The shaking comes and goes. I am working very hard currently–six days a week, while protecting Saturday very carefully–and what had been working was roughly 3 hours daily of meditation, yoga, autogenics, stretching, AVE and Neurofeedback. It was a lot, and I have not had the energy to do all that lately.
But what I have noticed when I don’t shake, is that my dreams seem to channel shame. I will find myself in some social situation, and suddenly someone will realize I don’t belong there, that I am a fake. And I will look at how the Other Half [remember how it used to be the other half until some dude up in Canada invented, then pushed, then got complicit media support for his 1% talking point during the Occupy Wall Street nonsense? Those people are still getting rich, and I’m pretty sure they are the ones who cheated Bernie out of his nomination, and put Joe Biden in the White House. Hillary would have been better, but even the super rich don’t always get exactly what they want. And while on the topic, pace Jordan Peterson, do you think Bernie cleans his own room? He looks like a slob, so he probably is a slob.] lives, and feel excluded.
This is a shame dream, of course. Shame is feeling like you don’t and can’t belong. Gabor Mate and Jonathan Hari have put out good talks on how addiction and social disconnection are related. But to my knowledge neither has put out good TREATMENTS. In my own view, the best book I have read is Sebern Fisher’s one. Peter Levine and Bessel van der Kolk have some good ideas too, but my own treatment plan is essentially Kum Nye, Autogenics, Neurofeedback, and AVE.
Here is the thing: trauma creates the Unholy Triad of fear, anger and shame. Anger gets you in trouble socially, and fear manifests as anxiety (not uncommonly diagnosed in my view as ADHD, because it prevents long term concentration), which is unpleasant. So as I have been arguing, trauma often results in what amounts to self harming, self destructive behaviors I am calling generally Masochism.
And the functional effect of shame–and perhaps its definition–is an INABILITY to feel like you belong. That you are a part of a coherent social whole which is safe for you.
In my particular case, I think this was largely the result of a primary bonding failure. My mother, even now, is emotionally unavailable. It is uncanny that, even now, I can tell her something important about my life, and a week later she has forgotten entirely. For that reason, I rarely share anything important, although I do talk with her somewhat regularly out of a sense of duty. I don’t want to participate in a world where even bad parents (up to a point) are abandoned permanently.
And I don’t doubt she was much worse when I was younger. She herself has some form of trauma in her whose genesis I’m not destined to know in this life, but she has ZERO attunement. Almost none. She is in her own world, even now.
But I wonder if roughly that same effect is not being inflicted on many children now by technology. If you bond with your iPad, that your parents gave you at age 3 to make you easier to manage, you have not learned to connect with other human beings, have you? If that bright blinking light becomes your emotional home, have you not become a stunted, lessened human being, for whom shame sooner or later will emerge as a natural function of an innate human neurological necessity?
I think so. We are raising a generation of kids who will need to be taught to be human, if indeed it is possible. I think it IS possible, but we need to state now that it is likely a needed task.
But returning to myself, this basic thesis explains some things. With regard to addiction, drugs and alcohol manage anxiety for those still trying to live some semblance of a connected life, one filled with shame. As I say, to push out from masochism engenders fear, and drugs and alcohol blunt fear.
But would not work addiction become a sort of Reaction Formation (some of Freud’s terms seem useful, even if he was a craven liar, and always almost right, but rarely actually right) to a feeling of inferiority? Adler, actually, was known for speaking of an Inferiority Complex. Would this not amount to overcompensation brought on by shame?
And sexual addiction would be a combination of the need for connection combined with a deeply seated emotional conviction that it remained impossible for that individual. So you go through, you use, people, knowing you can never get what you really want.
And you can derive–and I think I’ve made this comment before–both Sartre’s “L’infer c’est les Autre” and his Nausea.
In my view, shame can precede a social interaction, in the form of trauma–Developmental or Acute–but of course societies can also reject people. In the modern world, many people find themselves alone. Their extended families are extended and often emotionally distant as well.
And Americans, in particular, have gradually substituted, in my view, niceness for sincerity, and a superficial affability for deep seated connection. David Riesman, among others, wrote about this in the Lonely Crowd. I am not arguing for rudeness, but after being asked for the fifth time in five minutes “how are you doing today?” at Home Depot the other day I told this poor gal “tired and irritable”, which was the truth. They ask, they get.
I suppose there are times when sincerity is unappreciated!!! But the reality is that if you never answer honestly, if everything is good, good good, then some part of you forgets that there is a human being on the other end, because the whole process is so mechanical and ritualized. I don’t doubt that yesterday someone killed himself who had been answering good good good for many years.
But being unappreciated–not “feeling felt”, to use a great pair of words I think originated with Dan Siegel–can easily have the effect of making the world seem hostile, and if the world is hostile, then fuck it. Fuck them. Sour grapes. Hell is others. Corollary: What is left is me and what belongs to me.
Likewise the effort, from within shame and alienation, to reconnect to the world brings with it profound anxiety, and that anxiety often manifests in nausea. Sufficient fear will make us sick to our stomachs. This is the vagus nerve, we now know. Movement from shame to self affirmation is still an activity within a triggered Limbic system. Nothing has been subtracted neurologically.
I honestly think my main task on Earth is and remains to walk this path, to find the way from deep trauma into contentment and peace and joy–a task which involves cutting through thick jungles of bullshit, crossing rivers of doubt and confusion, and climbing mountains of sheer unrelenting effort.