Sorry, do I know you?

No one arrives on this earth encrusted with shame. Rather, shame settles in our bones over time, accumulating during times of neglect or violation. Every one of us has encountered times when the connection between us and the one we neeeded for attention and love was ruptured. I remember once when my son was two years old, I was in the kitchen making him breakfast. He came running into the kitchen joyously shouted, "Daddy! Daddy!" I turned to him abruptly and shouted, "Stop it!" He looked stunned and ran to his bedroom. I knew that my response had shamed him. I put the eggs down and went to his room, knelt down on the floor and looked him in the eyes. I said, "You wanted something from me, and I didn't give it to you. What is it that you want to say to me?" He said, "I felt like you didn't want to be my daddy anymore." My heart sank, and I said, "No. No. We're good. That was all mine. I'm so sorry I got angry at you like that. We are good, and I love you." He brightened and smiled, hugged me, and went off to play; the bridge between us had been restored.
—Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief

The Rear End Covenant

We live in a culture of "sorry" and "thank you," of politeness and etiquette, of correctness and righteousness, and of being a "good" person in gender, orientation, occupation, roles, and employment. Some may say this to be the "social contract" we sign off to somehow qualify for whatever the world thinks we need and want. Yet, I would like to sensitize to the fine print. All that is small, not read, and often holding exactly the signature what is most important. Simply hidden by its significant insignificance.

Marshall B. Rosenberg, an observer to how violence emerges at the level of language, observed in himself and of his surroundings the contractual experience of the rear end:

Jackal^[1] [violent] language is the language of moralistic judgment. We think in terms of "who's right?" "who's wrong?" and "who's good" "who's bad?" And when you mention change, we do want change sometimes. So, how do you get change in the jackal system?

In the jackal system, watch a parent try to bring about change in the child. This is a parent teaching a child one of the most important words in jackal.

"Say you're sorry!"

"I'm sorry"

"You're not really sorry. I can see it! You're not really sorry!"

The childs cries, "I am sorry..."

"Okay. I forgive you."

Can you imagine a game like that?

Can you imagine a parent responding to a child that way?^[2]

Here is an audio as Marshall really spoke life into these words that text cannot quite convey:

In the scenario Marshall acted out, he brought up one of core strategies of change-making in Jackal language: shame. The emotion that wraps, enmeshes, and conceals who we are in bitterness, anger, and soft resentment. As this scenario deeply embodies a core tenet of spoken violence. That somehow, to create change to unwanted behaviors in others, it is necessary to make people hate themselves for what they are doing.

In this parenting scenario, shame is employed in a longing to teach. To educate the child of an unwanted behavior to get what the parent wants. Underneath what was said is more deeply a disrespect. A disrespect that comes from a distrust that whatever the parent wanted would not be met with the use of shame.

Marshall established that a tenet of spoken violence comes from a belief that one can change another person. Which is then expressed in the necessary employment of strategies to then meet this need to reconcile. I brought up shame but of the many there is guilt, blame, name-calling, humiliation, embarassment, and pity.

To speak to shame, shame is eroding to the self as is every other strategy aforementioned. Because shame is this sandal that walks one in direct contact to the rear-end, in every expression of that word. Of car, stick, punishment, and most deeply: consequence. As with every one of those strategies, they all take place in the aftermath of what happened.

This typically follows a format: If you misbehave, I will do this.
If you don't do your homework, I will take away your video games.
If you don't say you're sorry, I won't believe you will change!
If you don't tell me what is going on, I don't think I can continue to trust you.

What Marshall noticed something in the arithmetic of the consequential was consequence of the consequence. That in saying "sorry," a silent shame is attributed to oneself. We say "sorry" because we did something "wrong" and "bad." These labels double as corrective measures. Though, they start to collide with our identities: who we are is "wrong" and "bad."

These transfixing identities that wrap us into the conviction that we are worthy of shame. Worthy enough that we have to shake it off. Though, more often than not, the shaking that we do further wraps the straitjacket of shame tighter. What is so damaging about shame is that in its language is a threat. What the parent is saying in the in-between is this:

My love, trust, and forgiveness to you can be compromised if you do not behave to my preferences.

