#509： Good Shame; Bad Shame
Episode Stats
Summary
In the modern age, shame is often seen as an unmitigated bad. According to a popular review, all shame is negative and toxic, and steps should be taken to avoid and rid oneself of it. My guest today, however, makes the contrarian case that some shame is actually necessary to develop a true sense of self. His name is Joseph Bergo, and he is the author of the book, Shame: Free Yourself, Find Joy, and Build True Self-Esteem.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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In the modern age, shame is often seen as an unmitigated bad. According to this popular
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review, all shame is negative and toxic and steps should be taken to avoid and rid oneself of it.
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My guest today, however, makes the contrarian case that some shame is actually necessary to
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develop a true sense of self. His name is Joseph Bergo. He's a clinical psychologist and the
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author of the book, Shame, Free Yourself, Find Joy, and Build True Self-Esteem. Today on the show,
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Joseph and I discuss what exactly shame is, what it feels like, and the difference between toxic
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shame and productive shame. Joseph then walks us through the sources of shame and how childhood
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shame can mark us for life. We then discuss tactics we use to mask or avoid feelings of shame, how these
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masking behaviors can sometimes get in the way of us making progress in our lives in more productive
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ways to engage with shame. Joseph then digs into the culture of online shaming and the dangers we
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face as a society when we shame men by pathologizing healthy masculine attributes like assertiveness,
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risk-taking, and competitiveness. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is
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slash shame. Joseph joins me now via clearcast.io.
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All right, Joseph Bergo, welcome to the show. Thank you. So you are a psychotherapist. You've
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written several books and your latest is called Shame, Free Yourself, Find Joy, and Build True
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Self-Esteem. Now, shame is a topic that's gotten a lot of attention lately in the past few years,
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particularly online shame. Maybe we can get into that too a bit, but before we do, let's say,
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what is shame exactly? Because I think when people talk about shame, they might be talking
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about something else than what other people are talking about shame. They're usually talking about
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one type of shame. Shame turns out to be a whole family of emotions. They have a similar basis in
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our physiological responses, in our biology, but shame can be a lot of different feelings. They all
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make us feel bad about ourselves. They make us self-aware in some way that's painful. So shame
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could be self-consciousness, embarrassment, guilt, mortification, humiliation. You know,
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it could be extreme or mild. It could be fleeting or it could last for a long time. But all those
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shame feelings have that painful awareness of self in common.
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And this is something that even like Darwin noticed that all humans experience, even maybe
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some animals to a certain extent. Like there's a certain sense of self-consciousness that we share
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Well, and if you, if you look at the evolutionary reasons why we might have the ability to feel
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shame, you know, it has survival value. There's every reason to believe that other animals could
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experience shame too, even if they're not self-aware in the way that humans are.
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I mean, so what are those reasons? Why do we have shame? Like why, why is it a, I mean,
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it feels terrible, but we feel it for a reason from an evolutionary, evolutionary theory would say,
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well, we have, it's there for a reason. So what's the reason that we think it's there?
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Well, the most recent studies say that it's there to promote group unity and conformity with
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tribal values. So it, if you violate the expectations of the tribe and you put everybody
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at risk by your behavior, you're going to be shunned. You're going to be left out. And evolution
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gave us the ability to feel shame so that we would want to avoid that pain, right? So nobody wants to
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feel ashamed. So you're likely to conform to tribal values. You're likely to cooperate with other members
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of your tribe. And if, if you don't, then you'll be shamed. And that encourages you to behave
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differently next time. So it does have survival value because it promotes your chances of surviving
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and it promotes the tribe's chances of surviving and triumph over, triumphing over competing tribes.
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So shame is just that feeling of, you know, that we did something wrong, right? And it can be like
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embarrassment, even another types of emotions being left out, et cetera.
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There's also this talk that there's a, you know, I've, I've read in different books on psychology
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when they've talked about shame, like there's a difference between shame and guilt. Do you,
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we're going to start off like, what do you, what do the, what do people typically say the difference
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between shame and guilt is? And do you think there really is a difference?
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Well, the, you know, the classic formulation was put forward by John Bradshaw. He wrote that book,
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Healing the Shame That Binds You. There have been other people who have said the same thing,
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but he put it pretty succinctly. He said, guilt is about what you do. Shame is about who you are.
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I think that's true in some limited way. I tend to look at it slightly differently. I see guilt as a
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member of the shame family and it's, it's about something specific and it's less pervasive than
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other types of shame, but it still involves that bad feeling about yourself. It just, it's just
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specifically about something you did rather than something larger.
