Offering: December 11, 2022
"I will stay with you"
Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, Pamela Colman Smith’s Four of Swords from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck. In the background is the face of an orange dog looking up at the camera and a wooden floor. On the card, a knight is laying in a sarcophagus with hands folded over their chest. There are three swords on the wall and one underneath them. There is a stained glass window with two people. One has a halo with the letters PAX above their head, and one on their knees as if receiving a blessing.
The Offerings are an archive of language and pictures that I love. I make them because I’m always finding new words and images for truths that feel important, and because it’s one of my realest pleasures in life to learn, to weave together what I find, and to share with those who are interested. Writing these essays to you every week is a highlight of my life.
This week, I learned the phrase emotional contagion, which psychologist Lindsay Gibson describes as a way of communicating that stimulates the feelings we’re feeling in others (2015). So if I’m feeling ashamed, I might behave in a way that stimulates shame in someone else, like blaming, so now they feel shame too. And that’s emotional contagion, in action.
Some people think that emotional contagion is one of the ways we allow ourselves to feel things we need to feel but don’t know how to cope with up close. So if I’m feeling ashamed or angry, I might do something—unconsciously rather than intentionally—to stimulate shame or anger in someone else. This way, I don’t miss my chance to interact with the feeling, but it happens at more of distance and that feels safer.
I’ve been thinking a lot about blame, specifically. And about how hard it is to feel shame, and how contagious it is. Shame doesn’t only come from blame, but blame’s a common path of transmission. I’ve been paying attention to the blame-loops that I live in with people and systems that I know well, where if you look closely you can see the shame just getting shuffled around, pushed off, taken on, and cast back out to others.
These patterns of redistributing shame without ever dealing with it directly can feel never ending. I’ve been wondering what it would take to interrupt them.