Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Between Us

  I also shed these emotions because no one else around me focused on self-expression the way I did, and because self-expression of this kind did not get positive responses. With help of subtle and not-so-subtle feedback, I came to see my Dutch way of self-expression as too forceful and unnecessarily impolite. There was the clearly written feedback on my teaching evaluations: “She is blunt at times” or “Professor Mesquita tried to impose her beliefs.” But there must have been more subtle signs as well—from colleagues, friends, my children’s schoolteachers—that I came to interpret as disapproval. A journalist from my university’s monthly magazine nodded politely when, during an interview, I volunteered my criticism on the university’s research policy. He seemed in a hurry to leave the topic behind us. My experience of sticking out like a sore thumb served as a cue to suppress my indignation or weaken it. At first, I tried to not express what I felt, or not as bluntly. But after a while, I lost my sense that it was natural to feel this way, and I traveled some distance towards learning emotional ways that were more effective and better understood in my new cultural environment. When I did show indignation or anger on occasion, as with the journalist from my university’s magazine, I immediately realized that this was a relic from my time in the Netherlands. It did not feel “right” anymore, not in that context. My emotions came to serve respect and politeness rather than intellectual autonomy. The learning was not merely cosmetic; I felt less anger and indignation. I never became fully North Carolinian, but I do think my waltz became smoother over the years. Less stepping on other people’s toes. In the same way my emotions had once allowed me to be part of a Dutch relationships, they now allowed me to grow more in sync with my North Carolinian environment. My colleagues Heejung Kim, Jozefien De Leersnyder, Alba Jasini, and I have come to see similar changes in immigrant populations that we study. These changes are what we call in psychology jargon emotional acculturation: learning to do emotions in the new culture’s ways. In much of our research, we studied emotional acculturation by comparing the emotions of immigrant minorities with those of the average majority respondent for a particular type of situation.

• From Between Us

  When we conducted our interview studies, the same interviews that taught us that Japanese respondents were unsure what we meant by emotional intensity, we encountered another surprising fact: the Japanese interviewees felt most comfortable talking about situations of shame. In other cultures, we had saved shame episodes for the very last, and had started with a positive emotion, such as pride. But talking about moments of success, or standing out, risks jeopardizing the relationship with others in many Japanese contexts, and so it did not break the ice for our Japanese respondents. To the contrary, they were reticent to share prideful happiness situations. On Mayumi Karasawa’s strong recommendation, we thus turned the order of the emotions around for the Japanese respondents. And much against my intuition, starting the interview by reporting an instance of shame broke the ice for Japanese respondents. When shame is a step towards remedying your shortcomings and mending a relationship in jeopardy, it is good to be talking about it. Shame was “right,” and in our survey studies, Japanese respondents reported higher frequencies of shame than their U.S. counterparts. If shame sets off a downward spiral in WEIRD cultures, it has the exact opposite effect in cultures where it is “right.” In many of those cultures, it motivates you to invest in the relationship at stake, adding to its reputation as a socially beneficial emotion. In their study on shame, Bagozzi and his colleagues compared Dutch salespeople to their Filipino counterparts. Like the Dutch, the Filipino salespeople recognized shame as feeling exposed, a failure, and small and weak. But shame did not make the Filipino salespeople withdraw or stumble. To the contrary, shame signaled that they had to invest in the customer relationship that was not going well. Rather than making them want to hide, shame made them reach out to their customers. Separately, Filipino salespeople who felt shame reported better sales interactions and higher sales volumes—showing the yields of their investment in the customer relationship. There are other cultures in which showing shame breeds acceptance. Among the Minangkabau and the Taiwanese, for example, the shameful child is a good child who saves their parents’ face. Shame is shared by the members of the secure family network and gains them acceptance in the broader community. The Japanese friend or spouse expressing shame or self-criticism meets cultural expectations, and can count on their friend’s or spouse’s acceptance and support. And in fact, Japanese college students indicated that they encountered many situations eliciting strong shame—the opposite of their American counterparts. The Japanese students seem to seek out shame situations, rather than avoid them as the American students did. Shame means you know your place or your shortcomings, and in a culture where this does not change anything in the relationships, this is a good thing.

• From Between Us

  Shame in this latter sense protects feminine honor: the (sexual) modesty of the female relatives, on which the family honor depends. Among the Egyptian Bedouins, hasham (roughly translated as “shame”) is a dignified way for women, considered weak and dependent, to achieve respect and honor. Hasham is part of the modesty code that individuals adopt as matter of self-respect and pride, rather than an obligation. Shame, and the deferent behaviors associated (e.g., veiling, avoiding contact), are moral in this context. They mitigate any negative consequences that modesty breaches might bring for the less powerful. This shame is perhaps closer to the shame seen in cultures with a fixed hierarchy of positions, and in fact there may be a fixed hierarchy between men and women in honor cultures. THE COURSE OF SHAME Whenever I present cultural differences in shame, colleagues have asked me if “exotic” examples of shame are really the same emotion. Was Akio Toyoda, Toyota’s CEO, really ashamed, as Dorothy was? Could Toyoda’s apologies have been an expression of embarrassment, or could he have been merely polite? Was Aslan’s aggression an “expression” of the anger following his shame rather than of shame “itself”? And did the Egyptian Bedouin women have an emotion at all, or were they merely rule-abiding? Do people in other cultures not mislabel their emotions? Are we talking about the same shame in all these cases? Shame, like anger, is part of a relationship. Depending on the (projected) responses of others, shame runs a very different course. “Right” shame is successful at performing the act of reintegration in the community; “wrong” shame further alienates the person who feels shame. Right shame may either be the relational act of propriety or modesty, or interestingly enough, the awareness that your social position is under threat and needs to be reclaimed; wrong shame may be the “wanting to dissolve into nothing,” or perhaps, having lost honor irrecoverably. Right shame is an awareness of others’ perspective, wrong shame is the realization that you fall short. For instance, Japanese college students reporting shame were on average more focused on being judged by others (“I focused on what the other(s) is/(are) thinking of me”), and U.S. college students were focused on falling short of the standard (“I blamed myself for the outcome of the situation”). Spanish students (from an honor culture) associated shame more with “public evaluations,” while Dutch students associated shame more with “self-failure.” There are perhaps some universal themes that run through shame episodes, such as a bid for acceptance, but there is no reason to think that shame is characterized by an invariant feeling, or that it runs the same course.

