Embarrassment sometimes gets named in post-show discussions, shame never does. Yet shame produces a large share of the silences and the recited right answers that performing companies know so well. By distinguishing it from guilt and understanding why it peaks in adolescence, we can design encounters that give it a way out, notably through the body.
“We have the right to feel uncomfortable”, and then what?
“Shame, I often feel it very strongly. It comes back especially when we talk about fatphobia, about disability. And I can’t manage to do anything with it. Except say: yes, we have the right to feel uncomfortable.” These words were shared with me during a training session I was leading with a company that performs in schools and holds, after each performance, a discussion with the students. The person speaking would often begin these discussions by asking the teenagers what emotions the show had stirred in them. Embarrassment, they told me, gets named from time to time, when someone finds the courage. Shame, never. Yet they could feel it in the room, massive, and they could feel that it inhibited everything else.
This absence of a name does not mean the emotion is absent. Shame runs through almost every post-show discussion with teenagers as soon as the subject touches on discrimination, racism, gender relations or exclusion, and if it is almost never named, it is because it is the very emotion that prevents speaking. This is not shame of oneself in general, but a localised shame, bearing on the fact of recognising that one has already thought what the stage has just condemned, on one’s own half-glimpsed reflexes, or on one’s family, one’s neighbourhood, what gets said at home, that is, on the feeling of belonging, even partially, even involuntarily, to the “wrong side”.
What this artist said captured very accurately an unease that I believe is widely shared. We generally do not know what to do with shame in a mediation setting, because we have not planned for it and it is not mentioned in the pedagogical objectives.
“The ashamed person longs to speak”
Shame is an emotion of the gaze. Boris Cyrulnik, in Mourir de dire. La honte (Odile Jacob, 2010), shows that it does not exist without the gaze of another, real or internalised, and he describes its specific effect on speech. The ashamed person, he writes, longs to speak but stays silent for self-protection, because to speak one’s shame is to expose oneself to the very gaze that gives rise to it. The person feeling shame would like to be heard and cannot take the risk of being heard. This mechanism sheds light on what happens in a classroom after a show. The teenager whom the performance has touched in a place of shame will not work through that emotion in front of the group. They will stay silent, or else endorse the prevailing discourse as quickly as possible so that the moment passes, because the right answer is the shortest way out of a discomfort that strikes too close to home.
I have described in Former une compagnie à la médiation participative how the classroom apparatus manufactures formatted speeches, delivered by the students who have understood what the adults expect. Shame adds to that analysis an explanation from the inside. The young people who say the right things while nodding along do not all do so out of calculation or quiet conviction; some do it to put an end to an inner unease they do not have the words to articulate. A consequence follows that deserves to be faced squarely. A show that works, that touches, that creates real friction with the spectators’ representations, will produce more shame than a consensual show, and therefore potentially more silence or defensive endorsement in the discussion that follows. A session during which speech seemed locked may be the sign that the show has truly touched.
“I did something bad” is not “I am something bad”
Clinical psychology has long distinguished shame from guilt. The American psychoanalyst Helen Block Lewis laid out this distinction in 1971 in Shame and Guilt in Neurosis, and the empirical work of June Tangney and Ronda Dearing (Shame and Guilt, Guilford Press, 2002) confirmed it across very large populations. Guilt bears on an act; it says “I did something bad”, and because an act can be repaired, it opens onto apology, repair and behavioural change. Shame bears on the whole being; it says “I am something bad”, and because you cannot repair what you are, its only ways out are withdrawal, flight, or what Tangney calls humiliated fury, the aggressiveness that turns against others a self-image that has become unbearable. The same studies show that guilt goes hand in hand with empathy and reparative behaviour, whereas shame goes hand in hand with withdrawal, denial and aggression. In France, Albert Ciccone and Alain Ferrant (Honte, culpabilité et traumatisme, Dunod, 2008) describe the possible destinies of shame, among which burial and projective reversal onto others, but also affect sharing and artistic creation, two outcomes I will come back to, because they directly concern our professions.
