One area where I have found shame to be damaging is with respect to failings that are habitual. If I do something like snap at a family member, I feel shame which is productive, because it's relatively easy to apologize and do better next time. When it comes to my more habitual failings, like procrastination, I think these failings are so ingrained in me at this point that the progress I expect to make is only incremental. So that puts me in a weird loop where I procrastinate, feel shame, but can only expect to procrastinate a bit less tomorrow.... but that's still procrastination and still causes shame.
Perhaps the right perspective is that for some failings, I need a healthy dose of shame so that I can do better. For other, more engrained, failings, what I primarily need is the affirmation of actually *believing* I can do better, and it's hard for that to coexist with the "punishment" of shame that even accompanies incremental progress. Or another way to put it is that shame is only useful when I am grounded in the belief that I actually can do better, which many people in the throes of habitual failings or addictions don't have yet.
I don’t disagree with you, but I would also consider shame to be one of the passions, and so while it can be an appropriate and virtuous response to certain situations (like anger at injustice, or sexual desire for one’s spouse), I think it is also something that can be addictive, and needs to be restrained.
It’s probably also worth parsing out exactly what we mean when we say “shame.” There’s the shame of “I did something wrong even though I have the capacity to do better,” and then there’s the shame of “I did something wrong and now I am DISGUSTING AND WORTHLESS FOREVER.” Not to mention there’s “shame” as a transitive verb, where the real sting is not what you did but how others treat you for it! All those are very different things.
I think in distinguishing between helpful and unhelpful shame, I’d look less as particular situations and more at the content of the shame itself—what exactly is the message of the shame?
For instance, I find it helpful when the feeling of shame is the sort that can be articulated as “This thing/action is unworthy of me.” That sort of emotion can actually be a spur to me to stop doing the thing (or, since I’m a big procrastinator, start doing the thing!); it is even more helpful when it keeps me from getting into a bad rut in the first place.
But there’s another flavor of shame that I find distinctly unhelpful, even destructive. It surfaces for me oftentimes in memories: of a stupid or cruel thing I said or did years, even decades ago—the sort of thing that is not mendable any more, and that I am already matured past the point of being likely to do again. For other friends of mine, I see this same flavor of unproductive shame in dealing with alcohol addition, or recovering from the purity culture. If I had to articulate this flavor of shame relative to the “helpful” kind, its message would be something like “This thing/action makes you unworthy.” That’s a very different message from the other one, and I doubt it really helps anyone change for the better—if anything, it seems more likely to drive the sort of despair that Martha worried about in the porn conversation.
Caveat here: I am a Catholic, and so I do think there’s ONE place where it can be helpful to feel “This thing/action makes me unworthy.” If it’s the preliminary step to a conversation with God, it actually seems kind of essential to feel this way--briefly. Yes, my sniping, complaining, yelling at the kids—all these petty things make me unworthy of a relationship with my creator. And if I didn’t feel that, I don’t think I could go on to have an authentic conversation with said Creator. Mind you, once one’s past that initial point of saying “O Lord, I am not worthy,” then the REST of the conversation should be about other things. Dwelling on one’s spiritual sins is not healthy.
So I suppose the problem with feeling that “This thing/action makes me unworthy” in ordinary contexts is that (except in the case of God) it’s a lie. This thing makes me unworthy--of what?? Of love? Of overcoming the addiction? Of other people’s respect? Of being happy? Of being alive? No matter how you frame it (again, outside of the specific spiritual context of creature/creator) “This thing/action makes me unworthy” is false, and destructive.
Tl;dr, shame can be good when it helps you see the unhealthy thing as bad, and it is not good when it makes you focus on how YOU are bad (esp. relative to others).
I read an article on Fight the New Drug a while back that made a distinction between shame and guilt that I found very helpful: they defined shame as a negative judgement of the entire self, while guilt was a negative judgement of a specific behaviour. The article also noted that shame was associated with attempts to deny and hide from the behaviour but that guilt tended to motivate people to change.
