"Humiliation"

Brian Lynch

Humiliation is a big issue and could be a theme in almost all I write, it should be incorporated more. It is nevertheless it seems to be more appreciated in horrible and subtle, and sophisticated ways in literature, television, and the movies. It needs to be spoken about, lived in the moment in the sense of being brought to consciousness. We have to stop avoiding the moment of humiliation and learn that I am in the act of humiliation and need to stop and learn another way or that I am being humiliated and must do what I can to save myself in nonviolent ways from this violence.

There is a way of thinking of “humiliation” as part and parcel of the shame dynamic. Shame is a feeling that is at first something that truly catches us off guard. It is akin to being surprised but not nearly as abrupt. Being surprised will make you forget everything that was just happening and focus on the here and now. What is it that I should be paying attention to now?

 Shame, so to speak, is surprise under the radar. It happens when we are interrupted in our pleasant activities we were interested in and we still have that desire. Yet we cannot continue. Shame is this horrendous gap between what I had within my grasp and what I now find much out of my reach.

So what of “humiliation”? I think we usually think of this as a more public act or spectacle. I often recount now that for many years I spoke only of “shame” and then about three years ago it hit me that it might be better, especially when introducing these ideas to start with the word “humiliation” as almost everyone can envision a time when they were humiliated in public. A surprising number of these incidences of humiliation were in school, and early school, but there can certainly be private humiliations, how many times have we felt “humiliated” by not being able to remove a bottle cap with not a sole in sight?

Yet “humiliation” carries with it the sense of some forceful action from without. The eyes of others are truly on me. “I am weak.” “I am not worthy.”

Evelyn Linder makes a great contribution to the study of shame and humiliation when she points out that it was not until 1759 that the meaning of “humility” and “humiliation” were parsed. That is up until that time the terms were interchangeable.  In short, it was unthinkable for one lower class to humiliate one of a higher station. All were “humble” before their masters and all were humbled and humiliated before God. It was not until the mid-18th century that the two words start to have their more modern meaning. This, it is argued, helps give rise to the individual rights movement as it levels the playing field. Now everyone can humiliate anyone! And are we not suffering the consequences of that negative quirk now!? And humility is a rarer and rarer commodity. The solution is not backsliding but discovering the opposite sides of this great discovery, which is the emotive force of “interest” and healthy pride. Oddly enough, we have to wade through the negative to get to the positive.

Brian Lynch

“How About Dinner?”

Brian Lynch

I have found several episodes intriguing of a television series that exemplified a few themes that I stress in these pieces.

The scenes involve a cop that is divorced, in his early forties, and has only his work and kids but mostly his work to sustain him. He drinks and has little or no insight about his drinking and cheated extensively on his wife. He has an encounter with a political consultant of some weight; they are attracted to each other. They sleep together.

She is driven and seems to “know” the rules and so avoids at all costs any “real” involvement in calling him late at night for a rendezvous, at least for a while. He reverses the usual sexual roles and wants more involvement and asks for a date, they meet for dinner at an upper-class restaurant and he compliments her on the place. It is obvious that he rarely has eaten at such a place. The conversation turns towards what exactly they do and she says she does pretty high-profile political consultations. She asks about his politics and voting.

I don’t remember if he said if he voted or not in the last election but it became awkward very quickly he said something like “Oh Bush and that other guy what’s his name,” and she said you mean “Kerry” and he said, “ As far as I am concerned they haven’t a clue as to what I am doing.” “I don’t know, that is the way I see it,” his voice trailing off somewhat embarrassed. The scene cuts to him standing lonely up against his car.

Then there is a conversation with his female partner in the car on a stake with her asking him how is it going with his new girlfriend. He says “She looked right through me.” He was not embarrassed as if he doubted himself. No, he, knew himself and the work he did and he knew it was real and important. He was simply humiliated.

Much that can be extracted from this, the most obvious is the humiliation the detective feels.

This is the world of “script” and “ideology.” Silvan Tomkins speaks of Ideology. I cannot cover script and ideology in fifty words but in short, it says protest as we will it says that human beings must have a unifying principle to organize their lives. For my purposes, I point out that this almost universally will result in the root of prejudice or severe isolation. That is we each need an organizing principle in our lives. Therefore in the absence of a verifiable truth we have cultural relations, we have political parties we have a religion or we try and “stand above it all” in an attempt to intellectualize everything. I emphasize this later because I think intellectuals too much get on their high horses just as everyone else does.

