[āOne of the very hardest things about preventing and ending violence is that most of our work isnāt really about getting someone to stop being violent. Most of the time, thatās not the heart of the thing. The even-more-rigorous struggle is to cultivate all of the awareness and skills that would have been necessary for the violence not to have happened in the first place.
Which is why, when we talk about violence, we always end up talking about everything: slavery, binary gender, the original disconnection of humans from the rest of life on this planet, and so on. Solving violence is rarely as much about the moment at hand as it is about everything else that preceded it.
Which is where shame comes in.
As a therapist who has spent the last decade working with movement folks who are survivors of intimate violenceāas well as with many people who have caused harmāI see shame as one of the most pervasive, painful, and insidious barriers to our efforts to fulfill the aspirations of transformative justice.
In order to develop real responses to the myriad harms in our livesāor even the capacity to develop real responsesāwe need to understand shame and develop tools for working with it, individually and collectively.
(ā¦) Shame is different than guilt. While guilt focuses on our behavior (āI did something badā), shame creates an identity: āI am bad.ā Shame keeps us stuck, isolated, and hiding. With no way to escape from the totality of our belief (āI just am wrongā), we may do some of the following:
hide what we feel is bad about ourselves and try hard to pass as āgood.ā
overcompensate in other parts of life through overwork, caretaking, or perfectionism to make up for whatever is āwrongā about us.
defend ourselves from any insinuation that we might have done wrong, attempt to rationalize, or justify our actions.
blame someone else, try to divert responsibility, or shift the focus onto another.
attack anyone who draws attention toward the source of our shame, try to have power by dominating or shaming others.
numb through self-harming use of alcohol, substances, food, sex, technology, and so on.
Most of us use all of these strategies in different moments. Overaccountability and underaccountability are two sides of the same coin: āI canāt stand how bad I feel and canāt imagine making it right (overaccountability) so Iām going to hide that it (whatever it is) even happened, or lie about it or blame someone else (underaccountability).ā]
Nathan Shara, Facing Shame: From Saying Sorry to Doing Sorry, from Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories From The Transformative Justice Movement
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