CU #3: Shame on You
Conscious uncoupling from the ivory tower, Part 3
Note: this is Part 3 of a series of essays using the book “Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to a Happily Even After” by Katherine Woodward Thomas to stimulate conversation about academic careers. Part 1 can be found here, Part 2 can be found here.
I’m perched on the edge of my seat in our little high school classroom, leaning forward with excitement. We are learning about subatomic particles and I am enthralled.
I raise my hand yet again, determined to understand everything. Mr. Johnson puts his hands into the pockets of his lab coat, and sighs with annoyance. “Haswell, everyone else in class understands this.”
I’m sure some of my classmates do get it. But others are passively taking notes, chewing gum, dozing off. I do not think I am the only one who is confused.
His dismissal feels gendered. I suspect he would have answered my question if I weren’t a girl.
When I tell my mom, she thinks so, too. Over the next few years, she will send him clippings from the local paper about my SAT scores, college scholarships, an award for excellence in chemistry.
This story has been on my mind over the past week, as I’ve been contemplating shame, guilt, and how they might stem from a disparity between our ideal selves and our actual selves. The connections here are a bit tenuous, and I’m still working through it, so bear with me. And please share your thoughts in the discussion!
In the last CU post, I wrote about the romantic ideals associated with marriage and how they might be a useful framing for academia. Katherine Woodward Thomas, the author of Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to a Happily Even After, says that much of the pain of divorce comes from being seen as failing to live up to these fairytales. She describes how she felt during her own breakup:
“Upon telling people that Mark and I were breaking up, I could look forward to a covert and automatic devaluing, either of our entire relationship or one of us or both of us.”
She describes hiding her empty ring finger in her pockets, fearful of being judged. According to Thomas, she was feeling shame.
Shame comes from violating an internalized ideal self
But what exactly is shame? In her book, she argues that “ . . . guilt is something we’re more likely to feel when we violate our own core values, disturbed that something we have done is fundamentally bad and wrong. Shame is what we feel when violating external rules and expectations that society imposes upon us, and it leaves us feeling that we are fundamentally bad and wrong.” (Here, Thomas is referencing anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s classic (and highly problematic) work The Chrysanthemum and the Sword).
This definition didn’t feel right to me, and a quick Pubmed search shows that there is scholarly disagreement on the definitions of guilt and shame. In a fascinating article in the European Journal of Psychology, Maria Miceli and Cristiano Castelfranchi argue that shame is “concerned with a perceived discrepancy between one’s actual and one’s ideal self” while guilt is about the inability to meet what we consider to be our moral responsibilities. Importantly, they state that “ . . . if a negative evaluation comes from outside, one has to share it in order to feel ashamed”. This is the opposite to Benedict’s and Thomas’ definition of shame.
In this way of thinking, even if people devalue you for ending your marriage, it would not lead to shame unless you also devalue yourself. Not living up to a romantic fairytale creates shame, but only if you have internalized the fairytale.
What determines whether you buy into academic fairytales?
The idea that internalized romantic notions play a role in creating feelings of shame resonates with me. But not everyone shares in those romantic notions in the first place. In an interesting conversation about my last newsletter, we discussed the ways in which internalizing the academic fairytale is affected by privilege:
Jason Hills wrote (I’ve pinned this comment to the top of the comments section):
”The myth busting was way easier for those of us who never, even for a moment, lived the fairy tale.”
If you enter the academy without accepting the romantic rules, or you come to reject them while you are there, they have no power over you. What a powerful thought.
Needhi Bhalla made a related comment on Twitter:
“ . . . I also think that some professors, like myself, have always seen academia as flawed because of the concerted effort to keep historically excluded folks out . . . “
This conversation got me thinking about two things, one directed inward, and one outward-looking:
What I have experienced as a slow shift in perspective over time, a fading of the academic magic during my professorship, is simply recognizing the reality that historically excluded faculty and students have been seeing all along. Because for the most part, my idealized academic self was never too far from my reality, and that kept me enchanted for too long. I definitely feel shame about quitting, about not being dedicated enough to find a way forward inside the ivory tower; this newsletter is, in part, an attempt to make peace with the past few years.