But back to our cop, he is certainly sympathetic in his alienation. Going back to his dinner he tells her his story of going to Loyola of Baltimore and having to drop out due to being married and having a child. His date gives no signs that she is “getting it.” He goes on to say he joins the force and how he is a very good cop and how he thinks there are only a handful of “police” that can do what he does. Again her demeanor continues to be the same, this, the daily humiliation that wears us down; to be looked through.

But it begs some questions. We need not answer all questions. One is what creates her disconnect. She is behind a “liberal” candidate in a ravaged Eastern seaboard city, he a cop trying to improve his city, why the disconnect? What is going on here? The answers are not easily come by. She is “withdrawn" in some part of her being a prisoner of her “tony” upbringing, be it Georgetown or Harvard Yard or maybe Kansas City to Harvard never to look back, somewhere in there an inability to empathize with those below her. For both, we only have what the writers give us about their past, well after all this is fiction so we don’t know his biography. What abandonment must he have suffered? What shame or self-disgust leads to so much drinking or why he succeeds in alienating everyone around despite his intelligence and personality?

The series is “The Wire” and the episode is near the end of season 3.

"The Chicago Scam"

I had just admitted two addicts in their sixties in the same hospital room. They were buddies and this was not their first visit to the rehab and as I walked by the room one of them called to me, “Hey Doc, come here I want to tell you something.” What followed was a fascinating half-hour on how not to get scammed. He said, “Now doc I am telling you this so you won’t get hurt.”

 He proceeds to explain the intricacies of a version of a “Pigeon Drop” scam. This is where you convince someone to put up collateral for a bigger payoff in the near future, of course, the bigger payoff never comes. I was seated in a chair at the foot of his bed against the wall as he regally held court. He explained in detail how he entered the bank with a woman and she withdrew 10,000 dollars and gave it to him. He sincerely cautioned me not to fall for any such a scam. I thanked him and I got back to business.

 Later he once again summoned me and this time with an anguished gaze he asked, in a pleading voice, “Doc you don’t think I am a bad person do you?” I don’t remember exactly what transpired but I do believe I did say “no” he persisted and went on and on for a while explaining how he had done nothing wrong, nothing at all wrong that, “That the lady had gone into that bank of her own free will and taken out the money.” He had not laid a hand on her.

Switch to “The House of Cards” a movie that captures what I experienced above. I don’t know if a city can have its signature on a scam but this one is set in Chicago. It has its weakness such as the plot being centered on a psychiatrist getting caught up in investigating the lives of grifters to the point of participating in the life. Yet, in doing so it touches on the emotion of interest-excitement. She is bored with her life and the patient leads her to investigate this other world. She is ultimately hurt as she is “played” by the leader of the group, made love to in the making of a scam, and then abandoned. 

My purpose in bringing the movie up is to parallel it with my experience in the hospital in this way: A deal goes bad and there is violence. There is an older partner who is upset about this and, if I remember correctly “resigns.” He throws a major fit and goes on and on about how honorable they were because nothing they ever did involved violence or hurting anybody. He had a “code.” After all, he had his “ethics” to uphold.

Of course, all this is to say that human beings can justify anything. It is not in any way to “condemn” these people or to say they are “evil.” It is to start to appreciate what psychologist Silvan Tomkins calls “script theory.” It is to get away from simplistic terms such as to “excuse” actions and behaviors. It is to deeply understand it.

 Many will want to say about my patient, “Oh, he knew that he was doing wrong.” “Oh, Dr. Lynch your so naïve. He was playing you!” Well, if he was what was his goal? What was he getting out of it? Laughs? One never knows. 

It seems to me that we don’t want to hurt people but we are hurt and taking care of that hurt is important. That puts us in a tough bind, a shame bind. Damned if I do and if I don’t so I make all kinds of compromises and secondary rules and before I know it I live in my castle, my world. And yes I am saying that while I am in that castle I cannot make any other “choice.” 