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So, and also when people, psychologists write books about shame or guilt, shame is typically
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framed as something completely negative and you have to like, get rid of, you know, get rid of
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completely. You make the case that that's not necessarily the case. Shame can actually be useful
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That was the whole reason why I wrote this book because I'm, I'm, well, I'm kind of tired of it,
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but also troubled by the narrative that shame is this uniformly bad thing. I think we live in a
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kind of, we've got an anti-shame zeitgeist going on. It's like, you know, nobody is going to make
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anybody else feel ashamed about anything. And, you know, that's, that's a really useful perspective
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when it comes to being a more inclusive society, people who have been excluded because they don't
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conform to social norms and they've been subjected to shame. This is a topic that, that Andrew Solomon
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deals with in his book, Far From the Tree, outliers. You know, I think we should be less shaming. We need
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to become more inclusive and, and make room for people who, you know, are hearing impaired or suffer
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from dwarfism or autistic or handicapped in some other way. But there are times when shame is not
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a destructive force. It's, it's, it's telling us something about ourselves if we'll listen to it.
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I think that we often feel shame when we, we disappoint the healthy expectations we hold for
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ourselves and when we behave in ways that betray our own values. You know, if we do that, I think we
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ought to feel ashamed. I think shame can be useful in those cases if we, if we don't, you know,
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defend against it, you know, in just the way that shaming in a tribal setting encourages,
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you know, you to behave in ways that support tribal values and, and help everybody. If you, if you feel
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shame in relation to yourself, it might be a way of telling you you're, you're not conforming to your
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own values and you need to change. Right. And I've, we've written about the concept of honor,
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right? Sort of, it's a masculine virtue that you can see across cultures and it's sort of
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an honor we can equate to as like a sense of esteem, a sense of your place in your, your group,
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whatever it is, but like honor cannot exist without shame because you have to know, like you're not
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doing the thing that could bring you honor. So you feel a sense of shame and that causes a course
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correction in your, in your behavior. Exactly. It's, it's interesting that, you know, a traditionally
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masculine virtue like honor doesn't get a lot of respect these days. It's usually, it's usually linked
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to a kind of restrictive, vindictive sort of code of behavior that causes men to behave in, you know,
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in aggressive ways towards other men when they feel that their honor or reputation is challenged. So I,
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I see honor as a really good thing. That's not the way it's often approached these days.
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And this whole idea is sort of, so anti-shame zeitgeist you talked about. It's kind of explains
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all of social media. Like people just, people don't care about doing, I don't know, like looking,
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like, you know, being honorable, right? All they care about is attention. And oftentimes the way you
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can get attention is just being as shameless as possible. And you see just, just really, just,
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you know, just terrible things that people do online just to get that attention.
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Exactly. And that was, that was the subject of my last book, The Narcissist You Know,
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writing about the other side of shame, which is narcissistic kind of behavior that often appears
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And so another thing, so shame can be good. We'll talk more about how it can, how we can use shame
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to create a true sense of self, true sense of esteem and honor in our lives. So that's one
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misconception. But something else that whenever you read books about shame is that there's different
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types of shame. There's good shame and there's toxic shame. Do you make that distinction in the
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I do. I find the idea of toxic shame, that's again, that's John Bradshaw's idea. I find that
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really useful and it's very much linked to a concept that I use of core shame, which we might talk about.
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But toxic shame is destructive because it's not about something specific. It's not pointing the
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way towards, you know, growth and improvement. It's, it's a total indictment of someone's character
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as being essentially without value and unlovable. So that's, that's the destructive type of shame.
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So how's that related to your idea of core shame?
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I've worked with a lot of people over my career who had horrific childhoods and they were left with
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this feeling inside that there was something defective and ugly about them, unlovable. And that,
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that can be linked to toxic shame. The difference that I make is that sometimes that sense of core
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shame is telling you the truth about something. And this is a message nobody wants to hear. And I get
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a lot of flack for it is that sometimes your childhood can have been so damaging that it's marked you for
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life. It doesn't mean that you can't grow, doesn't mean you can't build self-esteem, doesn't mean you
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can't feel good about yourself, but it might place some limits on what you can do, what you're capable
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of. And that, that sense of being damaged by your past is what I call core shame.
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Okay. So like toxic shame, an example of that would be like, you feel shame, ashamed because you have some
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sort of disability, right? Or some handicapped. And like, because you have that, you are, you are
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unredeemable. Core shame, you know, you might have had just a horrific childhood where you didn't have
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a disability, but you, your parents treated you or not even your parents could just be someone
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treating you in such a way where you just feel defective as just to your being and that there's
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More or less, that's right. But it's interesting that you bring up the handicap because that's,
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that's the, the metaphor I use for core shame is let's say you suffered from rickets when you were
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growing up during the time when your bones, your skeleton was forming. Even if you correct your diet
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later on as an adult, you can't, you can't change that. You, you know, having had rickets,
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a vitamin D deficiency as a child growing up, it will mark you physically for life. And I say the
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same thing about certain kinds of emotional and psychological damage you experience when you're
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growing up that, that it's going to mark you for life. It doesn't mean you can't do things. It
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doesn't mean you're completely without value and utterly incapable of anything, but it might place
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limits on what you can do. So, you know, if I have some sort of physical handicap, that doesn't mean
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I can't, you know, go on and compete in the special Olympics. Doesn't mean I can't do lots of things,
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but I might not be able to, you know, compete in the regular Olympics. It is, I know people don't like
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hearing this. I just think it's, it's better to be honest about the way our paths, pasts,
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our physiological past, our psychological past can place limits on our, on our future. It's better
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to take those limitations into account rather than pretending there are no limitations and then
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failing and feeling more shame. If you see what I mean? No, I get what you're saying. I think I've
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seen that happen in the lives of a lot of people in my own life, where you don't take into account
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your own limitations and, you know, you go, you reach for the stars, right? You can be whatever you
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want to be, but like that can't, sometimes not in the cards for you for whatever reason.
