The Art of Healing: Shame Is Less of a Problem than You Thought
Western culture has really sold us a bill of goods when it comes to our psychological health. Gordon Wheeler, PhD, who heads up the Esalen Institute, put it like this:
“Traditionally in the West, our understanding of self and relationship has come out of…the dominant paradigm of individualism as an underlying worldview and model of human nature...This model has roots that reach at least as far back as the Greeks, and…down to us in a consistent stream, through the Judeo-Christian tradition, Renaissance humanism, Enlightenment and 19th-century scientism, and on into our own century.”
Even in the post-Freudian era, we still suffer from believing in Freud’s view of what it means to be mentally healthy. Wheeler says, “If separateness is our basic nature…the highest realization of that nature, will be found in the developmental ideal of…maximum emotional independence from other people.” To Freud, the strong, independent self — a patriarchal ideal — was equivalent to a healed self.
Would we really agree that the pinnacle of human achievement is never to need anyone? Guess what? Our physical survival depends on other people. Three months before my oldest child was born, the New York Times reported on the neurochemical processes released by skin-to-skin contact. Studies demonstrated that simply being fed isn’t enough for premature infants. Given the same excellent care by the same competent carers in Neo-natal Intensive Care, preemies who are cuddled by *gasp — other humans!* — gain weight faster than infants who are left alone.
I’ll argue that it’s an insult to your former baby self to go around thinking you don’t need anyone. I also know that sugar isn’t healthy, but as Lorrie Moore once put it in a short story, one of the stages of grief “is Haagen-Dasz.” Just as we’re conditioned to comfort ourselves with food, we’re also conditioned to believe we should be able to go it alone.
People commonly say a lot of things that reflect the false notion that we aren’t intimately connected with others. It leads to a lot of harsh beliefs: “Talking about emotional needs is selfish.”
“Nothing Donald Trump says has anything to do with the fact that hate crimes have multiplied by a bazillion since 2016.”
“I’ll have time for self-care once I’ve done enough to fight global warming/fight social injustice/make sure my kids are launched in life/rescue my addicted friend/make a lot of money.”
“Does it really help your kids for you to be stressed all the time?” I ask
“Yeah,” sighs my made-up friend. “I‘m my own worst enemy. I really need to do better.”
Sure, it feels morally preferable to put too much responsibility on yourself than to refuse obvious responsibility when your Tweets cause other people to get beaten to a pulp. But right or wrong, neither approach is accurate. They aren’t who we are.
Here’s where SHAME comes in. According to Wheeler, shame is in our evolutionary makeup. In the Gestalt view, “who we are” is not a static, fixed thing. The Self isn’t a thing at all, but a process. We’re all “self-ing,” all the time, in interaction with other, well, humans. And shame isn’t something I carry internally, all my lonesome. The cring-ey, get-away-from-me feeling of shame has everything to do with social interaction. All of us carry shame because all of us, as we grew up, encountered parents/a school/a gang/a Kardashian who didn’t get it. Who didn’t get us.
Unfortunately, the English language has no words to accurately define what the self is. We have to resort to what Gordon Wheeler (who in his own writings is a prime culprit, which is why he’s so little read) calls “phenomonological jargon.” I’ve read lots about the term “inter-subjective” but if you stick a gun in my face, I probably can’t define it.
Fortunately, we have poets. Vietnamese Buddhist monk, poet, and activist Thich Nhat Hanh understands the problems with English. His term for human nature is “interbeing,” which is kind of sweet.
Even sweeter is his statement: “When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce.”
Links:
helenwmallon.com Contact: hmallon@navpoint.com
Gordon Wheeler in the Gestalt Review
The New York Times on Infants and Touch
