IN DEFENCE OF SHAME – A VIEW

Tanveer Ahmed is a psychologist, author and columnist for the Australian Financial Review.  In his new book, In Defence of Shame, Dr Tanveer Ahmed looks at the history and contemporary rise of shame and its overlap with group identity morality and mental health. His arguments pose new perspectives for today’s more secularist Western societies. Monica Doumit is the Director, Public Affairs and Engagement for the Archdiocese of Sydney and a columnist with The Catholic Weekly. On Wednesday 30 September 2020, The Sydney Institute heard two views on the place of shame in a modern world – those views were offered by Monica Doumit and Tanveer Ahmed. Their papers were followed by a discussion with Gerard Henderson.

IN DEFENCE OF SHAME – A VIEW

TANVEER AHMED

The term #Covidiot emerged online first as a hashtag. It has since been used thousands of times to criticise behaviour deemed errant, a marker of the rise of pandemic shaming.

Pandemic shaming has been used to expose drunk spring breakers flouting advice in America to those attending a large, Stereophonic concert in Manchester. Public officials have been forced to resign after not living up to their own advice, including the Chief Medical Officer of Scotland and NSW Minister Don Harwin exposed holidaying at his beach house in Australia.

Even wayward Rugby league players, well known for scandals involving sex or violence, were termed Covidiots on the front page of the Sydney’s Daily Telegraph after flouting health protocols.

While sidelined critics might argue tyranny describes the restrictions imposed by public health authorities, the priorities of such officials currently hold sway. Suddenly the acts of social distancing and appropriate hygiene have fallen into the realm of public law and order. Police prosecute those walking too closely or in excessively large groups. The act of targeted coughing is now a form of assault.

Epidemics have changed the course of history by reshaping our worlds, both physical and existential. Nothing compares to staring bald faced at our mortality when it comes to raising moral and philosophical issues.

Shame’s diffuse re-emergence in recent decades is a function of political tribalism reinforced by online information flows. Shame is a proxy for our relationship to groups, a moral language and with primitive emotions. It implies transgressions where we ascribe fault not just to an act, but also to the self, what is known in psychology as a global attribution.

The Left focused on those who transgressed boundaries of political correctness whereas the Right preferred targets like welfare fraud. Public health advocates had a greater tolerance for fat shaming or ostracising smokers. Meanwhile shaming associated with sexuality, its original iteration in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, became increasingly rare.

Discussions around shame indicate a yearning for a moral language stripped bare from the decline of religion. We remain morally inarticulate and existential despair has been poached by the more medicalised language of mental health. The elevation of positivity has further stigmatised emotions like shame. Psychological studies have found our culture fosters an unhealthy inability to tolerate negative emotions like anger, disgust or shame contributing to a growth in disorders like self harm.

From a mental health point of view, there is an added urgency, being in the background of both the health and economic crises we face. Despite being one of the wealthiest countries Australia still has the second highest rate of anti-depressant prescription after Iceland. The coronavirus has acted to prick a moment in Western civilisation which Israeli historian Yuval Harari calls a combination of incredible prosperity combined with a lack of purpose.

While there will undoubtedly be a rise in psychological ailments in the face of economic despair, many of my patients with anxiety disorders have not deteriorated. Their distress is no longer individualised but now shared. The socially anxious are also spared the performative strains of modern life in a service economy. These vary from the heightened focus on self presentation in the workplace to the scrutiny of chance encounters.

Just as coronavirus exposes the different fault lines and weaknesses of each society it invisibly penetrates, it has functioned as something of an exclamation mark upon a half century of social and economic liberalism. If Brexit and Trump were initial portents, an epidemic that has stymied individual autonomy has potentially slammed a historical door. Covid-19 in its uncaring destruction has further highlighted Douglas Murray’s lament about modern liberalism and “the feeling that the story has run out”.

The language of individual rights are being smashed by the priorities of public health, which is dependent upon mutual obligation. Just as many national insurance programs received momentum after the Spanish flu, the emotional disconnection and dilution of group ties preceding the crisis may receive a much needed tonic. The values of introspection, family, community and renewed faith are likely to gain traction.

