I’ve been thinking a lot lately about something that happened to me in the grocery store near the town where I grew up.
Lincolnville is a town of 900 people on the Maine coast. When I went to school there back in the 1980s, Lincolnville Central had 200 kids in total, kindergarten through eighth grade.
Most of the other kids spent their time fishing and snowmobiling and tinkering with cars. Their families had been there for generations while mine hadn’t. My parents were transplants from New York and Boston who ran an alternative high school. They were divorced because my mom’s a lesbian.
I was different. I didn’t care about how to replace a carburetor. I wanted to play real-life Dungeons and Dragons. Plus, I was chubby and I liked computers. This is me in sixth grade.
Yes, that is a Celtic medallion I’m wearing. Image via Eli Pariser.
You know where this is going. I got picked on. I got shoved into walls. I got called "fag" a lot. There was a whole line of insults about how I wasn’t enough of a man or the right kind of man. It sucked.
In many ways, I shrugged it off. I doubled down on my eccentricities, and maybe that even helped me become who I am. But if I’m honest with you, it’s not like it was just some "character building" thing. It changed me in ways I’m not proud of.
For instance, last summer, my wife and my infant son and I were visiting Lincolnville. We’re in the grocery store with a big summer-sized load of groceries, lots of watermelons and charcoal. The teenager bagging our groceries offers to help carry them to the car. My wife, Gena, quite reasonably says, "That sounds great!"
I got furious. I felt undermined. I felt emasculated. No freaking way. How could she make me look weak in the middle of the town grocery store?!
I was trying to figure out where that came from, and I realized: Some of that teasing had wormed its way into my consciousness. Some of those kids’ ideas about what makes a man — ideas I consciously reject — are here with me still.
There’s a technical word for this: shame.
According to psychologists, shame is the feeling that there’s a big gap between who you actually are and who you believe society wants you to be. They describe this as the true self and the ideal self. You’ve got this ideal self, and then the true self doesn’t totally match. We feel shame about the places where the reality doesn’t match the ideal.
In the grocery store, I was reliving this idea of what a man’s supposed to do that those kids had set up for me as an ideal. My wife was undermining that. And I felt shame, which was really kind of a triple whammy because — not only did I have to have the bad experience in the first place — but then it was making me feel bad about myself now, years later, and it was driving me to act like a jerk to my wife.
That experience in the grocery store has been on my mind a lot lately. Because what is the right response? How do we deal with people who make us feel this way?
We live at a time when it feels like hate is on the rise — whether it’s racists or xenophobes or misogynists or just really unpleasant commenters with obnoxiously bad grammar. How do we deal with these people who not only stand in the way of social change but threaten to push us backward?
I have a theory. It’s a theory that comes from my work at Upworthy, where we're reviewing, measuring, and creating thousands of videos that aim to create social change and make the world a better place. I noticed there’s a pattern to the videos that make the most impact, and when I looked into the research on hate, I recognized this same pattern. It’s part of what drives those fundamentals.
The theory starts with a simple question: "What drives haters?"
One of the interesting things about hateful behavior is that not only does it create shame in its targets — like it did for me — but, actually, psychologists say shame is often the cause of hate in the first place.
James Gilligan, a highly regarded professor of psychiatry, writes that "the basic psychological motive ... of violent behavior is the wish to ward off or eliminate the feeling of shame."
If you listen for it, you can hear it in the stories of individual haters.
I’m sure some of you saw the amazing story of Lindy West, a writer and feminist activist confronting one of her nastiest online trolls who had spent months relentlessly torturing her. She gets on the phone with this guy and asks him, basically, "Why?"
Man: "Well, it revolved around one issue that you wrote about a lot which was your being heavy — the struggles that you had regarding being a woman of size or whatever the term may be."
Lindy West: "You can say fat. That's what I say."
Man: "Fat. OK, fat. When you talked about being proud of who you are and where you are and where you're going, that kind of stoked that anger that I had."
He also told her he’s 75 pounds heavier than he wants to be.
In the email that kicked off that conversation, he makes it even more clear. He writes:
"Hey Lindy, I don't know why or even when I started trolling you. It wasn't because of your stance on rape jokes. I don't find them funny either. I think my anger towards you stems from your happiness with your own being. It offended me because it served to highlight my unhappiness with my own self.”
Hate is an externalization of shame. The weaponization of it.
