Primary and secondary shame

• Welcome to the BOL Forum on Shame and Affect Theory by John Grohol, 2/10/96
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    • Response to J. Morley's comments RE: Don's Theory of ADD/ADHD by Gordon Shannon, 1/23/98
      
      

There sure is a lot of shame associated with ADD/ADHD. The behavior alone, the difference between the afflicted individual and everybody else in a classroom, the actual inability of the young person to focus, obey, blend in with others, function, modulate affect, respond to questions, do homework, and so on, these differences make the child with ADD/ADHD so defective in the eyes of others that shame is inevitable. To grow up with this syndrome is to grow up with a forest of shame.

Yet this form, this realm of shame is what I call secondary shame, the emotion triggered in response to our comparison of ourselves with others. When I say that the biology, the neurophysiology of the syndrome itself is related to shame, I mean something quite else. What I describe as primary shame in this situation is my observation that these kids/adults/people respond normally with the range of affect we call interest-excitement when a novel stimulus appears. So far, so good. But, I believe, in this syndrome something is wrong with the mechanism for the maintenance of interest-excitement, and that the affect is interrupted suddenly. I think that the interruption is forced by an internal glitch of some sort, but no matter what does the interrupting, it turns out to be the perfect trigger for shame affect. This new affect (shame) pulls one away from the source that had triggered interest-excitement only a moment ago, and literally stops one's ability to think. I've referred to this aspect of shame affect as a "cognitive shock" in other writing.

After the physiological phase of shame affect (blush, cognitive shock, averted gaze, etc.) comes the quartet of possible responses I call the compass of shame, and within the four script libraries of this compass you will find each and every one of the behaviors for which people single out people with ADD/ADHD for shaming attention.

The primary shame here, then, is the mechanism that makes people pay attention for a moment and then get thrown into the defenses known as the compass of shame. The far more easily understood secondary shame appears in the effect on the individual of having the experiences I describe as due to the primary action of shame affect in this syndrome.

Incidentally, the book in which I wrote about this has just come out. Title: "The Widening Scope of Shame"; Editors: Melvin R. Lansky and Andrew P. Morrison; Publisher: Analytic Press. Pretty good range of chapters providing most of the current theories for shame, many of which disagree earnestly with me. Oh well.

• re Don's response:Primary and secondary by Gordon Shannon, 7/13/98
  • Primary and secondary manifestations of ADD by Don Nathanson, 7/19/98
    • Secondary as trigger for primary by (No author), 9/22/98
      • affects are analogues of their stimulus conditions by Don Nathanson, 9/23/98