Who Says We Are Not Aware of Shame and Humiliation?

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Who Says We Are Not Aware

 of Shame and Humiliation?

"The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but that this humiliation is seen by everyone."
Milan Kundera as quoted by Hotch on “Criminal Minds”

The full quote appears to be “The basis of shame is not some personal mistake of ours, but the ignominy, the humiliation we feel that we must be what we are without any choice in the matter and that this humiliation is seen by everyone.”

Shame and humiliation are concepts that have become more prevalent in the psychological literature over the last twenty years. At the forefront of articulating their meaning and use have been those who work with the concepts of Silvan S. Tomkins and Donald Nathanson.

This short piece is the result of my in-depth use of these concepts in my work and study of Affect Psychology for several years and nascent ideas about how I see these ideas playing out in the culture, especially in the popular media.

The final impetus for this was an episode of a popular TV series called “Criminal Minds.”

This show revolves around a fictional FBI task force stationed at Quantico Vg. of mainly criminal “profilers” that can be called into action by invitation by local authorities to investigate difficult crimes. Usually, these are serial killers. They are a “strike team” with their private jet. In reality, the FBI has no such force. At Quantico, there are, however, special agents with profiling skills that can be called.

There is much fantasy here: first that there would be federal dollars to support such a task force on an ongoing basis. They are just not that many cases in reality and the more disturbing fact is that it portrays the mentally ill as statically much more violent than they are.

Why this case? There is no particular reason other than it was just one more plot of many I have seen that is based on the motive of humiliation for murder.

Synopsis:

Three talented young women disappear; they are all preparing to go off to college on athletic scholarships.

A relative of one of the girls contacts one of The FBI team members and gets them involved. Jumping to the conclusion of the episode it is found that the suspect must have been on the soccer team long ago. He is a garbage man, he blew out his knee in the championship game, lost a scholarship to Notre Dame, and everyone forgot about him. As many of these scenarios are they are rather gruesome.

But their gruesomeness introduces an interesting twist. They are gruesome to pique our interest and excitement. In being so gruesome and extreme we tend to put out of mind that such crimes do take place. We put reality out of our minds and somehow play a trick on ourselves. We feel that if we put the humiliating acts out of mind we can pretend that such humiliation only takes place in extreme cases or to other people.

In this case, the man had sequestered the three girls in a dungeon-like room without food or water until they decide who they would kill. They had to kill one of the three so that two would live.

One of them was sick so as she became weaker the more aggressive of the three took control and convinced the third they simply had to kill her. They yell to their captor telling him they have decided and his response is to throw them two large hammers.

Once they realize what has happened one weakens but the other becomes resolved that they have to kill their mate while they are agreeing the third revives sneaks up, and hits the aggressive girl in the head killing her instantly. A neat twist, thus saving the audience and the girls from the other horrid outcome of the other two wailing away freely on their teammates. Here we have a more clear-cut case of self-defense.

One might be quick to say that none of the synopsis of the murder adds much to my theme of shame and humiliation except to suggest and remind us of the debts to which toxic shame can lead people. I mainly recount the main plot for completeness.

Yet it has some further purpose. What is the murderer doing? This TV crime show is not just a silly excitement riddled story. The killer is playing out his morality play of and repeating a ramped-up version of his humiliation as payback to this pristine community for the years of “nothingness” he has felt.”

It is what I call the dangers of inadvertent humiliation. Society has not a clue, nor in this case should they, of what happened in this young kid's mind so many years ago and how it festered. How it could show up in such pathology so many years later? And we know it is quite rare that such a scenario would or does happen. Yet every mass shooting, that has its origin in humiliation, is certainly, not rare.

The important point is that humiliation was and is used in almost all crime stories used as a motivation for the action. But I emphasize also all the creator is doing is describing a real tangible dynamic.

I note that the motivation of humiliation is not even spelled out or followed through on in this particular episode. It is implied. We see the agents unite friends and relatives of these girls in this small town and then watch as they start fighting amongst each other and then see the agent telling them that this is what the suspect wants. Why? They don’t say it but the only reason would be to redress some previous wrong, that is for revenge.

Then all we find out is that he is a garbage man and supposedly all others involved have much higher stations in life. Of course, the three girls are star athletes and going off to IVY league schools and we learn that he lost a scholarship to Norte Dame. But there is no further comment about him. No interview, just his arrest.

It seems as if a slight misstep in the writing or just the time constraints of the format leaves no time for exploration of motive. That is not the point of the show. As always in American TV it is the case that it is our addiction to “excitement.” That does not diminish our growing maturity in recognizing shame and humiliation as a motivation for crime. Or it might be more sophisticated; a recognition that the viewer can sort all this out.

