Shame and empathy & 'cold' violence

Well, here I am again, venturing to ask some questions this time. I hope you will bear with me if I seem a little ignorant. I have read most of Shame and Pride and all the documents from the SSTI homepage, and I'm sure I haven't digested it all yet but there are some things that aren't clear to me.

Firstly, in relation to the empathic wall. Does shame play a part in the development of this wall? I ask because my observation is that young children are often shamed into repressing their expression of affect. From your writing it would seem that everyone builds this wall to protect themselves from the effects of too much broadcast affect interfering with normal functioning, but isn't this process just as likely to cut people off from each other (the Western cultural malaise) and interfere with intimacy? Where is the balance and what part does shame play?

Second, I have been very interested in the many postings in this column about interpersonal violence. I would very much like to hear from those of you who are adapting the ideas of affect theory and shame to the work with violent men. One of the things that strikes me in talking to women who have been subjected to violence is the presence of behaviour I think of as 'cold' violence, where the violence is not heat of the moment, not associated with an interaction or with conflict, but is deliberate, premediatated and cruel. An example of this is when a man comes home every day after work and checks his wife's speedometre. If she cannot account for every kilometer he then becomes abusive to varying degrees. I assume this fits somewhere in the 'attack other' pole of shame response but I don't really understand how? Can anyone enlighten me?

Thirdly, I love the distinction between empathy and sympathy (is that from Vick Kelly?), it makes so much sense to me! I think it could be very helpful to the family violence field, who are quite caught up here on the issue of developing empathy in the violent man. To understand that it is not empathy that is the issue, in fact that many of these men are perfectly able to experience empathy, and do know what effect their behaviour is having on the person they are subjecting to it, BUT that it is sympathy they do not feel. Fantastically helpful!

Lastly, I was enormously impressed by Crime and Nourishment! Ther are many fields of endeavour here in Australia that have been influenced by the New Zealand model of Family Group Conferencing, including the work I have been doing with adolescents who have been violent to other family members. i don't know if you know this, but in Victoria it is built into the Child Protection system, and Group Conferences are a regular part of long term planning for children and young people who have come into that system. I would like to get in touch with the people mentioned in that article, if anyone knows how I could do this? Ironic, isn't it that I found out about them from the other side of the world! I want to read 'Knowing Feeling' which is available here but out of my pricerange (books are very expensive in Australia) I wanted to ask if there is any other source of Vick Kelly's chapter on intimacy and David Moore's on juvenile justice?

That will do for now I guess, and thanks again for this fantastic forum!

• Good Questions by Jim Duffy, 6/4/97
• Talk about a global village! by Don Nathanson, 6/4/97