My patient does not believe he is doing anything wrong at any given moment. But then you ask why does he have to ask if I think him a bad person? Good question. That is the problem with making it “right” and “wrong” black and white, “good” and “evil.” The situation is as they say “what it is.” And what is it? As someone said we are indeed “many selves” at once. Shame and “shame binds" help us understand all of our conflicting interests and how we can live with all kinds of what we call “cognitive dissonant” behaviors at once. So does he or doesn’t he know he is doing “wrong” and will punishing him or arguing with him do any good? It seems to me that all of the above are pretty much non-starters. He is pushed and pulled by fears and demons that only he understands and the only antidote is a sense of safety and security however impossible that may seem.

Brian Lynch

'Withdraw'

Brian Lynch

This term turns out to be a powerful way to summarize several ways in which we deal with emotional pain. It is probably, on average, the first step we take when hurt. It can be recognized in recognition of “fight or flight.” We do not like pain and move away from it.

A great cause of pain is the world causing us a sense of humiliation or any sense of shame. The idea is to get a sense of how this concept of “withdrawal” along with a few others in later essays, is capable of engulfing huge swaths of our behavior. I start by thinking in biological terms. Pleasure- pain. Did you ever nudge an amoeba with a pipette under a microscope? The organism moves away. It withdraws. A sea anemone closes its tentacles.

So on the most practical level, it is a move toward safety, although depending on the circumstances some would call it cowardice others prudence. Would that such labels be of any use? The purpose here is to show that such responses as “withdraw” start at such an early age we are well within their clutches before we can do much about them. It can take years to free ourselves and unfortunately, we can become more entangled in our web.

There is a specific term for this problem when it becomes severe and it is “agoraphobia” but one point of these essays is to blur the line between those “official” words and the terms I am using such as “withdrawal.” That is “Agoraphobia” is withdrawal but all withdrawal is not agoraphobia the vast majority of withdrawal is not agoraphobia yet damages everyone. 

Yet, we like to think of it as a “them” not an “us” problem. They have the problem we do not. We do not see all the ways we “withdraw” from people hurting ourselves and others. A few examples:

In the distant past, I remember my first year away at college early in the semester I left the safety of my elite campus and went with a “townie” out to a restaurant a few miles out towards the strip malls with a friend of his. We sat down and we were talking and at some point, I noticed that his friend had disappeared. I panicked I said, "Where did he go?" How was I going to get back to school? He said he left. I was flabbergasted. My friend was a bit older and a very nice guy and looked at me knowingly like I was a lost puppy. Knowing what? Knowing that I had just “not been” around. Knowing that I had not learned about people that abandoned other people. Not knowing about people who “withdrew.”

So an important point “withdraw” is a double edge sword. We “withdraw” because we were “attacked” but this sets up a “habit” that we later cannot control, which may later lead us to not attack others but to “abandon” them when they need us.

An important insight to appreciate is that to “withdraw” can be an attack. What feels worse to be yelled at by a loved one or to simply have them disappear sometimes never to return? I have mentioned before there is research to show that children that have been verbally abused do better than those that have been abandoned.

Then just the other day deep feelings were triggered in me when a patient got a ride to see me and we were having a very difficult time negotiating something. He said, “I would have walked two hours to get here.” I saw his ride In the waiting room and then I saw him get up and leave and the patient excused himself for a minute. Then after he came back a while later I asked him what happened to his ride he said, “Oh he left.” 

A discussion ensued and I asked him what more important thing did his friend have to do? I asked, “he knew he was bringing you to the doctor right?” (he did not have to wait to see me at all). So the point is the man (fifty-some years old) “withdrew,” bolted for some reason known only to him. True enough I always say when you know the answer it makes perfect sense. He probably “hates” doctors’ offices. But it is one more testament to our level of empathy for one another or at least our capacity to carry it out.

Finally, one place where there is a crystal clear problem with “withdrawal” is in Japan where they have a specific name for it. It is called Hikikomori (pulling away, being confined). It is a phenomenon whereby young men will leave school and come home and live in their rooms. This possibly affects up to 20 percent of all adolescent males or 1 percent of the overall population. I understand that it is pretty much that it is not that they live in the house but in their room ( by definition at least 6 months). This can and does go on for years. It is often precipitated by an incident of bullying at school.

I mention that humiliation and shame are primary causes of withdrawal such as above in the case of Hikikomori. I am sure it occurs to anyone that fear would be a great motivation to withdraw and so it is, And so too are any number of sequences of feelings.