In writing that, I am sorrowful to say the practice of the conditional is customary. To compromise, sacrifice, and unnecessarily hurt because we are accustomized to the amusement of violence. As violence has become a ritual of the masses: how public shaming, blaming, and name-calling has become in a reality more cybernetically disembodied than chronicles of presence.

My sorrow echoes when I recognize how in a culture consistently mummified by shame, "sorry" means so much, thus so little. Entombed in pyramids of which their makeup is puzzling, Marshall, in his raiding of the lost ark, observed that someone can say "sorry" yet feel nothing. The blankets of shame that we have wrapped ourselves in have become so comforting (and suffocating) that the word "sorry" has become a pillowcase. A protective, warding spell that is casted in companionship to shame.

A call and response that is as much automatic to some as it would be birdsong erupting and emerging at te break of dawn. Often when bumping into things in great inordinance to how one presence is a clumsy, messy burden. Or even in situations where responsibility is not even so much question rather than a declaration and to say "sorry" would somehow mean to exercise control and choice to be the one to blame. To slip into shame, like a pair of old pajamas, as if it were a duty.

I do recognize the shame laden within me. The tune goes a little like this though often these songs are without tangible, direct lyrics:

"Boys are supposed to be like this if they are to be considered men."
"I need to earn others respect."
"I need to earn rest."
"I am ashamed of myself because I can't do what I should do."
"Love can't be free... there is always a cost."^[3]

I would share more, though what I want to turn back to is the reversing of our culture. Under the rear-end convenant, shame is as much a confession as it is punishment. So, to speak about shame would be quite the shameful act, which is why no one really speaks about shame (something that brings me sadness). It would take no prolonged investigation (rather a bristling instigation) to know the silence around shame to be shame-laden. Intimated by a culture consistently shameful of itself.

Sorry for being sorry

The necessary extension of culture consistently shameful of itself is a culture that finds comfort in blame. In shame this is expressed in the assigning of self-responsibility. "It is my bad." and "My fault." As one says, "It is on me." When one chooses to fully blame themself, thus take full responsibility of how a situation happened.

"Sorry" is the blurted compulsion of a culture addicted to blaming. Of fault finding and evidence excavating. Of placing responsibility and of repentance. Of a culture so apologetic of itself because of how threatening its only known way of speaking is. Apologies are a strategy of defense to a culture where words are launched in attack, argument, and in assigning..

By nature of humans being sensitive creatures, it is in deep sense and sensibility that one comprehends how hurting it is to be in a state of sorry. Sometimes it expresses itself in pity. I remember myself hiding in a closet from my scolding parents that punishing myself was somehow comforting. Or other times it expresses itself in simply hesitance. Of choosing not to speak. Choosing not to initiate. And in shutting down one sensitivity to life because of how much rejection, hurt, and bitterness have built up inside.

Shame is constructed in a crystallizing way. Francis Weller wrote to how shame has a saturation point:

... I recalled an experiment making rock candy in my high school chemistry class. I'm sure many of us share this memory, but for those who don't, the experiment involved taking a glass of water, tying a string to a pencil, and placing the string in the water. Then we slowly added sugar to the water, creating a solution. And nothing happens ... nothing happens ... and then, when the saturation point is reached, the sguar molecules begin to crystallize around the string. I thought. This is how it is with shame. We can endure a certain number of times when the connection is broken between us and the people we love and need. We can digest a certain volume of disappointments and criticism. But as some point, with enough repetition, the interal stories associated with those events reach their saturation point, and the fictions crystallize into things that feel like truths.^[4]

Shame crystallizes in a stalwart effort. In enduring. In bracing and self-protection to what is broken, so that the in the brittleness of those moments, we do not break. There is nothing more crushing than when the brittleness of shame breaks us. Since shame seeks to protect us, often by contracting ourselves to the smallest, most flat arc of experience.