• From Between Us

  When the primary cultural goal is to meet the social expectations for your role, showing an awareness of your violations is appreciated. Shame tells others that you know your place, that you are prepared to do what it takes to be accepted by them. Shame also means that you take others’ perspective in the situation: How are you doing in their eyes? Are you meeting their expectations? Shame, in other words, indicates that you care about your bond with others. In a New York Times Op-Ed with the title “An Admirable Culture of Shame,” Nassrine Azimi, then senior advisor at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), held a mirror to her American readers by describing exactly this kind of “right” shame for Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota, a Japanese company: When in February of this year Akio Toyoda . . . testified before the U.S. Congress and took personal responsibility for the failures of his company, it was seen as a matter of course. But can one even imagine an American executive from Wall Street apologizing in the parliament of another country? Why would such an act of apology by an American be so unimaginable, whereas a Japanese doing this seems unsurprising? To understand why the president of Toyota apologized to the U.S. Congress as a matter of course, we need to know that people in Japan habitually see themselves as incomplete, and are encouraged to be self-critical. Shame fits this focus on self-criticism, and on working hard to make up for the deficits you (as anybody) unavoidably have. Shame is not only rated as less unpleasant in Japanese than U.S. American contexts, but it helps to achieve a core cultural goal, that of maintaining harmonious social relationships and doing enough for the group. The Japanese emotion haji (shame, embarrassment) fits the general Japanese ethos of perspective-taking and embodies a keen motivation not to burden others. Many of the emails I receive from my Japanese friends and colleagues start with, “I am sorry to trouble you.” Apologizing is at the center of shame practices: it is an acknowledgment of burdening the other, and the wish that this could have been prevented. When we conducted our interview studies, the same interviews that taught us that Japanese respondents were unsure what we meant by emotional intensity, we encountered another surprising fact: the Japanese interviewees felt most comfortable talking about situations of shame. In other cultures, we had saved shame episodes for the very last, and had started with a positive emotion, such as pride. But talking about moments of success, or standing out, risks jeopardizing the relationship with others in many Japanese contexts, and so it did not break the ice for our Japanese respondents.

