it back.'

That's what shame can do to a mind. Dredging it up can make the old pain return, the body's version and the heart's version both. And once a person senses that telling the truth might get them shamed again, they lock it away from anyone who might do the shaming.

The sexual abuse cases involving well-known names have pulled a lot of this back into daylight. I can say now that I am a victim of sexual abuse, even if I choose to keep the particulars to myself, because I wasn't the one who did anything wrong. The shame belongs to the abuser, not to me and not to anyone else standing in the same place. That logic still breaks down in parts of the world where law and religion turn it upside down, under something like Muslim Sharia rulings, where it is the raped woman who ends up killed and not the man who raped her.

Related