Cutting Off Reflected Shame
How one responds to brushes with fame and how one responds when confronted with shame influences which stories are written and which are erased.
Inside the self-serving institution there are parts kept at a distance, parts made up of untold stories, of stories forgotten, ignored, and obscured. The stories were not told or really heard because they revealed the failure of a community or its leaders. And while wearing glory-seeking frames, that failure reflected shame, and that shame couldn’t remain. These are the stories of people who have been cut off from their community because they reported a trusted person who abused them, or dared to dissent in a place of coerced assent, or blew the whistle on cover-up and corruption.
I’ve learned not to judge an institution by the first impressions engineered during early interactions but by the lasting impressions left on those who speak truth in love. Were they cherished or banished? Character is revealed at the moment someone is presented with truthful information that confronts their beliefs, actions, or attitudes. Do they embrace that information, even if it might reflect back to them their own failures, or do they cut that information off, along with the messenger?
Cultures of fame and fandom hide subcultures of fear and silence. (See Cubicles of Charm and Crucibles of Condemnation). The institution ends up harming the people it is supposed to protect each time it chooses to cut itself off from a difficult truth in order to preserve its reputation, power, and possessions. The institution then enters into a cycle of cover-up - it must continue to suppress stories because any return to integrity will necessitate the unveiling of a history of harm and they will have to visit the places and people they have kept remote and islanded. And as the stories stack up, the threat to the institution grows, and along with it the incentive to keep such truths at a distance.
Remote and Islanded
In her book, The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett describes life along the Maine coast in 1896. In one idyllic scene, the narrator of the book tells of a sailing trip with a Captain Bowden. She finds herself among some unfamiliar islands which prompts the memory of a woman named Joanna who lived alone on one of the remote islands more than two decades ago.
“Where is Shell-heap Island?” I asked eagerly.
“You see Shell-heap now, layin’ way out beyond Black Island there,” answered the captain, pointing with outstretched arm as he stood, and holding the rudder with his knee.
The captain brought the boat on shore of the island and she ventures up a path toward Joanna’s house:
I found the path; it was touching to discover that this lonely spot was not without its pilgrims. Later generations will know less and less of Joanna herself, but there are paths trodden to the shrines of solitude the world over,—the world cannot forget them, try as it may; the feet of the young find them out because of curiosity and dim foreboding; while the old bring hearts full of remembrance. This plain anchorite had been one of those whom sorrow made too lonely to brave the sight of men, too timid to front the simple world she knew, yet valiant enough to live alone with her poor insistent human nature and the calms and passions of the sea and sky.
As she reflects on her time on the island and what she imagined Joanna’s life must have been like she offers this insight:
In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness;
How do we get to the point, as individuals or as institutions, where the remote and islanded places are given to endless regret? I think our response to failure has something to do with it. Or to be more precise, our response to the shame we believe the failure reflects. We cut off the parts that reflect shame and bask in the parts that reflect glory — and we keep doing this until we are fragmented and scattered, like an archipelago of islands slowly drifting apart from each other.
As I work with and study institutional responses to abuse, it seems so much hinges on how the institution relates to success and failure. When they are led by narcissists, and when the system itself is narcissistic, identities become linked with shows of success, and whatever might come along that speaks of failure is seen as an identity threat.
An Everyday Example from Athletics
In my last post, Basking in Reflected Glory, I wrote about the ways in which self-promoting individuals boast in their connection to another’s success (BIRGing). It’s opposite is Cutting Off Reflected Failure (CORFing). Studies on BIRGing and CORFing have focused on the behavior of sports fans:
The phenomenon of basking in reflected glory is well documented and reflects the psychological nature of fanship and the premise of vicarious achievement. On the other hand, when an athlete or team fails, fans tend to distance themselves through a process labeled cutting off reflected failure.
Fans can identify with a team’s win: “We won!” and then disassociate themselves from the team’s loss: “They lost.” Similarly, a parent can shower praise on a child’s performance on the field because it makes the parent feel or look good - it enhances their own esteem - and then speak harshly or give a cold shoulder when the child’s performance on the field is lacking because it embarrasses the parent.
And while this phenomenon has been observed and documented among fan behavior, I think the BIRGing and CORFing framework is helpful for understanding many of our experiences with success and failure, fame and shame, celebrity and suffering.
Because I think it’s often the shame that threatened identifies seek to distance themselves from, I’m using the phrase Cutting Off Reflected Shame, or CORSing. Just as there are tactics of deception used by glory-seeking leaders to make others appear better than they really are, there are tactics of deception used by shame-distancing leaders to make others appear worse than they really are.