Within this context of a more united resistance against a collective threat, the usefulness of a gentle shame is being highlighted. This is especially true in a multicultural society where a focus on expressive individualism and self esteem will not translate for many ethnic groups.

According to anthropologist David Jordan shame in Chinese cultures “is the ability to take delight in the performance of one’s duty”. Given Chinese and Indians dominate new migrants over the past decade, the stigmatisation of shame has implications for education and the law. Another example is domestic violence, which in ethnic communities has considerable overlaps with maintaining perceived honour. Alcohol and social disadvantage are stronger correlates in other demographics.

But recent outbreaks of pandemic shaming also expose the limitations. There is a tension between appropriate enforcement of acceptable behaviours to the trashing of individual dignity with no paths to forgiveness. This has been especially pronounced in the past decade through online shaming, where a host of figures both prominent and otherwise have been cancelled due to some kind of inappropriate action.

Healthy shaming involves a brief period of stigma combined with an associated ritual of re-integration. This is exactly what happens in group therapies for addiction or dieting, but cancel culture is narrowly about retribution. The combination of online activism and permanent marks on the internet, shame’s digital shadow, also hamper the path of reintegration.

When discussing the world of social media, religious leaders have raised the prospect that without the concept of sin, our society lacks the structure to allow for forgiveness. The alternative is ostracism and exile without a route for reunion. Even groups such as those for weight loss or drug addiction contain aspects that incorporate Christian concepts of forgiveness.

Our belief in the role of guilt as a superior emotion to regulate transgression is also under threat with the declining role of Christianity’s moral axis of sin and redemption. Shame can be scaled which can be significant when behaviours are unacceptable but still within the law, especially when it comes to corporations or governments which are not capable of feeling guilt.

Western societies have underplayed the role of shame. Its utility has been deemed less relevant in a social milieu of greater diversity and urban anonymity. Shame requires an audience and a shared morality, something at odds with a multicultural society. We are ashamed of shame, portrayed instead as the inner demon responsible for a range of psychopathology.

Yet poorly understood shame is an unnamed undercurrent that leads people to avoidance and isolation. The emotion hides in plain sight while we pretend we have superseded it. As Salman Rushdie writes: “Dear Reader, shame is not the exclusive property of the East.”

 What we often call social anxiety is steeped in shame, but one coloured by perceived failures in our media rich meritocracy that breeds inadequacy. In the language of evolutionary psychology, we live an environment that encourages us into acts of social submission instead of grasping towards invitations of affiliation. Symptoms of emotional distress are often signals with regards to our perceived status within groups and hierarchies, many of which are now imagined online.

Our current circumstances are challenging us to renew our inner lives, just as we strive to avoid the threat to our physical bodies. The rise in the discussion of mental health in recent decades corresponds with a decline in a moral, metaphysical language. We increasingly lack a language for suffering and adversity.

Pandemic shaming is likely to be limited to this period whereby coronavirus is the dominant force shaping our lives. But it’s re-emergence is a pointer that shame has never really left, but just lurked with alternative names or iterations.

A better understanding of shame and a focus on its reintegrative potential offers promise to enliven our emotional selves.

In the wake of a shared threat to our species, we are bonded together in a mutual dread, imagining the implications for a better future. It is time for a kind of aggressive friendship to satisfy our longing for a richer collective, a lurch to greater affiliation.

FOLLOWING TANVEER AHMED AND MONICA DOUMIT’S PAPERS ON SHAME, ON WEDNESDAY 30 SEPTEMBER 2020, THERE WAS A DISCUSSION WITH SYDNEY INSTITUTE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR GERARD HENDERSON

Gerard Henderson: Well, thanks Tanveer and thanks Monica. So, now, a few personal questions. To you, Tanveer, have you ever felt shame?

Tanveer Ahmed: All the time. Regularly, particularly growing up. I write about this, in a culture sense. As a kid, I had to grab my ears and sit back up and down whenever I did something wrong. Specific rituals of shame. Shame was a natural part of how we were disciplined. I also write about my public transgressions. Such as in my journalistic life, when I was accused of plagiarism.

