Healing the Shame That Binds You

I wrote his German treatise entitled Über Scham und Schamgelfuhl in the mid-20th century. Unfortunately, this work has been translated only into French under the title La Poudrière. I am completely indebted to Schneider for his preservation of this important material in English. I have put this material in the new chapter 12 entitled Spirituality and Sexuality. In this chapter I outline how healthy shame forms, directs, and fulfills development of healthy sexuality. I have added my own interpretations to Scheller's work and I take full responsibility for the final product. With shameless pornography grossing more money than ABC, NBC, CBS, and cable networks combined, Scheller's work is most relevant. The most important enrichment in my understanding of healthy and toxic shame has come directly from reading the work of Sylvan Tompkins, called The American Einstein by Donald Nathanson. Both Gershon Kaufman, who was a constant guide in the first edition of Healing the Shame That Binds You, and Donald Nathanson, who helped clarify many issues in this new edition, are directly indebted to Sylvan Tompkins for their own works. This is not to take anything away from each man's originality, but it is something that both generously acknowledge. Tompkins' work is highly clinical and often hard to read and understand, but it seems clear he is presenting a new and original theory of the primacy of human effects as the essential motivating force in human behavior. Effects, according to Tompkins, are biological mechanisms that unfold according to precisely written scripts. When an effect is named, the word feeling is used. The word feeling implies that the person has some level of awareness that an effect has been triggered. When Tompkins speaks of an effect as an emotion, he implies some biographical experience has taken place, since a triggered effect, feeling, always happens in the context of some situation or interaction that is encoded in our memory as a scene. Tompkins thus describes an emotion as the complex combination of an effect with those memories that record their original occurrence and with the effects that the emotion may further trigger. When I use the words effect, feeling, or emotion in this book, I will be using them in the sense I have just described. For example, if I told you I was angry with my dad because of his continued broken promises, you would go to your own scenes, your memories of being angry at your dad if he broke his promise to you, but you would not know exactly what my emotion of anger is referring to. I would have to describe in sensory-based detail what I meant by anger. In my case, the scene or scenes involved my dad promising me every month for two years that he would take me to play golf. On the day we were finally going to play, he said he had to go downtown to his office on Franklin Street in Houston, Texas, in order to get his paycheck. We didn't have a car, so we carried our golf clubs on the bus and went downtown. I can remember standing at 504 Franklin Avenue while my dad went up to his office. He was gone twenty-five minutes, which is an eternity to an anxious twelve-year-old. When he finally came down, he told me that he had to go back to work, that an emergency had come up. I knew he was lying, that he was going out to drink with his pals. My dad was a serious alcoholic. I was too cowed and too desperate for his love to confront his lie. So I took my golf clubs and got back on the bus. Shortly after I got on the bus, I felt intense hurt, anger, and shame. I went into an hysterical state, crying, sobbing, and yelling at the bus driver to open the window next to my seat. I intended to throw my golf clubs out of the window. They were brand new, a gift from my grandfather. I was in such a state of panic that the bus driver stopped the bus and a group of people on the bus tried to console me. This triggered an even stronger feeling of shame as humiliation. As you hear this scene, it may trigger some scene you experienced and feelings that go with your scene, or you may have felt your own feelings of anger at my father and sadness for me. In any case, you now can understand and get a visual picture of the scene that embodies my emotion of anger at my father for his broken promises. Here's what's next!