Tarnishing and Humiliating
In my last post, I suggested that those who BIRG use polishing and whitewashing tactics to deceptively make the source of reflected glory appear better than they really are. Take for example, a group of board members who BIRG their key leader who might be the face of the institution and in need of reputation management. They polish, or exaggerate, his good qualities while downplaying reports of his harmful treatment of others. This, in turn, contributes to a culture in which people increasingly minimize unwanted messages and maximize appealing messages.
Those same board members might engage in CORSing behaviors toward those who are bringing complaints about the leader. They act one way toward those who make them look or feel good and a very different way toward those who make them look or feel bad.
Note: It’s not just leadership that engages in this behavior. An entire community can also use CORSing language in response to a survivor who comes forward about abuse perpetrated by someone important to the community, as evidenced in some social media comments that attack the credibility of a survivor who comes forward publicly.
CORSing is accompanied by two tactics that I’ll refer to as tarnishing and humiliating. They are the opposites of polishing and whitewashing.
As the BIRGer polishes the positive attributes of the source of reflected glory (such as the toxic leader), the CORSer tarnishes, or belittles and devalues, the positive attributes of the source of reflected shame (such as a complaining party) in order to make them appear worse than they really are. “Despite what you’ve heard, these people are not as well-meaning as you might think. We need to be careful or they’ll take us all down with their story-telling.” One of the most common examples I’ve come across is the assertion made by leaders that a person who made a report or blew the whistle blindsided the leadership and skipped over any attempts to follow due process, concealing the fact that the person only blew the whistle as a last resort.
As the BIRGer whitewashes the harmful conduct of the source of reflected glory, the CORSer humiliates, or reveals to others, actual, fabricated or exaggerated perceived weaknesses about a person that they believe will make that individual look bad in the eyes of others. For example, they might reveal past trauma a reporting person has suffered in order to give others a reason to distrust them, suggesting they haven’t yet healed, are overly sensitive, easily triggered, and “crazy.”
The impact of institutional CORSing is that it discards and further harms the people who should be cherished. Often the reporting person is speaking up out of a love for those around them. They want to protect others and they desire to do what they believe is right. A person who then speaks up out of a love for others ends up being unjustly cut off from the people they were trying to serve — and they are devalued and humiliated in the process.
The Source of the Problem: The Supremacy of the Self
If you keep tracing the words that make others seem inferior you’ll find they are made up of the same language that makes the self feel superior. Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote, “If you want to cleanse a river, seek the source.” At the source of a culture that cuts off reflected shame are threatened identities of supremacy.
Take, for example, the self-promoting misogynistic leader who subjugates and debases women in order to assert his own need to have power over. Despite his power, he is paranoid, insecure, prone to outbursts, in constant pursuit, and always on the run. One can’t simply manage the anger, control the outbursts, and explain it all away as a leadership or communication style without addressing his own need for superiority.
Of this connection to superiority, Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own writes:
With the exception of the fog he seemed to control everything. Yet he was angry . . . it seemed absurd, I thought, turning over the evening paper, that a man with all this power should be angry. Or is anger, I wondered, somehow, the familiar, the attendant sprite on power? Rich people, for example, are often angry because they suspect that the poor want to seize their wealth. The professors, or patriarchs, as it might be more accurate to call them, might be angry for that reason partly, but partly for one that lies a little less obviously on the surface. Possibly they were not “angry” at all; often, indeed they were admiring, devoted, exemplary in the relations of private life. Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price.
The misogynist sees the women around him as mirrors because he can only see himself -- and the reflection matters a great deal. Elaborating on the problem of male supremacy, Virginia Woolf writes:
Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?
Wherever I see harm to certain groups of people, and wherever I see the cutting off of their stories because they reflect shame instead of glory, and wherever I see the defensiveness of institutions that hunker down and deceive when confronted, I discover issues of pride, narcissism, self-promotion, and supremacy at work behind it all.
Part of the solution, then, requires humble, selfless, servant leadership that doesn’t seek glory or cut off shame and is willing to seek out all the remote and islanded places off its shores, to hear the stories of harm, to sit with the regret, and then seek out the actual source.
A Final Note:
I believe one of the most powerful actions a person or institution in the wrong can take is to listen to the stories of harm and then present a confession, or apology, that mirrors the truth. I give some recommendations in this post. Just as words of deception are so often used to harm, words of sincere truth can bring healing. And while words are significant, words are not enough. Those in the wrong must ask, “What must be done that goes beyond mere words?” Words should be followed by repair, restitution, and lasting change.