• From Between Us

  It was humiliating in a way because someone had to help you go to the bathroom or get dressed. . . . [I felt] Worthless. No one would want me: especially a woman who wants children. I blamed God and everyone else except the person who did it— me. . . . I had been very athletic before, and here I was, not able to walk or do anything . . . I just felt like I would not be any good to anyone. . . . Dorothy, a sixty-five-year-old woman, remembered how she and her first husband had been refused as youth counselors for the church camp, because her husband was gay (and “he was not seen as someone that could be trusted with youth”): We were supposed to be youth advisors to a certain group at church . . . and everybody got their assignments but us. . . . I can remember sitting in the youth pastor’s home that night and feeling that, through no action of my own, I was being lumped as somebody that was undesirable. . . . [The pastor and his wife] knew . . . how I would feel about it . . . , but it had to be done. [I felt] a deep sense of loss . . . being exposed. A situation where you’d like to go somewhere and pull the lid over ya and not come out again. . . . [I felt like] avoiding going to church, but uh, I did go . . . Ryan calls his feelings the strongest he ever had, and Dorothy says that if she had been suicidal, this would have been the time to end her life. Shame means to be criticized and rejected in a culture where you are supposed to feel good about yourself and be loved. Ryan literally falls short of the cultural ideal of independence, and Dorothy becomes “exposed” by what she holds to be the immorality of her husband’s sexual preference; in either case, they fall short of a positive identity they value. Both are rejected (not qualifying as camp counselor), or at least imagine being rejected (“No one would want me: especially a woman who wants children”) for reasons they agree with, and that are collectively valued. Ryan thinks he is “worthless,” and Dorothy thinks that her and her husband’s being barred from the youth camp “had to be done.” Shame is “wrong” because it shows you are worthless or bad, but in addition, it may be “wrong” because it personifies withdrawal from social life. Ryan would “stay in bed,” and would have liked to “just go away”; Dorothy felt like avoiding going to church. In both cases, shame interfered with their normal participation in social life.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  "Yes, I will do anything; spare him." "Let him live," said Coeur-de-fer, "but he has got to join us, that last clause is crucial, I can do nothing if he refuses to comply with it, my comrades would be against me." Surprised, the merchant, understanding nothing of this. consanguinity I was establishing, but observing his life saved if he were to consent to the proposal, saw no cause for a moment's hesitation. He was provided with meat and drink, as the men did not wish to leave the place until daybreak. "Therese," Coeur-de-fer said to me, "I remind you of your promise, but, since I am weary tonight, rest quietly beside Dubois, I will summon you toward dawn and if you are not prompt to come, taking this knave's life will be my revenge for your deceit." "Sleep, Monsieur, sleep well," I replied, "and believe that she whom you have filled with gratitude has no desire but to repay it." However, such was far from my design, for if ever I believed deception permitted, it was certainly upon this occasion. Our rascals, greatly overconfident, kept at their drinking and fell into slumber, leaving me entirely at liberty beside Dubois who, drunk like the others, soon closed her eyes too. Then seizing my opportunity as soon as the bandits surrounding us were overcome with sleep: "Monsieur," I said to the young Lyonnais, "the most atrocious catastrophe has thrown me against my will into the midst of these thieves, I detest both them and the fatal instant that brought me into their company. In truth, I have not the honor to be related to you; I employed the trick to save you and to escape, if you approve it, with you, from out of these scoundrels' clutches; the moment's propitious," I added, "let us be off; I notice your pocketbook, take it back, forget the money, it is in their pockets; we could not recover it without danger: come, Monsieur, let us quit this place. You see what I am doing for you, I put myself into your keeping; take pity on me; above all, be not more cruel than these men; deign to respect my honor, I entrust it to you, it is my unique treasure, they have not ravished it away from me." Chapter 10 It would be difficult to render the declarations of gratitude I had from Saint-Florent.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  “I can see that,” he said. I waited for him to say something more, but he didn’t. I was wearing a navy blue jacket over my shirt. I took it off and flung it on the couch. Then I piled my hair on top of my head and tied it into a knot. “So why are you here?” He looked at me then. “I want you to be okay.” Too much. I ran upstairs. I was crazy. I knew that. Normal people didn’t leave conversations right in the middle. Normal people didn’t let strangers sleep on their couch. Two years ago I purchased a stationary bike from an eighty-eight year old widower with pink hair named Delfie. She’d put an ad in the Penny Saver after she’d had hip replacement and couldn’t damn well use it, as she’d said. I’d picked it up the same day I made the call. After all the hassle and tassle of hauling the thing up the stairs, I’d yet to sit on it. I walked over to where it was collecting dust in the corner of my bedroom and climbed on. I had to adjust Delfie’s setting on the padded seat. I pedaled until my legs felt like jelly. I was panting when I climbed off, my bare feet sore from the plastic pedals. I walked on the sides of my feet to my night table. I flipped open the cover of Knotted with my pinkie. For MV I closed it, and went downstairs to see what Isaac was making for dinner. [image file=image20.jpg] Fortune favors the brave. That’s what I repeated to myself as they prepped me for surgery. Except I didn’t say it in English, I said the Latin words: fortes fortuna juvat ... fortes fortuna juvat ... fortes fortuna juvat. Mantras sounded better in Latin. Repeat any phrase in the educated fancy-pants language most of the ancient philosophers used, you sounded like a goddamn genius. Repeat the same phrase in English, you sounded like a loon. Who wrote that phrase? A philosopher. I should have remembered his name, but I couldn’t. Nerves, I told myself. I searched for something else to focus on, something that could comfort my decision. I knew that the Bible said something about cutting out your eye if it offended you. I was cutting out my breasts. I thought that this was both my brave move and my offended one. It didn’t matter; most bravery boiled down to nothing more than a strong sense of duty that piggybacked an even stronger sense of crazy. Everything brave was a little bit crazy. I tried to focus on something else so I wouldn’t have to think about how crazy I was. There was a nurse taking my blood.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Now why? You must try to stop being frightened, to stop hiding your head. You need life, you need people. People are the food that we writers live on; get out and devour them, squeeze them dry, Stephen!’ ‘My father once told me something like that—not quite in those words—but something very like it.’ ‘Then your father must have been a sensible man,’ smiled Brockett. ‘Now I had a perfect beast of a father. Well, Stephen, I’ll give you my advice for what it’s worth—you want a real change. Why not go abroad somewhere? Get right away for a bit from your England. You’ll probably write it a damned sight better when you’re far enough off to see the perspective. Start with Paris—it’s an excellent jumping-off place. Then you might go across to Italy or Spain—go anywhere, only do get a move on! No wonder you’re atrophied here in London. I can put you wise about people in Paris. You ought to know Valérie Seymour, for instance. She’s very good fun and a perfect darling; I’m sure you’d like her, every one does. Her parties are a kind of human bran-pie—you just plunge in your fist and see what happens. You may draw a prize or you may draw blank, but it’s always worth while to go to her parties. Oh, but good Lord, there are so many things that stimulate one in Paris.’ He talked on about Paris for a little while longer, then he got up to go. ‘Well, good-bye, my dears, I’m off. I’ve given myself indigestion. And do look at Puddle, she’s blind with fury; I believe she’s going to refuse to shake hands! Don’t be angry, Puddle—I’m very well-meaning.’ ‘Yes, of course,’ answered Puddle, but her voice sounded cold. 4 After he had gone they stared at each other, then Stephen said: ‘What a queer revelation. Who would have thought that Brockett could get so worked up? His moods are kaleidoscopic.’ She was purposely forcing herself to speak lightly. But Puddle was angry, bitterly angry. Her pride was wounded to the quick for Stephen. ‘The man’s a perfect fool!’ she said gruffly. ‘And I didn’t agree with one word he said. I expect he’s jealous of your work, they all are. They’re a mean-minded lot, these writing people.’ And looking at her Stephen thought sadly, ‘She’s tired—I’m wearing her out in my service. A few years ago she’d never have tried to deceive me like this—she’s losing courage.’ Aloud she said: ‘Don’t be cross with Brockett, he meant to be friendly, I’m quite sure of that. My work will buck up—I’ve been feeling slack lately, and it’s told on my writing—I suppose it was bound to.’ Then the merciful lie, ‘But I’m not a bit frightened!’ 5 Stephen rested her head on her hand as she sat at her desk—it was well past midnight. She was heartsick as only a writer can be whose day has been spent in useless labour.