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It doesn't mean you can't have a good flourishing life, but sometimes you have to, you have to work
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within those limitations, those confines you've been, you've been given in life and you can have
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a really, really good life even doing that. You can, and it's hard in this environment,
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you know, in, in the kind of social media world where everybody is posting about their fabulous
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lives. And we're bombarded with images of celebrities and wealthy athletes and these
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people who appear to have it all and don't have any limitations. It's hard to accept your own
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limitations when the messaging you get is like you're saying, reach for the stars. You can do
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anything. Have you noticed that issue coming up more and more amongst people you work with this
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idea of like this increasing sense of there's no limits, like they, they believe that. And so they,
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they live their lives like that, but they, they, they come to the realization, no, there are limits
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and they just end up frustrated. Have you, have you noticed that sort of anxiety or frustration
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because of that sort of idea that's out there that there are no limits in life?
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I certainly have noticed that in, you know, in the people I know, my acquaintances, my friends,
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there's the people I come into contact with the, the people who come to me for therapy usually come
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because they've got a lot of shame. They know that's what I work with. So they're not,
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they're not in that same, that same group. Although the, you know, the, the creation of
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this ideal self that you're supposed to attain is, is something that shows up in people that I work
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with, particularly people who have narcissistic issues. They, they want to believe that they can
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create this, they can become this ideal person. And that's the antidote to that, that shame they feel
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at base. Well, let's talk about some of the sources of shame. I guess, I mean, is, are the sources of
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shame the same for core shame and sort of everyday shame or are there differences between those types?
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I think they're, they're all the same. And, you know, in the book, I, I came up with these categories
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of experience to help people understand when and why we might feel shame just to sort of just useful
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labels. I call them the shame paradigms. So I think they're, they're pretty intuitive. We feel
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bad about ourselves when our love is unrequited. So whenever we like somebody who doesn't love us
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back, whenever we want to be friends with somebody who doesn't want to be friends with us, that's a,
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a one obvious source of shame. We also feel shame when we're left out, when there's some kind of
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group we want to belong to, but they don't let us in. When we see on Facebook that all of our friends
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are, you know, are getting together without us, the famous fear of missing out is really about the
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fear of being excluded and feeling the shame of being on the outside. So unrequited love, exclusion.
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The third one is unwanted exposure. I think everybody gets that when you embarrass yourself
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in public, when you make a mistake that's called out, when you appear unfavorably for whatever
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reason, that makes you feel bad about yourself. And then the final one is one you and I have been
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talking about a bit already, disappointed expectation. When we have some hope for ourself or
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ambition or expectation and we fall short of it, that it makes us feel bad about ourselves.
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That one, as, as we were saying, can also be, you know, a message to us that, well, you know,
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maybe you didn't try hard enough. Maybe you need to work harder. Maybe you need to rethink your
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approach. You know, it can be a message rather than just a painful feeling.
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Can those other sources of shame, like unrequited love, exclusion, unwanted exposure, can those,
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so, you know, disappointed expectations that can help guide your life and help you improve,
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but can those other sources of shame sort of change the way you do things so things work out better for you?
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I think so. If you look at unwanted exposure, you know, sometimes the unwanted exposure that
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embarrasses us is the result of our own choices. Like maybe, maybe I shouldn't have had that other
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glass of wine at that party because then I came, became a little too garrulous and said some things
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I regretted the next day. You know, maybe I need to be more cautious. If you're feeling the shame of
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exclusion, you know, it might lead you to choose other groups to look elsewhere for a sense of
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belonging. It's important to belong. We all need to belong somewhere. And if you persistently on the
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outside of a group, maybe it's because you're choosing the wrong group. Those are some examples.
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And then unrequited love, it might be something, maybe I'm doing something that's
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like I'm turning people off for some, for whatever reason.
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Or, or maybe you're, you're going after people who are inappropriate for you. You know, maybe you
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have some idealized view of yourself that doesn't comport with the way other people see you. I'm not
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sure, but, but, you know, people do fall in love with people who are just aren't right for them.
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Oh yeah. That happens all the time. It's a source of frustration for a lot of people.
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So we talked a little bit about, you know, early childhood and you have this, you believe that,
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you know, sometimes things can happen in your early childhood that can just affect you for the
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rest of your life. And you can, you know, you're never gonna be able to get rid of it, but you can
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work with those limitations. I imagine like the shame of unrequited love, right? Just having a
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parent that as a little, as a child just doesn't really love you, that can be a big source of core
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shame in a person's life. Absolutely. And the, the, the sad science shows that children who grow up
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with parents who don't love them, their brains are different. There's interesting MRI studies out of
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UCLA, a guy named Alan Shore. And he, he talks about and shows the brain scans of children who grew up in
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normal, relatively normal environments, and those who grew up in, in really deficient ones. And,
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and they show that their brains are smaller. They have fewer neural connections between the neurons.