Since reading that, I’ve tried to approach my “bad feelings” about myself in that light. When I feel bad about a particular immoral action, I say, well this is a behaviour, and I can change it with the help of God, as I have with other bad habits before. But I try to pump the breaks when I feel what FTND defined as shame - the negative judgement of the entire self. That tends to lead to despair, and a recurrence of whatever behaviour induced the shame in the first place, seeing as the "shameful" behaviour is often some kind of emotional crutch anyway. I think that shame in that sense is in fact a temptation, and should be resisted as such.
I feel so honored, Leah! And I do really love this topic (and that substack link re: school lunches was awesome).
I think guilt is 100% fruitful. Guilt is related to actions (I think I read this in Brene Brown?) - I feel guilty *for doing something*. When I feel guilt it's a trigger that something doesn't sit right, that I need to explore that action, and do something to make the situation right. I do think you need to feel guilt to feel remorse, and I think paying attention to feelings of guilt (and not fearing guilt, which can prevent you from listening to it) is important for living a good life. Also, sometimes I feel guilty *wrongly* because of culture/upbringing/etc. and *it's still helpful*! Unpacking why I feel guilty even then helps me know myself better, unpack deeper truths, and more.
Shame gets tricky. Shame is about *you* not about an action. It would take some convincing for me to believe shame is fruitful. I can imagine feeling shame, "oof, I am not the person I want to be" and it motivating me to be better, but much more often it makes me feel unhelpful feelings of worthlessness & despair - feelings that get me stuck in a rut of 'this is who I *am*'.
Which brings me back to the dieting point! Dieting is a 60-80 *BILLION* dollar industry with, according to some, a 95% failure rate. Nothing about the dieting industry sets me up to believe they are a trustworthy tutor, but especially because their incentives are all about making sure I fail. If I succeed, I no longer need them. Now, what's really horrifying is that dieting has expanded its empire into 'clean eating' campaigns, and increasingly goes after younger and younger kids (stories of instagram marketing tactics will make you weep). The more you tell young girls in particular that they are shameful, that they should be ashamed of their bodies, ashamed of what they eat, etc., the more money you can make off of them *for their whole lives*.
That's the horror story I see replicated in the porn addiction industry. They have the same set of perverse incentives as the diet industry - they make more money if more people feel shame, and the more people who succeed in combatting their addiction the *less* money they make.
Should someone feel guilty about viewing porn - I think, absolutely! But shame? Unworthiness? Despair? Nope. And I think folks should be *very* wary of anyone who peddles shame in any context who has strong incentives to make you feel as bad about yourself as possible for as long as possible.
Thinking it over, I find myself speculating that one kind of healthy shame would be the kind that is symbiotic with healthy pride. If I take pride in thinking before I speak, then I will feel shame when I fail to do so. Healthy pride leaves room for shame when we fail to measure up. The shame prompts us to do better; the pride sets the standards by which we measure what that better behaviour would consist of.
Unhealthy pride happens when our positive image of ourselves prevents us from seeing where we need to improve. Unhealthy shame happens when we can't think of ourselves as even being able to do better in the first place.
The Sole-Smith essay was interesting to read and reflect on right after your questions, because while the author’s goal was to question shame and stigma around school lunches, it ended up reminding me of how contemporary media around parenting (and mothering in particular) shames mothers for both for doing “too much” and for doing “too little” - there’s some elusive, perfect middle path, no one is quite sure what it is, but they’re all pretty sure the mothers are doing it wrong.
In light of that, I think of shame as being healthy when there’s a clear moral disorder (in the theme of “mother media,” gossip and pride first came to mind), whereas shame in decisions that are morally neutral (to pack or not to pack lunch, daycare or no daycare, tacos or pasta for dinner) is at best unhelpful and at worst actively destructive.
As far as trustworthy tutors, I’ve found that the people who most encourage me to have well-ordered appetites aren’t doing a lot of comparison between persons. They might ask how does this action serve the good? How does this action build up the Body of Christ? How does this action strengthen your relationship with God? But they aren’t saying “see this person over here? She visits the Blessed Sacrament every day, why don’t you?” or “see that person over there? He hasn’t been to Mass in years, so you’re doing fine.”