• From Between Us

  Second, the illustrations were compromising for the Prophet Muhammed and for Muslims as a group. As if this weren’t enough, the cartoons were published for everyone to see, and reprinted many times. In other words, the cartoons offended the social image of Muslims in a very public way—which in an honor culture is both shameful and offensive. In one study, those valuing honor more were more likely to appraise the “illustrations” as harmful to their reputation as Muslims, and if they did, they reported both more shame and more anger. So, what was at stake for these Muslims? Presumably, the honor and reputation of their group, and, because honor is a shared commodity, their own honor and reputation. In this cultural context, honor is the very key to being a valuable person. FIGURE 8.1 Unpacking emotional episodes: A toolkit If honor was at stake, the media focus on “freedom of expression” missed the Muslim “shame” entirely. If honor was at stake, it might not have helped that the Danish government refused to meet with a delegation of Danish Muslim organizations to discuss the cartoons; it certainly did nothing to reassure these organizations that they were in good standing. Unpacking the emotional episode, and seeing what was at stake, would have benefited the dialogue in Denmark and beyond. In unpacking episodes, it is also important to check what emotions other people perceive—in themselves or in others—and what these emotions mean in the situation. People may describe the episode by one or more words or by expressions. The point is to understand how they conceptualize their own emotions, including what the emotion means to them in a particular instance. You cannot stop at a word if you want to unpack the episode: translations of emotion words are rough at best (chapter 6), and may have very different connotations and implications. After all, the associated episodes make up distinct realities. Kaat Van Acker’s client Ramla reported “shame.” Van Acker’s first impulse was to talk it down, and in doing so, raise Ramla’s self-esteem. But Ramla’s shame was not about harmed self-esteem; to the contrary, it made her more respectable, in her own eyes, but more importantly in the eyes of other people. Van Acker unpacked Ramla’s shame by asking her what her shame wanted to do (a question that is common in the kind of therapy she practices). She found that Ramla’s shame played a role in restoring the relationship with her mother, and in so doing, being a better daughter. So, it was important that Van Acker checked what the meaning of “shame” was for Ramla. Unpacking emotional episodes means to understand their projected ending: Is the emotion “right” or “wrong” or neither? This is often a hard one to unpack, but there are concrete questions that people may be able to answer, which would provide you with opportunities to learn about these OURS aspects of emotions. Applied to Ramla’s case: Would your mother or your friends approve of your shame?

• From Between Us

  The situations that Americans found most shameful were also the ones that they rated to be rare. One such situation was originally reported by an American college student named Elizabeth whose mother told her on her graduation that she was disappointed in her grades. Shame is so damning that it comes with strong defenses. The one that received most attention is to deny one’s own inadequacy, and instead blame someone else. Shame is often associated with anger or hostility. Ryan may have been more reflective than many a person experiencing shame, remembering: “I blamed God and everyone else except the person who did it—me. . . .” Psychoanalysts have called shame-turned-anger “humiliated fury.” Humiliated fury appears to skip the painful experience of rejection and transforms it into aggression towards others. One way of understanding the benefits of humiliated fury is that ashamed individuals draw on anger as a resource to overcome the painful and paralyzing experience of shame, and to regain agency and control, though sometimes at a great cost to themselves and others. These costs become clear in a unique study on shame among American inmates who were followed from incarceration until after their release from prison. Inmates who felt shame about their crime often (though not always) suffered from humiliated fury, and it was humiliated fury that predicted the bleak future of recidivism. Inmates who reported shame-turned-anger were more likely to lapse into committing new crimes after they were released than inmates reporting shame without fury. The bad rap of shame is also clear from the attention it has received among clinical psychologists, mostly psychoanalysts. Where the developing child is seen to be secure, happy, and full of self-esteem, the neurotic child is afraid of disapproval, and therefore, prone to shame. And at the root of the child’s neurosis are detached or critical parents. These parents are doing the opposite of what is culturally valued: making their child feel bad (rather than good) about themselves. Not surprisingly, then, individuals who are easily ashamed are vulnerable to depression, anxiety, and somatic symptoms, always carrying the critical parent with them, and seeing everyone else as unescapably critical as well. The latter may be the reason for shame-turned-anger: a critical other is an easy scapegoat, and it is “a short step to attribute the cause of painful shame feelings to others who are perceived as disapproving.” If the meaning of shame itself already interferes with the cultural ideals of self-esteem and being loved, then humiliated fury does not help its reputation. If anything, the hostility that is marshaled as a defense against shame helps to reinforce the idea that the shameful person is anti-social. But does shame have to be “wrong”? In many cultures, shame or a mild form of shame, is omnipresent and “right.” Remember, the Minangkabau and Taiwanese kids are raised to have shame, as a way to make them take their proper place in their networks. Showing shame is a virtue rather than a sign of weakness.

