Fault Lines

Today I have a couple of things to share. The first is that I have a book coming out this week! Dead Dharma: The Grateful Dead and the American Quest for Transcendence arrives Thursday, November 5, in all formats. Well, except eight-track. But the audiobook, e-book, and hardcover editions will be available wherever fine books are sold.

The following day, Friday, November 6, I have a book talk at the legendary Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. Interviewing me will be a nice writerly chap named Robert Ham. That should be fun! If you’re local, or know someone who might be interested, please spread the word. All the details are on the Powell’s website. If I remember to record audio or video, I’ll try to share it.

I also wanted to talk about what’s been happening in the field, so to speak. As I continue through my clinical pastoral education, I’ve had opportunities to work with people experiencing major life transitions. Some are experiencing any combination of homelessness, incarceration, and addiction. Much of the emphasis is on accompaniment in substance recovery, but beneath compulsive and self-defeating behaviors there is often a great deal of undigested life stuff. We can call it trauma, with a capital T, but whatever terminology we use, there can be a lot to work through.

Lately, I’ve been contemplating shame as a powerful inner voice. Less than a single emotion, and more like a hive, shame can contribute to the patterns that keep people stuck in reactivity—typically expressed through anger, fear, hostility, or aggression, as well as disconnection and inaction.

My primary mentor in chaplaincy, who coincidentally, magically, or karmically happens to be a Buddhist practitioner in Tibetan lineages, has worked extensively with incarcerated individuals. She recently shared some material about shame that I found particularly illuminating.

One of the central ideas is that shame can be a powerful fuel for addiction and compulsive behavior. At the core of toxic shame is a sense of a ruptured self, accompanied by the belief that we are fundamentally flawed. It can manifest as an inner critic that judges everything we do as worthless, wrong, or doomed to fail.

Often that voice is an echo of what we’ve heard from parents, family, teachers, or peers, somehow internalized along the way. It can originate in harsh punishment, abuse, or family and social belief systems that reject vulnerability. Sometimes it develops from witnessing violence, substance abuse, or other disturbing behaviors at a young age.

Shame can manifest in all sorts of ways, including defensiveness, aggression, arrogance, grandiosity, entitlement, controlling behavior, judgmental attitudes, distrust, and diminished self-worth. And yes, addiction. These behaviors can serve to conceal an underlying conviction that something is wrong with us.

Of course, there is also a healthy capacity for shame. It’s a normal human emotion that can help us recognize when we’ve fallen short, take accountability, and do better. It can keep us humble. Toxic shame, by contrast, keeps us believing that we are bad, defective, unlovable, or somehow separate from everyone else. It can even become addictive in its own right.

Guilt and shame aren’t the same, but they’re connected. A useful distinction is that guilt concerns something we’ve done, whereas shame concerns who we believe ourselves to be. Feelings of guilt can provoke a deeper sense of shame.

In my conversations with people who have done things they aren’t proud of, I sometimes distinguish punitive guilt from regret. Guilt can be constructive when it motivates us to make amends, but when entangled with shame, it can feel like a finger pointing directly at us, activating the familiar refrain: I’m not good enough. I always fuck up. Why am I such a terrible person? Regret, on the other hand, can remain centered on the behavior itself, allowing us to recognize what happened without making it the totality of who we are.

And what’s between our actions and who we want to become? Choices.

We can reconnect with our values, including qualities we may have expressed before life became confusing or painful, and allow those values to guide our present and future behavior. We recognize how certain choices lead to outcomes we don’t want, which helps us orient toward those we do. Over time, new habits can take shape.

Obviously, this is a process that requires support, and there’s much more to it than I can cover here.

So many people carry these feelings without ever having recognized them, much less had the opportunity to meet them with curiosity and self-kindness. The good news is that there’s never a wrong time to start.