My interest was really piqued by this topic. I think shame is different from repression, and this is a distinction worth dwelling on. Shame shouldn't mean hiding our faults or errors, either from others or from ourselves. For me, it's the precursor to dealing with our failings; and to dealing with our feelings about those failing. As a kid, I felt guilty all the time. It was, I kid you not, when I converted to Catholicism as an adult, that I was able to release the burden of guilt I had been carrying so long. This was because in the Church I found a formula for dealing productively with the feelings that were going to be there one way or the other. So contrary to the popular notion, it's been my experience that as a Catholic I am not more subject to a guilty conscience--I just talk about it more. And in talking about it, the aim is to work through it, acknowledging both the need to change and the great difficulty of change, giving God both my contrition and my frailty, and receiving real forgiveness.
Rosamund is totally right that it needs to be the right kind of shame. I think it's something like: "I am a beloved child of God, inherently good and good in many of my actions. For this very reason, I am called to be better than my selfish impulses." So in other words, shame shouldn't define us--it should show us the distance between how we are behaving and what the best version of ourselves would look like. So I think it stands in relation to the good in us; and if it prevents us seeing the good in ourselves it is not being what it needs to be.
I have some half-formulated thoughts about shame and secrecy and addiction, and I'm going to throw out a lot of gendered cliches and some poorly articulated theory of mind, so I'm requesting extra charity in the reading of this comment. Also, TW for binge-eating disorders, other addictive behavior, etc.
The (usually woman) binge-eating an entire box of cookies or tub of ice cream late at night in the kitchen and the (usually man, especially married ones) frantically watching pornography in the bathroom/office late at night are both absolutely driven by shame- it's the thing that forces them into the shadows, into the most destructive, self-punishing ways of acknowledging their desires. I'm worried that heaping more shame onto people who are stuck in this cycle won't help them break out of it, and it's not for nothing that binge-eating disorder is often treated in much the same way that anorexia and bulimia are: by helping the sufferers to regain a sense of food as a necessary, nourishing component, their bodily needs as worthy of honoring with kindness, and even food as a vector of pleasure in moderation (ice cream occasionally, etc).
If pressed to come up with a heuristic of when shame is appropriate in a sexual context, I would suggest that shame works when the person is harming others, and backfires when they're primarily harming themselves (obviously the pornography industry hurts the people who participate in it, but by the point a video lands on a streaming site, that harm is more-or-less completed, or can at least be assumed so for purposes of this discussion). A friend who's objectifying his dates, ghosting his lovers, etc. might need shame to help him realize that he's doing something wrong. Someone struggling with porn use might already feel that shame, be trapped in a spiral of it, and might need help seeing that he deserves to honor and fulfill his desires in a way that are nourishing and healthy, rather than self destructive.
This also intersects with gender in really complicated ways- I would be more likely to assume that a female friend who was having a string of one-night-stands, etc is acting in a self-objectifying way, and needs to be told that she deserves more, whereas a male friend is objectifying others, and would respond well to shame. But this is also a case where you have to know and love the person you're thinking about shaming in order to make the call of whether it's helpful.
TL;DR, maybe: shame is useful when people feel entitled to objectify others to fulfill their desires, and backfires when they have lost sight of the idea that they are entitled to fulfill their desires in a healthy, well-ordered way?
Psychological research makes a distinction between guilt and shame. We feel guilty about our behavior; we feel shame about ourselves. When we feel guilty, we feel responsible for our behavior and its consequences; we regret what we did; we want to make it right. When we feel ashamed, we feel that some inherent, inescapable flaw is driving our troublesome behavior; we feel doomed to repeat our behavior; and we fear exposure and rejection. Guilt motivates repair and change. Shame motivates avoidance -- either by internalizing (depression, hopelessness) or externalizing (blaming others, lashing out).
That's why shame gets such a bad rap. It is harmful to promote shame -- but neither should we run from it when it arises, because we will never stop running. All of our emotions are data -- very noisy data. If we take the time to look closely, we can find the signal and gain insight.
I agree with much of what you are saying about food, and to a lesser extent about sex, but I disagree about the remedy. I believe the remedy is to refine our discernment of our own experience, and to help others do the same. This does include education about junk food, gambling, and pornography; that is all useful information to bring to bear. It does not include proscribing these things and does not require anger (though there's nothing wrong with getting angry about it).
