The Power of the Herd (40 page)

But even among “enlightened” social activists, mental health professionals, and leaders in the human potential movement, shaming statements abound. I've observed thousands of shaming phrases and gestures used in planning and team-building contexts, each time undermining trust, creativity, communication, and problem-solving efforts. And I've worked with numerous clients whose careers have been needlessly derailed by shaming attacks from bosses, colleagues, and subordinates. Shaming people in the workplace is more than a silent epidemic; it's a powerful, incredibly hard-to-break
addiction.

Let me give you one, unfortunately typical but rather mild, example: The CEO of an internationally recognized healing and wellness center recently told one of the facility's founders: “You're no longer relevant.” He did this in a full staff meeting, effectively ending a twenty-year relationship. He could have easily said, “I think we need to update some of the healing modalities in your department.” Instead he callously depicted
her
as old, outdated, and incapable of revision. She wasn't the first valued team member to leave the organization after enduring the CEO's insensitive, competitive, purposefully demeaning remarks. And she certainly won't be the last, under current management at least.

C
ONSTRUCTIVE
A
LTERNATIVES
.
Many of the guiding principles offer strategies for removing shame and blame from interpersonal and group interactions — without compromising the need to discuss difficult topics, increase personal accountability, and change unproductive behavior. These include Guiding Principle 3 (managing contagious emotions;
chapter 15
), Guiding Principle 4 (mastering boundary setting and assertiveness techniques;
chapter 16
), Guiding Principle 5 (developing a higher tolerance for vulnerability in oneself, and refraining from using others' vulnerabilities against them;
chapter 17
), Guiding Principle 7 (defusing panic;
chapter 19
), and Guiding Principle 9 (preparing for difficult conversations;
chapter 21
).

Of these, Guiding Principle 4, oddly enough, is
key
to shame-avoidance training, according to Brené Brown's pivotal research. In her 2010 bestseller,
The Gifts of Imperfection,
she deftly illustrates how
“the fear of setting boundaries
and holding people accountable” is the unexpected root cause of many personal and work-related shaming tactics.

The author herself was “stunned” to find that “compassionate people
are boundaried people,” yet Brown's subsequent personal transformation informed her understanding of the link between the two. Earlier in her career, she admits, she was “sweeter — judgmental, resentful, and angry on the inside — but sweeter on the outside.” Today, she describes herself as “genuinely more compassionate, less judgmental and resentful, and way more serious about boundaries.”

How does this work, exactly? “The better we are accepting ourselves and others,” Brown reveals, “the more compassionate we become. Well, it's difficult to accept people when they are hurting us or taking advantage of us or walking all over us.” She insists that “if we really want to practice compassion, we have to start by setting boundaries and holding people accountable for their actions.” The related tactic of blaming others, she observes, is also related to boundaries and accountability:

We live in a blame culture — we want to know whose fault
it is and how they're going to pay. In our personal, social, and political worlds, we do a lot of screaming and finger-pointing, but we rarely hold people accountable. How could we? We're so exhausted from ranting and raving that we don't have the energy to develop meaningful consequences and enforce them. From Washington, D.C., and Wall Street to our own schools and homes, I think this rage-blame-too-tired-and-busy-to-follow-through mind-set is why we're so heavy on self-righteous anger and so low on compassion.

Wouldn't it be better if we could be kinder, but firmer? How would our lives be different if there were less anger and more accountability? What would our work and home lives look like if we blamed less but had more respect for boundaries?

Answers to these questions demand an advanced understanding of power, backed up by significant emotional and social intelligence. Brown goes on to show how one business leader she worked with was initially perplexed by the idea that he was shaming his employees because of a reluctance to hold people accountable. It's clear that we're dealing with a
skill set
that most people simply don't have, no matter how high they climb up the corporate ladder — or how intelligent, religious, moral, or caring they otherwise prove to be. Brown writes,

Shaming and blaming without accountability is toxic
to couples, families, organizations, and communities. First, when we shame and blame, it moves the focus from the original behavior in question to our own behavior. By the time the boss is finished shaming and humiliating his employees in front of their colleagues, the only behavior in question is his….

It's hard for us to understand that we can be compassionate and accepting while we hold people accountable for their behaviors. We can, and, in fact, it's the best way to do it. We can confront someone about their behavior, or fire someone, or fail a student, or discipline a child without berating them or putting them down. The key is to separate people from their behaviors — to address what they're doing, not who they are…. We have to stay away from convincing ourselves that we hate someone or that
they deserve to feel bad so that we can feel better about holding them accountable. That's where we get into trouble. When we talk ourselves into disliking someone so we're more comfortable holding them accountable, we're priming ourselves for the shame and blame game.

When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated. This is why we sometimes attack who they are, which is far more hurtful than addressing a behavior or a choice…. It's also impossible to practice compassion from a place of resentment. If we're going to practice acceptance and compassion, we need boundaries and accountability.

The use of shame as a power tool is epidemic in the professional world. As a result, skills associated with managing its effects — and ultimately eradicating shame in the workplace — need to be incorporated into any serious leadership training program. Yet people without overt leadership aspirations also must address this frequently ignored emotional- and social-intelligence issue. I've seen many talented, creative people face needless hurdles in realizing their personal and professional goals because they lacked shame resilience.

According to psychologist and Eponaquest instructor Pamela Zamel, “repeated and unprocessed encounters with shame can erode your self-esteem and sense of wellness. While the temporary feeling of guilt or embarrassment can lead to positive self-correction, shame is accompanied by the profound message that
you are not fit to belong.
Shame also interrupts curiosity, enjoyment, creativity, and the desire to connect with others.”