All this said it is and was for me an opportunity to comment on how humiliation has become a mainstay, a workhorse of motivation in TV drama as well as in “reality” TV. There has been some discussion of this on email lists but with this episode, it just occurred to me how it is really “right under noses” and yet not explored.

It has been suggested to me that at least the general public will more or less readily accept and understand the humiliation and the concept of shame at this level. The level of it being a motivation for murder whereas we, as already suggested, we have a much harder time understating the concepts in our day-to-day emotional lives. What do you think?

What do I mean? I mean that this whole point of this is a segue to talk about that despite the concepts of shame and humiliation being in the literate for many years they are not readily or easily accepted or introduced to the public or patients. Yet, as we see in this episode of “Criminal Minds” they are used in popular culture.

This raises some interesting questions that I think are being ignored.

First, I should be clear that for those not familiar with television drama this episode of “Criminal Minds” is by no means isolated. I wish I could offer a statistical analysis of several shows but I can’t. I can attest that any number of episodes of the set “CSI” series, the set of “Law and Order” series, and well as “Criminal Minds” base the motivation for the murder on revenge, revenge for having been humiliated. Of course “revenge” is an age-old motivation. What is different is the addition of the motivation for the revenge. That addition is the articulation of being shamed and humiliated.

Likewise, for years now, there have been several “reality shows” of all types. Shows that pit people against one another in artificial situations such as “Survivor” to shows such as “Hell’s Kitchen” and The “Weakest Link.” All of these in one way or another, in non-fictional ways, put people in situations or play-up situations where they are apt to be or ritually shame and humiliate each other.

I have broached the idea for some time that quite possibly we are simply discovering these concepts and there is no particular positive way to come to peace with them. Or they are, for the first time, coming fully into human consciousness. 

Technology and the entrainment medium offer a somewhat “safe” arena to, gain, and come to terms with these powerful emotions. We have always had the battlefield and 2000 thousand years ago we had the coliseum with Gladiators to “play with our emotions.” We still have the battlefield but to a much lesser extent despite popular opinion and we still have the coliseum for the NFL to the WWF but we also have the reality that we have seen concerning how war technology places soldiers in a surreal world where killing becomes a video game.

This is about an observation that we are making progress. Shame and humiliation are coming into consciousness and unless they do we will not be able to mitigate their power.

Although we are making progress. When I and my colleagues present these ideas in talks and therapy sessions we marvel at how little excitement and understanding there seems to be.

I will say that I think we as teachers might be missing powerful teaching moments by not referring more to and pulling examples from popular culture.

Then the question is why is it that popular culture, in my mind at least, is equal with or ahead of science in this area?

There is a saying that “the artist gets there first.”

This is completely consistent with the concepts that neuroscience is teaching us. The idea is that our information flow is in that order. It is preconscious in our deep memory banks of “affect” bundled up with “imagery” and it is only finally that it comes into consciousness. So it would seem that groups and history would follow the paradigm of the individual. The artist works on the subconscious level. They simply are pulling up the feeling and imagery more quickly then society at large.

It is said that the history of modern physics is portrayed in early modern art.

I will leave you with a synopsis of what I think is one of the poorer crime shows and that is “CSI Miami” It focuses almost totally on the mechanics of yet-to-exist technical crime techniques and very little character development. I say this as this episode had a fairly strong storyline based on humiliation.

The telling of the tale, however, takes only a few lines. The story takes place during the famous “Spring Break” in Miami. Two young men are found dead under suspicious circumstances. It turns out that at some previous point, they had severally humiliated a young lady who was overweight making her feel as if she was “nothing.” So much so that she lost the weight and became quite attractive, came to spring break, and enticed them sexually. They were none the wiser as to whom she was. At the appropriate moment, she let them know who she was and then killed them.

My final comment is this type of understanding of shame and humiliation is articulated over and over again. The writers have a very conscious understanding of it or so it would seem. They must be familiar with the literature. I invite comments about it. So it would seem that we in the business seem to be, to me, on a “high horse” of sorts and with blinders thinking we are the only ones of sorts “holding these concepts in consciousness.”

Shame is inevitable. It is at base a biological signal that something went wrong. We then learn what that signal means. It can mean many different things  The opening quote is complex and accurate on all levels. Shame is certainly not some “personal mistake of ours.” But it is precisely the helplessness we feel in the fact that we have no choice in the fact that our desires are interrupted by life willy-nilly and we are brought to our knees that we, often, feel immense humiliation. And when we are exposed it can drive us insane.