• From Between Us

  In cultures with OURS emotions, there are many examples of people using emotion words without necessarily feeling the emotion. Inauthentic? Not necessarily. If the most important part of emotion is what happens between people, then inner feelings become irrelevant—implied, but not necessary. Anthropologist Andrew Beatty describes the use of emotion concepts on Nias, an Indonesian island, as mostly limited to public events. The people living on Nias are “among the poorest in Indonesia, but they marry expensively, a contradiction certain to generate passions and passionate words.” The bride’s family is responsible for the grand reception of the groom’s family, but the groom’s is expected to pay a dowry that weighs up against the “gift of life”: the bride’s fertility and labor force. It is in the context of the public and theatrical negotiations of the dowry, where the families are gathered around, that emotion concepts are used most. These negotiations are not conducted by the people most involved, the bride’s or groom’s parents themselves, but rather by orators who represent each side. In one instance, the groom’s family complained about the welcome they have received upon arrival, possibly in an effort to bring the dowry down, and says: “If I accepted it I’d be ashamed, mocked by my own children. . . .” The bride’s side makes it known that they are concerned with the groom’s reproach, and disappointed with the dowry. On both sides, emotions are proclaimed, but as Beatty notes, it is doubtful that the orators actually feel every emotion they express. And yet, emotions articulated by the orators perform their interpersonal role. They influence others, and in doing so, promote their goal. In going back and forth, “[p]eople sum up their position or mark where the debate has got to by referring to their hearts, each claim to frustration or resentment pegging their progress and forcing the other onto the back foot.” Labeling emotions may also directly appeal to other people’s emotions. This is the case when caregivers encourage their children to have the culturally right emotions, or not have the culturally wrong emotions. Utku Inuit told their children not to cry, or “you’ll make your pants wet and then you will freeze.” Javanese kids were told to have isin, shame, in front of elders. Ifaluk mothers admonished their children to fago, “as a way of promoting gentle (as well as generous) behavior.”

• From Between Us

  What is the culture of reference when we say anger management is “right”? Obviously, this message would have invalidated Coates’s experience of “right” in that moment. In a world where you need to show you are tough, threats may be right. If “emotional literacy” is unwittingly defined as literacy in the dominant culture, it will hardly reaffirm students who are not part of that culture. Instead, it may serve as one more gatekeeper. One reason that emotional literacy programs may work could be that they provide a crash course in acculturation. Offering children a shared alphabet or vocabulary, and teaching them to use it in conversation, may create common ground within the school. Emotional literacy programs may be instrumental in socializing students to the school’s emotion culture, and this itself may be conducive to the child’s relationships with the school and the teachers, and may socialize them to meet the expectations of the school culture. For instance, when we teach students how to “manage their anger,” we may simply socialize them to be the kinds of people that we want in our schools. Creating common ground can be a worthwhile project for schools, but only if all students are included. Parents have an important role in the enterprise of emotional literacy. According to UNESCO, “when home and school collaborate closely to implement social-emotional learning programs, children gain more and program effects are more enduring and pervasive.” But is this realistic when there is diversity in doing emotions, and the school and home context may be different? What if the messaging to the child is inconsistent, and leaves the child in the uncomfortable position of bridging the gap with their home culture? Why not give children the tools to understand these differences and cope with them? Rather than teaching students the “right” emotions and their “proper” causes and consequences, why not teach children that different ways of doing emotions may be “right,” depending on the goals valued and the kind of person you want to be? In other words, it may be productive if emotional literacy programs teach children that emotions are OURS—tied to our social cultural contexts. This could mean that our school curricula teach children cultural humility and the tools for unpacking emotional episodes. Teachers could provide their students with the tools to follow their own and other people’s emotions to the outside. Teachers and students alike would learn to unpack emotional episodes, in a way similar to what anthropologists and culturally humble clinicians do.

