Offenders enlightened

• Shame and offender therapy by Rich Kuyper, 1/3/97
  
  

Now imagine that your whiteboard talk were to be given in every high school in the land. Imagine that adolescents all over the country were given the opportunity to understand the difference between competition as the wish to excel and thus find the upper limits of their abilities, and the quite different urge merely to diminish another person. Imagine that teen-age alcohol and drug use were identified at that time in their development as behavior used to control or diminish shame. Imagine a shift in adolescent social politics characterized by laughter and mild disgust whenever someone treated a peer with ridicule, dissmell, disgust, or any other trigger for humiliation.

I know, I know. Just a fantasy. And what would we do for a living?

In more specific answer to your generous post, it has been the experience of everybody who has taken care to explain the compass of shame that the recipients of this concept begin to develop new systems to handle shame and move away from the avoidance/attack other poles with remarkable speed. The concept itself doesn't cure anything; it does, however, give people a way of understanding their own actions and feelings, and a useful way of understanding the behavior of those who set them into dangerous action.

Good work, Rich! Your groups are lucky that you've been willing and able to do so much for them.

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