It’s worth saying not every negative reflection on yourself is shame. As shame researcher Brené Brown explains, there’s a difference between guilt and shame. When you feel guilty, you feel bad about something you’ve done. But when you feel shame, it’s because you believe there’s something deep inside you that’s wrong.
That belief is really quite dangerous. June Tangney, a professor of psychology at George Mason University, gave a bunch of prison inmates a test that measured whether they felt more guilt or shame. She then looked at where they were a year after they were released from prison. The people who felt guilty had largely been able to change their ways, but among the inmates who scored high for shame, a significantly higher number were back in jail.
There’s something else about shame we need to put on the table. It’s not just something we conjure in ourselves. It’s also a potent social force that is used to keep people in line.
When people don’t fit in, society shames them and pushes them out.
When Playboy model Dani Mathers took a picture of a naked woman in a locker room and posted it with the comment "If I can’t unsee this then you can’t either," that’s what she was doing. She was saying, "My body fits social expectations. This person’s body is a failure."
Shame can even motivate murder, as it did in the so-called honor killing of Pakistani model, activist, and YouTuber Qandeel Baloch. Her brother strangled her because, he said, "she was bringing dishonor to her family." In other words, he felt shame because his sister was deviating from the normal idea of what a woman’s role should be.
I think shame’s role here is a level deeper. "You brought me shame" is usually code for "I’m ashamed of myself." And there’s a long history of men who, rather than confronting their own shame, project it onto women and then punish them.
Psychologists say blaming others, in fact, is one of the primary responses to shame.
I’d argue you see this response — groups of people looking for someone to blame — in a lot of the uglier movements that we’re confronting today. It’s a flammable combination. On the one hand, it helps to know these people are motivated by a feeling of shame. It’s not a happy situation for them. Still, they’re acting like assholes.
So what do we do? How do we respond to the haters?
There are two ways people typically respond: flee or fight.
The first is captured best by what I’ll call the Taylor Swift Doctrine. To wit:
"Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I'm just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off"
I’m deeply nervous about getting in a fight with Taylor Swift's fandom, but I actually disagree that shaking it off and developing a thicker skin is a good piece of advice.
The fact is, when you’re threatened with rape and murder, like many people who share their opinions on the internet have been, it hurts. It’s not so easy to shake that off. When you’re called by racial epithets, it hurts.
When you’re someone who isn’t a part of the dominant groups in our societies, it’s especially hurtful and scary. If you’re disabled, if you’re mixed race, if you’re queer or trans, if you’re part of those groups, you know that words do sometimes translate into actions.
Sometimes words come first — and sticks, stones, or bullets come after.
In its most extreme form, flight can be truly tragic. Think of the teenagers who have taken their own lives — Megan Meier, Tyler Clementi, Amanda Todd — after being bullied online.
Fighting haters — the other alternative — can be really problematic, too. Feeding trolls really does make them bigger. Paul Jun, who calls himself a former troll, writes, "A troll’s behavior reflects a deep insecurity, so having someone respond to their words gives life meaning, regardless of how pathetic that may sound." Defensive "fight" reactions just give haters energy.
So if those two strategies don’t work, what does?
I want to suggest a third path, one that’s profound but counterintuitive:
The most powerful thing you can do in response to hate is to reveal your real self.
Make your private pain public.
Let me tell you a story about myself. Just to set expectations, it’s not some big story of deprivation or humiliation. I’m a Western, white, straight guy, I’ve had it pretty good.
This, however, is one of the worst things that happened to me, and it’s a story I’ve never told a public audience before.
In June 2008, I got married. She was clever and cute. We’d been together for six years.
I thought I was getting married forever. The marriage lasted four months.
In October, she went on what was supposed to be a half work trip, half San Francisco vacation alone. When she came back, she was super-cagey about it, and I just had an "uh-oh" feeling. So I poked around on her computer — I’m totally embarrassed to admit — and found a chat with a guy she worked with. I confronted her. The four minutes of silence after that were the worst.
She was having an affair. After six very, very long months of being on the fence, she left me for the guy.
I had to explain to everyone I knew and loved that the person I’d pledged my life to so recently had left me for someone else. I’m telling it because even though this is a thing that has happened quite a few times in the history of humanity, it makes me totally uncomfortable to tell it publicly.
Because what does that say about me? Either I was an idiot who couldn’t see who I was marrying, or I was a loser who was worth leaving.