As to maintain sensuality and sensitivity would be deeply hurting. To remain exposed and vulnerable to a world of rejection. So, we close. Rejecting parts of ourself that appear to not sustain us. Francis Weller put it this way:

Herein begins the slow, insidious process of carving up the self to fit into the world of adults. We become convinced that our joy, sadness, needs, sensuality, and so forth are the cause of our unacceptability, and we are more than willing to cleave off portions of our psychic life for the sake of inclusion, even if it is provisional. We become convinced, one some basic level that these pieces of who we are, are not good enough—that they are, in fact, shameful—and we banish them to the farther shore of our awarenesss in hopes of never hearing from them again. They become our outcast brothers and sisters. I remember going to therapy with the expressed interest in having my therapist help me rid myself of these unwanted pieces.^[5]

Weller expresses how in an inability to contain what is within us, we banish what we resent outside the circle of belonging within us. Shame is placed on that something that should not be where it is. It is as if something inside of us is this intruder. An onlooker, bystander, and trespasser in gross violation of one's privacy. Homo sacer. That is the mission of shame. To convince ourselves we are worthy by pushing everything unworthy to the furthest corners of our mind.^[6]

Privacy, banishment, and cleaving. The protective expressions that are emplyed to eclipse the presence of what we are ashamed of. So, how does one contain that which we do not want to contain?

The connivers of shame are in defense

The conniving of shame comes in its defense. To explore defense, one can revisit the 1960s during which the former SS officer and administrator Adolf Einchmann was taken off the streets of Buenos Aires, flown to Israel was taken to trial. Marshall connected this to an example of another expression of shame:

Amtsprache is a language is layered in shame. A shame like a Matryoskha doll. Within Eichmann's necessity to do certain things is shame within shame. Deep shame that has layered, calcified, and congealed over time. Like Weller's crystallization of self, there is a saturation point where shames crystals start to reflect into the deep geographies of self.

So, how does one map the geography of shame? One can look for the Other. The foreign body. The one who should not be here. The one who does not belong. The Other places an Order upon things. How things should be, interact, and belonging. And it is in deep sorrow that I can see how much expression of the self is in consistent exposure to "other-oriented" spaces. Where rules, orders, and the qualifications of belonging are placed over self-oriented spaces and self-belonging. Belonging in balance to both body and mind.

An other-oriented expression of self is deep sensitivity to others. To their needs and expectations. That if they did or did not do certain things, a heavy responsibility would be placed upon them. The weight of shame, guilt, and blame. Of "it was your fault!" and "it was your responsibility." In other-orientation, one allows oneself to displace the discomfort of being in "self-orientation."

Since it is wildly uncomfortable and inconvenient to continually to be in self-orientation when the world is said and made out to be so necessarily violent. As we are separate from the Earth. People are out to get you. There are evil out there that needs to be eradicated. There are people out there who need to be locked up, placed outside the matters of life, and tortured for what they have done.

Thus, to be in Other-orientation. One inecessarily holds the valor of the hero maintaining Order. Of being empowered in organizing life, as without being the hero, then the world would be overran with villains. So, we live life in defense. In the defense of Truth, Order, and Rationality because without the fabric of life would tear. Or so we think.

Other-orientation is one well-intentioned, informed way to tear the fabric of life.

That is because a language so deep in attributing responsibility to external actors is so deeply in touch with defense. In protecting itself from foreign actors: shame, blame, and guilt. As Marshall observed: when someone says they "had" to do something or follow orders, guidelines, and listen to superiors, then shame and guilt^[8] are not as much felt as they are avoided. Repressed and returned in the dead alienation of integrity.

I was surprised that Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish philosopher, was at this interview and was sent by the New Yorker. Surprised because in her writing, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, she said something about Eichmann which I was grateul to stumbled upon:

He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.[9]

What is implicated in Arendt's response is how Eichmann was without thoughts and if he thought more or thought more "critically," then he would not have done what he had done. I am uncomfortable with that. I would not say that Eichmann was purely "thoughtless" as Hannah Arendt observed. He was well-intentioned and well-adjusted to the point of his own death. To Arendt, he spoke in "cliché" which brought about her banal evil. The one of order following and amtsprache (Order speak.) She and others have then connected this to a necessary conclusion: "we all carry an Eichmann in our minds," though this is a sensitivity still insensitive.