Japanese has an amazing phrase to describe one variety of mindless eating: "lonely mouth" or "eating because your mouth is lonely." By simply paying attention, I can discern whether I actually want a snack and will feel satisfied after eating it, or whether my impulse to eat is driven by something else. In a comment on the previous post, Lynette noted: "I know it is purely anecdotal, but the two best lovers I ever had both had no ethical issues with phonography, they just both found it mostly boring. Preferring hour(s) spent with a lover doing many sensual but not explicitly sexual things over a 20 minute pump and grind to orgasm." These lovers paid attention to their own experience and realized they just don't enjoy porn very much. I do not presume that careful discernment will lead everyone to the same conclusion. Rather, I believe that discernment helps people discover what is true and healthy for themselves -- whatever that might be.
There's a difference between acknowledging feelings and thoughts of which I don't approve, and feel shame for, and choosing to entertain and hold onto them. Acknowledging them, noticing the fears underlying them, and trusting God to continue loving me and healing me, indeed starts with acknowledging them. If it stalls there, as is amply reinforced by much advertising and advice, or by reports of statistics showing that it's normal to feel and think this way, and why not "be yourself" by acting on them...that leads to long detours (in my personal experience) and delays becoming the self God wants me to continue becoming (while loving me however I am).
In other words, there's a difference between loving myself and loving someone else as we are right now, however we're feeling and thinking and acting -- and wanting something for us with richer, fuller, more lasting joy. It's the loving as we are now -- to the extent that we can bear such joy and light -- that enables us to be transformed.
As an aside...I think it's quite possible that human beings have different genetic predispositions to get stuck or stalled in specific dead ends -- different addictions, different temptations. Since these tend to run in families, people often are raised in an environment that amplifies them. Another reason not to judge someone for "not having enough will power not to X or Y or Z" when that particular thing seems easy for me to resist or change.
C.S. Lewis was really good at explaining this kind of thing, long before more recent genetic research got to the current point.
When it is a nudge to my conscience that I should think about what I'm doing. Without shame, we'd be monsters with no conscience, no sense of right and wrong. We'd be mere actors who act only upon our base instincts as though that is what we are.
But this is what modern society encourages, untrammeled giving into whatever our desires are, in the name of freedom and liberation. It doesn't seem to recognize the existence of excesses.
How do you discern who and what are trustworthy tutors to your appetites?
Does it lead me to wholeness, or not. Here, the best example I can think of comes from the Book of Common Prayer Baptismal Covenant and Catechism, about respecting our own dignity and others'. Does my behavior lead to wholeness or brokenness?
Shame about a behavior that when viewed objectively is against your code (or in my case my Church's code as well) of behavior is worth reflecting so as to understand what went wrong. Apologies, confession and recommitment to sanctification is often called for. However if the source of shame, eg, not knowing something at a social gathering, or feeling "less than" then another person is certain situations that are not linked to a true moral good or bad is something to be treated with the balm of the love of God. Ascertaining whether the source of shame is based on God's metric or man's is the key. Fully inhabiting that distinction is an ongoing process of discernment. One that if not taking seriously could lead to disaster.
Good thoughts, but I think you're making a big mistake in conflating shame with guilt. See the great article below from the Atlantic. To quote the article, guilt is about transgression; shame is about the self. If guilt is about behavior that has harmed others, shame is about not being good enough.
"I don’t simply trust people’s choices, desires, and appetites as reliable in a world where many people and powers are trying to shape them. Shame isn’t the only means of resistance, but it’s a powerful one."
I wholeheartedly agree, but then what follows, ethically, for our *own* behavior in relationships or even just as a citizen? Setting aside the challenges of accepting corrections to one's own choices, desires, and appetites -- in what contexts, and how, is it appropriate to try to shape the choices, desires, and appetites of others? I struggle daily with this question.
Robert Bly has spoken useful things about shame, readily available online. His open honesty about his own shame can be helpful in recognizing my own. Any time I read or listen to Bly I get something new, but the main thing about shame I've gotten from him is how it can tempt us to go into our little room of shame and hide from the world. So the worst thing about shame is that it can keep us from intimacy and growing and contributing. That's a pretty big "worst thing!"