But something interesting happened when I started telling people.
One by one, they embraced me. They took care of me. They grew closer to me. One of the people who I connected with then is now my brilliant, loving, gorgeous wife — who is married to something much more like my true self.
Still, telling a story like this publicly isn’t actually fun.
When you tell a story like this, you reveal the ways in which your true self isn’t your ideal self — the one you want to live up to.
My ideal self is ideal. My true self is not ideal.
It’s not just that. Being vulnerable — sharing who I really am, what actually happened to me, and how it made me feel — is really scary. Telling this story is scary. It makes me feel exposed. It makes me worry I’ll be seen as weak. Ultimately, by telling it, I lose control of it. It gives me a feeling of powerlessness. It’s in the world. It’s not mine any more. And what are people going to do with it? Can I trust all of you with it?
Here’s the thing: Being vulnerable actually isn’t powerlessness. That feeling of it being hard and uncomfortable is actually really important. It’s the work of change.
In telling these stories, we’re not just freeing our true selves. We’re doing something even more important.
There’s a story we worked on at Upworthy where we interviewed a black woman who’s now a professor, and she talks about how as a kid, every day, she put a clothespin on her nose because she thought it was fat. Her mother, who was white, would always say, "Why are you doing that? Take it off; you’re going to hurt yourself."
Years later she talked to her grandmother, her father’s mother, who was black. Her grandmother mentioned in passing she had put a clothespin on her nose as a girl.
The woman had this moment of revelation. She had thought this was just a thing about her own nose. If her grandmother was doing it, maybe there was something bigger. She realized that just like her grandmother, she’d grown up surrounded by photos of beautiful women who were all white. So she thought her nose wasn’t beautiful.
See, when we tell these stories, we free ourselves from the ideal society sets up for us.
You realize that gap between the true self and the ideal, that’s not about us. It's about the ideal and where it came from. The truth is, the ideal self is a vehicle for some pretty messed up ideas. It's not a coincidence.
Consider this, from psychologist Linda Hartling:
"It is advantageous to the dominant group to persuade the subordinate group that they are deserving of shame, that they are responsible for the damage they have brought upon themselves, to blame themselves for some deficiency or supposed inferiority."
Shame is the mechanism by which the dominant groups in a society maintain their dominance. It’s a tool of social control.
That’s why telling our true stories, however raw they may be — being vulnerable — is such a powerful response to haters.
It does a bunch of things at once. It takes the power out of shaming. It offers the haters a different way to deal with their own shame. It promotes empathy, which shifts the nature of the response. Most importantly, it doesn’t just reject the ideal self, it changes the ideal. It actually updates the picture of what the ideal self is not just for yourself, but for everyone.
When you look back at the advances of social acceptance over the decades — that’s the way it happened. Gay men and women in America started to become a force in society when they came out of the closet and told their true, often painful stories, and these stories reached a whole new audience through efforts like the It Gets Better Project.
After being told to hide their pain for centuries, women who have been sexually assaulted are now sharing their stories, like the brave woman did in the 2015 Stanford case, and changing the culture around rape.
The core strategy of the civil rights movement in the United States was based on exactly this. Nonviolence is what you get when you deeply understand what shame is trying to do. Instead of responding to racial antagonists and getting up in their face and fighting with them — you assert that you’re a dignified but vulnerable human.
Sharing your true stories and your true self, especially the parts you’re inclined to be ashamed of — really can actually change who gets to say what’s ideal. And that can change the world.
Here’s the truly exciting thing: We have a tool that we have today that many of these movements didn’t have. It’s the internet. It offers a revolutionary opportunity for voices and stories and truths to be heard that were never heard before. Voices that were not allowed to be heard by the dominant forces in their societies.
We each have something to contribute to this picture. We each have something to say that can change how our society operates, what it generates as its "normal," and what it generates as its "ideal."
The culture in Maine where I grew up doesn’t look that kindly on vulnerability. People are expected to be self-sufficient: You fix your own car, you mow your own lawn, and you take care of your own feelings and keep them to yourself. So opening up doesn’t come easily to me. Maybe it doesn’t come easy to you either. The powerlessness of giving over control of how you are seen, losing control of your narrative, is scary.
But I want everyone to know there are lots of us — millions of us — who will receive you and lift you up and lift up your story.
The best response to inhumanity isn’t to pick up our weapons or shake it off. The best response is to be more fully human.
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