What discussions about racism and stereotypes awaken in teenagers is rarely guilt in the strict sense, since no act is being held against them. It is most often shame, the sensation that their way of seeing the world, their family, their social belonging are being called into question. The clinical sociologist Vincent de Gaulejac showed in Les sources de la honte (Desclée de Brouwer, 1996) that this emotion stands at the crossroads of the psychic and the social. One feels shame about one’s origins, about one’s family’s position, about whatever makes it appear illegitimate in the eyes of a judging world, and this shame is learned very early, without any personal fault having been committed. Serge Tisseron, who devoted a founding book to this emotion (La honte. Psychanalyse d’un lien social, Dunod, 1992) and later an autobiographical narrative (Mort de honte, Albin Michel, 2019), adds that shame is transmitted, that one can carry the shame of one’s parents or grandparents for situations one has never lived through oneself. A teenager sitting in a theatre sometimes carries a shame that comes from much further away than they do, and the show, without knowing it, touches it.
A point of method follows from this distinction. Guilt can be worked on with arguments, since it bears on acts that can be examined. Shame does not yield to arguments, demonstrations or good examples, which only increase the person’s exposure. Gaulejac observes that the awkwardness felt in the face of another person’s shame pushes us to keep our distance, to refuse to hear, and he sums up this circle in one sentence: the awkwardness of some contributes to the rejection of others and to the silence of all. For him, as for Ciccone and Ferrant, the way out lies in recognising and sharing the affect, not in correcting it with arguments.
Adolescence, the age when the gaze of peers weighs heaviest
If shame is an emotion of the gaze, adolescence is the age when it finds its most sensitive ground. The work of the neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, gathered in Inventing Ourselves. The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain (2018), establishes that the adolescent brain goes through a period of hypersensitivity to social evaluation and to exclusion by peers, to the point that social risk, the risk of being rejected by the group, often weighs more heavily in teenagers’ decisions than physical or legal risks. The psychologist Leah Somerville has shown experimentally that the embarrassment felt under the mere gaze of a peer rises sharply in adolescence, far beyond what children and adults experience in the same situation (“The Teenage Brain: Sensitivity to Social Evaluation”, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2013).
These findings give post-show discussions their exact weight. A school class is not a neutral audience; it is the peer group in full, the group whose judgement matters most in the world at that age. Asking a teenager to say in front of that group what a show about discrimination has stirred in them is asking them to take the maximum social risk at the very moment when they are most vulnerable to it. The silence that answers this request is not a failure of the young people’s intelligence or sensitivity; it is a protective behaviour perfectly adjusted to the situation they are being offered.
The work takes place inside the people present
Our mediation frameworks often measure their success by the speech produced, the number of raised hands, the quality of the exchanges. My hypothesis, and it is for me the most important shift that understanding shame makes possible, is that the essential work takes place elsewhere, inside the people present, in an elaboration that may be silent and deferred.
The mechanism, as I understand it from the authors quoted above, is this: as long as a shameful affect is not recognised, the person has to defend against it, and all their psychic energy goes into that defence, staying silent, hiding, saying what is expected, or attacking. When the affect is recognised and authorised by the frame, when someone says that it is normal and even rather a good sign to be shaken, the person no longer has to expel it or conceal it. They can begin to feel it, which is the condition for it to transform. Ciccone and Ferrant call this process affect sharing, and they show that it transforms shame from the inside, without requiring that it be told. This is a decisive point for us: the shared affect does not need to pass through public speech in order to have its effect. A teenager who said nothing during the session but who heard that their unease had a right to exist leaves with something different from the one who was pushed into reciting the right answer.
That is why the sessions in which the young people stayed silent are not necessarily the least successful. A group that does not speak is not a group that felt nothing; it is sometimes a group that felt something so close that it did not yet have the words, or the permission, to say it. Cyrulnik reminds us that one can suffer from not telling and still be unable to tell, and elaboration then finds other paths, later, elsewhere, in a conversation between friends or in solitude. The work of mediation cannot be measured only by what gets said in the room that day.
Naming shame without aiming it at anyone
The first thing the facilitator can do with shame is to name it, not to make it the subject of the session, but to create permission to feel it. A simple wording is enough: “This show speaks of things that concern us all. Some scenes may have made you uncomfortable in a way you don’t quite know how to put. That’s normal, and it’s even rather a good sign.” This wording normalises the unease, describing it as the sign that something has touched rather than as an anomaly, and it dissociates the unease from the person, since it is the show that produces this effect, not a defect in whoever feels it.