One area where I have found shame to be damaging is with respect to failings that are habitual. If I do something like snap at a family member, I feel shame which is productive, because it's relatively easy to apologize and do better next time. When it comes to my more habitual failings, like procrastination, I think these failings are so ingrained in me at this point that the progress I expect to make is only incremental. So that puts me in a weird loop where I procrastinate, feel shame, but can only expect to procrastinate a bit less tomorrow.... but that's still procrastination and still causes shame.
Perhaps the right perspective is that for some failings, I need a healthy dose of shame so that I can do better. For other, more engrained, failings, what I primarily need is the affirmation of actually *believing* I can do better, and it's hard for that to coexist with the "punishment" of shame that even accompanies incremental progress. Or another way to put it is that shame is only useful when I am grounded in the belief that I actually can do better, which many people in the throes of habitual failings or addictions don't have yet.
I don’t disagree with you, but I would also consider shame to be one of the passions, and so while it can be an appropriate and virtuous response to certain situations (like anger at injustice, or sexual desire for one’s spouse), I think it is also something that can be addictive, and needs to be restrained.
It’s probably also worth parsing out exactly what we mean when we say “shame.” There’s the shame of “I did something wrong even though I have the capacity to do better,” and then there’s the shame of “I did something wrong and now I am DISGUSTING AND WORTHLESS FOREVER.” Not to mention there’s “shame” as a transitive verb, where the real sting is not what you did but how others treat you for it! All those are very different things.
I think in distinguishing between helpful and unhelpful shame, I’d look less as particular situations and more at the content of the shame itself—what exactly is the message of the shame?
For instance, I find it helpful when the feeling of shame is the sort that can be articulated as “This thing/action is unworthy of me.” That sort of emotion can actually be a spur to me to stop doing the thing (or, since I’m a big procrastinator, start doing the thing!); it is even more helpful when it keeps me from getting into a bad rut in the first place.
But there’s another flavor of shame that I find distinctly unhelpful, even destructive. It surfaces for me oftentimes in memories: of a stupid or cruel thing I said or did years, even decades ago—the sort of thing that is not mendable any more, and that I am already matured past the point of being likely to do again. For other friends of mine, I see this same flavor of unproductive shame in dealing with alcohol addition, or recovering from the purity culture. If I had to articulate this flavor of shame relative to the “helpful” kind, its message would be something like “This thing/action makes you unworthy.” That’s a very different message from the other one, and I doubt it really helps anyone change for the better—if anything, it seems more likely to drive the sort of despair that Martha worried about in the porn conversation.
Caveat here: I am a Catholic, and so I do think there’s ONE place where it can be helpful to feel “This thing/action makes me unworthy.” If it’s the preliminary step to a conversation with God, it actually seems kind of essential to feel this way--briefly. Yes, my sniping, complaining, yelling at the kids—all these petty things make me unworthy of a relationship with my creator. And if I didn’t feel that, I don’t think I could go on to have an authentic conversation with said Creator. Mind you, once one’s past that initial point of saying “O Lord, I am not worthy,” then the REST of the conversation should be about other things. Dwelling on one’s spiritual sins is not healthy.
So I suppose the problem with feeling that “This thing/action makes me unworthy” in ordinary contexts is that (except in the case of God) it’s a lie. This thing makes me unworthy--of what?? Of love? Of overcoming the addiction? Of other people’s respect? Of being happy? Of being alive? No matter how you frame it (again, outside of the specific spiritual context of creature/creator) “This thing/action makes me unworthy” is false, and destructive.
Tl;dr, shame can be good when it helps you see the unhealthy thing as bad, and it is not good when it makes you focus on how YOU are bad (esp. relative to others).
I read an article on Fight the New Drug a while back that made a distinction between shame and guilt that I found very helpful: they defined shame as a negative judgement of the entire self, while guilt was a negative judgement of a specific behaviour. The article also noted that shame was associated with attempts to deny and hide from the behaviour but that guilt tended to motivate people to change.