• From Between Us

  Is it appropriate for you, as a daughter who cannot join her mother in a pilgrimage, to feel shame? Sometimes, posing the opposite question might work better: What would you think of a daughter, who was in your situation, but did not feel shame at all? How would other people perceive this daughter? Unpacking the meaning of an “emotion” can be done at the level of facial or bodily behavior also. Do not assume that you can infer what another person feels from their behavior: check it. Is the person with the big smile happier than the person with the “calm” smile? American children thought this to be the case, but Taiwanese children did not (chapter 5). Is the doctor with the big smile more confident in what they are doing than the doctor with the “calm” smile? White American healthy adults in the San Francisco area thought so, but their Asian American counterparts assumed the opposite. The consequences were real: in one study, the researchers found that participants adhered to the health recommendations of a doctor who looked “happy” and “confident,” but white Americans associated a big smile and an upbeat message with happiness and confidence, while Asian Americans thought the doctor with the “calm” demeanor was more happy and confident. Was Kaat Van Acker’s client Ramla’s crying an expression of sadness? By explicitly checking, Kaat found out that for Ramla these were tears of shame. Were my American dinner guests distancing themselves by thanking me (chapter 1)? I could have checked. I now think that thanking me emphasized appreciation over closeness, but did not necessarily do so at its exclusion. Unpacking emotional episodes also means figuring out what the next steps in the dance are supposed to be. It may in fact help the unpacking to think about emotional behaviors as performing certain types of dances: Ramla’s shame is a step in the dance of gaining respectability, not in the dance of lost self-esteem. Had I known or understood the dance of mutual enhancement, I might have better understood my friends’ thanking me for dinner. I might have complimented Hazel Markus for being such a good host at this successful conference, rather than trying to connect to her by focusing on her fatigued look. Would I have failed to state the truth? Not necessarily: I might have merely focused on a different aspect of the situation. Importantly, you cannot assume that the way you would finish the dance is the most natural one. There is no such thing. Remember that Emiko, Hiroto, and Chiemi reported doing nothing in situations where they were offended.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Though I couldn’t put my finger on how. Maybe less soul. When I was a child my mother would tell me that people lost soul in two ways: someone could take it from you, or you’d surrender it willingly. You’re dead, I thought. My eyes said it was true. I dressed, covering every inch of my body in clothing. I wore so many layers someone would have to cut me out of them to get to my body. Then I walked downstairs, flinching at the discomfort between my legs. I found him in my kitchen sitting on a barstool and reading the paper. He had brewed coffee and was sipping out of my favorite mug. I don’t even get the paper. I hoped he stole it from my neighbors; I hated them. “Hello,” he said, setting his mug down. “I hope you don’t mind.” He gestured to the coffee setup and I shook my head. He got up and poured me a mug. “Milk? Sugar?” “Neither,” I said. I didn’t want coffee but I took it when he handed it to me. He was careful not to touch me, not to get too close. I took a tentative sip and set my mug down. This was awkward. Like the morning after a one night stand when no one knows where to stand and what to say, and where their underwear is. “What type of doctor are you?” “I’m a surgeon.” That’s about as far as I went with questions. He stood up and carried his mug to the sink. I watched him rinse it and place it upside down in the draining rack. “I have to get to the hospital.” I stared at him, unsure why he was telling me this. Were we a team now? Was he coming back? He pulled out another card and set it on the counter. “If you need me.” I looked at the card, plain white card stock with block lettering, then back to his face. “I won’t.” I spent the rest of the day on my back porch, staring at Lake Washington. I drank the same cup of coffee Dr. Asterholder handed me before he left. It stopped being hot a long time ago, but I cradled it between both of my hands like I was using it for heat. It was an act, a piece of body language that I’d learned to imitate. Hell itself could unfurl in front of me, and chances are I wouldn’t feel it. I didn’t have thought. I saw things with my eyes and my brain processed the colors and shapes without matching them to feelings: water, boats, sky and trees, plump loons and grebes that glided over the water.

• From Between Us

  Rather than proliferating knowledge facts about the emotions and emotional dis turbances of certain cultural groups as rigidly and narrowly defined by ethno-racial or national identities, mental health professionals have “embrace[d] uncertainty as a path to competence,” to quote one of the founders of cultural psychiatry, Laurence Kirmayer. The knowledge that emotional episodes can , and systematically do, differ across cultures should make therapists inquisitive: you should be aware that you do not know how another person is feeling, but this is all the more reason to want to find out. Embracing the uncertainty and following its path is not unlike the “unpacking of emotional episodes” that is practice among anthropologists. Kaat van Acker, a cross-cultural therapist with a practice in Brussels, describes an example of embracing uncertainty. She was seeing a war-traumatized Lebanese woman, Ramla. Ramla, incapacitated by pain, had quit her job, and she and her daughters lived on social welfare benefits. Of all the topics that could have been covered during therapy—Ramla’s traumatic experiences, her inability to do paid work—the shame about her failure to fulfill her role as a daughter took center space in the therapy. During one session, Ramla told Van Acker that she had been unable to accompany her old and frail mother on her pilgrimage to Mecca. Tears ran down her face as Ramla recounted this. Was she sad? Van Acker kept herself from jumping to conclusions, instead asking Ramla what her tears meant. In so doing she unpacked what the emotional event meant to Ramla. Ramla tells Van Acker that she cries because she is deeply ashamed. Following her own Western European emotional logic, Van Acker might have comforted Ramla, or talked her shame down. Instead, Van Acker explored what shame meant to Ramla in her cultural context. Ramla explains that her failure to meet her obligation as a daughter makes her less respectable (in the eyes of others). But there is more: To Ramla, feeling shame is “right,” even if failing to be a good daughter is not. Shame shows Ramla’s commitment to counteract her moral failure. To Van Acker’s question what Ramla’s shame “wants to do,” Ramla answers it wants to hop on a plane, sit down next to her mother, hold her mother’s hands, and not let go of them again. Shame thus connects Ramla with her mother. Perhaps then, Van Acker concludes, Ramla’s shame should not be talked down, but rather acknowledged. Van Acker’s embrace of uncertainty allowed her to meet Ramla where she was. She unpacked Ramla’s emotions by tying them to their social and cultural contexts; this way, Van Acker gained insight in her client’s ailing. A therapist should not assume they know how their clients feel, but rather find common ground with their client.