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They're just visibly different. And because brains have critical periods for formation,
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meaning that there's a, there's a critical period when you need certain conditions for
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a brain to develop normally. If you go through that critical period and you don't get the conditions
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you need, like that kind of loving devotion in the first year of life, you can't make up for it
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entirely in later life. There's a lot of talk about neuroplasticity these days, and the brain is
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capable of rewiring itself and, and making new connections and growing to some degree. But, but if
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neuroplasticity were infinite, then, you know, having a traumatic brain injury wouldn't matter,
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right? You, you just reheal. And it's kind of the same way when, when I, when I talk about the,
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the neural deficits of people who grew up in grossly deficient environments with parents who
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did not bond with them in a loving way that, you know, that they, they are likely to be marked
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by that for life. It doesn't mean that they can't grow and compensate, but it's going to be within the
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limits, you know, imposed by their early experience. We're going to take a quick break for a word from
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our sponsors. And now back to the show. How does that early experience manifest itself later on
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as adults? Well, all sorts of ways. If you, if you grow up with this sense of core defect or
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unworthiness, it's often an unbearable experience. I mean, it's just too painful to feel that way,
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to acknowledge that you, you feel that way. So you tend to develop a set of defenses against
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recognizing that truth about yourself. And a lot of them are narcissistic in nature,
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rather than feeling that you're damaged or defective in some way. You instead insist to the,
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to the people that you know, to the world at large, that you're in fact a superior person. You're better
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than other people. So you become, you know, you become a narcissist. That, that's a very common
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way that it shows up. So we, that was, we're talking about core shame, but I think, you know,
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some people who are listening probably have experienced that core shame. They just weren't
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loved as a kid. They had some sort of traumatic experience where they just feel defective,
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but we can experience these types of shame on a day-to-day basis. In fact, we probably do
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multiple times a day, right? We've all probably today already had some moment of unwanted exposure.
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Maybe you passed gas when you didn't, when it wasn't really a good time to pass gas.
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Maybe a friend turned you down, you know, when you want to go hang out. Do we, are there defenses
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that we put up on just for this day-to-day shame that kind of get in the way of us progressing as,
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as people? Absolutely. It's one of the major messages in this book that the strategies for
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dealing with shame that I describe in my clients who suffered more from core shame are just a more
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intense version of strategies that we all use for coping with inevitable shame that comes up really
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every day in our life. So the, the, the clinical cases in the middle of the book are divided into
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these three strategies, the strategies for avoiding shame, strategies for denying shame and strategies
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for controlling shame. And, and I get, there are chapters in the book that, that describe those
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in everyday life. So avoiding shame in everyday life. Well, if I don't want to feel the shame of being
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excluded, I might avoid going to a party where I don't know anybody. And that's kind of understandable.
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I mean, that's not pathological. That's sort of like, why expose yourself to something potentially
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painful if you don't have to, I mean, you might also want to go because you could meet some new
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people, but it isn't pathological to want to avoid it. Another example I give is, you know, lots of
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people do not like to be on stage because they're concerned about embarrassing themselves or, you
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know, appearing unfavorable in some way. And there's nothing wrong with saying, you know what, you know,
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I, I don't want to be an actor. You know, I don't want to be on stage. I'd rather, I'd rather not do
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that. You know, we, we think about whether or not we know it, we think about the potential for a shame
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experience all the time. We're, we're, we're anticipating it. So say there's somebody new that
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you'd like to invite out a potential new friend or a possible date. So you're likely to be concerned
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with whether or not you're going to be rejected, right? Your, your love will be unrequited. So you,
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you think about how to approach that person. You, you might try and put it forward casually,
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like it's no big deal, or you just thought about it. Oh, Hey, you know, you want to want to get
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together for lunch next week, whatever you, you don't want to feel the shame of, of unrequited love
00:24:49.360
or, or exclusion. That's normal. Everybody does that. I think we, we're all doing it all the time.
