When Others Judge Us

by Miki Kashtan

Many years ago I had a dramatic experience when I offered someone extremely difficult feedback, the most difficult I believe I have ever given to anyone, and he demonstrated a way of receiving it that inspired me. As I was almost in panic about what I had said to this person, and yet knew that I couldn’t relate to him without saying it, he looked me in the eye and told me that his practice was that whenever anyone said anything to him about himself, he stretched to imagine it being true, and then attempt to digest it from that perspective. What I had shared with him was that I experienced him as having unusual powers, like a magician, and that I didn’t trust that the power he had was all benign. Having said that and gotten the response I got, all the tension about speaking that I had been feeling drained out of me, and was replaced by admiration and appreciation for this man. It’s hard to describe the oddity of sitting with him, still not trusting his power, and nonetheless appreciating him so much. We then proceeded to explore, together, what could possibly be the source of the “darkness” that I had experienced about his power. The details of that exploration have evaporated from my memory; it’s only the flavor of the interaction, and the intensity of his willingness to explore with me that stayed as a model.

I have often wondered about what made it possible for this man to have such extraordinary and exquisite openness. What did he do with his own need to be seen and accepted? Sadly, I have no answer. At the time I lacked the vocabulary to ask about this, as this conversation predated my involvement with Nonviolent Communication and the awareness of needs that comes with it. Subsequently, life took him to other countries and our collaboration ended.

Regardless of what was true for him, the question remains. I have never met anyone else who could take in such difficult comments with such grace. What makes it so difficult, and what can we do about it?

Vulnerability, Difference, and Belonging

by Miki Kashtan

Any of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while or know me otherwise have heard me talk countless times about how vitally important the path of vulnerability has been for me. I’ve been walking this path for sixteen years now, about as long as I’ve been using and sharing Nonviolent Communication in the world. The vulnerability path has been the occasion for profound liberation for me and I can say without exaggeration that it is the foundation on which I continue to do all of my learning about being human, about leadership, about power, about interdependence, and even about social change.

So it has been a great treat for me to discover a fellow traveler. Some time ago, I watched Brené Brown’s first TED talk, The Power of Vulnerability, and was astonished and delighted by the content. This past Sunday I watched her recent talk, Listening to Shame. I was spellbound. First, I found the content captivating, because it is so aligned with my own experience and what I teach. My most favorite quote is that “vulnerability is the most accurate measure of courage,” which fits entirely with my own efforts to re-frame vulnerability from an expression of weakness to a source of strength. I was also completely taken, again, by her personality and presentation style, which I found engaging, warm, and entertaining, even as she spoke of sensitive and painful subjects.

This would likely have turned into a lovely and satisfying experience I would never think to tell anyone about, except that I also focused on trying to learn what it was that she is doing that results in attracting millions to what I experience as fundamentally the same message I put out and get only a few hundred people at best. This question, in one form or another, has been a secret pain of mine for some years. In part because I consistently get astonishing feedback from some people, I continue to believe that I have some unique gifts to offer, and continue to suffer, from time to time, about my inability to reach more people.

Beyond the Limits of Empathy

by Miki Kashtan

Can empathy serve as a reliable guide to action? David Brooks, in his recent article “The Limits of Empathy,” suggests that empathy is no guarantee that caring action will take place. Participants in Milgram’s famous 1950s experiments willingly inflicted what they thought were near-lethal electric shocks despite suffering tremendously. Nazi executors early in the war wept while killing Jews. And yet those strong feelings didn’t stop them. Why does this happen?

Empathy, Shame, and Fear
I have been haunted for years by this great puzzle, reading, thinking, and writing about it. Brooks suggests that “People who actually perform pro-social action don’t only feel for those who are suffering, they feel compelled to act by a sense of duty. Their lives are structured by sacred codes.” My investigations lead me to think that “a sense of duty” is part of the problem, not the solution. A sense of duty usually gets instilled in us through fear and shame, leading us to act based on external considerations while doubting our own intuitive heart response. Who of us won’t remember times when despite being moved to do something caring we didn’t because of fear? Jason Marsh, in his response to Brooks, retells the story of Samuel and Pearl Oliner’s research findings about the empathic values on which rescuers - people who saved Jews during the Holocaust - were raised. The Oliners also point out that rescuers tended to be raised with little punishment. When there is no punishment, there is less shame and fear, and more willingness and capacity to honor our empathic inclinations.

