Once upon a time, if you observed certain people in the banking world – I’m not talking here about well-known people – you might notice a swagger about them, a showing-off when things were going well. If you observed the same people as everything was crashing down, you would notice that they seemed physically diminished, that they no longer swaggered and were no longer loud.
Some of this was down to testosterone. Wins boost testosterone and defeats lower it. But this article isn’t really about testosterone, it’s about shame. What these men – and the ones I’m talking about were almost all men – were experiencing was shame.
Shame
One aspect of shame is that you want to hide away and not be seen by anybody. You’ve often heard people saying that they wished the ground would swallow them up. Probably there have been occasions when you felt that way yourself.
(Let me reassure you, by the way, that this is not another article about the banking and financial crisis: a topic which, if you’re like me, you don’t especially want to know anything more about.)
Shame is something that we all know about, and it strikes me that this is why we are so afraid of failure in our culture. In Ireland, for a very long time, failure has been equated with shame. It suggests that you tried to “get above yourself” and you have been brought down to earth.
Status symbols
But this isn’t only about business. Many of us, I think, build our lives around the avoidance of the experience of shame, even when we don’t realise that’s what we’re doing. Some people like status symbols, because toys are fun and they can afford them.
Other people need status symbols to cover up their sense of inadequacy, because that sense of inadequacy connects with shame and shame is the thing they desperately want to avoid experiencing.
I know that at my very core I’m very afraid of shame. It’s something all children experience whenever they are called out for misbehaviour, and for that reason I think we all have the experience of shame.
In some, shame is linked to perfectionism. You can either be perfect or you can be ashamed. In others, it’s linked to procrastination: you just don’t want to approach a task that might lead to failure and the experience of your own shame.
It is as though we have inside us a pool of shame that sits there throughout our lives from whenever it is we first experienced it. We fear dipping into that pool of shame, and perhaps we fear never getting out of it.
Hide away
Some people hide away because they can feel their shame seeping into them. Sometimes you can actually recognise this in their posture as they walk along, trying not to be seen.
Other people, as I suggested, find ways to cover it up. My way is to procrastinate about the very things that might cause me, if I failed, to contact my own sense of shame.
As to the question what can you do about it, I don’t really have a very clear answer. In Cognitive Behavioural Therapy you could learn to dispute the thoughts that surround shame: for example, the irrational thought that I must impress everybody who is important to me and if I don’t then I am useless. But actually, I think a certain level of shame remains and defies our attempts to argue it away.
The best I can come up with, and I often find it helpful, is simply to be aware of the ways in which shame, or the fear of it – which I experience as a fear of failure – influences my everyday life. And, being aware of it, at least I have the option not to act in accordance with it.
But the fear of shame remains, nonetheless. And in a world in which we love to shame others, including those bankers, we might remember that what we may really be trying to do is to pass off our own shame onto someone else.
pomorain@yahoo.com
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness reminder is free by email