Educators

Note to our teachers: We're in the process of developing programs appropriate for students in each age range, and will post information explaining these offerings as they are ready. For now, we hope that the information in this Teacher's Guide will augment your enjoyment of our video production. Please do not hesitate to contact us to discuss your own specific needs and interests, and to post questions about your concerns on the Educators section of the Members' Forum.

Teacher's Guide for Managing Shame,
Preventing Violence: A Call to Our Teachers
by Donald L. Nathanson, MD, Bruce P. Murray, MSW, and Margaret Lowmiller, MS

A new way of understanding what goes wrong in school allows us to explain not only the causes of explosive violence but also the rudeness, incivility, sexual hedonism, and drug abuse that make school so challenging for today's teachers. The video will demonstrate new ways of understanding, managing, and reducing classroom disruption. This guide is a supplement designed for teachers who have already watched the video and are considering how to use its information with students in each Grade range. Some images in the video make portions unsuitable to play for audiences younger than 13.

Perhaps more than anyone else in our society, teachers are forced to deal with people who are embarrassed. For students, school is life in a fish bowl where every public statement brings the risk of shame for being seen as either dumb or (too) smart. Children have always rated themselves and each other by how close they are to some local norm. Within a peer group, deviation is perilous, conformity tricky, exposure potentially humiliating.

By definition, the teacher knows more than the student. Each child's personal background and peer culture determines whether it will feel good to be in the presence of someone who wants you to be knowledgeable, successful, or smarter, or awful that the mere presence of a teacher implies one is always "stupid" relative to someone else. Great teachers have always seemed to balance authority with sensitivity to the feelings of individual students and the mood of the class.

As every teacher knows from personal experience, there is a vast difference between mastery of a curriculum and the artistry that lets us work with a class. We believe that the most successful teachers have developed exceptional skill at the management of shame within a community. Through their own education teachers learn how to transmit lessons, but only through on the job training do they learn how individuals and classes are made brittle by shame sensitivity. The material presented here will advance the skills of teachers at all levels of experience.

Let's look at the vocabulary and concepts introduced in the video, after which we'll suggest some ways to use them in your work.

Vocabulary for this Video

Affect: The purely biological part of emotion that calls our attention to something requiring action. Nothing becomes the subject of our attention unless some affect has turned a spotlight on it. The video defines an "alphabet" of nine affects, the small group of building blocks from which all possible emotions are assembled. Although there are lots of physiological reactions that make up each of the nine innate affects, it is the way they form easily recognized facial expressions that allows us (and others) to know which of them has been set off.

Feeling: It is our awareness that an affect has been triggered (the way our face feels, alteration in breathing, heart rate, posture, or tone of voice) that we call a feeling.

Emotion: Affects are visible on the face of the infant from birth, long before the child is capable of understanding them. Eventually we label as an emotion the experience or sequence of what happened just before and after each affect was triggered. Affect is always biology and pretty much the same for each of us, but emotion depends on our biography and must differ somewhat from one to another. This deeply personal origin of our emotional vocabulary sometimes makes it difficult for us to understand each other.

Mood: normally an affect lasts only the couple of seconds until we decide to focus on whatever it spotlights, after which we begin to think about and perhaps deal with what we now "see." Occasionally this emotional event reminds us of an experience that never really got resolved, an event that can linger in the mind for several minutes or even longer whenever it crops up. By the term mood we refer to the way we tend to remain involved with our thoughts, feelings, and memories. Normal mood vanishes just as soon as a new stimulus triggers a new affect that takes charge of our spotlight system and focuses attention somewhere else.

Disorders of mood: Sometimes the persistent bad moods that afflict people are due not to such preoccupation with unresolved events from their emotional history but because there is some sort of glitch in the biology of emotion. Here, the affect spotlight is "on" not because some event or memory has demanded attention but from a defect in the on/off switch for the affect. There are a lot of psychological techniques that teach us how to limit the distractions caused by such glitches, and many classes of medications that approach this problem from the biological angle.

Shame: A large family of emotions ranging from mild personal embarrassment to public humiliation and the deadly destruction called mortification. It starts as a simple affect spotlight that calls to our attention some attribute that is lesser than we had believed. If we pay attention to the spotlight and acknowledge what it shows us, the experience is actually not very unpleasant because rapidly we remember that the remainder of our attributes are real and worthy of pride.

Potential Shame Experiences:

1. Matters of personal size, strength, ability or skill - situations in which we feel inferior.
2. Dependence and independence - feeling shame when helpless.
3. Competition - feeling good if one is a winner but shameful if one is a loser.
4. Sense of self - "I am unique only to the extent that I am defective."
5. Personal attractiveness - proud when seen as beautiful and ashamed when we feel ugly.
6. Sexuality - no aspect of life is more governed by our fear of humiliation.
7. Being seen and seeing others - the urge to escape from the eyes before which we've been exposed.
8. Wishes and fears about closeness - the sense of being shorn from all humanity, feeling unlovable, the wish to be left alone forever.

Some Common Experiences and Words in Which Shame Is the Most Powerful Emotional Force:

Awe, awkwardness, bad, bad character, bad conscience, betrayed, clumsy, criticize, defeated, defective, deficient, dirty, disappointed, discouraged, disrespect, embarrassed, envious, exposed, failure, fake, foolish, guilty, helpless, humiliated, hurt feelings, ignored, inferior, insecure, jealous, privacy, prude, rejected, sensitive, shy, sick at heart, sluttish, stupid, ugly, vulnerable

Pride: There are three forms of pride, all of which can feel equally good. Healthy Pride usually results from success that confirms our best hopes for some attribute or quality of the self. When we take pride in the actions of others (like a professional sports franchise) and wear that pride as if it reflects some personal attribute, this is actually Borrowed Pride. False Pride is the good feeling achieved when we lie to others about a success that didn't really happen.

