When we find ourselves questioning our very worth or adequacy, we begin to doubt ourselves, and we feel to blame ourselves. "I can't inadequate as a woman/man." We feel a mounting inner anguish, a sickness of the soul. This is shame. To feel shame is ...
When we find ourselves questioning our very worth or adequacy, we begin to doubt ourselves, and we feel to blame ourselves. "I can't inadequate as a woman/man." We feel a mounting inner anguish, a sickness of the soul. This is shame. To feel shame is to feel seen in a painfully diminished sense. This feeling of exposure constitutes an essential aspect of shame. In the midst of shame, an urgent need to escape or hide may come upon us. Therefore shame makes a negative effect in order to escape the affect shame. We become to know that we live with false self, not real self. The feelings of worthless carry the emptiness. One who feels deficient as a human being hides the emptiness and takes the mask in order to escape shame.
Shame is a phenomena occuring in the family, but shame is not the result of dysfunctional families alone. It is also a phenomena of the culture including families. Among the various cultural phenomenon, shame has an effect on the socialization of gender, feminine and masculine. In response to the differential patterning of gender socialization, two distinct scripts emerge : a feminine gender script and a masculine gender script. In the feminine gender script, women should express the affects of distress, fear, enjoyment, and shame. In its counterpart, the masculine gender script, men should express the affects of excitement, anger, dissmell, disgust, and contempt, which is a learned affect blend of dissmell conjoined with anger.
This study is about the effects on shame from the view of feminists. The characteristics of shame in this study are ; first, shame is a feeling of exposure with painfully diminished sense. Second, becoming aware of the self makes the self difficult to speak, to move, and to experience the self freezing. If there is much shame in the mind, the shame experience is repressed and makes the person not to see the world itself. And it is the cause not to live with the real self. Third, shame doesn't like to be seen. Therefore it carries the different affects with second reaction. The second reactions following shame are fear, distress, anger. These affects serve a much-needed, self-protective function by both insulating the self against exposure and by actively keeping others away. Fourth, in addition to the shame of exposing the inner mind, women have the senses of inferiority and shame when they are compared with the men in the external environment of men-centered social culture. Women can be depressed or contempt themselves because they withdraw themselves to second reactions in men's centered social culture.
This study is to manifest the effect of shame on women aged 20-40. After knowing the degree of shame feeling, there is an analysis of second affects about shame, the strategic defenses against shame, the external factors occuring shame, and the showing phenomenon from shame in this study. First, There are han, inferiority, depress, guilty, and jealousy in the second affects concerning shame. There are also internal withdrawal, blame, contempt, and striving for perfection in the strategic defenses against shame. The external factors in reality of shame are husband's dissipation, loving boys prior to girls, deficiency of body condition, being compared, over-expectation from parents, external features for external features principle, divorce, violence. Outer reality of phenomenon showing from shame are mother fantasy becoming a superwoman, the need of dependency, no intimacy, an obsessional cleaning, the addiction of shopping, the addiction of smoking, attachments.
Women suffer from the bad function of shame because of the prejudice in men's central culture. Here women need to empower themselves and to understand the effect on women from the social culture and to inspect the inner mind. Therefore church and christian counselor support the women in order to be able to have their own voice securely. Women have to perceive sensitively the differentiation between men and women in our social culture, to understand the problem concerning the social culture as well as the inner psyche. The women who suffer from the bad shame have to be given the healing it and to be empowered. We need to transform the toxic shame into the healthy shame. Therefore we can take the good relationship with others and God.