Shame and the Continuity of the Self
- Shawn A. Stack
- Jun 12
- 3 min read
Notes on Being #03
Who you are depends upon the person asking.
And I mean this both as the definition you are given, and the one you give yourself.
We are social beings, and so we want to be for another person the person they want us to be.
That is:
we want to cooperate.
Cooperation is at the basis of what we are as people.
We may experience ourselves as individuals, but only because we are part of a collective.
And we remain part of that collective only so long as we cooperate within it.
When we stop cooperating, we are ostracized.
No longer an individual within the collective, we become Other.
Of course, as with all group activity, there is inevitable strife within the collective.
And some may feel that others are bullies.
But the bully is not Other.
They remain an individual within the collective.
While most people cooperate in order to entice cooperation with them,
the bully coerces cooperation rather than inviting it.
They force relational terms rather than mutually establishing them.
And this creates a peculiar dynamic:
the bullied individual often remains in relationship with the bully long after the collective
itself has recognized the coercion.
This is important to understand clearly.
Victimhood is not the same thing as suffering.
Nor is suffering consent.
But victimhood can become a stable relational identity within coercive systems.
The victim cooperates in the hope that cooperation itself will eventually entice reciprocity
rather than further aggression.
The victim feeds the tiger his hand under the promise that it will not eat his arm.
But the tiger always eats the arm—
it is in its nature.
We tend to think of the bully as being cruelly indifferent to the collective’s cooperative order.
But they are not indifferent.
They are ignorant.
And this ignorance makes them cancerous within relationships.
The victim’s relationship to the broader community is, however, often perceived as heroic.
By enduring the coercive relationship, they spare others from occupying that role themselves.
And the collective observes this suffering with a complicated mixture of gratitude and pity.
In enduring suffering publicly, the victim risks becoming a kind of martyr.
But while observers may admire martyrdom abstractly, they rarely desire it concretely for those they love.
For their own children they intervene.
For their own they establish boundaries.
For their own they shield them from coercive exchanges.
But for Others, they remain quietly thankful for the sacrifice while pitying the one who bears it.
And pity is not inherently bad—
provided it is properly ordered.
Because pity is deeply bound to love.
I pity that my wife loves me in my imperfection.
That a better man is, in some sense, being deprived of her affection.
I do not pity this imagined better man.
It is my wife who is shortchanged.
For what I love deserves the best—
or at least the better.
And yet she has fallen in love with me.
It is a pity.
But it is precisely this pity that animates me.
That moves me toward transformation.
That calls me to flourish so that I may more fully mirror the value she already sees in me.
Shame emerges when we become conscious of the gap between the self we present and the self we feel called to become.
And love has a peculiar way of revealing this gap.
Because to be genuinely loved is to encounter someone who sees more in us than we currently embody.
Humbled by our beloved’s affection, we fear that they are deceived about who we are.
And this fear awakens shame.
But shame, properly encountered, is not merely humiliation.
It is responsibility.
It is the awakening of the self to the possibility that it must become worthy of what has been freely given to it in love.
Love is not accepting someone merely as what they are.
Love is cooperating with them in becoming.
It is participating in the difficult continuity of another self across time.
It does not coerce.
Nor does it reduce the other to their fear, weakness, or suffering.
It calls them beyond these things.
It is cooperating through challenge.
Not coercing acceptance through fear.
It is not protecting someone from everything that frightens them.
It is explaining that fear is often the very precondition of courage.
It is making agency a responsibility—
and refusing to allow victimhood to become an identity.
Because shame, properly understood, is not the destruction of the self.
It is the realization that there exists a discontinuity between who we are,
and who we are being called to become.
And love does not resolve this discontinuity through comfort.
It resolves it through courage.
Through challenge.
Through responsibility.
Through continued becoming.
This is how the self maintains continuity through time:
not by remaining unchanged,
but by remaining in honest relationship with what it might yet become.
Comments