And that’s an interesting example of modern shame. It felt like a clumsy error at a personal level; publicly it had quite variable interpretations. There’s a modern marker, the digital marker of shame. Even though, personally, you’ve overcome it, and on many levels you feel like you’ve overcome it, there’s a digital poke of shame that keeps coming back. That’s quite a new element. And that’s part of why this book has an extra power.

Arguably, initially I didn’t necessarily incorporate the personal dimension. But when the manuscript was being shopped around a little, such as for extracts in Good Weekend and with publicist material there were suggestions for the book to incorporate more personal stuff. It made it stronger. As a psychiatrist, dealing with emotional disorders, this was an interesting angle of professional interest.

I have also looked at the cultural angle, the difference between a shame based society and a guilt based one. Western societies are some of the few societies globally that would see themselves as primarily guilt based. Most societies in the world are probably more shame based in the sense that they’re more collectivist cultures. And I come very much from that angle. Then, obviously in a fairly minor way, I’ve also experienced shame in the public realm. The combination of that gives me a special access to this topic.

Gerard Henderson: You may or may not recall that when you got into trouble with your plagiarism allegation, you rang me and asked me for advice. My advice was to go away for a bit and come back. It would be okay. But you didn’t go away, you kept going.

Tanveer Ahmed: That’s a marker that it just felt like a clumsy error to me. I never felt that deep sense of shame that I’d made a big plan to transgress. That’s what kept a really strong drive in me. With humiliation or shame, it can go either way. You can go into hiding or it can be a big motivator. With me, it’s always been a big motivator.

Gerard Henderson: Now with you, Monica, we’ll ask a slightly different question. How much guilt have you felt? Has there ever been a time you haven’t felt guilt?

Monica Doumit: I feel guilty all the time. I have the perfect storm of a migrant family background, life with Catholic guilt and being a woman. I don’t know any woman who doesn’t feel guilty about pretty much everything – being a bad friend, sister, mother, wife, whatever it is. I get the trifecta.

Gerard Henderson: Now you mentioned Pope Francis and how he had a good word to say about shame, that it’s a virtue. But he may be transgressing here, because in Pope Gregory’s seven virtues, shame is not one of them. Is this more heresy from a Jesuit pope? How do you explain all this?

Monica Doumit: Often, there’s a fair bit lost in translation from the Holy Father. I always say that Pope Francis has a tendency to preach to the choir, while most people think that’s a waste of time. Pope Francis is less interested in speaking to the world, if we categorise the world as outside the church. He’s trying to preach solely to the people in the pews. In reading some of his comments, he often tries a different tack. There’s not the heresy in what he says that some people accuse him of.

Tanveer Ahmed: Jumping in from what Monica was saying, Gerard, women are more likely to feel an internalised version of shame and are much more likely to be self-critical. From a parenting point of view, the same sex parent is far more likely to use shame as a parent on the same sex child. Men are far more likely to shame their sons and vice versa with women and their daughters. That’s an interesting trend. There’s certainly a view – a broader argument in mental health – that men are more likely to externalise all manner of distress. Shame is often externalised for males in terms of the violence or aggression. So that’s quite a difference from a gender point of view.

Gerard Henderson: Monica, you said you might do a book in defence of confession and made some interesting comments about that. You are obviously talking about confession in a religious sense, a Christian sense, specifically a Catholic sense. But what about in a secular sense? Is a psychiatrist so much different from a confessor?

Tanveer Ahmed: I think there’s lots of overlaps. Many psychiatrists or psychologists would see themselves, to some extent, as the modern secular priests. Realistically, the majority of the population, who have life problems, are more likely to go to a psychologist or psychiatrist or their GP or a social worker because they would see it in secular terms. They would see their problems as those from living in secular terms and look for help in that way.

