Change in systems requires change in language

• Reintegrative shaming praised by Rich Kuyper, 1/30/97
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    • Yes, Work Stress Is the Euphemism That Propogates Self-Shaming in the Work System by c.h., 2/2/97
      
      

The concept of "stress" and the search for stressors started with the work of Hans Selye in the immediate post WWII era, and had a tremendous effect on the history of psychology. Much of what Selye presented is counterintuitive, despite how firmly it has become engrained in our culture---reviewed half a century later, doesn't it seem ridiculous for Selye to have said that love was a stressor that could limit the duration of life? His was an extension of Freud's idea that the organism prefers to remain at rest, and that any way we were forced to react to a stimulus we were using valuable energy that might otherwise be used to maintain longevity. His ideas caught hold in this postwar period, everyone having been through the war with tremendous overloads of work and nearly constant danger.

These, of course, are adequate sources of the affect distress-anguish, an affect still ignored by most clinicians (we disavow overwork just like everybody else). But Selye's work also entered the public consciousness at the same time that Freud's work was moving from the status of the risque and arcane into common knowledge, and Selye's idea of "stress" as a neutral word for all stimuli was allowed to merge with the Freudian concept of "anxiety" as the handle for all negative affect.

The problem, then, is that the general public knows about stress and anxiety, even though there are six well-defined negative affects, each of which is produced by a quite different trigger, and each of which causes us to pay attention to its source in a very different manner. As Chauncey says, much of what Rich has identified as "stress" at work is part of the shame family of emotions. A lot might change were people to change their language from the outmoded and simplistic wording of 1940s psychoanalysis and Selye psychology. We humans are pretty smart, and might do a lot to change things if we knew the proper name of our problem.

• A systems approach to shame and abuse by Rich Kuyper, 2/3/97
  • It isn't just shame by Don Nathanson, 2/3/97
• A Neat Hope, Yes! And an Absolute Necessity by c.h., 2/3/97