• From Between Us

  The situations at hand were vignettes based on previously self-reported shame situations, and respondents who read them both rated the intensity of shame they would feel in such a situation, and their perceived frequency (Boiger et al., “Condoned or Condemned”). 98 salespeople in the financial sector: Richard P. Bagozzi, Willem Verbeke, and Jacinto C. Gavino, “Culture Moderates the Self-Regulation of Shame and Its Effects on Performance: The Case of Salespersons in the Netherlands and the Philippines,” Journal of Applied Psychology 88, no. 2 (2003): 219–33. 98 shame stories that involved customers: Shame stories were collected in focus groups with financial salespeople from a firm that did not participate in the final study. Bagozzi, Verbeke, and Gavino, “Culture Moderates the Self-Regulation of Shame and Its Effects on Performance.” The article does not provide much detail on the process by which those stories were selected. 99 feel like “crawling in a hole,” “suddenly shrinking,” and “physically weak” and “tongue-tied”: Items used to measure the phenomenology of shame. Bagozzi, Verbeke, and Gavino, “Culture Moderates the Self-Regulation of Shame and Its Effects on Performance,” 232. 99 Dutch salespeople . . . would “strive to be unique . . .”: Bagozzi, Verbeke, and Gavino, “Culture Moderates the Self-Regulation of Shame and Its Effects on Performance,” 220. 99 no longer able to deliver appropriate service: I use slightly different labels than Bagozzi et al. do, but my labels are equally based on the actual scale items that were used. All findings are self- reported. 99 situations that had elicited shame: Boiger et al., “Condoned or Condemned”; the examples are real experiences reported in previous studies—names are fictitious—that were used as vignettes in the study. The precise wording of the vignettes can be found in the supplemental materials to the article. 100 strong defenses: Sana Sheikh, “Cultural Variations in Shame’s Responses,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 18, no. 4 (2014): 387–403; Alexander Kirchner et al., “Humiliated Fury Is Not Universal: The Co-Occurrence of Anger and Shame in the United States and Japan,” Cognition and Emotion 32, no. 6 (2018): 1317–28. 100 “humiliated fury”: Term was coined by Lewis, “Shame and Guilt in Neurosis.” 100 transforms it into aggression towards others: E.g., June P. Tangney et al., “Shamed into Anger? The Relation of Shame and Guilt to Anger and Self-Reported Aggression,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 62, no. 4 (1992): 669–75. 100 the bleak future of recidivism: When inmates did not externalize blame, their shame predicted less crime after they were released from prison (June P. Tangney, Jeffrey Stuewig, and Andres G. Martinez, “Two Faces of Shame: The Roles of Shame and Guilt in Predicting Recidivism,” Psychological Science 25, no. 3 [2014]: 799–805). 100 mostly psychoanalysts: E.g., Karen Horney, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (New York: W.

• From Between Us

  My colleague Alba Jasini tells me that in her country of origin, Albania, the relatives of deceased people hire “professional mourners” to wail for (and with) the family, and thus raise the level of grief display to the right cultural standards. Outside-in emotions may involve excitation rather than suppression. Arguably, many rituals have a similar function of collectively supplying individuals with situationally appropriate options for behavior during emotional events. Among the Indonesian Minangkabau, people are expected to show malu (roughly equivalent to shame) when they violate any social norms. If necessary, educators force the display by highlighting the norm. Malu was induced in thirteen-year-old Andi who had his hair cut in front of the class. In Andi’s own words: “Two days ago, the teacher told me to get my hair cut. Today, she called me in front of the class and took a pair of scissors out of her desk. She gave me a haircut and the others [classmates] watched. I had to sweep up the hair and go home. Now I can only run around with a baseball cap on, but wearing caps is not allowed in class.” When the situation requires it, people are expected to show malu, or else helped to recognize the situation as one of malu. The direction of the emotion is outside-in. A final reflection on the terms emotional expression and emotional suppression is that they may themselves be suggestive of a MINE model of emotions. They imply that there is a deep inner feeling that wants to come out, or alternatively, has to be actively suppressed. Expression and suppression privilege a view of emotions as inside the person, and naturally wanting to come out. When emotions are conceived of as acts between people, rather than feelings within, then no “expression” is naturally privileged over another. There is no essence to be expressed. There is no reason to assume that any emotional act is more authentic, or to the contrary, less. There is also no reason to think it is unnatural to meet social expectations. If emotions live between people, then why would yelling in anger be any more natural than Hiroto and Chiemi’s accommodation to the expectations of their environments? Why would silently mourning by yourself be any more natural than wailing with the professional mourners? Why would managing your emotions to accommodate the expectations of the social environment be any more phony than asserting your frustrations? Emotions: Mine and Ours? Emotions are not solely feelings deep inside us. The way they have been portrayed in the Pixar movie Inside Out is a MINE model of emotions. Many cultures have an OURS model of emotions, which understands emotions primarily as acts happening between people: acts that are being adjusted to the situation at hand. Emotions in MINE and OURS cultures look different.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  The essence of the sin of Adam consisted not in the eating of the fruit; for this was in itself neither wrong nor harmful; but in disobedience to the command of God. "Obedience was enjoined by that commandment, as the virtue which, in the rational creature, is, as it were, the mother and guardian of all virtues." The principle, the root of sin, was pride, self-seeking, the craving of the will to forsake its author, and become its own. This pride preceded the outward act. Our first parents were sinful in heart, before they had yet fallen into open disobedience. "For man never yet proceeded to an evil work, unless incited to it by an evil will." This pride even preceded the temptation of the serpent. "If man had not previously begun to take pleasure in himself, the serpent could have had no hold upon him." The fall of Adam appears the greater, and the more worthy of punishment, if we consider, first, the height he occupied, the divine image in which he was created; then, the simplicity of the commandment, and ease of obeying it, in the abundance of all manner of fruits in paradise; and finally, the sanction of the most terrible punishment from his Creator and greatest Benefactor. Thus Augustine goes behind the appearance to the substance; below the surface to the deeper truth. He does not stop with the outward act, but looks chiefly at the disposition which lies at its root. II. The Consequences of the primal sin, both for Adam and for his posterity, are, in Augustine’s view, comprehensive and terrible in proportion to the heinousness of the sin itself. And all these consequences are at the same time punishments from the righteous God, who has, by one and the same law, joined reward with obedience and penalty with sin. They are all comprehended under death, in its widest sense; as Paul says: "The wages of sin is death;" and in Gen. ii. 17 we are to understand by the threatened death, all evil both to body and to soul. Augustine particularizes the consequences of sin under seven heads; the first four being negative, the others positive: 1. Loss of the freedom of choice,1807 which consisted in a positive inclination and love to the good, with the implied possibility of sin. In place of this freedom has come the hard necessity of sinning, bondage to evil. "The will, which, aided by grace, would have become a source of good, became to Adam, in his apostasy from God, a source of evil." 2. Obstruction of knowledge. Man was originally able to learn everything easily, without labor, and to understand everything aright. But now the mind is beclouded, and knowledge can be acquired and imparted only in the sweat of the face. 3. Loss of the grace of God, which enabled man to perform the good which his freedom willed, and to persevere therein.

