“The Internet has made us more invisible to each other, but also able to be much more intimate at the same time,” said Professor Gershen Kaufman, a psychologist and author of several well-known books on shame, including The Psychology of Shame, which was first published in 1989.
Professor Kaufman, a native New Yorker who now lives in Michigan, coined the phrase “shame spiral” in a 1974 research article published in The Journal of Counseling Psychology. (Although you’re probably more familiar with the terminology from a scene in the 1995 teen satire Clueless, in which Alicia Silverstone’s character, Cher, exclaims to her friend Tai, played by Brittany Murphy, whom she’d been avoiding since they had a big fight earlier that week, “I have been going down a shame spiral!” )
“All these different venues increase the likelihood of experiencing the shame spiral. It’s really become rooted in the culture,” Professor Kaufman said, offering the following analysis: “The feelings and thoughts flow in a circle, and one feels as if he or she has descended into a whirlpool.”
PERHAPS THE ISSUE is that things have just become too easy. Easy to ignore a text message. Easy to blow someone off on the Internet. Easy to sort out so many of the annoying details of everyday life with the click of a mouse.
Except when they’re not.
For Lauren, a 28-year-old librarian in New York who until recently lived in Pennsylvania, the shame spiral began with an unrenewed car registration. “It seemed prohibitively complicated to me—the car was registered in New Jersey; the title was in my dad’s name,” she explained.
Rather than deal with it, Lauren drove around for a couple of months with an expired registration and malfunctioning taillights. Eventually, she got a $150 ticket, but didn’t pay it. “It just seemed so complicated!” she said. “I was broke. I lost the ticket. I probably couldn’t find my checkbook or something. Of course, my license was eventually suspended. You can try to explain a suspended license to your future husband’s parents the first time you meet them, and they’ll nod politely, but you know that they know you’re a huge loser. I had failed at being an adult.”
When Lauren finally did take care of getting the registration renewed and attempting to get her license reinstated on a trip home to New Jersey, it turned out her license had actually expired six months earlier, which meant that in order to legally operate a vehicle in Pennsylvania, she’d have to retake her driver’s test. In the end, she was too ashamed to do so, and instead let her roommate have the car in exchange for rides around town when needed.
“I’m so uncomfortable with conflict that I’m willing to sacrifice everything in order to avoid it,” Lauren said.
Nicole, a 30-year-old copy editor who works in Chelsea, has also lately found herself in a vortex of avoidance. “If I have to have a conflict, I would prefer to have it over email or Gchat, and I think I’ve become spoiled by getting to deal with conflicts that way,” she said. “So when I have to actually deal with conflict in person, I’m starting to realize that I’m not very good at it.”
It all began two months ago, when the front desk attendant at Nicole’s gym on Eighth Avenue started greeting her by name.
“Hi, Nicole!” the woman would say brightly each time Nicole came in to work out, which was all fine and dandy except for the fact that Nicole’s name is not actually Nicole (though she asked to be identified as such for this article).
The first time it happened, Nicole almost didn’t notice. The second time, she still wrote it off as a fluke, certain the woman would soon enough realize her mistake upon seeing Nicole’s real name pop up on the computer screen when she scanned her membership card. But by the fourth or fifth time, it seemed like it was too late to go back.
Nicole entered a full-on shame spiral over the fact that she was just too damn timid to let this woman know she’d been screwing up her name for weeks. She’s played along ever since, even though she wells up with anxiety every time she walks through the doors of that gym.
“It makes me feel like a loser,” she said. “Like, I’m 30! I should be able to deal with a simple interaction like this. But instead, I feel like somebody who’s not in control of her life.”