Since reading that, I’ve tried to approach my “bad feelings” about myself in that light. When I feel bad about a particular immoral action, I say, well this is a behaviour, and I can change it with the help of God, as I have with other bad habits before. But I try to pump the breaks when I feel what FTND defined as shame - the negative judgement of the entire self. That tends to lead to despair, and a recurrence of whatever behaviour induced the shame in the first place, seeing as the "shameful" behaviour is often some kind of emotional crutch anyway. I think that shame in that sense is in fact a temptation, and should be resisted as such.
I feel so honored, Leah! And I do really love this topic (and that substack link re: school lunches was awesome).
I think guilt is 100% fruitful. Guilt is related to actions (I think I read this in Brene Brown?) - I feel guilty *for doing something*. When I feel guilt it's a trigger that something doesn't sit right, that I need to explore that action, and do something to make the situation right. I do think you need to feel guilt to feel remorse, and I think paying attention to feelings of guilt (and not fearing guilt, which can prevent you from listening to it) is important for living a good life. Also, sometimes I feel guilty *wrongly* because of culture/upbringing/etc. and *it's still helpful*! Unpacking why I feel guilty even then helps me know myself better, unpack deeper truths, and more.
Shame gets tricky. Shame is about *you* not about an action. It would take some convincing for me to believe shame is fruitful. I can imagine feeling shame, "oof, I am not the person I want to be" and it motivating me to be better, but much more often it makes me feel unhelpful feelings of worthlessness & despair - feelings that get me stuck in a rut of 'this is who I *am*'.
Which brings me back to the dieting point! Dieting is a 60-80 *BILLION* dollar industry with, according to some, a 95% failure rate. Nothing about the dieting industry sets me up to believe they are a trustworthy tutor, but especially because their incentives are all about making sure I fail. If I succeed, I no longer need them. Now, what's really horrifying is that dieting has expanded its empire into 'clean eating' campaigns, and increasingly goes after younger and younger kids (stories of instagram marketing tactics will make you weep). The more you tell young girls in particular that they are shameful, that they should be ashamed of their bodies, ashamed of what they eat, etc., the more money you can make off of them *for their whole lives*.
That's the horror story I see replicated in the porn addiction industry. They have the same set of perverse incentives as the diet industry - they make more money if more people feel shame, and the more people who succeed in combatting their addiction the *less* money they make.
Should someone feel guilty about viewing porn - I think, absolutely! But shame? Unworthiness? Despair? Nope. And I think folks should be *very* wary of anyone who peddles shame in any context who has strong incentives to make you feel as bad about yourself as possible for as long as possible.
Thinking it over, I find myself speculating that one kind of healthy shame would be the kind that is symbiotic with healthy pride. If I take pride in thinking before I speak, then I will feel shame when I fail to do so. Healthy pride leaves room for shame when we fail to measure up. The shame prompts us to do better; the pride sets the standards by which we measure what that better behaviour would consist of.
Unhealthy pride happens when our positive image of ourselves prevents us from seeing where we need to improve. Unhealthy shame happens when we can't think of ourselves as even being able to do better in the first place.
The Sole-Smith essay was interesting to read and reflect on right after your questions, because while the author’s goal was to question shame and stigma around school lunches, it ended up reminding me of how contemporary media around parenting (and mothering in particular) shames mothers for both for doing “too much” and for doing “too little” - there’s some elusive, perfect middle path, no one is quite sure what it is, but they’re all pretty sure the mothers are doing it wrong.
In light of that, I think of shame as being healthy when there’s a clear moral disorder (in the theme of “mother media,” gossip and pride first came to mind), whereas shame in decisions that are morally neutral (to pack or not to pack lunch, daycare or no daycare, tacos or pasta for dinner) is at best unhelpful and at worst actively destructive.
As far as trustworthy tutors, I’ve found that the people who most encourage me to have well-ordered appetites aren’t doing a lot of comparison between persons. They might ask how does this action serve the good? How does this action build up the Body of Christ? How does this action strengthen your relationship with God? But they aren’t saying “see this person over here? She visits the Blessed Sacrament every day, why don’t you?” or “see that person over there? He hasn’t been to Mass in years, so you’re doing fine.”