00:24:55.740
I think that strategies for denying shame are also pretty common. I talk about them more in terms of,
00:25:02.480
you know, narcissistic traits in the, in the case studies, but you know, think back on a,
00:25:09.100
a fight you might've had with a romantic partner, say he or she criticized you for something or
00:25:16.160
faulted you for something. I think most people have a tendency to react defensively when they're
00:25:24.460
criticized in that case. And at least initially they might, they might say, well, what about what you
00:25:31.300
did? You know, you, you, you might blame the other person or try and turn tables or make excuses
00:25:37.920
for themselves, or even become indignant that you dared to criticize me for forgetting, you know,
00:25:44.240
the dry cleaning when you never empty the dishwasher. You know, these, these are kinds of things that we
00:25:49.860
all do. And hopefully we, you know, we cool down and we are able to say, oh yeah, you know,
00:25:57.540
you had a point. I'm really sorry about that. Those are kind of normal, normal strategies,
00:26:04.620
controlling shame strategies, self-deprecating humor. I mean, it somehow feels a lot better to
00:26:13.060
make a joke at our own expense than to hear somebody else make that joke or to expose something
00:26:19.140
about us. I think that's a healthy thing in a way. I think we all, we all like, I think it's a
00:26:25.080
healthy sign to be able to laugh at yourself as long as it doesn't, you know, verge into, you know,
00:26:30.720
kind of savage self-hatred, which is more what I talk about in the case studies. So, so those are
00:26:36.120
ways that we all avoid, deny, and control shame in our everyday life. They're healthy, normal, and not
00:26:43.380
pathological, as long as they're sort of temporary strategies. Yeah. The, the avoid shame, I think that's
00:26:49.120
where you had the case study of how a shame coping strategy can become detrimental of the, the young
00:26:55.680
man basically just wasn't doing anything. He's basically just checked out of life. Didn't, wasn't
00:27:01.120
going to college, just living at home. He was, you know, seeing you because his parents were making
00:27:05.640
him. We've had other psychologists on the show talking about this tendency of, for young men to
00:27:12.960
check out. And a lot of it, it's like the reason they check out because they just want to avoid the
00:27:16.880
shame of failure. So there's like, it's, I mean, especially in this world where it's hyper
00:27:21.620
competitive, right? If you don't get the right SAT score, you don't go to the right college. Like
00:27:26.300
you basically, the idea is out there, you're ho, like your life is just ruined. Well, it's not the
00:27:29.640
case, but they think that. And so to avoid that shame, they just like, ah, I'm just going to stay
00:27:33.940
home and play video games. Right. I mean, so that the so-called slacker personality is, is basically
00:27:39.160
organized around avoiding shame. It doesn't look that way. It looks like they just don't have any
00:27:43.640
ambition, but that's not really the issue. And then that idea of, of controlling shame,
00:27:48.680
you know, self-deprecating humor can be healthy, but then it can sort of, it converge into
00:27:52.640
an extreme form of like just self-pity where you just, instead of letting other people say where
00:27:58.120
you're, you're falling short, you just, you go ahead and you just lay it on. Well, I'm such a
00:28:01.580
terrible this, I'm a failure, I'm this, and that's just self-pity. Right. Right. And it's, and it's
00:28:06.700
very, it's very destructive, but what isn't obvious about it is that it's a, it's a strategy
00:28:14.140
for dealing with shame. It just, you're, you're in control of it. You're never going to allow
00:28:18.800
anybody else the opportunity to shame you because you're there first.
00:28:22.960
But then it holds you back because, I don't know, people don't like being around, you know,
00:28:26.740
like people don't like being around Eeyores, right? They're just like, nobody.
00:28:31.000
And so it actually just sort of, it's like a vicious, vicious cycle where people just
00:28:36.540
continue to exclude you because you're just not pleasant to be around.
00:28:40.920
Leading you to feel even more sorry for yourself.
00:28:43.640
Right. Right. That's, that's what I noticed with a lot of these case studies. There are,
00:28:47.700
there are just tons and tons of vicious cycles that are going on with these individuals.
00:28:52.340
Well, the, you know, as they, as they often say in, in psychoanalytic therapy, it's, it's not
00:28:59.940
the original problem that's causing you trouble. It's, it's your defenses against it. That's what's
00:29:06.960
in your way. And in my work with my clients, I'm, I'm always trying to help them see their
00:29:14.000
defensive strategies for coping with shame and how they're getting in the way of them
00:29:19.240
doing the very things that would make them feel better about themselves.
00:29:23.940
Well, let's talk about shame in men. Cause you talk about this a bit in the book.
00:29:27.160
I thought it was interesting. You started off or you mentioned somewhere in the book that when
00:29:30.720
before you, right, you, right now you do video online video sessions, right? So you're someone's
00:29:36.120
out at the computer, they're at their computer. But before that you did in person, right? Where
00:29:40.300
someone would like, you know, lay on a couch and you guys would talk when you were doing the in
00:29:43.760
person, you mentioned that it was like 60% women, 40% men. But then when you started doing the
00:29:49.800
online, it flipped. Now 60% of your clients are men and 40% of the clients are women. And you kind of
00:29:56.640
made an observation that might be related to a man's sense of shame. What do you think is going
00:30:01.800
Well, you know, the whole cultural comfort conversation about expectations for men,
00:30:06.800
that they're supposed to be self-reliant, stoic. They're supposed to be able to solve their own
00:30:12.820
problems. They're not supposed to need help. So admitting that you have psychological issues
00:30:20.520
and you need help from somebody else is looked down upon. It's considered unmanly, even more so
00:30:28.900
in other cultures than our own. I mean, we're relatively liberal minded in that respect. But
00:30:34.060
if you look at, you know, other cultures, I think it's much more intense. And it's interesting that I've
00:30:42.000
had a number of men in my practice from other cultures. They were English speaking, but they were,
00:30:48.000
you know, perhaps from, you know, India, the country, India, where getting help, you know,
00:30:55.960
from a psychotherapist would be, you know, admitting that would be suicide in a way.