Overriding Empathy
I carry with me, with some tenderness and horror, the story of a man I know who, at 7, delightedly told his science teacher that he had captured a special insect. His teacher asked him to put the insect in alcohol and bring it to school. The insect, meanwhile, had other designs. Struggling for its life, it repeatedly attempted to climb out of the alcohol, and succeeded in doing so several times before it was finally drowned. All this time the child was shaking as he struggled to overcome his aversion to inflicting further damage on the insect. In the name of contributing to science and obeying his teacher, he set his feelings aside. As an adult, he said: "I never questioned my actions, only my feelings."

Being from Israel, I wanted to understand this dilemma in the context of the treatment of Palestinians by Israeli Jewish soldiers. Director Ido Sela, in his gripping 1993 documentary Testimonies (a short version of which is available on youtube), interviewed soldiers who shot Palestinians, subjected them to prolonged physical torture, or killed them during the first Intifada. They spoke of the same difficulty. Despite a felt sense of trauma from having inflicted harm on others they continued to do so. The most common reasons that allowed them to ignore, overcome, or numb out their empathic responses to the people they harmed were fear of consequences to them; doing what they were told to do; or believing it was the right thing to do. Only one person described an incident when he likened his own daughter to the children he was facing, and stopped short of harming them.

Writer David Grossman, a Lt. Colonel in the US Army, studied extensively what makes people overcome the natural aversion to killing that was discovered after World War I. In On Killing, he demonstrates repeatedly that US Army training focused on reducing access to empathic response by numbing and desensitizing trainees, thereby increasing the shooting rate from 10-20% in earlier wars to 80 and 90% in later wars. The cost, he warns us, is unprecedented massive trauma to war veterans as well as to the nation that sent them to war.

Trusting Human Nature
If we believe that humans are fundamentally evil and unruly, or at best plain old selfish, a view which still underlies most of the institutions we have in place, we will naturally want to control, shame, and punish our children into being “good” and insist on obedience to a strong code of behavior, thereby prolonging human suffering on this planet. As more and more of us trust our children and our own humanity, we will engage empathically enough with children and adults, allowing all of us to find and act on our own empathy without fear. I long to live to see that day.

Talking about Bullying

by Miki Kashtan

When I said “yes” to giving a keynote speech about bullying at a community conference put together by the Albany Unified School District in CA, I knew I could count on a global network of Nonviolent Communication trainers to help me. The biggest support I received was a deeply moving story about Zeke, a 16-year-old boy, member of the KKK, who was met with such empathy that he could recognize that his membership was an attempt to have connection with his father. Being understood as deeply as he was by my colleague Catherine Cadden was a new experience for Zeke. He came up to her after the event and said: “You know, that was the first time I felt fear begin to leave my body. I’m actually relieved.” Zeke ended up leaving the KKK after taking a deeper look at his choices.

I titled my talk For the Benefit of all Children: A Compassionate Perspective on Bullying, and started it with Zeke’s story (click here to see the talk on Youtube). I could see and hear the shock in the room when I mentioned his affiliation. As the story unfolded, I sensed that people were trying on the idea, so foreign to our habitual sensibilities, of meeting a KKK member with empathy. Unless, of course, one is a KKK member, in which case meeting many other people with empathy would be equally shocking. By the end of the talk I had a sense that the audience and I had been on a journey together. We went from an individual responsibility for and a punitive response to bullying to a community-based sense of responsibility and a systemic approach based on preventive and restorative responses. Understanding violence as an expression of unmet needs invited the audience to consider the possibility that having everyone’s needs cared for and more of them met would likely result in significantly less violence. Whatever is leading a person to bullying would not be attended to by being told it’s wrong and bad to bully. Especially given the strong association of violence with shame, as James Gilligan so lovingly calls us to consider in his book Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes, punishment can only increase violence, because it leads to more shame.

I ended the talk with a vision of possibility. In this vision schools are structured in a way that maximizes children’s physical safety. When transgressions happen, both the child who bullied and the child who was bullied know they will be accepted and supported in finding reconnection.      The child who was bullied has hope that s/he can express her/his vulnerability and pain, and that it matters to the community. The child who bullies has support in finding other ways to get her/his needs met. The child who bullies also has hope that there is a place in the community for her/him. No one is ostracized. The community has a way to talk about behaviors that harm others without making the person who did the harming bad or wrong. The sense of a community caring for everyone is maintained even through hard times.

I have so much faith that in such a community fewer and fewer children will resort to violence, because they will have ample other avenues to meet their needs.