"Anger-Rage"

Brian Lynch

It was not too long ago that many thought that we all “learned” to be angry. That is it was supposed that it was theoretically possible for someone to develop without the capacity to get angry. Some people still believe this.

Intriguingly, it was Darwin that began to solidify the innate nature of anger and then was promptly ignored for some seventy years and, as I say, only recently has the notion taken hold. But then what can be said about anger?

I think many will agree that anger is problematic and maybe the most problematic of the specific emotions. Many think we should never express it while others think it should always be expressed. Many want us to “learn“ to control it.

Like so many things we seem to know so much less than we presume. Or at least if the knowledge is there it has not been widely disseminated.

It goes something like this: Anger can be triggered in essentially one of three ways. First, it is a survival mechanism that is triggered directly when the organism is threatened in such a way that it is in imminent danger. I would say “overwhelmed” but that is not necessarily accurate. That may be the case but it need not be the necessary condition in imminent danger to the point that a certain type of action need be taken.

It is thought that this is not based primarily on our cognition, that is our thinking but is “hardwired” and will take place on an individual basis based on our life experiences. The point is it is “automatic.” It is our body taking care of us.

A most important insight is that probably the great majority of anger comes secondary to the hurt after shame and humiliation or the hurt suffered after failing to reach a desired goal, not from being in imminent danger, a most important distinction.

These have been the most useful insights in helping people in understanding their relationships and their struggles with “anger” problems. It is my approach to “anger management.” I have said often elsewhere that “anger management” is wrongheaded in that it focuses on anger per se. The problem with this is that most anger is of this second type of being secondary to “hurt” and that it is like asking someone to hold a hot potato and “deal with it.” “Deal with your anger.” “Control your anger.” What is missed is any understanding of the origin of the anger that is that the person was “hurt” because they wanted something and did not get it. 

In labor and management problems, anger comes from desires being blocked. So too in marriage, and in friendship. The primary thing is a desire that is not achieved then ends in hurt and this ends in a type of confusion. Anger ensues. Simply telling the person or group to deal with the anger sets up a vicious cycle and deflects the issues and gets everyone off track. Those in power can easily use it to their advantage and hammer away at “anger control” issues and make it the “the” issue. “We will not discuss anything until you get your anger under control.” 

For example, in a relationship, the person getting angry quickly can get caught in a dependent position. The more controlled person can browbeat the other to no end and obscure and legitimate desire the partner started with that produced the anger. The more the desire is ignored the greater the anger because the more the anger is focused on the more it becomes the issue and the more the conversation is co-opted and the angry party becomes more confused and more shamed and humiliated and maybe now guilt-ridden because they now start to become convinced that they are wrong about everything and maybe start to doubt the worth of what they wanted in the first place. In the end, it will only lead to more anger because, of course, they are not wrong. Ok, the wish for desire might be unreasonable but it has to be respected and negotiated.

And yet none of this has to be “on purpose” by any party involved it is that we simply do not understand anger and we do not listen to each other. We are not listening to what the other person wants and are not trying to accommodate.

Much of this explains why in interpersonal relationships when anger flares we so rarely remember what the whole thing was about. Why is that, again, it is because there is going on a great confusion. Nothing is “pure.” We have “wanted” something and have not gotten it so we are in a state of at least momentary “shock”, cogitative shock, and confusion if you will. Due to earlier learning, we have “learned” that anger is an appropriate response in these situations. “I don’t get what I want so I throw a tantrum.” Or at least show my displeasure but in that state, I do not do my thinking neurons much good. I prolong the state of confusion and shock. The ability to store short-term memory is hindered and fragmented. The feeling/affect of “surprise” is involved which further hinders my later recall.                                  

Then there is a type of anger or any emotion that is in effect fairly purely “cognitive.” That anger that follows being “hurt”, is important to understand, but is not important for survival. It is “cognitive”, it is a “learned” response, a defense against a perceived “danger”. Remember where we started when we said that at one point most experts felt we all “learned” or did not learn to be angry? We can all “act” “as if” we are angry, a “third” type of anger.

None of this is to say that anger does not get out of control and is not often difficult to control. 

“"Surprise, surprise!”

