Article written by Gendreau Alexane – M2 PCPI
Boris Cyrulnik is a French Psychiatrist mainly known for his contribution in the theory of resilience. He published a book in 2010 about shame, a book that I would like to present briefly in this short article.
He presents this book by saying that we all experience the feeling of shame once in our life. But for some, shame can overcome everything else and become paralyzing. He states that shame is one of the factors that prevent resilience to happen. These factors are in the number of 3 : isolation, nonsense or inability to speak about an experience we lived, and shame which results in people deciding to isolate themselves from others.
He mentions that it is the only emotion created only from a representation. Anger, sadness, joy can be triggered with chemical substances, which isn’t the case for shame. When someone is ashamed, it’s because he has the thought, the representation that he is less than the others. This feeling is directly linked to his self esteem, it is because he believes strongly that he is lame and worthless, he is then going to feel attacked by the sayings of others.
There is a paradox in the situation of the “shameful one” as Boris Cyrulnik names him. He aspires to speak but cannot say anything because he fears the sight of others. If he speaks and shows his vulnerability, he gives people a low image of himself, a bad representation, that he will suffer from. But if he doesn’t speak, he keeps his feeling of shame for himself, and still feels bad nonetheless.
This phenomenon can be highlighted by Boris Cyrulnik’s own story.
During the second world war, he was a young jewish boy. He grew up with the representation of jewish people being less than others. His rights weren’t the same than everyone else, there were lots of injustice in his early years. Growing up in this climate, can create in one’s mind the feeling of not being allowed to belong there, the feeling of never being good enough. These people will grow and keep this representation within themselves. Later on, during their adult years, it can create difficulties in their social life.
For the extreme cases, it can be linked to social phobias, people that are excluding themselves from the social area because they don’t feel like they’re enough. This feeling of shame, when at paroxysm, is paralyzing and prevent people from living their life.
As psychologist, we put emphasis on what is said, and we want people to talk. In this case, these people are afraid to speak, and feels judge everytime they open their mouth. People that are deeply in this problematic will not come to see a psychologist, there needs to be new ways to go to them, and help them experience something new.
As a future psychologist, I would like to help these people who doesn’t feel the right to be there, to help them feeling allowed to speak without fearing the reject. I don’t have an exact thought on what to do in order to help them, but i believe strongly there is something we can create. In a world where social pressure is so intense, and social interactions so artificial, virtual and sometimes fake. I think these kind of problematics are going to grow. People rather run away from the real world, so difficult to cope with, and go into virtual spaces where they feel protected. We need to create a social space where an emotional security exists so everyone in these dynamics can feel safe and in real world interactions.
I discovered this book through an interview of Boris Cyrulnik presenting it, i will, for sure, buy myself a copy of the book in the coming months, to go deeper on the question of shame.
If you wish to go deeper on this question, here is a link to a Boris Cyrulnik’s conference on this subject : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j0dz9aHGRg&t=3687s