Shame, Power and the Invisible Walls
Kaisa Vaittinen
There is an unspoken agreement about when one is permitted to tell one's own story. The agreement runs roughly like this: when you have come through, when you have succeeded, when you have reached the other side. Only then does your experience become inspiring. Before that, it is something else: evidence that you are a risk.
This essay opens the logic of the system of shame: where it comes from, whose power it serves, why it falls structurally unevenly, and what its becoming visible would change.
Shame as a societal control system
The sociologist Thomas Scheff (1988, 2000) called shame the master emotion, the ruler of social emotions. Charles Cooley's (1902) looking-glass self proposed that our self-image is built from how we imagine others see us. Erving Goffman (1963) showed how a stigmatised identity reduces a person from "whole and usual" to "tainted and discounted". Norbert Elias (1978) described the civilising process as a history in which Western humans learned to be ashamed of an ever-growing list of things, while at the same time concealing their shame ever more carefully.
Scheff named the mechanism: the deference-emotion system. Outwardly visible respect produces inner pride; outwardly visible lack of respect produces inner shame. The system is effective precisely because it is largely invisible. Most people follow norms in advance, before any breaking takes place.
Helen Block Lewis (1971) showed, on the basis of hundreds of clinical interviews, that shame was present in nearly every therapy session, but was not recognised. She called this unacknowledged shame. Its directing force is greatest precisely when shame is not consciously acknowledged.
June Tangney and Ronda Dearing (2002) distinguished shame from guilt: guilt concerns the act ("I did something bad"); shame concerns the whole self ("I am bad"). Guilt produces action; shame produces silence. In social interaction, shame is also carried through vicarious shame, by which the community polices its boundaries without any named authority.
Shame and the imbalance of power
The mechanism of shame is not symmetrical. The one who has more power also bears a smaller burden of shame, and vice versa. This is a structural, not a moral claim.
Pierre Bourdieu (1977; 2001) described this as symbolic power. The interpretations of those in power become common sense, and resisting them looks like deviance. Bourdieu's doxa is the zone in which a power arrangement is so internalised that it does not appear as an arrangement, but as a natural state. Shame is the affective interior of doxa.
Susan Brison (2002) described how, after violence and serious boundary violations, the victim's self-narrative breaks in a way that requires reconstruction, and that this reconstruction is possible only if another person hears the story and acknowledges it as having taken place. The shame mechanism, however, works in the opposite direction.
Lilia Cortina and colleagues (Cortina et al. 2017) on incivility show that the targets of these phenomena are statistically and systematically the groups with less power. Silence is not weakness; it is the rational output of the system.
Violence, harassment, and whom shame protects
According to the World Health Organization's analysis based on data from over 150 countries (WHO 2021), about one in four women has experienced physical or sexual intimate-partner violence. In Finland, the FRA (2014) survey found that about 47 percent of women reported having experienced physical or sexual violence after the age of 15, while the EU average was 33 percent. According to the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare's (THL) 2024 figures, in killings, murders and manslaughters of a former or current spouse or cohabiting partner, twelve out of thirteen victims were women.
From the standpoint of the shame mechanism, the central question is whose agency shame restricts. The answer is structurally unambiguous: the victim's. The person who has experienced violence or harassment almost without exception bears a heavier shame burden than the perpetrator.
Brené Brown (2006, 2012) found that shame grows in darkness and withers in light. The victim faces a double-bind: speak too much and you are hysterical; speak too little and you cannot really mean it. The mechanism protects the perpetrator: their silence is taken for politeness, their calmness for maturity.
The Nordic Paradox
The term Nordic Paradox was named in the research literature by Enrique Gracia and Juan Merlo (2016). Finland and the Nordic countries are seen, from outside, as highly equal societies, particularly in terms of gender. Yet we have not made visible the phenomena of gendered violence.
Unlike Spain (Ley Orgánica, 2004) or Brazil (Lei Maria da Penha, 11.340/2006; Lei do Feminicídio, 2015), the Finnish Criminal Code contains no specific qualification directed at gendered violence. In the FRA (2014) study, Finland was in the top three for women reporting violence after age 15: 47 percent vs. 33 percent EU average.
Finland and the illusion of class mobility
Pöyliö and Erola (2015) showed that the influence of family background on a child's social position has weakened over time in Finland. But Erola, Kilpi-Jakonen and Ruggera (2020) revealed that the persistence of the most advantaged class has more than doubled. Those from advantaged families have routes independent of education for maintaining their parents' class position.
Simmons, Wiklund and Levie (2014), with data from 33 countries, showed that in countries with a high stigma of failure, failed entrepreneurs return to entrepreneurship significantly less often. Augustin Landier (2005) modelled this as a conservative equilibrium in which even good entrepreneurs do not dare try again. Such an equilibrium is non-falsifiable.
It is socially rational to keep silent about one's goals and difficulties before crossing such a threshold of success. Shame is not an irrational emotion; it is the system's rational response to its structure.
What does the one who tries to step outside the box do?
First, the individual cannot escape the system. Shame and fear cannot be removed by force of will. Shame is reduced only through recognition and naming.
Second, action can take place despite the shame — not despite the fear, nor past the fear, but with the fear. Resilience research (Masten 2014) has shown that the capacity to act under difficult conditions does not rest on removing emotion, but on moving forward with it.
Third, belief is rarely an internal property of the individual. It is borrowed from those few people who see something good and possible at the moment when the individual cannot. In resilience research, one of the most consistently identified protective factors is at least one stable and committed relationship with a supportive adult.
Make the invisible visible
Shame is effective largely because it stays out of sight. When one person says "I am afraid, I am ashamed, and yet I try," they make visible something that was previously invisible. The same applies when someone says "this was done to me, and I had no words for it then." It does not undo what happened, but it shifts the centre of gravity of the shame away from the victim.
The basic insight of shame research (Lewis 1971; Scheff 1988; Tangney & Dearing 2002; Brown 2006, 2012) is that shame loses much of its force when it is recognised. A society that keeps shame in use as a tool of power loses an enormous amount of human capacity. When this system is made visible, its power weakens. It does not vanish. But it weakens. And that is enough.
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