Hello! I hope you're doing well!
There's a video of yours that I can't find at the moment, it might've been a Q&A, but in it you said something to the effect of "shame is a widely useless emotion" and I found it really helpful at the time what you said. Would you mind expounding on that sentiment, if it is one you still hold, that I and others might have it for reference in times where it is needed?
Oh sure, ask the guy with ADHD to remember anything he's said! Ableist!
(this is a joke. I am joking about my disability.)
What I mean when I say something like that, though, is that I believe that shame is an extremely limited instrument. The only thing it is really good at is causing a kind of mental pain that prevents you from repeating a behaviour.
This is useful for some things—one should generally feel ashamed of harming other people, for example. But the trouble with shame is that, once it has provided the pain of itself, it doesn't really have anything else to offer.
If you harm someone and you feel ashamed of it, while that feeling is appropriate, the shame doesn't really offer you any useful way to address the harm you have done. At most, shame has a tendency to prompt us to seek punishment for our misdeeds (or, more commonly, prompt us to hide our misdeeds for fear of punishment), but there is nothing in that emotion that offers a way to make actual amends, limit or undo your harm, or even learn to do better in the future. All the feeling tells you is "THAT WAS BAD AND YOU ARE BAD BECAUSE YOU DID IT!", which, even if it is accurate, is not constructive or especially useful. Making amends, addressing your harm and learning to do better, these things all require many different tools and feelings, like empathy and care and responsibility and self-respect. Shame alone teaches you almost nothing.
Thus, shame is an absolutely dogshit motivator for getting in shape or taking care of your health, for example. If the reason you are exercising or eating better is because you feel intense shame about your weight or your body shape, then 1) exercising is going to be absolutely miserable because all you are doing is running away from a horrible painful feeling you can't deal with and 2) any "failure" to exercise (skipping a day, being too tired, not doing enough reps, not hitting step counts, whatever) becomes yet another source of shame which just makes you feel even more miserable, and the cycle compounds.
Compare and contrast with exercising out of an earnest love for your body, and a desire to nurture and strengthen it, out of curiosity to find out how you can change it or the desire to learn a new physical skill or sport, or just out of a neutral, practical acceptance that you have some condition or need that requires exercise as part of the treatment.
Shame is similarly absolutely bottom-of-the-barrel shitfucking garbage at motivating people to express themselves. Shame will drive you away from art, away from poetry, away from literature and song and, oh my god, especially from dance. It will drive you away from anything that requires you to in any way make yourself vulnerable, because the fear of shame and the pain that comes with it makes vulnerability even more terrifying.
Shame, generally, is a feeling that wants you to shrink into yourself and disappear forever. It's a feeling that wants you to be less in the world.
Shame has a place and a use, it exists in us for several evolutionary reasons, same as anything, it has a function in our social structures. But it is a limited instrument. It is good for a very, very small number of things, and when it is misapplied to almost literally anything else, all it does it make everything worse and everyone more miserable.
That's what I think, anyway.
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