00:31:02.600
And in your experience in work with men, where do you see the biggest source of shame for men?
00:31:10.280
Like, is it unrequited love, unwanted exposure, disappointed expectations, or is it just all over
00:31:15.060
the place? It is all over the place. And I think that's, I think that's borne out by the distribution
00:31:22.860
of the cases I talk about in the book. There's men in each section. There are men who have problems
00:31:29.140
avoiding shame. There are, you know, men who deny shame and there are men who control shame. So I think
00:31:35.900
it pretty much runs the gamut these days. So yeah, so men are also handling shame in pretty much all
00:31:42.940
the different ways, either avoiding it. We just talked about an example of a lot of young men
00:31:46.900
dropping out simply as a way to avoid it. How do you see men trying to deny shame? Where do you see
00:31:53.720
that? How does that manifest itself? Well, you know, it, it shows up in narcissistic kind of
00:32:00.000
behaviors, but also ones that can be like hyper-masculinized, if you know what I mean. Like
00:32:06.800
there are, you know, normal traits that are associated with masculinity, you know, throughout
00:32:14.980
our history, you know, assertiveness, aggressiveness, competitiveness, those can be hyper-masculinized.
00:32:22.120
Like somebody who's like too competitive, somebody who has to constantly win at everything and is bent
00:32:29.500
on destroying the competition, that, that's a very narcissistic strategy for denying shame.
00:32:36.520
and inflicting it on other people. And how do you see men controlling shame? How do they
00:32:41.340
tend to do that? You know, those are the less obvious examples because, you know, self-deprecation,
00:32:49.200
self-pity, and self-hatred are not really socially acceptable for men to be, you know, men aren't
00:32:57.580
supposed to behave that way. So you don't see that very much. Those are the people who would probably
00:33:02.580
come to me. The, the hyper-competitive, narcissistic type of men who are denying shame are the ones
00:33:09.340
who would never come for therapy. Um, and, you know, avoiding shame, you know, I think that's
00:33:17.120
No. Yeah, for sure. Well, and so we talked, I mentioned earlier that, uh, there's been a lot
00:33:22.240
of talk about shame lately, particularly online shaming. You see this happening a lot where people
00:33:28.580
are basically just eviscerated on Twitter or Facebook or social media, and they're just
00:33:34.240
shamed. And some people say that's, well, that's a good thing because, you know, people
00:33:37.640
are changing their behavior and it's helping them sort of steer, course direct them. But
00:33:42.920
you mentioned earlier, you wrote earlier in an article in the Washington Post that actually,
00:33:46.540
you know, yes, it can be, but also you're seeing a trend where shame is becoming weaponized
00:33:51.620
and it's actually becoming more destructive as opposed to helpful. Talk a little bit about that.
00:33:56.920
So there's actually a long history of the use of shame to promote social values that are shared.
00:34:07.180
So, you know, being put in the stocks, for instance, or, you know, the scarlet letter,
00:34:12.420
there are, there are many, many examples from the Greeks onward of, of cultures using shame as a way
00:34:19.200
of enforcing their values. That, that can be a bad thing, but it can be a good thing if it promotes
00:34:25.720
more socially acceptable behavior. In order to do that, it has to hold out the possibility of
00:34:34.100
redemption. It has to be, you should feel ashamed of this and your shaming experience is going to have
00:34:42.860
this duration and we expect you to make amends and then change your behavior. That's the only way
00:34:49.980
shame is ever effective. The problem nowadays is that shame isn't used in that way. Shame is used for
00:34:58.060
a vindictive kind of revenge and there's, there's no chance of redemption and reintegration back into
00:35:04.880
society. Now, sometimes that's, that's, that's appropriate. I mean, like for, for Harvey Weinstein,
00:35:11.760
let's say that's probably really appropriate. He's beyond redemption. He shows no remorse and no,
00:35:18.840
you know, no sense that he has anything to make up for, but other people, their, their careers have been
00:35:25.280
destroyed, their lives ruined, and, and they really weren't given a chance to try and make up for it.
