Excerpt: How can violence to the body kill the soul, even if it does not kill the body? Having heard hundreds of men describe the experience of being beaten nearly to death, I believe the answer to that question is that violence - whatever else it may mean - is the ultimate means of communicating the absence of live by the person inflicting the violence. Even a pet dog knows it is unloved when it is beaten. A child would haev to be out of touch with reality (as many do in fact become) not to realize on some level that to be beaten deliberately is to be rejected and unloved. But the self cannot survive without love. The self starved of love dies. That is how violence can cause the death of the self even if it does not kill the body.
The two possible sources of love for the self are love from others and one's own love for oneself. Children who fail to receive sufficient love from others fail to build those reserves of self-love, and the capacity for self-love, which enable them to survive the inevitable rejections and humiliations which even the most fortunate of people cannot avoid. Without feelings of love, the self feels numb, empty, and dead.
The word I use in this book to refer to the absence or deficiency of self-love is shame; its opposite is pride, by which I mean a healthy sense of self-esteem, self-respect, and self-love. When self-love is sufficiently diminished, one feels shame. But it may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a “feeling”, for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling, an absence of feeling. An analogous image comes to mind if we think about our experience of cold. If we say we are “cold”, we experience cold as a feeling, as something that exists and is painful. But we know from physics that cold is really the absence of heat, or warmth. Shame is also experienced as a feeling, and an intensely painful one; but like cold, it is, in essence, the absence of warmth, emotional warmth, or love for the self. And when it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness. We know that cold starts out feeling painful, but when it reaches an intolerable extreme, it results in complete numbness and physical death. At first, only a limb may die, but when the cold is sufficiently severe, the whole body dies. In the same way, the self dies when exposed to more shame than it can tolerate. This is why Dante was profoundly psychologically correct when he stated that the lowest circle of hell was a region not of flames, but of ice-absolute coldness.
…To suffer the loss of love from others, by being rejected or abandoned, assaulted or insulted, slighted or demeaned, humiliated or ridiculed, dishonored or disrespected, is to be shamed by them. To be overwhelmed by shame and humiliation is to experience the destruction of self-esteem; and without a certain minimal amount of self-esteem, the self collapses and the soul dies. Violence to the body causes the death of the self because it is so inescapably humiliating. When we cannot fend off, undo or escape from such overwhelmingly unloving acts, when we cannot protect ourselves from them, whether by violent or nonviolent means, something gets killed within us-our souls are murdered.
…people do not need to be physically attacked in order to become violent. Violent child abuse is not the only way in which an adult can shame and humiliate a child. Words alone can shame and reject, insult and humiliate, dishonor and disgrace, tear down self-esteem and murder the soul.
Not all violent adults were subjected to violent child abuse. Nor do all who were subjected to violent child abuse grow up to commit deadly violence. Child abuse is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for adult violence, anymore than smoking is a necessary or sufficient cause for the development of lung cancer. There are, however, plenty of statistical studies showing that acts of actual and extreme physical violence, such as beatings and attempted murders, are regular experiences in the childhoods of those who grow up to become violent, just as we know that smoking is a major, preventable, cause of lung cancer.
…The kind of man I am describing protects himself from the emotional suffocation of living in a loveless atmosphere by withdrawing the love he has begun to feel from everyone and everywhere, in an attempt to reserve for himself whatever capacity for love we may have, but his supply of self-love is also deficient. And it cannot grow to the dimensions that are necessary for health when it is not fed by love from others. If it were not deficient, he could afford to love others. But his withdrawal of love from everyone and everything around him not only protects him from emotional pain, it also condemns him to absence of emotional pleasure or joy; for we cannot enjoy the people who make up our world, cannot enjoy being with them, except to the degree that we love them. So the person who cannot love cannot have any feelings-pain or joy.
