I may do that sometime this weekend. I haven’t heard French in awhile.
It’s interesting to note that those who suffer from shame, are those who most often knowing or not, perpetuate it in others.
I saw Welch give a talk about Steve Jobs introducing the iphone for the first time. Jobs gave the typical business report of the companies projections and upcoming products, and then at the end of the meeting, as a kind of sidenote of no importance, Jobs says, and by the way we also have this thing we are calling an iphone.
Welch said, and so this is like what we read in Genesis 2:25.
No doubt! That would be read as a pointed observation.
I was observing it in myself first, and of wider, abstract culture too then. I wasn’t thinking of you or any other particular person here when I wrote it.
I didn’t read it as directed to anyone here. Not at all. But it is certainly a tricky subject that bears an important relationship to what we mean when we talk about meaning
“After that, you will hear God’s words to the shamed, and you will discover shame’s opposite: You are acceptable. You will receive honor, value, worth, even glory, and it will be public.”
Ed Welch Shame Interrupted: How God Lifts the Pain of Worthlessness and Rejection
I listened while I shelved some books before open at work. Really super piece. I particularly valued the discussion of Honor Cultures. I’ve seen exactly the kind of thing he described.
The last section about vets and young men was good, too. It’s important to feel that we have value, just not at the expense of others
Hmmm… that does sound a lot like the ‘bullies only bully because they were bullied’ fallacy, if I am honest. I am sure that some who have experienced great shame feel the need to inflict it on others to ease their own, but I’d want to be very cautious about making generalisations. From my pastoral experience, shame affects people in a myriad of ways, sometimes obvious, sometimes seemingly hidden. I’ve known shame sufferers who can be highly encouraging and supportive of others.
That may be analogous to some being edified coercion and some not. Some learn from their own experience of being shamed and some don’t… some learn from their own experience of… [whatever] and others do not.
“Experience is what you get just after you need it.” It’s wiser to learn from someone else’s!
I searched your terms fully expecting to find a fallacy I was unaware of. Which I didn’t find immediately, but I then searched “statistics for bullying and abuse at home”:
“Children who were exposed to violence in the home engaged in higher levels of physical bullying than youngsters who were not witnesses to such behavior, according to a study by researchers from the University of Washington and Indiana University.”
By the way I found an article which touched on some of the other factors which can lead to bullying:
“The functionality of aggression is part of the allure of bullying. Youth bully to get what they want and to control the behavior of others. Peer social structures exist in which some members are more popular, more powerful, and more likely to control resources than other members.”
klw,
I know it’s been over a week since you posted this. Sorry. There are so many rabbit trails I’ve tried to follow, I have forgotten some real trails I had intended to spend more time with.
Where are you with this article? What stands out to you? What makes sense to you or meshes with your thinking?
Jay, thanks for the Wittgenstein quote. He said better what I was trying to manage with “sense of” and “sense for.” There are many subtle things in our lives that give us a sense of place in the world. Wittgenstein pointed to a few: glance, gesture and tone, which he called “imponderable evidence.” But there are so many, many more. I wonder how many we never notice, never develop a nose for.
If we are developing our noses, learning to recognize what speaks meaning to us and how, I wonder if we can help ourselves out, by working on cultivating those things in our lives and even the lives of others.
I struggled to get through it too and did not feel edified by it. (Maybe coerced? It was two decades ago and I don’t remember.) Piper’s first chapters typically make his point, but successive ones seem more of a slog. But Desiring God, Future Grace and The Pleasures of God contain important basic ideas. Just the titles and the initial chapters might suffice.