The reality is, and this is part of the reason for the book, shame has a moral dimension. There’s a whole set of mental health disorders that will present in secular terms. A patient will say he/she has a trauma disorder or an anxiety disorder. But when you chip away, there’s a moral dimension to his/her distress. With trauma disorders, shame is often about social subordination. Lots of anxiety disorders are about not adequately handling society’s perceived identities and meritocracy. Shame, historically, was about not fulfilling one’s duty. But, increasingly, in our society, it’s often about feeling unlovable for various reasons. That’s a shift.

The other aspect of shame, in dealing with a individual and the secular confession phenomenon is how do we bring a ritual language to the people I’m seeing. I now often see people with very low levels of education talking in technical medical terms. They’ll say, “I have a borderline personality disorder.” And so forth. Others have almost no metaphysical or moral terms to describe their experiences. That’s a big gap and something that would interest Monica. And, often, I try to shift people away from the language of psychology because I feel it limits their recovery.

The other aspect of this, is when some patients present in this secular confessional approach, it does not suit all groups. If you’re from a more collectivist type of society, or if you’re from a more shame honour type group, it’s very hard to absolve people or help them recover if they’re just seen as individuals. You have to think of how to involve the group. Sometimes that involves various rituals. A simple way is to bring in the family, organise a family therapy. But sometimes it needs more than that. Sometimes it needs involvement by the local priest or the imam. I’ve had patients, particularly in south west Sydney around Bankstown, where they’ve had to have counselling parallel with an African kind of ritual.

Gerard Henderson: So, the model of religious confession, while it has overlaps, it arguably also has some limitations. This will be interesting for Monica. With confession, does it incorporate the congregation? It probably does.

Monica Doumit: The priest, hearing the confession, stands there in the name of Christ, and has that authority and the ability to restore that relationship, not only with God, but with the community. Because the priest is seen as a community representative there is that communal aspect, even in the private confession. I wanted to ask Tanveer about people not having a moral language to deal with their distress. How do you, in an obviously secular clinical setting, try to point them towards a moral language if that’s of assistance, while keeping it secular?

Tanveer Ahmed: For several years, I once was the only fly in/ fly out psychiatrist at Armidale in regional New South Wales. This was seven or eight years ago when I didn’t qualify as psychiatrist. One of my first patients had a letter from his GP which said nothing of importance. When I asked the man what his problem was he said he kept having affairs. Right. I thought it was ridiculous that I had been asked to see him. But then I looked into his history and saw the overlap. In reality, this guy was extremely impulsive. Probably he wasn’t at the level of an outright illness. Clearly, there was a moral dimension. But I saw there was a mix where I was able to improve his impulse control a little. We put him on mood stabilisers, so he became slightly less impulsive. It did help him in the longer term. At the same time, I had to say this is not a medical problem. A lot of people come to psychologists and psychiatrists to absolve themselves of responsibility. In cases, say, like ADHD where a lot of the problem is a family dynamic or bad parenting or bad environment.

Monica Doumit: You medicalise a moral problem.

Tanveer Ahmed: Exactly. You medicalise a moral problem. But often it helps too. People come in from a totally messy family, messy parenting, and you have sympathy for them, you want to help them. On one level, you’re trying to get them to take responsibility and you can do that. But you have to be careful not to entrench their lack of responsibility; it’s a fine balance.

Gerard Henderson: Monica, tell us about absolution. You mentioned people of a certain generation being are familiar with young Catholic children who sort of made up sins in order to get the sacrament. But what about the real thing? We know if you go to a psychiatrist, you talk to someone like Tanveer, you’ll get some advice, and you may come away with some medication like the person Tanveer mentioned in Armidale. What do you come away with after a Christian absolution?

Monica Doumit: Well, the first is that – absolution.

Gerard Henderson: But what’s it feel like?

Monica Doumit: What’s it feel like? Like a complete weight is lifted off you. I guess, particularly in talking about shame, you carry around these feelings of being a terrible person – not only did I do the wrong thing, I’m a bad person, I am unlovable. I need to hide. So, when you walk in, you’re actually able to be completely upfront about that, not try to put responsibility on anybody else. You put your hand up and own it. So you walk out feeling as if a weight has been lifted off your shoulders.