In one of her workshop brochures, she summarizes Gershen Kaufman's pivotal insights in
The Psychology of Shame.
Pamela emphasizes that shame is often followed by fear, distress, and anger. “The potential for shame exists in every interpersonal encounter. When an individual's expectations or needs are deemed as wrong, unattainable or ‘too much,' shame is experienced.” Shame can also be a “private phenomenon,” Pamela writes, accompanying “a failure to measure up to our own internalized view of how we should
be, do, act
or
perform.
These internalized standards come from early life experiences, significant relationships, cultural values, and societal messages.”

In 2012, Pamela joined two Eponaquest faculty members — horse trainer Shelley Rosenberg, author of
My Horses, My Healers,
and psychiatrist Nancy Coyne — to create an equine-facilitated personal-development workshop titled “The Cage of Shame.” The seminar helps abuse survivors who face significant blocks in dealing with home- and work-related interpersonal challenges develop “shame resilience.” As the course description reveals, unprocessed shame “can become an organizing principle in one's personality, shaping and coloring
all perceptions and expectations, and essentially making one more and more prone to future shame experiences.” This powerful equine-facilitated intensive offers skills to interrupt the “vicious circle” set in motion when people become “imprisoned” by their own shame-based feelings and experiences.

A D
EEPER
C
HALLENGE
.
There's another side to shame that becomes even more problematic for visionaries, particularly innovators seeking to inspire widespread social change. Throughout history, and quite literally in the biblical sense, shame appears to be an inescapable by-product of transformation — with blame and guilt following close behind. As discussed in
chapter 5
, the Adam-and-Eve story offers one of the earliest depictions of this archetypal pattern. After the first man and woman ate the forbidden fruit, engaging a higher state of consciousness as a result, they didn't suddenly feel God-like. Instead they experienced a shocking surge of emotions associated with self-reflection and personal responsibility. They felt guilt for disobeying God and shame upon becoming aware of their nakedness. To release the intense pressure of these uncomfortable new sensations, Adam blamed Eve for their trouble, and Eve blamed the snake, setting in motion a guilt-shame-blame cycle that every human faces upon reaching the age of reason.

The now-standard definition of shame as a rejection of someone's state of
being
— as opposed to the definition of guilt as a critique of unproductive, hurtful, irresponsible, or immoral
behavior
— is still relevant here, but the issue takes on a wider scope in the context of social evolution. It appears that anytime we move from a limited worldview, accepting new information, expanding and transforming in response, we encounter feelings of shame for the previously constricted, perhaps selfish or even childish, state of being from which we just emerged. This is often accompanied by guilt for the hurtful things we may have unknowingly done to other people, cultures, animals, the environment, and perhaps even ourselves. Recognizing that we were operating from a narrower state of consciousness is essential to moving through this form of shame, allowing us to take personal responsibility for our actions, change our behavior, and fulfill the promise of a new, more empowered state of being.

I often encounter this uncomfortable yet necessary sequence of events with equestrians who attend my workshops. Once they see that horses can act as sensitive, highly adaptable teachers — that some of these animals show a greater capacity for compassion and healing than most
people
these students have encountered — many conventionally trained riders feel not just guilt but also incredible shame for the ways they previously treated these intelligent, openhearted beings. The same thing happens to scientists who've engaged in
conventional animal research activities that involve extreme confinement, pain, and death.

If we have any hope of moving from practices associated with predatory dominance, which thrives on objectifying animals, women, slaves, and so on, we must temper the urge to shame or punish those who've recently “woken up” from the culturally induced trance that promotes these dubious power tools. People can more easily and efficiently change their behavior when realizing that
they
are not
evil, callous,
or
abusive,
but that the system they grew up in
taught
them to engage in these destructive practices. Helping people sort through the shame and guilt they feel while supporting them in learning to use or invent more productive tools allows them to embrace a new way of operating in the world. Acceptance, understanding, and forgiveness are
essential
to transformation.

The initial jolt of awakening to a higher level of awareness and responsibility is so jarring that those of us who don't receive the kind of unconditional support mentioned in the previous section (and, hopefully, some new behavioral skills to go with it) tend to slide backward, desperately grasping at timeworn evasions. We may try to hide, medicate, or lash out rather than embrace the initial feeling of nakedness and vulnerability. We may blame others instead of looking at our own behavior and acknowledging what role we played in some questionable situation.

From there, we can quickly digress to the deadly arts of objectification and projection, easily receding back into the ancient human habit of punishing, enslaving, or preying upon “lesser beings” who aren't “sentient” enough to warrant consideration, empathy, and care. It's a vicious circle. After abusing objectified populations, sometimes simply to release the pressure of our own shame, we must either wake up and finally change our behavior (and both forgive ourselves and make amends for an even longer list of callous, sometimes horrendous acts) or
project
the additional guilt we feel ever more vigorously, making others pay for the mistakes and weaknesses we struggle desperately to disown. The latter option leads to multigenerational cycles of punishment and revenge. At the extreme end of this spectrum, we find serial killers who dispatch women, men, or even children with incredible cruelty, acting out unresolved betrayals or abuse scenarios in all kinds of “imaginative” ways.

Most shame-avoidance techniques, however, are nonviolent, a dubious side effect of human intelligence: despite significant potential for innovation and expansion, our big brains can be used to actively suppress feelings, experiences,
scientific evidence, and personal observations that challenge our limited, selfish agendas. The Buddha called this mental evasion tactic “ignorance,” recognizing that, while it may initially feel more comfortable than letting new information in, this impulse keeps people in an arrested state of mental, emotional, and spiritual development. (Metaphors and techniques for breaking through intellectual blocks to innovation and transformation are outlined in Guiding Principle 6,
chapter 18
.)