• From Mud Vein (2014)

  Nothing was okay. But, I didn’t say that. Instead, I thought about the way he knew exactly what to do and what to say to keep me calm/ He was a doctor; in hindsight it all made sense. If I could choose my ride home, I choose not to ride in the back of a police cruiser. I nodded. He glanced at the cop who seemed more than happy to hand me off. A rape case on Christmas Day, who wanted to be reminded that there was evil in the world while Santa and his reindeer were still leaving contrails in the sky? Dr. Asterholder walked me out a side door and into a staff parking lot. He’d offered to pull around the front of the building to pick me up, but I’d shaken my head firmly. His car was nondescript. The unflashy hybrid. It looked a little self-righteous. He opened the door for me, waited until my feet were tucked in … closed it … walked around to his side. I stared out the window at the rain. I wanted to apologize for ruining his Christmas. For getting raped in the first place. For making him feel as if he had to drive me home. “Your address?” he asked. I pulled my eyes away from the rain. “1226 Atkinson Drive.” His hand hovered over the GPS before moving back to the steering wheel. “The stone house? On the hill—with the vines on the chimney?” I nod. My house was noticeable from all across the lake, but he must live near if he’d seen it close enough to know about the vines. “I live in the area,” he said a moment later. “It’s a beautiful house.” “Yes,” I said absently. I suddenly felt cold. I lifted my hands to my arms to catch the goose bumps, and he turned up the heat without me asking. I saw a family crossing the parking lot, each with an armful of presents. All four of them were wearing Christmas hats, from the toddler to the beer-bellied father. They looked hopeful. “Why aren’t you with your family on Christmas?” I asked him. He pulled out of the lot and turned onto the street. It was one o’clock on Christmas Day so, for once, there was no traffic. “I moved here from Raleigh two months ago. My family is back East. I couldn’t get enough time off to go see them. Plus hospitals are short staffed on Christmas. I was scheduled to come in later today.” I looked out the window again. There was silence for a few miles, and then I said, “I didn’t scream … maybe if I’d screamed—” “You were in the woods, and it was Christmas morning. There was no one to hear you.” “But I could have tried. Why didn’t I try?” Dr. Asterholder looked at me. We were at a light, so he could. “Why didn’t I get there sooner? Just ten minutes and I could have saved you…”

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  We know not the practical way to reach the glory of Islam and to serve the welfare of the Muslims. We are weary of this life of humiliation and restriction. So we see that the Arabs and the Muslims have no status and no dignity. They are no more than mere hirelings belonging to foreigners.… We are unable to perceive the road to action as you perceive it, or to know the path to the service of the fatherland, the religion and the ummah.52 That very night Banna created the Society of Muslim Brothers, which inaugurated a grassroots reformation of Egyptian society. The Society clearly answered an urgent need because it would become one of the most powerful players in Egyptian politics. By the time of Banna’s assassination in 1949, it had two thousand branches throughout Egypt, and the Brotherhood was the only Egyptian organization that represented every social group—civil servants, students, urban workers, and peasants.53 The Society was not a militant organization but sought simply to bring modern institutions to the Egyptian public in a familiar Islamic setting. The Brothers built schools for girls and boys beside the mosque and founded the Rovers, a scout movement that became the most popular youth group in the country; they set up night schools for workers and tutorial colleges to prepare students for the civil service examinations; they built clinics and hospitals in the rural areas; and they involved the Rovers in improving sanitation and health education in the poorer districts. The Society also set up trade unions that acquainted workers with their rights; in the factories where the Brotherhood was a presence, they earned a just wage, had health insurance and paid holidays, and could pray in the company’s mosque. Banna’s counterculture thus proved that, far from being some obsolete vestige of another era, Islam could become an effective modernizing force as well as promote spiritual vitality. But the Brotherhood’s success would prove double-edged, for it called attention to the government’s neglect of education and labor conditions. Banna’s Society of Muslim Brothers thus came to be perceived not as a help but as a grave threat to the regime.