Gerard Henderson: And you don’t need medication?

Monica Doumit: You don’t need medication. I do want to say, though, I’m not proposing confession as a complete alternative medication. Obviously, you don’t want people to entrench their bad behaviour by medicalising it. By the same token, you don’t want to say confession is a cure for every type of mental illness. I would say you need both.

Gerard Henderson: We’ve talked about the concept of being unlovable. I must say it was a joke, but when I was at school many, many years ago, we had a teacher who had a sense of humour and who was not a priest. He was a secular teacher. He told the class that a parent had come up to him to speak about young Jimmy and said Jimmy had an inferiority complex. The teacher said “No, he doesn’t really. He’s just inferior.” Now, are there people who are unlovable? For whom it wouldn’t do any good for them to go to a psychiatrist or a priest. If you walked in unlovable, might you also come out unlovable?

Tanveer Ahmed: Monica will be able to speak to this. As a psychiatrist, there’s a saying that if you don’t love them, you can’t help them. And that does overlap with Christian notions of dignity, of every person having a sort of innate dignity. An important theory in mental health treatment is that there are people who have never been loved and your job is to try and build a connection and make them feel like there’s some sort of regard for them. It’s essentially what mums do. It is called early life attachment. And that overlaps with notions of dignity, where our first sense of dignity is just being loved, the non-judgmental love from mum. So both priestly love and therapeutic love have overlaps. Our highest job, to some extent, is to love the unlovable to some extent. That can help them recover to some extent and they can form relationships again.

Gerard Henderson: Is that true in confession?

Monica Doumit: I would say the same is true in confession. But in confession, it’s not so much unlovable as unforgivable. Many people are horrified that anyone should discover knew how terrible they are. So, love is part of that. Confession is an affirmation that nobody is beyond redemption. There is absolutely nobody that is a lost cause, which I think works into the unlovable, but also into the unforgivable.

Gerard Henderson: As you know, in the Catholic Church, there used to be one-on-one confessions and then there was a kind of community confession with a section of the church going back to one-on-one confessions. Community confession, as one of our members pointed out to us, is not unlike the very secular organisation of Alcoholics Anonymous where people get an opportunity, at a meeting, to speak for no more than three minutes. I’ve been to one of the meetings when I was writing about an alcoholic. People seem to get great relief from telling their story over and over again, week after week, sometimes two or three times a week. Ross Fitzgerald, whom we had here when his book came out about being 50 years sober has mentioned this. So, what about Alcoholics Anonymous? Where does that fit in, when you make a sort of public declaration to your friends about how bad you were when you were on the grog?

Tanveer Ahmed: I think there are lots of overlaps with Christian things, such as forgiveness. And with the notion of original sin, arguably, there are innate aspects of humans that are irredeemable, or not necessarily under control, that need a degree of control. Doing this through a group, be it through a congregation or some other, is also important. That element of confession overlaps with shame, especially when it’s group facing with a reintegration of sorts. A lot of psychological treatments overlap with prayer. It is called cognitive behavioral therapy, where you are constantly challenging negative thoughts. Many aspects of group therapy, to some extent, and mental health treatments are the secularisation of certain religious rituals where you’re repeating the same thing, and in a group. It’s actions, that may have worked in a religious context, made secular.

Gerard Henderson: What’s the difference between doing this in a kind of communal way or doing it in an individual way?

Monica Doumit: In terms of the communal ritual, as it exists in the Catholic Church, there’s no individual confession. Being encouraged to silently renounce mistakes is different from actually articulating them aloud. There is a great merit in articulating sins or the shame that you’re feeling. In terms of Alcoholics Anonymous or that type of communal environment, there’s also an accountability. There are people there who will hold you to account and assist you in not falling back into the same pattern of behaviour. And knowing that with such regular group meetings, I’m going to have to go back there and share that I fell. A good motivator. It’s always important to have people who hold you accountable in whatever setting.

