In October 2018, I had a panic attack during a screening of the film First Man, a movie about astronaut Neil Armstrong. It was triggered when the lights were about to go down and a young woman I didn’t know came into my row and sat just a couple seats down from me.

In that moment, I was sure that she was a plant, that she was setting me up, and that I was about to be arrested as soon as she might start screaming that I was assaulting her. I was experiencing a bad episode of PTSD stemming from a nightmarish attempted political hit that I had just survived, which had briefly made me a figure of national attention and upended my life. I was paranoid and on edge.

It has taken me more than five years to understand and diagnose this component of my PTSD affliction—perhaps the key component. That component is the emotion of shame. New research is revealing the role of shame in PTSD. Shame, it happens, is also the favorite go-to weapon of the political left. Soros-backed protesters repetitively yell at their opponents to feel “Shame! Shame! Shame!” Conservatives are supposed to feel shame about opposing transgenderism, illegal immigration, and, of course, feminism. It’s a tactic that has worked going back at least to the ’60s, perhaps longer. In the age of Trump, however, reckless accusations and their accompanying demands for people to feel shame are losing their power.

When I freaked out at the screening of First Man and had to retreat to the lobby for several minutes, I was experiencing the usual symptoms associated with trauma—fight-or-flight adrenaline, anger, confusion, hyperventilating. Yet there was also a powerful feeling of shame.

Researchers have shown the way shame as a part of trauma is separate from things like fear and anger. In the paper “Association Between Shame and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Meta-Analysis,” four scientists argue that

over the course of the last decade, the primacy of fear and anxiety in our understanding of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has given way to the recognition that negative emotions other than fear contribute to PTSD’s development and course. It has been widely documented that traumatic exposure disrupts affective processes beyond the fear network. For some individuals with PTSD, shame, sadness, or anger are more associated with the disorder’s clinical distress and functional impairment than pathological fear.

Furthermore, the American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013)

points to this increasing field-wide appreciation of negative affect in PTSD. Specifically, the previous requirement that individuals must experience fear, helplessness, or horror after trauma exposure has been removed and a new symptom cluster that captures alterations in negative cognitions and affect (e.g., guilt, shame, and anger) has been added.

The journalist Helen Rittelmeyer (formerly Andrews) has called PTSD a “shame storm.” In 2019, Rittelmeyer was publicly embarrassed on television when an old boyfriend began insulting her about how their relationship ended. Her shame was debilitating:

Everyone at work was supportive … but no amount of support could counteract the paranoia that settled in over the next weeks and months. My colleagues probably didn’t believe the woman they worked alongside was secretly a comic-book ­villain—but surely the suspicion had been planted? I never knew whether someone on the subway was giving me a second glance because he knew me, or because he recognized me from the video. Fellow journalists reported back to me from conferences where [my ex-boyfriend] Todd expatiated on my depravity at length—in one case, before an audience that included my boss.

Andrews insightfully sums up the new digital world of shame: 

No one has yet figured out what rules should govern the new frontiers of public shaming that the Internet has opened. New rules are obviously required. Shame is now both global and permanent, to a degree unprecedented in human history. No more moving to the next town to escape your bad name. However far you go and however long you wait, your disgrace is only ever a Google search away. Getting a humiliating story into the papers used to require convincing an editor to run it, which meant passing their standards of newsworthiness and corroborating evidence. Those gatekeepers are now gone. Most attempts so far to devise new rules have taken ideology as their starting point: Shaming is okay as long as it’s directed at men by women, the powerless against the powerful. But that doesn’t address what to do afterward, if someone is found to have been wrongfully shamed, or when someone rightfully shamed wants to put his life back together.

My own shame storm was on a considerably larger scale than the one Rittelmeyer describes, though I’m sure hers was no less keenly felt. In 2018, I became briefly famous for my involvement in the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Kavanaugh, a high school friend, was falsely accused of sexual assault by a women named Christine Blasey Ford. Ford claimed I was in the room when the alleged assault took place in 1982 when we were in high school. My world was turned upside down. Reporters told lie after lie about me. People stared at me in public or, uninvited, felt entitled to walk up and talk to me about my private life. My entire past was examined, and I was declared a villain. Protestors on Capitol Hill demanded I be subpoenaed and that every inch of my life—whether it was my past drinking, dating life, and writing—be exposed so that I and Brett be made to feel shame (and, of course, that he would thereby not be confirmed to the Court).

Intense shame is a difficult thing to navigate. Kavanaugh and I had been raised in an Irish Catholic community that recognizes shame as a sometimes powerful and healthy thing. After all, shame is part of a well-formed conscience and it is invoked to prevent you from hurting others. Yet a person’s life is not meant to be ruled by shame—especially a false shame.

During one of the worse parts of the Kavanaugh nightmare my friend and book editor Adam Bellow called me. “So,” he said, “how does it feel to have the entire liberal world projecting their shadow onto you?” He was using Jungian terminology, and it fit—as is so often the case with the left, when they are guilty of crimes I would never even imagine, they were shaming me for the “crime” of enjoying crime fiction and attractive women.

