The Shame Spiral

 From January 7th.

 Wow it's so wet today. I'm unendingly grateful for a warm and dry house and happy that I learned how to provide for myself, gain safety, and have a life that is practical and free from existential threats.

I'm grieving my old friend George, who is no longer conscious though his body is still present I think. He could be dreaming, visiting us. I had a dream about riding behind him on a motorcycle, whispering I love you into his ear. He didn't respond...but I know he loved me too. We first met around 50 years ago, a little less maybe. He attended poker games at Hap's Garage and I was living with Hap Hazard, as he called himself then. George was a Scorpio and about 6 months younger than me, and I have Scorpio rising, but we connected for lots of reasons. He had a partner but we tried to date at one later point, too early in my personal development to have a mature relationship, but we stayed friends and kept the trust and collaboration as we grew in community.

I've been remembering those times and his familiar face. I don't need to visit his body, as I know there are dozens if not hundreds of people who also love him and want him to still be there for them. He had some wonderful qualities and such a soft and nurturing presence, plus all that charisma. I greatly admired him even though we didn't always agree, and I think I saw his true nature. He made a powerful impact on many lives and I am proud to be one of the artists he supported with his vision. Even though I was "just the screenprinter" I also got to paint the Treehouse, twice, and we shared fifty years of t-shirt projects, which makes him my longest and oldest collaborator. 

I kind of do want to go sit with him, to be honest. I just don't think I will help anyone who needs help right now. I told them my heart is with them. I've always been chicken about dealing with death, since my dad's was so traumatic, and I was young then, and I always think I will do better. I also think I prefer to grieve in private. I'll talk about it, I'll help spread the news, but I don't want to have to say any platitudes or join in any group tears. I'll continue to work on it, as we're solidly in the time of our lives when we will be losing everyone, until we are the one lost. 

I heard a new term today that seems useful, the shame spiral. It's the reaction that happens when you feel shamed, and are sent into a process of defense, self-protection, and full display of your woundedness in that area. I've felt it, and seen it happen to others, but it's good to remember that this can help explain the seemingly outsize reaction people have when their errant behavior is addressed and acknowledged. They can't acknowledge it until they see the spiral themselves, track the process, identify their wound, and get to the healing. All of these types of healing take years. Shame is such a powerful emotion, imposed from without.

As someone raised as a Catholic, I'm well aware of how it feels. I can sometimes distinguish it from guilt, which is about what you did, not what someone else thinks about it. They get locked together sometimes, when the shame makes you feel guilty...but sometimes your outrage is because you don't feel like you did anything that deserved being shamed. And sometimes you didn't. I often find myself framing things as if there were a courtroom and a judge and jury, with all of my evidence and justifications. But I think I am learning to just sit with the guilt feelings, which usually can point out at minimum something I could have done better, and put the shame back on the source. 

I told someone they didn't have the right to scold me, and it's the same with shame. People don't have the right to shame you. However, often, they didn't, but your woundedness tells you they did, and you go into the spiral. If you did something that hurt them, or caused a problem, people have the right to bring it up and look for redress or point out a better action, but not to attack you for it. If they don't have the skills to have a rational and productive, problem-solving discussion, perhaps they are not the person who should address it with you. It takes skills and practice to keep that kind of discussion helpful. 

Many of us revert to parent-talk, bringing back the way our parents dealt with their need to guide or correct our behaviors. I felt lots of shame as a kid, sometimes put on me intentionally and sometimes just the reaction I had learned to feel as a little kid under attack. It was the 50s. My Mom was pretty good at parenting after helping raise her 9 siblings, but my Dad was toxic and barely tried to learn. My parents had a lot of late night discussions but I don't think there was any evidence that my Dad learned any better ways. I think he did carry a lot of shame. But all of that is decades old and it's more useful to pry into current issues and look at what I could be doing better.

Any kind of righteous crusade is fraught and I know I am falling close to that line with my need to help the market to get better management and get back on track. I'm frequently feeling shamed and scolded for telling the truth, which makes me even more determined to keep doing that. It's probably useful to go back to one of the primary experiences with lying that happened to me when I was maybe 8 or 9, not sure exactly. My older sister and I got to go to the yacht club with my dad, one of the only times I remember having any kind of nearly one-on-one experiences with my dad. He sent me up to the bar to get cokes for us, a huge treat we never got except at the yacht club, and on the way back along the dock, I took a sip from mine, and then because I had less than my sister, I took a sip from hers. I proavly did it twice, because my deprivation was a prime driver of my actions then.  I had no idea that I was being watched the whole time and I lied about it, denying trying to somehow get myself on equal footing with my sister, which was the underlying problem which of course was not understood or ever addressed. My sister and I were adversaries in many ways until we were adults, and talked about out mutual feelings of not being seen and heard as children. We took it out on each other for at least two decades until my dad's death changed the subject. 