If the audience indeed went on a journey with me, I also went on a journey with them. Being a visionary for so many years I have gotten into a tragic habit of assuming that people will ridicule or oppose my vision. I believe I spoke this time without compromising my message and without alienating people, at least as far as I could tell through my interactions with the audience. To do so I had to muster enough trust and confidence to assume that people will join me on this journey, to counter my habitual assumption to the contrary. I walked from the place of being all alone in the world to a place of trusting that there is room for me in this world and in this community that invited me to speak. Like the person who bullies, or the one bullied, I want to trust my belonging. I can see now that the invisible expectation of not being heard, not having room, not finding commonality, may well be a self-fulfilling prophecy and make it harder for me to connect fully with others. I hope to be able to apply this lesson in every area of my life.

Shame and Love

This post was inspired by an email I received two days ago: “Where does shame come from …? How can we approach it so we can eventually free ourselves from it? What works for you? What did you see working for others? Anything alive in you around this topic that might serve other readers as well?”

I don’t really know where shame comes from, so I can only share my opinions and conjectures about it (and I tend to have those about almost anything). My sense about shame is that it’s a primary mode of punishment, a way that adults instill forms of behavior in children who then internalize it and grow up carrying enormous amounts of shame in them. If you look at the language, adults will often say, most literally: “shame on you.” In Israel, where I grew up, the equivalent expression translates into: “Be ashamed of yourself.” In both cases the adult is commanding the child to experience shame as a way of expressing their unhappiness with how the child acted.

Shame is in the category of what are called social emotions, and is deeply connected to our sense of belonging and being loved. If we are shamed often and deeply enough, we end up feeling shame about our very desire to be loved and accepted. Shame is endemic in this culture, and has consequences beyond the pain that it brings to those who feel it. Profound shame is one of the most common experiences of very violent people, a tragic finding to which I have already alluded (see my post Nonviolence and Living Undefendedly). If Gilligan is accurate in his understanding of violence, then overcoming shame goes beyond feeling better – it may well be an essential condition for a violence-free society.

My earlier studies when I was doing academic research point in the same direction. Cross-cultural studies suggest that the single most powerful predictor of a violence-free culture is the length of time that babies are carries in arms, and the other key predictor is the degree to which teenagers are allowed free sexual play in a given culture.[1] Our freedom to love and be loved, both in our infancy and when our sexuality wakes up, is the key to understanding all of these findings. The pain of not being allowed to show love and ask for love is so extreme it can lead to violence.

So how do we overcome shame? How I have worked with my shame is by walking directly into it. I have been doing it for many years now, and I am delighted to say that I have burned through most of my shame. It takes immense discipline and courage. Often when I have done it I felt totally spent afterwards. It means going against everything I was ever told is wrong about me, doing what I was repeatedly told is shameful, and setting myself up for potential ridicule and shunning. Perhaps it’s been relatively easy for me because I have suffered so much ostracism in my life that the prospect of it is no so frightening any longer. I often think that the best way to experience deep safety is by being thrown into what we are afraid of and seeing that we can survive it. One tool that helps with gathering up the courage is finding my own inner acceptance, which can then nourish and protect me if others don’t. The practice of NVC helps me find the acceptance through connecting to the shining light of the core human need or longing that is at the heart of whatever it is that I feel shame about. In my case it’s almost always about love: wanting love, wanting to show love, or trusting love or people.

As life would have it, the next day after receiving that email I had the opportunity to practice. I stepped in front of a group of 40+ strangers who are attending an intensive program with me (Institute for Sacred Activism, led by Andrew Harvey). I let them know about my struggles with the program, and specifically that in some ways I was not resonating with what has been moving and inspiring to them. And I believe I managed to do with dignity, with undefended vulnerability, and without in any way implying judgment of anyone who was resonating with the language. The result was a sense of more connection, more appreciation of the people, and more trust that there is room for me to be.

Later that day I received one more reference to shame in a comment on my previous posting (A Slice of Heaven). In that comment I see familiar themes: longing for human connection, yearning for support for one’s heart and sadness, aching for love. We all do, we all want so so very much to give and receive love. When will we, collectively, lift the taboo on tenderness so we can release the shame that plagues us and live and love freely? 

by Miki Kashtan

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[1] If you are interested in exploring, you can look for this article: James W. Prescott, "The Origins of Human Love and Violence", Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Journal, 10(3): 143-188, Spring 1996. Bear in mind this is very difficult to find; even many academic libraries don’t have it.