Shame stemming from trauma can also induce suicidal ideation or a “shame spiral.” This is the darkest and most difficult part of today’s atmosphere of trotting every private thing before the public. The trauma this causes is making it hard for people to function. As the shame storm is raging, one is faced with financial and emotional difficulties that require outside help, and oftentimes those one must turn to for help compound the shame by shaming you again. “What’s wrong with you? Why are you asking for money?” They’re right, you think to yourself. You were raised to have pride,  to keep your personal life personal, and to not go around begging. You begin to think there’s only one way out. 

One of the ways I started to deal with these powerful emotions was to study people in other cultures who had been shamed by political tyrants, and how they fought back. The most compelling and evil model I discovered were the Stasi, the secret police of communist East Germany. As journalist Laura Williams has described it,

If someone looked like he might challenge the Communist Party’s legitimacy or control, the Stasi systematically destroyed his life. They used blackmail, social shame, threats, and torture. Careers, reputations, relationships, and lives were exploded to destabilize and delegitimize a critic. Some forms of harassment were almost comical: agents spread rumors about their targets, flooded their mailboxes with pornography, moved things around in their apartments, or deflated their bicycle tires day after day. Others were life-altering: Individuals labeled as subversives were banned from higher education, forced into unemployment, and forcibly committed to asylums. Many suffered long-term psychological trauma, loss of earnings, and intense social shame as a result of Stasi lies.

While I am Catholic, I am also Generation X, born in the 1960s and a teenager in the 1980s. We were raised on Mad Magazine, punk rock, and movies like The Wild Life. We have an innate resistance to shamers and always found the Vietnam-era shaming of the Boomers to be pretentious. We punch back, and don’t like being told how we are supposed to feel about anything. During the Kavanaugh battle, the media tried to shame my friends and I over our high school underground newspaper and the fact that we had parties, dated girls, and drank beer. In response to their nonsense, we commissioned t-shirts with the name of our paper, The Unknown Hoya and mocked their pretentious concern for a lying “victim.” While Helen Rittelmeyer has fled to Australia to escape her shame, I stayed in Washington and wrote a book, The Devil’s Triangle. I went on Fox Nation to fight back and continue to write about what they’ve done, their motives, and the pattern of behavior that characterizes these vultures in the media.

Then there was the “moon shot.” One day shortly after Kavanaugh had been seated on the Court, a high school friend of mine called. He had something to show me. When he said that, I felt the familiar PTSD symptoms creeping over me—an adrenaline spike, dread, and yes, shame. What were they going to accuse us of now?

The friend I was meeting had been one of the best photographers at Georgetown Prep, where we attended school together. We had worked on the yearbook staff—a yearbook that the American Stasi had examined with a microscope to find silly double-entendres and references to beer. “Thanks for meeting me,” Fletch said. He looked around to make sure I hadn’t been followed, then disappeared into the front seat of his large maroon Ford SUV. Then he reemerged with an envelope. Inside was a photograph. It was a picture of 10 teenaged boys at a pool party, and they were mooning the camera. You could not see any faces.

My friend and I looked at each other and started laughing. We were at the point where a picture of some teenagers mooning a camera 30 years ago could conceivably be entered into the congressional record and weaponized against us.

It was around the time I saw this picture, which we still call the “moon shot,” that I had the panic attack I described above. First Man is a great film, and while watching it I wished I had the bravery of Neil Armstrong. Yet, maybe in a strange sort of way, Armstrong had his moon shot and I had mine. As Kathleen Parker put it in a column defending me, “It takes guts to breach the #MeToo Iron Curtain, as Judge is attempting to do.”

Still, there are days when I can’t help but feel the shame storm that was imposed on me. Maybe it will be a part of my psyche forever. In an academic paper on the great film The Lives of Others, which dramatizes the evil of the East German Stasi, Hans Löfgren explores the deep power of shame to alter our lives.

Stare long enough into the eyes of a dog who does not know you, and he will begin to bark. Many animals, human beings among them, experience the stare as threatening aggression. But, unlike other animals, human beings can feel shame at being exposed to an unwavering look, a look which threatens the private self that is only shared in deeply trusting relationships. For the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, hell was other people, the gaze of others in a room that was never dark, a place of no exit in which no one could close their eyes. On a broad historical scale, it was not long ago that the punishment of public shaming was abolished in Europe; leaders of English literature may recall, for example the laughingstock in Shakespeare’s King Lear. While this practice no longer exists in modern society, the expression “to be a laughingstock” persists as do, obviously, situations which provoke shame. But it is not just the exposure of guilt that elicits feelings of shame, nor even the violation of one’s integrity, or being personal and vulnerable without receiving reciprocal confidence. It is an anxious concern with the self, the feeling that the other has taken possession of us and that we have lost something of ourselves past control and recovery.

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/surviving-the-lefts-shame-storm/