My interest was really piqued by this topic. I think shame is different from repression, and this is a distinction worth dwelling on. Shame shouldn't mean hiding our faults or errors, either from others or from ourselves. For me, it's the precursor to dealing with our failings; and to dealing with our feelings about those failing. As a kid, I felt guilty all the time. It was, I kid you not, when I converted to Catholicism as an adult, that I was able to release the burden of guilt I had been carrying so long. This was because in the Church I found a formula for dealing productively with the feelings that were going to be there one way or the other. So contrary to the popular notion, it's been my experience that as a Catholic I am not more subject to a guilty conscience--I just talk about it more. And in talking about it, the aim is to work through it, acknowledging both the need to change and the great difficulty of change, giving God both my contrition and my frailty, and receiving real forgiveness.
Rosamund is totally right that it needs to be the right kind of shame. I think it's something like: "I am a beloved child of God, inherently good and good in many of my actions. For this very reason, I am called to be better than my selfish impulses." So in other words, shame shouldn't define us--it should show us the distance between how we are behaving and what the best version of ourselves would look like. So I think it stands in relation to the good in us; and if it prevents us seeing the good in ourselves it is not being what it needs to be.
I have some half-formulated thoughts about shame and secrecy and addiction, and I'm going to throw out a lot of gendered cliches and some poorly articulated theory of mind, so I'm requesting extra charity in the reading of this comment. Also, TW for binge-eating disorders, other addictive behavior, etc.
The (usually woman) binge-eating an entire box of cookies or tub of ice cream late at night in the kitchen and the (usually man, especially married ones) frantically watching pornography in the bathroom/office late at night are both absolutely driven by shame- it's the thing that forces them into the shadows, into the most destructive, self-punishing ways of acknowledging their desires. I'm worried that heaping more shame onto people who are stuck in this cycle won't help them break out of it, and it's not for nothing that binge-eating disorder is often treated in much the same way that anorexia and bulimia are: by helping the sufferers to regain a sense of food as a necessary, nourishing component, their bodily needs as worthy of honoring with kindness, and even food as a vector of pleasure in moderation (ice cream occasionally, etc).
If pressed to come up with a heuristic of when shame is appropriate in a sexual context, I would suggest that shame works when the person is harming others, and backfires when they're primarily harming themselves (obviously the pornography industry hurts the people who participate in it, but by the point a video lands on a streaming site, that harm is more-or-less completed, or can at least be assumed so for purposes of this discussion). A friend who's objectifying his dates, ghosting his lovers, etc. might need shame to help him realize that he's doing something wrong. Someone struggling with porn use might already feel that shame, be trapped in a spiral of it, and might need help seeing that he deserves to honor and fulfill his desires in a way that are nourishing and healthy, rather than self destructive.
This also intersects with gender in really complicated ways- I would be more likely to assume that a female friend who was having a string of one-night-stands, etc is acting in a self-objectifying way, and needs to be told that she deserves more, whereas a male friend is objectifying others, and would respond well to shame. But this is also a case where you have to know and love the person you're thinking about shaming in order to make the call of whether it's helpful.
TL;DR, maybe: shame is useful when people feel entitled to objectify others to fulfill their desires, and backfires when they have lost sight of the idea that they are entitled to fulfill their desires in a healthy, well-ordered way?
Psychological research makes a distinction between guilt and shame. We feel guilty about our behavior; we feel shame about ourselves. When we feel guilty, we feel responsible for our behavior and its consequences; we regret what we did; we want to make it right. When we feel ashamed, we feel that some inherent, inescapable flaw is driving our troublesome behavior; we feel doomed to repeat our behavior; and we fear exposure and rejection. Guilt motivates repair and change. Shame motivates avoidance -- either by internalizing (depression, hopelessness) or externalizing (blaming others, lashing out).
That's why shame gets such a bad rap. It is harmful to promote shame -- but neither should we run from it when it arises, because we will never stop running. All of our emotions are data -- very noisy data. If we take the time to look closely, we can find the signal and gain insight.
I agree with much of what you are saying about food, and to a lesser extent about sex, but I disagree about the remedy. I believe the remedy is to refine our discernment of our own experience, and to help others do the same. This does include education about junk food, gambling, and pornography; that is all useful information to bring to bear. It does not include proscribing these things and does not require anger (though there's nothing wrong with getting angry about it).