Brian Lynch

                     

 

Surprise, is an ignored emotion or feeling or more accurately an obscured emotion due to its nature, and what is that? It is that surprise is not so discrete as some emotions as it is followed immediately by some other emotion such as joy or terror. For many of us, we are particularly conditioned for one or the other, and most unfortunate for those people who have been conditioned to always or near always associate it with fear or terror. I will often hear people say “Oh I hate surprises.” This is probably due to having a history of what amounts to childhood abuse: a sibling or parent who would scare the hell out of them, as opposed to your father surprising you with a gift when he came home from work for no particular reason.

 
 
 
 One sense of painful surprise that has stuck with me since I have begun my study of basic emotion is the all too oft occurrence of the mother or today, the stay a home parent who will say, “Just wait until X comes home then you will see.” Well X does not come home until late when the kids are asleep and X prances into the bedroom and gets the kids out of bed for their punishment. The kids suffer “surprise” and terror. And at this point have no idea what is going on.
 
 For one thing, one attribute of surprise is that it “clears the circuits.” It wipes out everything that goes before it. Here the kids are in a deep sleep and are awakened, their memory banks are cleared and their Adrenalin starts pumping and they now can try and escape the intruder that came into the camp. There is no reason at all for them to be remembering that they were jumping on the sofa 10 hours previously and did not heed the pleas to stop.
 
 Surprise has much to do with trauma. But first, let me say that I want you to appreciate that pure surprise, I believe, is never pleasant. That is the initial jolt is a painful shock, it is only made worse or ameliorated by interest and or joy that might flow so the odds are weighted against coming out with a lifetime average of good experiences with surprises.
 
 But back to trauma; so logically when bad things happen surprise is likely to be involved and whether we are a “good” guy or a “bad” guy the emotion is almost impossible to control. Again, when it happens, and especially when we are a “good” guy when we are blindsided our memory banks are wiped clean, at least for the moment. This means that memory can and tends to be fragmented. Not repressed but fragmented and associated with fear-terror and shame. When we are small do we have power? Not likely, we therefore feel helpless. If we are subjugated to this trauma repeatedly we might turn to anything at hand to soothe ourselves sleep, food alcohol, incest, cutting. Each of these will bring on new experiences of surprise and new experiences of secondary feelings and some relief of interest and joy but of course, interest and joy will come at a very high price later on of shame and guilt.
 
 Much of sleep problems are due to childhood traumas such as those just described. A famous case is that of Michael Jackson. Michael was not shy about talking about his father terrifying him and his brothers at least once. One night in a dormitory arrangement when his father came in an open window dressed in a frightening costume. Michael seemed to be tracing his sleep problems to that incident. His father, of course, was, “teaching them a lesson.” A lesson that ended in his son’s death some fifty years later and a murder charge for Dr. Murray.
 
 How do we fix things? As always not easily done and too much to do justice here but it is but certainly not by ignoring things. It is essentially by reconstructing and bringing into consciousness the sequence of events, i.e. learning and then deconstructing what has been reconstructed so that we can have control over those feelings, and affects that are controlling us.
 
 So surprise at its core is a painful experience and its evolutionary role is essential to our survival. It is meant to clear the circuits so that we might forget entirely what was going on just before the event that is now taking place so that we can put our full attention to it. We are out gathering mushrooms in the jungle and a Bengali tiger catches our eye. No matter how good the treasure trove of mushrooms we want to clear our minds of dinner and focus on the tiger.
 
 As culture has become more sophisticated, unfortunately, so have the various ways feelings can become complicated. Surprise is primary for survival that then leads to joy.
 
 I want to thank Jim Duffy, psychologist, and Melvin Hill, therapist for much of my understanding of the above.
 
 

"Therapy"

"Therapy"

Brian Lynch

"I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in." 

Kenny Rogers

I am a person that talks to people with the hope that through a good conversation, we will come to some conclusions about their lives that will help them move forward. Through serendipity, it often happens, I learn something and I move forward. That is we both learn.

So what have I learned recently? It is this, that therapy itself can be used for many purposes. Or let us say not “used” or ok “used” but unconsciously used for various purposes not all of them “good.”