Self Esteem: Each of us has attributes that bring pride as well as perceived defects or inadequacies experienced as shameful. The way we feel about ourselves as a whole person usually reflects some balance between shame and pride. No one is either perfect or defective in all areas.

The Compass of Shame: It is when we feel unable to pay attention to the affect spotlight for shame that we shift into this group of four ways to ignore or minimize the experience of personal inadequacy. By actions at the Withdrawal pole of the compass, we move away from the eyes of those before whom our inadequacy has been revealed. When the loneliness of such withdrawal is more painful than shame, we can abase ourselves by using the Attack Self pole of the compass of shame to seek the favor of someone we see as powerful. At the Avoidance pole of the compass are all the ways we try to make the bad feeling go away by using drugs, alcohol, or sex to deaden the pain, or fill ourselves with pride about something else by calling attention to an entirely different attribute. When behavior at these three poles feels unacceptable or ineffective, at the Attack Other pole of the compass are ways we seek to reduce the self esteem of another person so that for at least that moment we feel "better" than someone. Some people believe that "real" shame involves only the Withdrawal pole of the compass, but all four poles are equally important if we are to manage the full picture of shame.

Teasing/Taunting: Shaming statements and personal attacks designed to reduce the self esteem of another person in order to push him or her into Attack Other angry or violent action.

Bullying: In an effort to minimize personal shame from some perceived inadequacy, the bully takes advantage of some attribute or power in order to produce shame in someone who can be overpowered and rendered helpless.

Violence: actions taken to demonstrate personal power by causing damage to persons or property. Explosive violence is always a reaction to an overload of personal shame. Attention to the anger that accompanies violent action is far less effective than understanding the shame that set it in motion. Often the person who exploded had long felt forced to act deferential to powerful others who were experienced as bullies. Usually this individual had used alcohol, drugs, or fantasies of immense power as ways of avoiding shame, and exploded into violence when all else failed.

Recommendations for Work With Specific Age Groups

Past infancy, at every age and stage of development, any individual's shame will be expressed through behavior described at one or more of poles of the Compass of Shame. It is the quite different concerns specific to each age that trigger the episode of shame you witness in the classroom, but responses to this family of emotions will always fall into the patterns described in the video.

It is rare for anybody to understand these disguised presentations of shame and to describe them as such unless s/he has learned the type of material presented in this program. You may always assume that teasing, rowdiness, bullying, inappropriate sexual behavior, episodes of explosive violence, and assaults on the authority of the teacher are the result of unrecognized shame experiences. Your growing ability to identify behavior at any pole of the Compass of Shame will allow you to prevent the process through which one student's way of handling shame ripples through a classroom and sets up its collective mood.

For example, a student who turns silent and refuses to interact with others may be handling a shame experience at the Withdrawal pole of the Compass. Others immediately around this student may interpret this withdrawal as insulting and react with behavior from the Attack Other pole. Only the mythical teacher with a thousand eyes will have spotted the withdrawal from interaction that triggered the much more visible insult by the second student - we see action far more easily than its absence. Shame is so contagious that teachers who don't think about it are most likely to feel that their authority has been insulted and then become unwitting participants in a wave of shaming that can take over the room. For instance, the second student will experience a rebuke as an additional source of shame, after which the entire classroom may become disrupted by attack and defense of one or another party. What works best is counter-intuitive support of the obviously attacking student, support in which you take for granted that unrecognized feelings might have set off that interchange. Even when it is absolutely necessary merely to suppress an interruption without discussion of its cause, you're unlikely to add fuel to the fires of humiliation when you know that it is going on.

With your own increasing ability to identify the many ways shame afflicts individual students comes a host of new approaches to those frequent and often distressing interruptions in classroom behavior. Here are some of the age-related situations that are most likely to trigger shame at any pole of the Compass:

K - 3
Key sources of shame are matters of excretory control, being forced to share rather than maintain a relationship with teacher as analogue of parent, identification of body parts, ability to shift attention on the demand of the teacher ("keeping up with the class"), beginning of the desire to be just like everybody else, fear that they're not good enough, conflict between the desire for independence and the need to be seen as just like everyone else.

4 - 6
Shame hovers around the ability to modulate feelings enough to work in groups and an increasing desire to be seen as fitting in with peers. Teachers' requests for problem-solving require the ability to minimize personal shame in favor of resolution of the issue itself. Issues of personal worth (self-esteem) develop real force here. Being laughed at is traumatic, risk of volunteering and participation is variably avoided in terms of shame sensitivity. Peer culture increasingly important, especially in urban areas where the code of the street may conflict with that of school and family.

7 - 9
Early adolescence brings with it the activation of sexual function with tremendous magnification of sexual arousal, excitement, and therefore susceptibility to shame. Maturation of brain brings increased ability to focus on abstract thinking and therefore concerns about identity, personal value, and the meaning of life. Body image shame values set here with great importance for adult life. Development of outsider psychology in those whose sense of personal shame is toxic. Use of drugs, alcohol, and sex in direct proportion to the need to manage the intensity of shame.

10 - 12
Concerns about self and other, formation of romantic relationships, how we fit together. How can I make myself nice or interesting enough to be liked but still feel good about myself and care for someone else? The age at which compromise becomes most important, with consequent willingness to accept reduction in self esteem or personal power for the sake of a relationship. All shame issues addressed in earlier years are magnified during this period.

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