Sex Addiction 4/7: Shame

What is shame?

The word ‘shame’ is derived from the Indo-European word ‘skem’, which means ‘to hide’. It comes to us through German and Old English – ‘sceamu’. Shame runs from mild embarrassment through to profound public humiliation. The feeling of shame is deeply unpleasant and, at its worst, can remove the desire to live.

I think about Simone Burns, the Human Rights lawyer, who was jailed for drunken and racially abusive behaviour on a flight from Mumbai. Thirteen days after leaving prison, she killed herself at Beachy Head. Perhaps she died of shame, perhaps killed by trolls. In one media report about her death, I noticed that a friend only spoke of her on condition of anonymity.

Shame – which is contagious and seeks to hide – is the painful feeling of being unacceptable. It is a negative experience of the self as defective, deficient and demeaned. In Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction, Carnes says that ‘sexual addiction is based on one key assumption, somehow I am not measuring up’.

The relationship between shame and addiction

A woman I knew, 30 years ago in a recovery programme, said ‘shame is to addiction what oxygen is to the fire’. She was a classical pianist and, also, a sex worker. She killed herself. (Cecilia, in memoriam). This was not her given name but chosen for St Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians. At her funeral, her family used a recording of her playing the piano as they took her body from the church. I wept.

Shame is the affect state that accompanies a Core Belief – ‘I am not enough’. Usually the Core Belief is expressed more powerfully. In the words of one Rabbi client, “I am a schmuck”. A Catholic priest told me, “I am intrinsically disordered”. Shame is a principal driver of addictive processes.

Remember the conversation in The Little Prince between the Little Prince and the drunk:

The Little Prince: Why do you drink?

The Drunk: Because I am ashamed.

The Little Prince: Why are you ashamed?

The Drunk: Because I drink.

In sex addiction, a cycle is also formed. I am ashamed. I escape the shame through sexual behaviour. The sexual behaviour creates more shame, and the greater shame creates more sexual behaviour.

I wrote earlier that shame seeks to hide. Many men keep their addictive sexual patterns secret because of shame – particularly if the desired sexual behaviour involves a paraphilia.

It may seem counterintuitive, but men can also keep it secret because they know that the partner will be really upset by it. Frequently men tell me at the first appointment that they have never told anyone. At this point, the absence of judgement and ‘unconditional positive regard’ come into their own.

The compass of shame

Nathanson writes about ‘the compass of shame’. He says that we tend to do one of four things with shame: we hide, we escape, we blame self or we blame other. Even the euphemisms we use to describe shame speak of death – ‘I was mortified’, ‘I wanted the ground to open and swallow me’, ‘I could have died of embarrassment’. The universal body language of shame is the covered face or the averted eyes.

Some clients escape temporarily from shame through alcohol or internet pornography. Some blame self, some blame other. The tabloids work on the ‘blame other’ principal. I was once doing research on paedophile clergy when the facility was invaded by vigilantes – the abusers I interviewed blamed self, while the vigilantes blamed other.

Working with shame

The repair of the self is central to any work with sex addiction. For there to be recovery, this must be changed. There are a wide range of cognitive behavioural mechanisms to do this, including:

· Thought Records: A tool to interrogate the negative automatic thought created by a situation.

· Good News Diary: This tool collects positive data about the self.

· Anxious Predictions: A diary recording an anticipated fear and then the reality of the feared event.

· Old System/New System: This helps people to construct a more functional way of interacting with the world.

These are just a series of tools that can be used to make the change. As the self is created by the reflection of others, through ‘unconditional positive regard’, the therapeutic relationship itself helps to make the change.