People supposedly come to therapy to solve problems. But it is obvious that maybe the stated purpose and the subconscious one may be very different. It may be the proverbial one step forward and two or three back as I have mentioned before. Once that first step has been taken then fear and shame take over and progress is inhibited. It is well known that patients often will have a period of worsening symptoms before real improvement is seen.

If indeed this is the case, the case that they take a step backward, then what would be the characterization of that step backward?

I think both the patient and therapist have to be very vigilant for a time. For what? For one a physical or emotional form of “withdrawal”:

Is this person coming to me to “escape” the outer world and establish a fantasy world that is in effect one of dissociation? A world in which I ( the patient) don’t learn much about life and how to carry what I learn into the world?

Or do I use the session as another kind of “withdrawal” which is a bit more subtle and that is like a drug? I simply lose myself in the process. I become “addicted” to the process of therapy. The therapist for example becomes the only person I talk to. Then I can actually “withdraw” by not coming to the sessions. Or be “withdrawn” in the sessions.

Finally, I can spend the time in the session in various ways of “attacking” myself or the therapist.

All of this is to say that therapy is a microcosm of life, as it should be but it is one where the stakes are supposed to be a bit out of the ordinary. It is everyone’s job to come back to the straight and narrow, to the problem at hand a bit quicker than we do in normal life, that is “to solve the problem.” But “quicker” in therapy even with something as useful as these explanations can and often is nothing akin to “quick.”

Brian Lynch

I want to thank Jim Duffy, psychologist, and Melvin Hill, therapist for much of my understanding of the above. 

" Email II"

Brian Lynch

Revised

There is a television show called “Lie To Me.” It is quite remarkable and I have written about it elsewhere. It uses the work of Paul Ekman who is its resident expert and who was mentored in part by Silvan Tomkins my theoretical mentor. The idea of the show is that an Ekman-like character runs a consulting firm that helps solve crime and other cases by figuring out if people are lying based on facial expressions amongst other psychological and physical attributes.

The idea is that in part if you are skilled enough you can tell a high degree of certainty a person is lying by the way they express emotion in the face and by the position of the body and its parts, “tells.” If they are lying it does not tell you why they are lying. They may have a good reason

This is true in other areas of life. Take email for example. In the show they also look for and use other clues, as I have said, other psychological attributes such as tone of voice and body posture. Are they aggressive or evasive? Do they demonstrate guilt in their response?

These fall in what we call the “Compass of Shame.” If you are not familiar yet with it is what Donald Nathanson devised to pigeonhole our four habitual responses to the sting of “hurt” and “confusion.” We can 1) Withdraw from the scene. 2) we can attack or blame ourselves for the situation. 3) We can “avoid” the situation by for example using drugs. 4) We can “attack others” or blame others for the problem. If there is nothing we can do by our hand or mind to raise our self-esteem we will lower the self of someone else. -Nathanson. This of course can trigger a back-and-forth of each trying to win and thus improve their self-esteem.

So it occurs to me that we are getting adept at interpreting all kinds of behavior. So the “Compass of Shame” makes even more clear the tools Dr. Ekman uses and if we were to apply them to email we might all 1) be a lot more aware of what is going on and 2) be a lot more honest in our dealings in email as one’s action in such a direct and personal act are open to direct analysis.

That is to the attack of self and others are pretty oblivious.

What is rampant in email is avoidance. We need connection and yet cannot find a way to converse so we send every manner of creation by others without ever revealing ourselves; jokes, pictures, videos and we will continue to create derivatives. And the easiest avoidance is simply not to answer the question asked, and pretend it never happened. How many pages have I written seemingly to the ‘Gods.’

What is more frustrating than something sent that can be interpreted in various ways by someone that has not revealed themselves to you for a very long time and yet they give no hint of their feelings about the piece or comment written by someone else?

Finally, there is a simple “withdraw.” No response whatsoever. From the beginning of my studies of these issues, it has seemed to me email was an excellent contemporary example to teach the shame response. I invest my “interest” in this project, large or small, and send it out into the world. I “want” and “desire” a response. I either receive one or I don’t. In the case of the former, albeit it might not consciously register we are going to feel at least a twinge of joy and in the latter shame.

Of course, why someone does not respond is another matter. How many times have I thought it was some strange animosity towards someone only to find out to my shame that some misfortune had delayed the other party? Nevertheless, this is by far not the rule.

Brian Lynch