It would be easeful to say Eichmann was sense-less, in blindness to rationale, and disconcertingly disconnected to those merely evaluating him. Yet, underneath, I would say he was deeply sensitive to a shame-embedded and eroding culture. Because it is in shame's erosion that rooting in body and soma appears to be depleting and diminishing rather than nourishing. As the concrete mixers and highways of asphalt in the industrailization of the self leave only cracks of availability to be with bodies and their embodied, rapturous senses. Of the sensuous wilderness of wishes, needs, preferences, feelings, and sensations. As they are necessarily cut off in obediance to what "needs" to be done.

Some of the "needs" of a culture of shame are these: I need to control my eating so as I do not get fat. I need to contain my emotions because I don't want to be seen as weak. I need to conceal my true feelings and hesitations because I want to be known as capable. I need to forgo sleep because work requires me to make such sacrifice: it's a part of the job.

Sensitivity is inconvenient to the industries of self. The industry of self where self-harm is made necessity: following orders, recitation, regurgitation, and endless hoop-jumping. Which are as lauded as they have been manufactured to be quintessential. This expresses itself in obsessions with productivity, of focus, in "getting things done," in "making use of the day," and of "making a living." Francis Weller noted these distinct splinters, cuts, and wounds of the industry of self:

In our modern culture of hyper activity and stress, we are seldom asked what we have carried into the world as gift for the community. The frequent question is: "What do you do for a living?" Or worse: "How do you earn a living?" I find that question obscene. We have gone from being seen as valuable to the community, a carrier of gifts, to having to earn a living. No one asks, "What is the gift you carry in your soul? What have you brought with you into the heart of the village?" We long to feel cosmically significant, that it matters that we are here and that we make a difference. Like the Pueblo Indians who know it is their cosmic duty to sing the sun up every day, we also long to feel that we are needed to keep the wholewild, spinning world happening. The absence of this remains as a persistent grief in our psyches. We have become spiritually unemployed.

Spritually unemployed is a way to express the misery that we disguise and put up with. I would say that in connection to Weller's speaking to gifts, we have become unknowingly become the Grinch to the gifts of the world. We have forgotten how to cherish life because in our distaste of parts of it, we have made all of it insubstantial. A choice edible because we choose to only live in the positive parts of it. So, when thoughts are thought to be the positive parts of homo sapiens or the "wise ape," then feelings are necessarily regarded as irrational. As in any hierarchy, something is made lower. Of lower order, rank, and ability and corresponding value.

Tupperware

Space is an amorphous thing without a container. So, what happens when the concretized Modern spills its asphalt into the wilds without edges? Black rivers of droning highways. Talking cobwebs of cellphones and the Internet. Home-less carriages of cars and vehicles. That could describe that how in the adolescent mixing of the Concrete and the Wild, circulation of life has become congested. The flow of life becomes bureaucratic. Professionalism, organization, and government standardize life into acceptable demeanor. Space is seized. Place is synonymous with property. Property is antonym to belonging, "to go along with, properly relate to," or to be with. Since when you own something, can you really say you are in relationship to it?

So, what happened to the containers?

The Tupperware of our times comes in the preservation of our sensuality. In the refridgeration of what one feels and the reservation around things "too close to home," The expression of shame always speaks in wanting to hold things at a distance. To keep away, thus safe. Shame is in the phenomenon where one freezes what one feels to save for another time.

This refridgeration could meet a need of restraint. Of holding in to not pre-maturely express something not yet ripe to be opened. Yet, more often than not, it is in a clinching. Of a cinching. Of contracting and in defense. Of desperating holding onto ourselves that its pressure flattens us. "One needs to hold them self together in times of challenge." (Lest one falls a part.) We choose to wait for "safe spaces," externalizing safety as a place and leave the integrity that comes from the place-hood of inner-safety. That intuitively knows we can live without defense to life.