Gerard Henderson: You both mentioned social media. It does change the concept of shame and the specific concept of guilt, because to some extent, it might be forgiven, but it can never be forgotten. Even only two decades ago, a lot of past misdemeanors were forgotten because of time, unless someone came across an old newspaper clipping. But not anymore. That’s obviously a dramatic change. So how would it affect the way you treat people as distinct from how you might have treated them, say, even 10 years ago, when this is now much more manifest? How does it affect people that you’re dealing with in your situation? You might be forgiven by God but you’re not necessarily forgiven by the neighbour down the street.

Tanveer Ahmed: This is certainly a big part of my work. Obviously, there’s a generational component. It magnifies things. As I was saying, shame can be scaled, guilt can’t. It gives it both a negative and positive power. Bullying can move from the playground to online. It also normalies lots of psychopathology. It can normalise being a pedophile or a terrorist or a self-harmer. These raise all challenges.

Even though we view our society as individuals, when I see people, even the loneliest people, they exist in imagined groups. In their head, they’re still facing a group of some kind. It could be their boss that criticised them 10 years ago. It could be their aunt whom they don’t see anymore. We’re still relational beings. As Monica was saying, the group facing therapy is often more powerful than an individual facing therapy for a lot of people.

I do think, increasingly, the imagined groups people live in, particularly for younger people, are online, even if they’re not actually engaging terribly much online. It is how they imagine themselves. They’re often thinking, I’ll put this up and people will see this on Facebook or Instagram, whatever it is. They’ll vary from professional to neighbourhood but the groups people are facing, especially younger people and increasingly, are their online groups.

Gerard Henderson: From the point of view of forgiveness, can you be forgiven? Well, you can be forgiven by God, according to your faith. But how does that work if the neighbour down the street finds out what you did 35 years ago and holds it against you?

Monica Doumit: Well, that’s the thing. That’s a real challenge we face at the moment. We have to find a way to assist people with this new merciless, unforgiving culture that exists online. You can’t even turn it off. I speak to people and I’ll say just turn your phone off, if the argument is getting too bad on social media, just turn it off. But even if you’re not facing the group in person, they can still be having an argument without you present. We do need some type of ritual for restoration.

Tanveer Ahmed: Well that is happening in Europe. For example, Europe is about to enact a law giving a right to be forgotten, where you can get rid of links like that. With the neighbour, in a busy city you just don’t associate with them. There is the argument that shame doesn’t work that much anymore, potentially because we can just disassociate from groups. If I get excommunicated from the Bangladeshi community it’d be upsetting, but I’d just go off and join new groups. Previously, in a village or some such, there’ was no escape. You would be banished for all eternity. So, in that respect, you can escape. With online connection, you may escape on a day-to-day level but, say, going for a job, there’ll be all manner of areas where you can’t escape it.

Monica Doumit: Going for a job, the first thing that any employer does is Google you

Gerard Henderson: Just a final quick question. We’ll start off with you, Monica, and end up with Tanveer. You’ve both said something favourable about shame and guilt, probably restoring them a bit. Could we live without them?

Monica Doumit: We need to have something that identifies a moral standard and we need a moral language or something that identifies that a moral rule has been crossed. It is not enough to shame people for the sake of it, but because these types of things damage us. I once heard guilt described as like putting a hand on a hot stove. Feeling the guilt, that’s hurting me, I need to take my hand off. Guilt is an emotional acknowledgement of what I’m doing is hurting me. It’s also hurting others. We cannot do without them altogether because we shall continue to do things that either harm ourselves or harm the people around us.

Gerard Henderson: Tanveer. Can we live without them?

Tanveer Ahmed: No you can’t, really. It is hard to regulate people, because we’re social beings and we’re the most social beings of anything in the animal kingdom. Shame and guilt are the key ways we regulate social behaviour. Without shame, we end up becoming psychopaths and potentially kill each other without care. That would be a tough way to live.

Gerard Henderson: And there’d be no one to buy books. All the best withIn Defence of Shame, which is published by Connor Court in Brisbane. And thanks to you, Monica, and Tanveer. Well done.