“In my own life, I have found that the most dangerous response to shame is recognition. Those of us who have lived lives of shared public space like a city, or who study history, know that people suffer. We know that people’s lives are complex, filled with contradiction and obstacles. So when someone tells us that their mother allowed their stepfather to beat them, or their son cannot take care of himself, or their father was sexually invasive, or their parents are alcoholics, or they were projected onto by a trusted lover so that they no longer allow themselves relationships, or that they themselves suffer from anxiety and mental illness, it can play out in different ways. The offering of honest information can be a test to see what it is like to tell the truth, to see if real experience will be met with rejection. But I find that if the information is received with consequential recognition, i.e., “Now that we know this, our relationship is elevated,” there is a possibility of a backlash, because that means the experience is real; the awful thing is no longer a repressed secret but a recognized reality. And this can provoke an explosion of regression. The recognition itself is now called a harm. The pain of the original violation is projected onto the person who knows about it. “What you are doing to me is worse than anything my father ever did to me,” becomes the accusation. Because, unlike the father, we are not pretending it away.”