Tupperware connects to how privitization has leaked into emotion (or emotions have spilled into privitization). Emotions commodified now carry a weight, that is, a cost. Commodified because the feeling of an emotion is now packaged with our compulsion to measure. To calculate. What is the value, exchange, risk, and sacrifice to allow oneself the indulgence to be connected to ones body?

Shame economizes and commodifies ourself into an allegiance of playing the game "What is to be accepted?" What is so characteristic of this game is how its container is of Tupperware. In the plastic container, in plastics playing of the game of postponement. As plastic represents postponement to change. The nature of Tupperware, the plastic container, is this: we consitently ask "is this appropriate?" when we feel something because we orient towards if others will bring us into a circle of belonging.

I mourn how even after facing the overwhelming tragedies that affect all called "change," I can still ask myself if expressing sorrow in public is acceptable, stifling tears as to not embarass myself from not being "put together." Even though everyone experiences change.

The work of Tupperware is of preservation, conservation, and in enduring ^[11]. To keep things contained and preserved beyond their usual temporal limits from threats. Distinct from the crystallization of shame, it comes from the deep need of being received in safety, in tenderness, and for one's need of expression to matter. To be witnessed and to be received. The strategy of the container that is Tupperware is expressed in its longing to freeze and refridgerate all that is stirring within to save for another time. Another time that is more safe than now. Later rather than now. In the postponement, concealing, and of shame beckoning its face once again only hidden to keep what is unacceptable out.

More often than not, what we feel yet cannot give home to, we pass over in silence. Modernity's psychoanalytical name for this amnesiac condition is to be alexithymic. The Greek a- meaning lack, léxis speech, and thūmós soul or heart. A word that describes numbness to the spells of the sensuous. Describing how we forgot the names of whole inner communities. Of bard and song coming home crestfallen as we haplessly choose to see feelings, song, and sensuality as foreigners. The foreigners who are actually the lodestones of heart that call for our attention and gift us life in times of need.

The orientation towards happiness, its pursuit, in self-improvement, and in things going up does not quite help. As it seems as though, there has been an allergy to sorrow placed carefully by Sorry itself.

Sorry, what is mourning?

The initation and intimation to reclaiming one's sensuality comes in understanding of needs. Since in the thirst and thrift of a world of measurement, needs have become displaced from the family of our souls. Touching needs, under normality, is synonymous to being needy. Of requiring, of being more than necessary of being hopelessly of an oversized desire, and of wanting excess. A system of scarcity and separation will quiet being whole as completeness is conditional under shame. As the surreptitious, shame-filled question goes: for what could we need when everything comes with a price tag?^[10]

Here is a list of needs that only touches the shallows of deep leagues, recesses, and extensive libraries of needs we are:

I remember when I first was learning about needs and was looking at the list, scanning the words and being both overwhelmed and a bit disoriented. How could we have all of these needs? It seemed indulgent to me. As I learned of Maslow's hierarchy of needs where needs were conservative: evaluated in scales of separation and distinction. It was not in the slightest as expansive as this list and many of its needs meant so much, thus so litte. So, it took time and experience for them to metabolize into understanding as I settled into their meanings. Since I have a deep, magnetic attraction to learn most deeply in experiencing the opposite of what I have been taught and warned about.

In reading about needs and starting to become literate in a vocabulary of them, I began to metabolize in how many of the needs listed have not been met in my life. There were many. Perhaps that was why I shamefully did not give reverence to needs because a lot of the time, they hurt to acknolwedge. Though, reminding myself now, I am see how seeing and observing needs may be one of the most radical practices of looking at life. Since needs are universal. They are not conditional, heralded in the practice of deserving or have anything to do with qualifying first. As if we need to file an application going through trials and tribulation to then finally earn something. Though the challenge is not to become literate but to digest and metabolize what needs are. It takes a life-time of practice to metabolize the extent of needs. Since the constellations of needs have been thrown to farthest rings and reaches of our planet. Something we only touch in times of meteoric uprising and upheaval.

Needs are like water. They flow through every action we have. They are as much quenching, relieving, and giving in times of thrist. Of longing and meeting.