00:35:32.600
I think that's destructive. I think we've gone too far, but that's the way things work, isn't it? I mean,
00:35:38.920
there's all this behavior being described as toxic masculinity and it was toxic in a lot of ways and
00:35:46.280
it's being called out now and men are being publicly shamed. That's a good thing, but it's also
00:35:53.520
been excessive and the pendulum will probably swing back at some point and, and, you know, land somewhere
00:36:01.020
in the middle. It's interesting. There's, there's been a big debate about Al Franken and the way he
00:36:05.720
was shamed and forced to resign and people are now starting to express some regret about that. You know,
00:36:11.980
even, even people who shamed him at that time and thought he needed to resign. There's, there's a sense
00:36:17.560
that, well, you know, maybe the punishment exceeded the crime. So, you know, public shaming is a good
00:36:23.700
thing as long as the punishment does fit the crime. And it's not about, you know, character assassination
00:36:29.100
and the vindictive destruction of someone's life. And you also talked about, you know,
00:36:34.180
particularly shame towards men. Okay. Certain behaviors from men probably should be shamed,
00:36:38.960
but there are certain behaviors that are just innate in men, right? Sort of aggressiveness,
00:36:42.700
assertiveness, that's sort of hardwired in a lot of men. And when you shame them for that,
00:36:48.480
like there's no possibility for redemption. That's like part of who they are, right? So they're just
00:36:52.140
like, why are you shaming me for just, just being me? Well, well, right. That, that is, well, there are
00:36:59.240
people who will argue that shaming men for being that way is a good thing because by using shame in
00:37:06.820
that way, we're going to change them. Essentially, we're going to change their nature so that they will
00:37:14.040
become more empathic, more emotionally sensitive, more in fact, like women. And there, there has been
00:37:22.120
a trend, you know, over the, since the 1960s and second wave feminism, that's trying to create a
00:37:30.140
gender neutral society. And this, this expectation is everywhere that men and women should express the
00:37:38.660
same set of positive character traits. Everything is culturally mediated. And there's no basic
00:37:45.040
difference. I don't believe that's true. And the science doesn't bear that out. You know, the, the, the
00:37:53.540
traits, the, the classically masculine and feminine traits were selected over millennia by, by evolutionary
00:38:02.300
pressures to lead to certain traits being encoded in our DNA, ones that led to greater sexual
00:38:12.340
reproduction and survival. And, you know, those, those traits evolved over, you know, hundreds of
00:38:19.400
thousands of years. And they are expressed in our DNA, particularly in the operation of our hormonal system. And
00:38:28.400
you, you can't, you can't shame that out of existence. All you can do by expecting men and women to be the
00:38:36.100
same is you can make men feel even more shame and, and either go into hiding or, as one writer I like
00:38:44.100
put it, you know, it, it goes underground, masculinity goes underground, and then comes out in even uglier
00:38:52.200
kinds of expression, kind of twisted by the shame and resentment about, you know, being humiliated for being
00:39:00.360
who one is. I think that says something about our current political and cultural moment.
00:39:05.880
No, I think that was Camille Paglia that said something, something, the last thing. Yeah, masculinity goes underground
00:39:11.420
and it sort of manifests itself in uglier, uglier fashions than, than what we, what we had originally.
00:39:17.140
Yeah. The, the person I was thinking of at that moment is, is the conservative writer, Andrew
00:39:22.600
Sullivan. Okay. Yeah. He wrote a, he really wrote a really great article, oh, 16 or 17 years ago,
00:39:29.840
called The He Hormone. He suffers from low testosterone from having been on antiretrovirals for
00:39:37.400
many, many years. So he has to self-inject with synthetic testosterone and he talks about what it does
00:39:44.740
to him and links it up to the whole evolutionary history of men and why these are innate masculine
00:39:51.720
traits that you can't change by societal expectation. What, what I, what I say and what I'm, I'm arguing in,
00:40:00.700
in the next book I'm writing is that it's like, it's like a computer, you know, evolution has bequeathed
00:40:08.380
to us this computer with pre-installed operating system that's in our DNA, it's in our hormones and
00:40:15.480
we can't change that quickly. But there's also the, the cultural software that is able to inhibit,
00:40:25.780
encourage, or redirect the expression of these traits. And we have some flexibility there. So
00:40:31.940
I think a lot of what's going on now in the, in the, the conversation about toxic masculinity
00:40:37.460
is a very positive thing. If we view it as how can we, how can we inhibit certain really destructive
00:40:46.360
expressions of masculinity while encouraging other positive expressions of masculinity rather than
00:40:52.820
trying to make everybody gender neutral? Yeah. The analogy that I like is that masculinity is sort
00:40:58.420
of a, it's like an, it's like electricity and we cultures create cultures of manhood that sort of
00:41:04.660
harness that energy for, if you, there's no like, like electricity, there's no like conduit for it.
00:41:09.780
It becomes very destructive, right? And just kind of goes all over the place. But if you provide it
00:41:13.700
some sort of wire and direct it, it can actually be really powerful. That's, I like that analogy.
00:41:20.200
Right. And so I think that what's going on now is people just want to get rid of that difference
00:41:24.760
completely between men and women instead of, okay, look, accepting, okay, here's how men are
00:41:30.260
because of biology. How can we shape that energy that they have and direct it towards something
00:41:35.200
more positive? That'd be a more useful way to use shame instead of just trying to eliminate men
00:41:42.020
completely or masculinity completely. I couldn't have said it any better. That's exactly what I think.
00:41:47.940
Okay. Well, I'm glad we're on the same page. Well, so like let's, so we've talked about sources of
00:41:52.600
shame and we've talked about ways that we manage shame on a day-to-day basis, but like, how can we,
00:41:59.340
how can we make sure that we're getting the message that shame is trying to send us, right? So that we
00:42:05.900
can use that to become better because that's, that can be hard, right? You're feeling bad about yourself
00:42:11.580
because you, you got excluded or you didn't get the job you wanted. It's very easy to say, well,
00:42:17.540
they're a bunch of bums. They're missing out on something great instead of saying, well,
00:42:22.640
is there something that I did that, you know, excludes it? How do you, how, how can you, I guess,
00:42:27.940
listen to the message shame is trying to send you? Well, it for sure depends on the nature of that
00:42:35.780
shaming message. It's pretty hard to listen to a shaming message that's, you know, cruel, you know,
00:42:43.240
or that makes you feel completely worthless. So it depends on how people deliver the shaming message
00:42:50.060
or how it comes across. But then I think, and what I'm, what I'm trying to help people do with this
00:42:56.640
book is to, to look at the ways you, you tend to defend against shame because we all do it, right?