Japanese has an amazing phrase to describe one variety of mindless eating: "lonely mouth" or "eating because your mouth is lonely." By simply paying attention, I can discern whether I actually want a snack and will feel satisfied after eating it, or whether my impulse to eat is driven by something else. In a comment on the previous post, Lynette noted: "I know it is purely anecdotal, but the two best lovers I ever had both had no ethical issues with phonography, they just both found it mostly boring. Preferring hour(s) spent with a lover doing many sensual but not explicitly sexual things over a 20 minute pump and grind to orgasm." These lovers paid attention to their own experience and realized they just don't enjoy porn very much. I do not presume that careful discernment will lead everyone to the same conclusion. Rather, I believe that discernment helps people discover what is true and healthy for themselves -- whatever that might be.
There's a difference between acknowledging feelings and thoughts of which I don't approve, and feel shame for, and choosing to entertain and hold onto them. Acknowledging them, noticing the fears underlying them, and trusting God to continue loving me and healing me, indeed starts with acknowledging them. If it stalls there, as is amply reinforced by much advertising and advice, or by reports of statistics showing that it's normal to feel and think this way, and why not "be yourself" by acting on them...that leads to long detours (in my personal experience) and delays becoming the self God wants me to continue becoming (while loving me however I am).
In other words, there's a difference between loving myself and loving someone else as we are right now, however we're feeling and thinking and acting -- and wanting something for us with richer, fuller, more lasting joy. It's the loving as we are now -- to the extent that we can bear such joy and light -- that enables us to be transformed.
As an aside...I think it's quite possible that human beings have different genetic predispositions to get stuck or stalled in specific dead ends -- different addictions, different temptations. Since these tend to run in families, people often are raised in an environment that amplifies them. Another reason not to judge someone for "not having enough will power not to X or Y or Z" when that particular thing seems easy for me to resist or change.
C.S. Lewis was really good at explaining this kind of thing, long before more recent genetic research got to the current point.
Where do you find shame fruitful?
When it is a nudge to my conscience that I should think about what I'm doing. Without shame, we'd be monsters with no conscience, no sense of right and wrong. We'd be mere actors who act only upon our base instincts as though that is what we are.
But this is what modern society encourages, untrammeled giving into whatever our desires are, in the name of freedom and liberation. It doesn't seem to recognize the existence of excesses.
How do you discern who and what are trustworthy tutors to your appetites?
Does it lead me to wholeness, or not. Here, the best example I can think of comes from the Book of Common Prayer Baptismal Covenant and Catechism, about respecting our own dignity and others'. Does my behavior lead to wholeness or brokenness?
Shame about a behavior that when viewed objectively is against your code (or in my case my Church's code as well) of behavior is worth reflecting so as to understand what went wrong. Apologies, confession and recommitment to sanctification is often called for. However if the source of shame, eg, not knowing something at a social gathering, or feeling "less than" then another person is certain situations that are not linked to a true moral good or bad is something to be treated with the balm of the love of God. Ascertaining whether the source of shame is based on God's metric or man's is the key. Fully inhabiting that distinction is an ongoing process of discernment. One that if not taking seriously could lead to disaster.
Good thoughts, but I think you're making a big mistake in conflating shame with guilt. See the great article below from the Atlantic. To quote the article, guilt is about transgression; shame is about the self. If guilt is about behavior that has harmed others, shame is about not being good enough.
http://www.empoweringpeople.net/shame/shame.pdf
"I don’t simply trust people’s choices, desires, and appetites as reliable in a world where many people and powers are trying to shape them. Shame isn’t the only means of resistance, but it’s a powerful one."
I wholeheartedly agree, but then what follows, ethically, for our *own* behavior in relationships or even just as a citizen? Setting aside the challenges of accepting corrections to one's own choices, desires, and appetites -- in what contexts, and how, is it appropriate to try to shape the choices, desires, and appetites of others? I struggle daily with this question.
Robert Bly has spoken useful things about shame, readily available online. His open honesty about his own shame can be helpful in recognizing my own. Any time I read or listen to Bly I get something new, but the main thing about shame I've gotten from him is how it can tempt us to go into our little room of shame and hide from the world. So the worst thing about shame is that it can keep us from intimacy and growing and contributing. That's a pretty big "worst thing!"