But anyway, I was full of bad feelings and must have been promised some kind of discipline when we got home, and the day was spoiled. My father chose to make his point about lying by washing my mouth out with a bar of soap, witnessed by the whole family. It wasn't the first time I had lied. Lying was no doubt an adaptive behavior I had learned to get myself some safety in the previous years. One of my friends' mothers had written about it in my autograph book, and I can still see that entry in my mind, on the pastel page, reading "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." I was always grateful to her for even noticing me at all, but I puzzled over this and didn't really understand the level of my lying, and it could have been a major problem among many problems. I was also a bully to my little sisters, as secretly as I could be, which is just part of the same attempt to get out from under domination and control. We often try out domination and control as that's what we're seeing and feeling.

So a complicated early memory and I doubt I vowed that day to never lie again, because I focused on the cruelty of the punishment and the feelings of being utterly unloved, misunderstood, and threatened, as well as hurt. I don't eat cilantro...just one persistent soap issue. I vividly remember the incident in great detail. I wonder if I confessed anything about it. Confession was also a shame and guilt experience with a male authority figure so I probably did, or didn't. I remember confession vividly as well but not that one in particular. Someday I'll think more about my "sins" back then. But my point is that either within or despite these early experiences, at some point in my life I realized my main values included honesty.  

All this to say that the shame spiral is what I believe I set in motion with my observation of someone's immature behavior, which launched some vicious anger at me, and others, at a really bad time. It explains to me why I don't want another interaction with that person, even if it were an attempt to make it better, an apology or process or whatever. I don't even want anyone to defend me (because, oh lord, I am guilty of the following sins...) I just want it to never happen again. I don't want the person to be punished, since they punished themself by making the situation a hundred times worse than my little observation warranted. Part of my guilt is paying attention to that person in the first place. The only thing that's working for me with this group of people is pretending as hard as I can that they don't exist, and certainly don't have any power over me. They try to.

Some of them are in power positions over me, and have shown that they will exert that power, but that has only happened in small ways and I wonder if they are in touch enough with themselves and their own lying to realize that their power over me isn't effecting my compliance with their control tactics. Doubting that they have any self-awareness, but since I know I am nuanced, I try to think that they are too, and working on their issues, which like mine, are really hard to keep on top of. Childhood damage persists, as it is so deeply embedded when we are so vulnerable. It drives a lot of unfortunate behaviors.

Circling back, I don't like remembering the ways I wasn't mature with my dying companion in life, but we got past them rather easily as it turns out, with his insistence on reassuring me that even though my imaginary construction of what we would create together wasn't going to happen, we still created a lot together! We set aside our shame and worked on friendship. Respect, openness, just loving each other without romantic attachment worked. I do think I saw him as he was. I do think he also saw me.

Of course we had fifty years to do it. This other thing just happened. Other people may address it, and because it wasn't just an incident about me, but a larger pattern, it needs to be addressed. People with skills have to do that. That's why it is so damn important to choose good leaders for these complex community organizations. They need a big toolbox of skills and when they don't have those, chaos follows and that's where we are. 

George had a lot of skills, but most of what he did in public for the last while as he served on the Board of OCF, was to just be in the room. He was always calm and deliberate and strong, not drawing attention to himself, but sticking to the business of the org. I'm sure he had his weaknesses and made his mistakes. There was plenty I didn't know, but I always remember that he was a wrestler. He once said that Kesey and his people wouldn't really like him if they really knew him. They connected through wrestling and wood, and if I remember right, George was asked to make Ken's coffin. 

George will have a very well-crafted resting place and parts of the sauna will be his legacy made visible, but his real legacy resides in how he was able to bring so much creativity to fruit in others. I'm going to think of him in his garden, the last place I spent time with him really, when I was painting the Treehouse the second time. He had just lost Katherine, and he invited me in to see where her box was and other parts of his private sacred space. The Treehouse was being repainted as a part of a memorial to her, which I think was derailed by the pandemic. They had a smaller safer gathering.

I also remember when he came by the market to connect with me after her death. He held me while I shook and wept into that vest he always wore, and he held me as long as I needed it, even though his grief was obviously huge and not mine. My grief was for him, was really empathy, very deeply. When he released me and I wiped my tears, he said "Good talk."