'You really ought to write a book about shame!' That's how everything started. Someone I met at a dinner party gave me the idea and I guess they were the words I had been waiting for. At that time I was wondering about a new dilemma for my next book, and I strongly felt that shame was a very interesting feeling to explore.
The first thing I needed to define was the difference between the concepts of guilt and shame, because for me the two emotions always felt quite related. The answer I found was that guilt is a question of concrete actions. Guilt will arise either after actions we have done, or actions we chose not to do, even though we know we should. Shame, however, is about how we are, our identity. We can get rid of our guilt by asking for forgiveness, or try to make up for what we have done. And in contrast with the feeling of shame, we are allowed to speak about our feelings of guilt. But shame is taboo. We even feel ashamed about our feelings of shame.
I started to try to learn more about the concept of shame. I mean, we all feel a little shame now and then, and I understood that a gentle sense of shame is healthy for us. It helps us protect our integrity and restrains us from doing things we know are bad for us. But the kind of shame that I wanted to know more about was the kind of devastating shame that goes so deep that it becomes part of someone's personality, when it complicates close relationships with other people and maybe even destroys a person's whole life.
My conclusion is that devastating shame is a reaction to the absence of love. And by love in this context I mean genuine kindness and respect for the individual. And my belief is that the deepest shame of all is the feeling of not being loved by one's parents.
I read a lot of specialist literature, mostly psychology and about human evolution. I am very interested in the human brain and why we behave as we do. One thing that puzzled me, considering the brilliance of evolution, was the fact that a human being is at their most vulnerable during the first period of their life, a period when they are totally dependent on their parents, whatever kind of parents they may have. It almost feels like evolution made a huge mistake. As Astrid Lindgren said: 'A child who is treated lovingly and loves its parents learns from a loving attitude to the whole of its surrounding world and keeps this foundation throughout life. Even future statesmen and politicians form their characters before they have celebrated their fifth birthday, that's awful but true.'
Is it possible to do something to recover from deep feelings of shame? Yes, according to some research on the subject, it is possible to create new tracks in the brain. Teach the signals to take another 'street' and not the old 'motorway of shame' that was etched in childhood. What a person with deep shame etched in its innermost self needs isn't comprehension, but redress. The only way to achieve that is through a secure and safe dialog with another human being, preferably in some kind of therapy.
My book Shame is about two women. At first sight Monika and Maj-Britt are as different as two people can possibly be. They have nothing in common but the determination to obliterate their memories and be left alone. Maj-Britt is a seriously overweight woman, who for 30 years refused to leave her apartment. Through food and TV she manages to repress all of her past. She was brought up in a strictly religious home where she learned to feel ashamed about her sexuality and her body. (When I did my research on the internet it was striking how often the word 'shame' appeared on websites with Christian values - especially shame concerning female lust.) The other woman, Monika, is an ambitious doctor who has filled her life with external success but keeps herself constantly on the run to avoid her inner demons. But in the end you can't run fast enough when what you are running from is your inner self.
A letter and a tragic accident force the two women to confront the past and their fearful inner demons.
I wanted to challenge myself and try to write a suspenseful book without physical violence, because I think we get too much of that just by reading the newspapers or looking at the news on TV. I find it harder and harder to be entertained by violence myself, since the world around us seems to be more and more violent and the media concentrates on how rather than why. My interest is definitely why.