And I think that is where my story at the start comes in. I’ve previously seen this story as a pivotal experience where I won out over a misogynistic teacher. I didn’t stop asking questions (if anything I became a toxic question-asker; I will write more on that later), I won the “Merck Index award” in college, I became a successful scientist.
But now I wonder how accurate that version of events is. It was around this time that my interest shifted from Chemistry to Biology. My high school Biology teacher was far more tolerant of questions, so maybe I was more discouraged by my Chemistry teacher than I have been telling myself. Maybe I did fold myself up a bit to fit expectations—if Chemistry wasn’t going to be welcoming, maybe I’ll try Biology. There are so many other examples of ways in which I’ve grown into academic expectations, and I suspect where a lot of my shame from not living up to those expectations comes from.
Secondly, what if majoritarians try so hard to get everyone to fold themselves up into the “right” shape because we (I include myself as a white cis straight person from an academic family) are ourselves so attached to those ideals and have folded ourselves up to fit? What if we are just jealous of the freedom that comes with knowing you’ll never fit into the stupid mold and you’re going to have do it your way if you do it at all?
Discussion Section
You are welcome to mull these over on your own, but I’d love it if you’d share your answers to these questions (or any other thoughts):
How would you define shame and guilt? Are you in the Thomas/Benedict camp or the Miceli/Castelfranchi camp? Or something else?
Do you agree that feeling shame at not living up to an idealized version of an academic might correlate with how much we’ve come to believe that we are capable of doing so?
Where are majoritarians folding, carving, and molding the people around them into these fairytale shapes? Most importantly, how can we stop doing that?
I think I'm with Miceli and Castelfranchi. Sometimes shame has more to do with how we think others might judge us, and our internalized conflict over that, than it does with how they actually judge us. I felt guilty about abandoning my students, especially other first-generation students, and my colleagues, including two people I'd helped mentor, when I resigned tenure. But I still struggle with shame as a writer who isn't really self-supporting and as a father who isn't living up to the provider role I was raised to emulate. I've mostly gotten over the guilt. But the shame lingers.
I was at a birthday party this weekend -- my son's classmate -- and I still struggle to tell my story to new acquaintances without lapsing into what feels like a story of failure or shame. Some of it is external. People naturally assume that if I taught at a private college in Iowa, then I must be teaching at Penn State. I probably need a better way of explaining why I don't (too easy to get into how exploitative adjuncting is and why I don't want to teach first-year composition). I have gotten better at saying simply that I'm a writer and trying to curb the impulse to explain (no one needs to know more than that, and if they're curious, they'll ask).
But it's hard to craft a narrative for self-worth when so much of that was grounded in academic identity. I try to think of myself foremost as a father and spouse. But that doesn't always work very well. I want to have the other thing that is "for me" -- and I want to be good at it. I'm not good at giving up ambition.
Some commentary on the guilt/shame disinction.
There's disagreement on what word to use in many fields, including mine, but the basic conceptual distinction is between whether the "source" of the shame is external ("shame" in philosophy) or internal ("guilt"). This distinction is especially important because both cases are what an individual experiences; do they experience the phenomena as internal or external?. As one's core dieas come from society and culture, the internal/external distinction is not simple either.
Regardless, the isuse in this context is that academics both feel shame (external) and guilt (internal) when they think of leaving the academy. Their identities are too closely tied to an external locus of control, of self- or identity-formation, such that when that locus becomes toxic ... they have few resources to cope ... which leads to almsot inevitable and profound trauma even with healthy coping strategies.
I am, btw, an expert in social ethics, especially identity formation. So ... I'm kind of like the doctor working on himself....