00:43:03.780
We all try to defend against shame because we don't want to feel it. And if you can, if you can
00:43:09.780
know yourself well, if you can recognize the ways that you tend to make excuses for yourself,
00:43:16.500
blame other people, get indignant when someone shames you, then, then, you know, you can say,
00:43:22.740
okay, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. All right. That's, that's defensive. Take a step back.
00:43:27.840
You know, what's the truth here? You know, what is, what is valuable? What, what can I take out of
00:43:35.580
that shaming experience that, that can work to my advantage? Because, because often it points the way
00:43:41.100
towards building self-esteem in a better way. It's like, it's saying, you know, you, you wanted to
00:43:47.340
succeed, but you, you didn't do it in the best way possible. You feel ashamed of, of the way you
00:43:55.500
behaved. So maybe you need to think about that. And it will tell you, oh, you didn't work hard
00:44:01.940
enough, or you, you didn't focus enough on this particular idea, or you, you need to develop
00:44:07.580
strengths in this area if you really want to succeed. And that way you have a better chance
00:44:14.400
of doing the very things that will build self-esteem and make you feel better about yourself. If you're
00:44:20.820
constantly warding off shame or denying it or defending against it, you tend to make the same
00:44:26.140
mistakes over and over and over again, because you haven't learned the, you haven't learned the lesson.
00:44:31.340
Is the hardest part recognizing how you deny shame?
00:44:34.560
Oh, I think so. I mean, how many people, how many people really know themselves and, and the ways that
00:44:41.420
they defend against all sorts of things? I mean, you know, one of the, one of the things that seems to be
00:44:47.380
true is that we're much better at observing, you know, defensiveness in other people than we are
00:44:53.180
at recognizing it in our own selves. Don't you think?
00:44:56.940
Oh yeah. No, I, I, I'm terrible at it. I recognize it in myself, but then I catch myself and I feel like
00:45:04.420
Well, there you go. Don't, don't, don't feel too much like an idiot. Just say, oh, you know,
00:45:09.800
there I am. That's what I do. I typically do that. You know, I tend to get defensive about something,
00:45:14.760
or I tend to behave in this way. I'm going to be on the lookout for that now.
00:45:18.900
And what do you do? Like, so instead of getting defensive, like what would be a better response
00:45:25.180
to like that feeling of shame, right? Okay. I messed up. You caught yourself. Okay. I'm not gonna,
00:45:31.160
I'm not going to go down that path where I get started getting defensive. What would be the better
00:45:36.900
Well, it's to view it as a learning experience. And there, even though they don't use this particular
00:45:44.740
word, there is a lot of conversation about failure experiences, the value of failure experiences and
00:45:52.280
learning from failures. The, you know, the whole startup culture, you know, accepts that failure
00:45:57.120
is, is to be expected. And the only real shame is in not learning from it. They, I look at failure
00:46:04.820
as a shame experience, makes you feel bad about yourself because you've disappointed an expectation
00:46:10.720
you hold for yourself. So it's, that's the whole way I'm trying to, to reframe the conversation about
00:46:18.980
shame in my book is rather than looking at shame as this bad thing that we need to get rid of,
00:46:25.180
it's to look at it as, as an opportunity to learn.
00:46:29.160
Well, Joseph, where can people go to learn more about the book in your work?
00:46:31.680
The book is available everywhere. It's available on Amazon. I don't know where your audience is,
00:46:37.740
but it's, it has a publisher in England and it'll be available in other languages as well,
00:46:44.740
but it's pretty much everywhere. I think Amazon is the easiest place to find it because, you know,
00:46:49.320
newly published books have a short shelf life and they have to go away to make room for other new
00:46:54.080
books coming out. I have a website called After Psychotherapy, which I've been blogging about shame
00:47:01.080
and narcissism for years. And I also have a blog on psychology today called coincidentally shame in
00:47:09.980
which I, I blog about shame lately more on the, uh, on the broader cultural level in politics and
00:47:17.800
what's going on in our culture. So there, there's a lot of stuff out there. Google my name and you'll
00:47:23.140
Fantastic. Well, Joseph Bergo, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:47:27.360
My guest today was Joseph Bergo. He's the author of the book, Shame, Free Yourself,
00:47:30.760
Find Joy and Build True Self-Esteem. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:47:34.740
You can find more information about Joseph's work at his website at josephbergo.com. Also check out
00:47:39.720
our show notes at aom.is slash shame, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper
00:47:44.900
into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. If you'd like to
00:47:55.960
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