"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.