Review: Breaking the Shackles: Bringing Joy Into Our Lives.
Breaking the Shackles: Bringing Joy Into Our Lives. Edited by Roy U. Schenk and John Everingham. Madison, Wisconsin: MPC-BEP Press, 2005. www.shametojoy.com . 362 pp. $14.95.
A decade after the original publication of Men Healing Shame , editors Roy U. Schenk and John Everingham have issued a revised version of their previously impossibly scarce and pricey book on men and shame, originally published in 1995. (Full disclosure: though I have not spent a lot of time with Roy Schenk, and it has been a decade since I last saw him, I count him as a friend.) Breaking the Shackles reprints the contents of the earlier book (a few pieces were revised by their authors) and includes two new chapters not present in the original volume.
Edited books are almost inevitably mixed affairs. While some scattershot aspects are visible in Breaking the Shackles , this book largely manages to maintain a consistently engaging, authoritative tone. One salutary reason is that editors Schenk and Everingham are happily not shy about strongly participating in their own book, and this makes Breaking the Shackles all the stronger. In writing seven of the volume’s twenty-three chapters, the two editors nearly account for a third of their book by themselves.
We start off with a roar with Everingham’s “Some Basics About Shame.” The author rightly points to disparagement of men’s direct, blunt language as a factor behind “the atmosphere of shaming that envelops men today.” A few sentences later, Everingham aptly notes that “women tend to be ashamed of their bodies, whereas we men are more ashamed of our feelings.”
Another set of piercing insights is worth quoting at some length: “Primary shame is not destructive. It feels awful , but it doesn’t do us any harm in itself. The trouble comes when we try to avoid this piercingly uncomfortable feeling, or make it go away – quickly. Typically, we allow ourselves to feel primary shame for only a few milliseconds, before shifting automatically to some other emotion, often fear or anger.” [italics in original] Everingham comes across in his writing as a blessedly down-to-earth fellow: “It’s often beneficial to say “shame” and “I feel ashamed”—right out loud.”
Schenk follows with his own enthralling piece, “Shame in Men’s Lives.” Schenk comments that “we find that boys are expected to excel in doing and girls are expected to excel in being.” “We then enforce these expectations through the differing ways we treat children. For example, we treat boys more roughly and usually less frequently, and we tend to interpret boys’ pain as anger.” As a result, unfortunately, “male children learn Shame, including The Shame of Maleness, very early and very well.”
Based on his own experiences as a longtime speaker and activist for gender equality and men’s rights, Schenk has experienced firsthand society’s reluctance to treat males equally. “Victim feminists often accuse me of being an extremist. This, I believe, is because I refuse to accept women’s presumed moral authority and moral superiority and the privileged treatment they demand because of this presumed superiority.” Schenk does offer a concrete and instructive solution: “[W]e can also choose not to assign superiorities and inferiorities. Indeed, this is an essential key to the healing of shame. ” [ bold and italics in original]
Gershen Kaufman outlines different strategies that are adopted to shield one from shame: rage, contempt, perfectionism, power, and transfer of blame each can be adopted, individually or in combination. Kaufman tells a powerful story of how a fellow therapist sensed Kaufman’s need to say, “I love you” to him, and held up other appointments until after some twenty minutes, Kaufman was able to work through his “paralyzing shame” enough to say the words.
Some of the contributions such as Robert Bly’s are taken from oral presentations, and though the pieces are often engaging, as readers we suffer from inevitable losses due to the different media. Also, the transitions between chapters and integration of each chapter into the overall arc of the book are not necessarily always as smooth as would be ideal.
Bly does have one powerful point, in answer to the question as to why anyone would ever want or accept shame given all its negative characteristics. “I think the intensity of same is the answer… Do you know that some people only feel alive when they’re in deep shame?” [italics in original]
In his chapter, “Men Facing Shame: A Healing Process,” Everingham usefully lists ten “rules” that maintain shame in families and other human system: control, blame, perfectionism, incompleteness, denial, no talk, disqualification, unreliability, not allowing the five freedoms (i.e., not letting others perceive, think and interpret, feel desire, or imagine in their own way), moral intimidation.
One contribution that risks being particularly disjointed contains responses from twenty-three men regarding why relatively few men turn for help to therapists or men’s groups, and how to get men involved in men’s groups. Lawrence Diggs and Francis Baumli each memorably hold forth on the profoundly anti-male culture of most therapy. A couple chapters later, John Gagnon provides a further answer: Many men leave men’s groups once they meet their own needs, as their shame leads them to believe they are not important to the other men in the group. “They could experience the novelty of accepting love, empathy and caring from other men, but they did not realize that other men needed them to return the gift.”
In a rare misstep, George Lindall’s chapter, “A Shame-Based Model for Recovery from Addiction,” is badly overheated. Lindall simply needs to get out more. I am intrigued by but far from convinced of the universality of his proposed “80/20 rule” that “80% of the feelings that drive addiction come from [in Lindall's awkward terminology] the childhood equipment.” His assumptions are a bit much to take seriously: “1. All human beings are addicts. 2. All addicts are shame-based. 3. All human beings are victims. 4. All human beings are codependent.” All? How does Lindall know for sure? Enough said.
David L. Lindgren follows with a chapter on “Grandiosity: The Shadow of Shame , ” observ ing , “ Shame and grandiosity are opposite ends of the same continuum of self-development.” Lindgren includes two fabulous stories about (suitably anonym ized ) real men healing lifelong pain and shame through love and attention from fellow men.
Everingham’s chapter on “Inadvertent Shaming: Family Rules and Shaming Habits” is golden enough that I am copying and distributing it to the members of my own men’s group. I will mention a few of its numerous nuggets. “Here’s a motto for giving feedback: I don’t have to be right; I just have to be honest.” “Some groups are safe for certain feelings—perhaps anger, sadness, or fear, but don’t welcome others—often shame, competitiveness, or impatience. Feelings of dependency, hopelessness, self-pity, or self-hatred are especially likely to be denied.” A valuable list of subjects that are often taboo among men is provided—money, feelings about their penis, anger at women, racial prejudice, feeling superior to others, feeling intimidated by another man (especially one in the group), obesity, alcohol abuse, toxic relationships, gambling, and disappointment or bad feelings about the group. Spiritual and political concerns meet when Everingham aptly notes, “By assigning special status to a wide variety of Victims, political correctness de facto directs the lion’s share of its shaming attack against a single class: Able-bodied white men who aren’t poor.” [italics and capitalization in original]
Other useful chapters address men and goodness (Andre Heuer) and initiation (Michael P. Greenwald). The two new chapters are particularly rewarding. John S. Guarnaschelli’s long piece addresses the Ali Baba and forty thieves story in penetrating detail and also delves into the author’s revealing personal insights. “Shame must be taught.” The reliable David Shackleton, discussing what he calls “the mother wound,” provides the other new chapter regarding his illuminating four-quadrant “gender codependent power-over matrix” that reveals women’s and men’s complimentary areas of power. “[W]e have as yet acknowledged only two quadrants of the gender codependent power over matrix: women’s positive side of nurterers and emotional caregivers, and men’s dark side of violence and abuse. . . . Our task as a society, and in particular as men, is to expose the other two quadrants.” Again politics and personal growth meet when the author writes that a “false notion of one-sided power and oppression is the complete basis of feminist analysis of male power, and totally overlooks the other side of the pattern, namely men’s powerlessness in the face of women’s power.”
This truly amazing book offers virtually unlimited riches. Don’t miss it!
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