On Love and Shame and Empathy and Resistance

1.

My entire life I have been trying to get my head around how loving someone does not necessarily mean empathizing with him. How loving often means silencing not yourself but a part of your beloved.

One thought this leads to is that love is cultural. How we love, and who we find loveable in which ways, is cultural. And our culture is conflict. Perhaps this is because of our American myth of the individual.

The individual is not a universal concept. It means different things to different cultures.

For one it makes me think about the difference between conflict and resistance.

Resistance starts within the self. Our idea of conflict is mostly outside the self. In fact, self-conflict can lead to resistance far more often than public conflict. Because self-conflict is often about self-contradiction, which leads to a better understanding of what one really believes.

Our myth of the individual is that what makes one an individual is how one is different from others. This is not essential to one’s conception of the individual, however. One way to rethink the individual is to consider those individuals who make their subjectivity from exploring difference within the self. This, as I understand it, is the theory of psychoanalysis.

Perhaps resistance in the self is a prerequisite for empathetic love. Perhaps, in other words, it requires the ability to see difference within oneself to see others as having difference within themselves, rather than simply being different from you.

 

2.

I’ve been thinking about shaming and social media and the relationship between the public and private. Shaming is conflict, so of course it has a place in our culture. But how often does being shamed really lead to feeling shame? The more common reaction is likely anger. Over time, if what is shaming does not disappear, anger becomes hate.

In contrast, feeling shame can create resistance within the self. Shame can tell you that your beliefs do not match your actions. Or that your beliefs do not match your professed beliefs. My daughter feels shame when she hides her lunch out of fear for what her friends will say about it. When she tells us, it’s okay, we ask, how do you feel?

Interestingly, if your beliefs match your professed beliefs, being shamed will not make you feel shame. If you do not realize your beliefs do not match your professed beliefs, being shamed will also not make you feel shame. If one is not aware of self-contradiction, it may manifest physically, but it will not lead to self-resistance or growth.

I hid the ways I was bullied from my parents because I wanted them to continue loving me and when I said, everything is okay, they said, great. What I knew was I was different from others. I didn’t know the differences within myself. I kicked out windows, I got into fights. I wanted my attackers to feel shame, but they did not. If they were forced to apologize, it only made them angrier and they used their secret anger on me at a later date.

 

3.

But worse were the people who believed they loved me, because they too believed they had done nothing wrong, but their love made me believe that I had. They too did not feel shame.

I felt shame. But I didn’t understand that to feel shame was to understand something about love. It wasn’t until I was able to separate the way they loved me from empathy, that I understood that none of us had become an individual.

They wanted to love me into being like them. My attackers wanted to let me, and themselves, know I was not like them. Both of these desires were about who they believed they were: different from me.

Neither of them knew who I was, though, because neither of them knew who they would be on their own.

If white supremacists got what they wanted, they would no longer know how to define themselves. But neither would hardcore allies.

Sometimes, at its best, my love teaches me that I need to resolve something in myself.

 

—Photo: Flickr/LadyDragonflyCC