In my article Your Self-image in the Workplace , I mentioned the interesting confession of an educator friend who has years of experience in teaching, and only at the best schools.
“Usually,” my friend had lamented with a big sigh, “a small child arrives for his first day of school with an excellent self-image.”
“Great - so what’s the problem, then?” I had asked.
“Well, very often, that’s the end of the story!”
The following incident, which I read of recently, may be an extreme example, but it surely represents the type of thing my friend had in mind.
A certain teacher asked her pupils to open the homework they were supposed to have prepared the previous evening. She noticed that little Suzie failed to open her book, and asked her why.
Suzie turned red and managed to stammer: “I…didn’t …do the homework. I…I…forgot about it.”
Thereupon, the teacher took a small coin out of her pocket, glared at the object of her anger and snickered: “Suzie, do you see this penny? Well, Suzie, I can tell you, it’s even more than you’re worth!”
I don’t know what our teacher had hoped to achieve, except perhaps to imbue in the poor girl a hatred of learning for the rest of her school career. The only thing we can be certain of, is that it’s past time that this lady looked for a new profession.
If what she had intended was to instill in her pupil a sense of shame, that’s a kind of shame that’s clearly very, very destructive. But it must be said, and said very clearly, there’s another kind of shame that’s very, very constructive.
And it’s nothing less than a tragedy that in today’s so-called civilized society, we’ve all but lost that sense of constructive shame. And as a society, we’re destined to pay very heavily for it.
What inspired me to write this post was an excellent article by Dr. Joyce Brothers entitled Shame May Not Be So Bad After All in Parade Magazine of Feb. 27. I urge you to read it, and think about it deeply.
A world in which a woman boasts openly on a TV talk show about seducing her sister’s husband, a man on a reality show confides his plan to humiliate an unsuspecting teammate - “knife him in the back” - a world in which songs about the joys of beating up women are openly aired and new computer games where the mission is to kill John F. Kennedy are openly sold on the market - is this a healthy world or a very, very sick one?
Carrying around the “baggage” of shame only makes people bad about themselves, say some pseudo-psychologists. But as Dr. Brother points out, rather than increasing our self-esteem, the suppression of shame can do just the opposite.
“Positive shame,” she asserts, “occurs when we see ourselves as we really are - perhaps too involved to notice that our spouse needs our help, perhaps too scared of what others think to stand up for someone in trouble, perhaps too resentful of the past to allow a wound to heal…”
Negative, destructive shame is something we can all do without.
But bringing back the positive shame of years and generations gone by is what may yet save this world.
thanku for your article on shame I had the worse night at work tonight working in a nursing home.My buddy I was working with kept putting me down all night and the more she did it the more angry I became inside and with that I could not concentrate worrying what she was going to pick on next so things got forgotten or were not done to her liking and the circle goes around and around.So how does one get themselves out of this, “I’m not good enough, life’s not worth it why are we here anyway attitude