Being There When Shame Finds a Language

Looking Back on Five Important Years of My Life

In 2004, I was admitted as a doctoral student at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Five years later, I defended my dissertation, An Exploration into the Concept and Phenomenon of Shame within the Context of Child Sexual Abuse. Looking back, I now see those years as some of the most demanding and significant of my life. The dissertation was an academic study, but it also became a long journey through people’s experiences of violation, shame, and their efforts to reclaim their dignity.

I already knew this landscape. For many years, I had worked with people who had been subjected to violence and sexual abuse. I knew that abuse could leave deep and lasting wounds, yet something about shame continued to escape language. Guilt could be connected to something a person had done. Shame seemed to strike at the person’s very being: not merely I did something wrong, but there is something wrong with me.

This distinction became central to my work. I wanted to explore how shame arises, how it can become part of a person’s understanding of themselves, and how a shame-based identity is maintained or resisted. The question was not only what sexual abuse does to a person, but also how these experiences are interpreted. How can the gaze of others become part of our own way of seeing ourselves? How can shame continue to exert its influence long after the abuse has ended?

Being There

The study was conducted in cooperation with the Incest Centre in Vestfold. The centre was founded on humanistic values and on a fundamental trust that each person is the foremost interpreter of their own life. Those seeking help were not primarily to be regarded as diagnoses or cases, but as human beings with needs for safety, closeness, belonging, recognition, and respect.

These values were expressed in the centre’s daily practice. Its most important working method was dialogue. The staff listened to people’s stories, often many times. They described their task as listening, offering support, and being present as fellow human beings. Several emphasised that what mattered most was simply being there.

This small expression contained a great deal: being where the other person is.

It is possible to be physically present without truly being present. We can hear the words without listening to the story. We can ask all the correct professional questions and still fail to encounter the person. Being there requires the helper, for a while, to set aside the urge to explain, classify, and repair. Only then can the other person’s experience emerge on its own terms.

Here, the dissertation found its existential and dialogical direction. Shame could not be understood as an isolated feeling contained within an individual. It arises and is formed in relationships between people. It is connected to the body, language, silence, and our perception of how others see us. The path out of shame must therefore also pass through relationships.

When Experience Was Allowed to Speak

The material in the dissertation did not come primarily from psychiatric experts. It came from people who had themselves experienced sexual abuse, and from staff members who encountered them in their daily work. I did not want to force these experiences into established theories. I wanted to listen to the ways in which shame revealed itself in people’s lives.

The initial analyses identified seven broad areas: emotions, the body, food, self-image, family, sexuality, and therapy. As I continued to work with the material, further connections became visible.

Shame appeared in despair and in a person’s self-image. It could be found in their relationship with their body and in the experience of being dirty, worthless, or unworthy. It could appear in the mirror, in food, in nakedness, and in sexuality. It could be expressed through guilt, anger, depression, self-harm, revenge, or the desire to hide.

Shame also lived in relationships with others: in relationships with fathers and mothers, siblings, children, and partners. It could be transferred through accusation, silence, and rejection. The person who had been subjected to abuse could be left carrying a shame that, morally, belonged to the person who had violated them.

Here lies one of the great injustices of shame. The guilty person may cast the shame away, while the person who was violated continues to carry it.

At the same time, the material showed that people are not merely passive recipients of shame. A shame-based identity can be resisted. People can protest against the degrading gaze. They can find words for what has been silenced and gradually learn to distinguish between what was done to them and who they are.

This rarely happens in isolation. A person needs other human beings who do not turn their gaze away.

To speak about abuse is therefore not merely to describe something that happened in the past. Telling the story can be an act of resistance against shame’s demand for silence. But telling the story is not liberating in itself. Everything depends on how the story is received. The person who speaks makes themselves vulnerable. If their words are met with doubt, minimisation, or condemnation, the violation may be repeated. If the story is received with respect, a space may open in which the shame-based identity is no longer allowed to stand unchallenged.

Good dialogue cannot undo the abuse. But it can change who is left carrying the shame.

More Than an Academic Study

A doctoral dissertation must meet certain academic requirements. It must explain its theory, method, empirical material, and analysis. It must be precise, open to examination, and capable of withstanding criticism. I spent five years on this work, first completing the doctoral courses and then conducting the study, analysing the material, and writing the dissertation.

Yet when I look back, it is not primarily the methodological details that I remember. I remember the encounters with people and the weight of their stories. I remember the responsibility that came with being granted access to experiences that did not belong to me.

Researching shame required particular care. The stories could not be reduced to quotations used to support a theory. Behind every statement was a lived life. Behind the categories of body, food, family, and sexuality were people attempting to live with experiences that could be almost impossible to put into words.

I had worked for many years as a social worker, teacher, and therapist. Even so, this research taught me once again how limited professional knowledge becomes when it is not accompanied by respect. Theories can help us to see, but they can also place themselves between us and the other person. Professional concepts can open experiences to understanding, but they can also close them.

Perhaps practical wisdom lies precisely in knowing when knowledge should be used and when it must step aside so that the person can speak.

The dissertation led me towards an understanding of shame as a fundamental social and existential experience. Shame does not arise only because a person judges themselves negatively. It is connected to our dependence on other people. We need to be seen, recognised, and received. It is precisely for this reason that the rejection and contempt of others can wound us so deeply.

When a person is subjected to sexual abuse, it is not only the body that is violated. Trust may also be violated: trust in other people, in one’s own boundaries, and in one’s own worth. If those around the person respond to their story with silence or disbelief, the person may be left alone—not only with what happened, but also with the responsibility of making the experience comprehensible to others.

Shame says: Hide. Do not tell. If others truly see you, they will turn away.

A Work That Did Not End

A dissertation must be completed. At some point, the analysis must stop, the manuscript must be submitted, and the work must be defended. But the questions opened by the dissertation could not be concluded in the same way.

When the doctoral work was finished, I walked the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. I had spent five years immersed in conversations and texts about shame and sexual abuse. Perhaps I believed that I could walk the shame out of myself. I sought silence and solitude, but instead I met people who spoke about love and loss, joy and sorrow, faith and doubt.

The road offered no simple conclusion to the work. It taught me something else: some experiences cannot be left behind like completed chapters. They become part of the road we continue to walk.

Many years later, I am once again reading the conversations on which the dissertation was based. I meet these words with greater distance, but perhaps also with a different calmness. I see connections that I did not see at the time. This does not necessarily mean that the earlier analysis was mistaken. A life that has continued to be lived simply brings new questions to old material.

When I now look back on those five important years, I do not think first of the doctoral degree or the title it brought me. I think of the people who told their stories. I think of the staff members who listened, and of how much courage it can require to put into words what shame demands should remain hidden.

I also return to the simple expression used at the Incest Centre in Vestfold: what matters most is being there.

Perhaps this was the dissertation’s most important insight. We cannot always remove another person’s pain. We cannot undo the past. But we can meet another human being without turning away. We can listen without taking possession of their story. We can help ensure that shame is no longer carried by the person who was violated, but is placed where the responsibility belongs.

Sometimes change begins precisely there: in the encounter with another human being who sees—and who remains.

Reference

Pettersen, K. T. (2009). An exploration into the concept and phenomenon of shame within the context of child sexual abuse: An existential-dialogical perspective of social work within the settings of a Norwegian incest centre (Doctoral dissertation No. 2009:184). Norwegian University of Science and Technology.