Under nonviolent communication or sensual speech, all actions are acted upon to meet needs. We act to meet needs. Marshall would say under every action is a "Please," of something asking for something and acting in conversation to how it may be possible, though if you listen attentively. And that conflict only emerges at the level of strategy. Of how one gets there. Of what one chooses to do to meet their needs.

There is also generational depth in that question since we have made it a practice to dispose of the vocabulary of needs as well as any metabolizing of them. Because it is painful to know needs when facing collapse.

The indulgence of needs really connected me to indulging in mourning. The alternative to saying "sorry." Mourning is distinct in that it allows one to metabolize sorrow. Mourning requires a container flexible. A place where stretch is available when paired with the balm of self-compassion when facing wide-pain. Wide-pain meaning pain that stretches beyond our singular selves, beyond causal chains to be blamed, and being a mechanic to life in longing to fix it.

Though, I am sensitive in using that term compassion. Compassion, like Sorry, means so much, thus so little. Compassion is a bundled word, so one must unbundle it. The blithe expressions of compassion is in understanding another. Sometimes sympathy: the Greek sympathēs meaning "having a fellow feeling" or feeling the same thing. Or in most disorientation: to walk in another's shoes which I could write extensively about though choose not, as that would touch flowers but not the root.

The Latin com- means "with" and pati means "to suffer." To suffer with. Which is of a challenge of depth when we want to transcend our bodies and identify mostly with thoughts about life and the feelings within us.

What happens when pain is Privatized? When pain is to be put in Tupperware? What happens when there are no containers that are not plastic?

[1]

"Jackal language" is used as byname to violent language, as Jackals, to Marshall, are creatures of trickery. They can say one thing and mean another. They exist in contrast to Giraffes, since of the land mammals, they have the largest hearts. (Back to text)

[2]

7:20, NVC Marshall Rosenberg - San Francisco Workshop - FULL ENGLISH SUBTITLES TRANSCRIPTION (Back to text)

[3]

The other premise of shame is how we need to qualification to do something. That we need to earn something. Whether that be the idea that we only deserve love, rest, and renewal only after a certain amount of work and employment. Or the transactional concept (a symptom of markets and commerce) that love can be something bought, invested in, and is conditional. I can only receive things if I invest into something whether physically, mentally or emotionally. The sensuality that we are has become commodified, thus quite susceptible to falling into the infinite dark abyss that we are not enough. (Back to text)

[4]

33-34, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, Francis Weller (Back to text)

[5]

34, Ibid. (Back to text)

[6]

Shame announces itself quite loudly in how we do not want to be alone with our thoughts. Because, of course, when given the space, those chatterings of those banished will crescendo. Since those yearning to come home will become ever louder when there is are openings. Another expression and reflection to how shame lives in silence. What is not expressed and what is hidden. (Back to text)

[7]

10:49, NVC Marshall Rosenberg - San Francisco Workshop - FULL ENGLISH SUBTITLES TRANSCRIPTION (Back to text)

[8]

Shame and guilt are similar yet distinct. Shame is more self-directed in the expression of "ashamed." The Old English an meaning "on" or "in." While guilt is more other-sensitive. The Old English gylt means "crime," "sin" or "moral defect." So, guilt is in reference and relation to something. (Back to text)

[9]

Eichmann in Jersuslem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt (Back to text)

[10]

The derivative of a culture full of prices is the princely idea that somehow in our re-presentations, life can be more present. I can see this in how systems of 'rights' and systems of policing and surveillance can appear like forms of justice yet are an exposé of a collective disease. These forms of protection only exposing the lack of love across self, village, town, community, and land with how we can withhold love to those who do not qualify as within the worth of our wealth. Because the systems of re-presentation forget how that in our longing to re-present life with us as heroes, superiors, the Good or the Rational homo sapien, in our attempts to eradicate evil, we often become it. (Back to text)

[11]

It is no mistake that most the wilderness we interact with are placed within the incarceration of places of "reservation," "conservation," and "preservation." We do not know how to welcome and relate to the Wild. It is something to be developed and if not, something to be left alone, as we still are confused with our place in the world (We are a peoples without a place.) (Back to text)