The direction of the words matters as much as their content. If I say “some of you may have recognised in this character attitudes you have had”, I expose, and I worsen the shame at the very moment I think I am relieving it. If I say “this show speaks of mechanisms in which we are all caught to varying degrees”, I include everyone, starting with myself. This inclusion of oneself is no rhetorical politeness. Prejudice does not stop at diplomas or good intentions; the people who lead these discussions have prejudices too, and know it if they look at themselves honestly. Saying it out loud changes something in the room, because by that gesture the adult steps down from the side of judgement to the side of shared experience.
Loosening the gaze, getting bodies moving
Naming is not always enough, however, and this is where our live performance professions have resources of their own. Since shame lives in the gaze, the forms that loosen the collective gaze offer it ways out that frontal discussion forbids. Several of the methods I practise, and which I describe in other articles of the cultural mediation methods, take on a new meaning in the light of shame:
- Sitting in a circle, on the floor, the adult included. This arrangement takes away speech’s stage and its tribunal.
- Having everyone speak at the same time, in pairs, as in the exchange exercise I have detailed for training sessions. Each person’s speaking is thus withdrawn from the group’s judgement, since no one can hear or control what is being said, and whoever prefers to stay silent does so without it showing.
- Moving through the space between speaking times, changing places. This movement undoes for a moment the positions each person holds in the class group, the leader, the mute one, the one who gets laughed at, positions that assign in advance who has the right to say what.
- Moving from voice to trace. Inviting people to write or draw what they would not say, possibly without signing, gives the emotion a form that entirely escapes the peers’ gaze at the moment it is expressed. This shift joins what Ciccone and Ferrant identify as one of the fertile destinies of shame, creation, and what Tisseron recounts of his own story in Mort de honte, where he shows how drawing, by allowing him to express what he could not say, gradually pulled him out of the shames inherited from his family. A drawn or written trace can then, if the person wishes, be shared, read by others, pooled, and speech comes in a second phase, resting on an object, which is far less exposing than speaking about oneself directly.
- Weaving the shared experience with words. This means commenting from time to time, in a few small words, on what is happening in the group, saying that we are living an experience together and naming it as we go, like a light weaving. This gradual documentation establishes and re-establishes the frame of a caring community, which is never a given, since a community can also be malevolent, through the very mechanisms of normalisation these shows deal with.
- Slowing down. Discussions that string together questions and answers leave no time for this emotion to surface in a form that can be worked on. A held silence, a question asked without expecting an immediate answer, a space where not answering is as legitimate as answering, create the conditions in which something truer can happen.
Planning for shame before entering the room
From all this I draw a concrete proposal for companies and mediation teams. Include shame in the preparation of these encounters, on the same footing as the running order and the instructions. Ask yourselves together, before entering the school, at which moments of the show and of the discussion it is likely to arise, for which students it will be most acute, and which ways out you have prepared for it, a wording that authorises it, a paired format, a time for written or drawn traces, an explicitly granted right to silence. Shame will not disappear from these encounters; it is even the sign that the subject is really being addressed. What can change is that it stops being a nameless emotion that locks the room, and becomes a working datum that the team knows and for which it has prepared exits.
Empathic gentleness
What remains is to name the disposition that runs through all these proposals. The first word that comes to mind is benevolence, but it is so overused, so present in charters and school mission statements, that it no longer describes anything of what we actually do. Above all, it is not enough, for two sentences equally benevolent in intention can produce opposite effects. “Some of you may have recognised in this character attitudes you have had” and “this show speaks of mechanisms in which we are all caught” both spring from a delicate intention, but the first designates and locks into shame, while the second inscribes into the community.
I would rather speak of empathic gentleness. By this I mean the capacity to put oneself in the place of those who will receive each of our sentences, to imagine what it will make them feel, and to choose, gently, the words that reassure, that do not judge, and that recall the human community to which everyone belongs. Shame is an emotion of exclusion; it assigns the person to the “wrong side” and cuts them off from the group. Faced with it, our role as artists and mediators comes down to one repeated gesture, re-including through words, sentence after sentence, those whom the subject at hand threatens to cut off. This gesture cannot be improvised; it is prepared and worked on, like everything that belongs to our stage crafts, address, listening, presence. Professionals trained to sense a house are well placed to sense the shame running through it too, and to speak to it gently.
