The Great Secret Shame Game
There is something fundamental about us, which affects every aspect of our lives, that we are determined to keep from ourselves and from each other. It is the idea that we are somehow worse than other people. It is a secret, shameful suspicion, always ready to twitch into conviction when the circumstances are right, that there is something wrong with you, and with your life and other people are free from the things that bother you most about yourself and are leading cleaner, better lives than you.
Pale dilutions exist in every branch of psychology (the internal critic, the inner bully, imposter syndrome, the inferiority complex) but Freud captured it best with the super ego – a structural component of the human mind: permanent, inescapable, as much a part of you (and everyone else) as one of the muscles in your back.
If you’re going to be able to function, these ideas about yourself have to be supressed, enough. And they can be: for long periods of time, you can be unaware of them and it can be possible to forget you ever felt like that. But, when they revive, you recognise them instantly as something that’s always been there. And just because you’re not aware of them, doesn’t mean they’re not affecting you – they are, all the time. You start reacting to the pressure these ideas exert way before you’re aware of them, and that’s exactly because you don’t want to become aware of them. These ideas about the self, and all the things that people do to manage them, are the great hidden motivator behind human behaviour.
Bigger than love, these ideas about ourselves we’re trying not to have are why love is longed for. The dissatisfaction with the self comes first – being loved feels like being accepted enough, at times, even cherished or adored; it feels like becoming safe. Loving someone else feels like something good, something precious, has come into your life; something much better than you on your own. In that sense, when things are going right, everyone is someone else’s trophy.
It’s the same with parents: love for children validates you; the need to provide care, adds weight and purpose to everything you do, you feel more significant and worthwhile. Our suspicions of ourselves, our dislike of aspects of ourselves and the anxiety (and aggression) they cause are essential ingredients in why we need other people the way we do and, when dependence gets out of hand, they are where that comes from.
The same ideas underpin luxury, exclusivity, cachet, wealth and driven aspirational lifestyles (which can come at a cost that causes the self-discontent they were meant to manage to surface with extra force). And the compensatory urge they generate to feel superior is the springboard for virtue signalling and the fuel for the culture wars.
The things people prize most about themselves (looks, professional success, education, athleticism, humour) are the things they use most successfully to keep these ideas off. Those ideas are the impetus behind compulsive promiscuity that can never feel wanted enough, often enough and dependence on alcohol to overcome social anxiety or numb yourself to feelings of inadequacy and shame. Feelings of inauthenticity (which make you dislike yourself a bit more) that no-one can ever entirely shake off are tied up with a sense of risk involved in showing yourself as you really are (or not being able to tell what you really think or feel) and connect to the same idea that there’s something wrong, something unworthy, about you. So do photoshopped images on Instagram.
And behind it all is a blank, shapeless fear, like waking all at sea in the early hours of the morning, that reaches down into evolutionary history to pre-cognitive spectres around worth, rejection, exclusion and survival-threatening isolation.
Most people do manage to live with these ideas and function well enough most of the time but, even when things are OK, they are the engines behind hyper-sensitivity to criticism, intolerance of contradiction, domineering behaviour, self-sabotage, irrational lashing out, impulsivity, compulsive behaviours and most things you do that are destructive or cause trouble.
It’s an essential element of the power and range of these ideas that they stay under cover. Being affected by these ideas makes it very difficult to see them affecting you – the idea that we might be so powerfully affected by ideas of weakness and inadequacy itself makes us feel weak and inadequate. So we recoil from it – determined to feel, and appear, competent, rational and confident. And if we don’t want to recognise these ideas about ourselves as individuals, we’re certainly not keen to acknowledge and discuss them at a social level. Even psychologists and therapists, who you might expect to be more dispassionate and objective, have a tendency to try to separate themselves from these ideas in a professional context and treat them as extreme, aberrational; evidence of disorder, as if it were somehow possible, even ‘normal’, to live undisturbed by them.
The result is that the furthest reaching idea we have, which touches everything around us, is one about ourselves, which we refuse to recognise because we’re trying very hard not to have it. It seems such a ludicrous situation that it’s tempting to treat it light-heartedly, but if there are game-like aspects to these almost comical levels of self-delusion and pretence, the capacity to cause ourselves and others misery by not having a clue what we’re up to is entirely serious.
This is just about the most important thing we could know about ourselves and it stays a secret.