You can survive shame.
Today I rewatched Monica Lewinsky’s TED talk from 2015. Entitled “The Price of Shame”, it resonates more deeply in me since I was cancelled in 2023 from an organization I had been part of for over 30 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_8y0WLm78U
I watched Ms Lewinsky’s talk when it was first released. What I responded to most then was the personal experience of the shame that my mother and father used as a parenting technique for all of my 17 years at home. That feeling of being cast out, isolated, and laughed at for being a child, for expressing myself or for making a mistake, lingers in my nervous system. Brené Brown PhD describes shame as the feeling of being unworthy of belonging and love. It is the emotion with the lowest vibration. I’ve been dealing with it all my life using meditation, therapy and yoga.
I had been clearing out the pain and shadows from my psyche for decades before I experienced a modern day shaming. The experience of being cast out by an anonymous “Board” of the organization that I had served for most of my career resurrected emotional and physical wounds.
What had I done? I had posted an article by Karleen Gribble PhD on the organization’s Facebook page. It was an article about the experience of a person who had gone through gender transition surgery, and then, years later, regretted it and worked to recover their original gender expression. However, while this person was able to bear a child, they were unable to breastfeed because part of their transition was to have a bilateral mastectomy.
I had email dialogue with Dr. Gribble about the article; she told me that members of the LGBTQ community in Australia had vetted the article. What made this article particularly valuable, as so I thought, to our professional community, were the 4 professional recommendations made at the end of the article. I assumed that my colleagues would be interested in these interesting recommendations and that professional discussion would ensue.
Gribble KD, Bewley S, Dahlen HG. Breastfeeding grief after chest masculinisation mastectomy and detransition: A case report with lessons about unanticipated harm. Front Glob Womens Health. 2023 Feb 3;4:1073053. doi: 10.3389/fgwh.2023.1073053. PMID: 36817034; PMCID: PMC9936190.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36817034/
That did not happen. I was bewildered to receive an email a few months after posting the article from “The Board”, telling me to stop posting. I emailed the President of the Board, someone with whom I had worked for years (and for whom I am grateful still for her guidance in other areas of my work). She wrote back saying that she could no longer engage with me on this topic because her allegiance was to the Board.
What happened next was that I cast out from the organization by The Board. Every mention of me, every post I had ever made in my task of administering our organization’s public Facebook page was scrubbed. My existence in the organization was obliterated.
A Zoom meeting of the Board was held and I was invited to attend. I declined, feeling that it would be a public stoning without any advocate for me and my position.
I received the following email in 2023. “The Board reached a decision about the grievances after meeting on 4/24/23.Attached is the resolution and it was decided to revoke your membership.”
I asked to see the grievances. I received 2 unsigned documents. One set of grievances came from a former Board president, who cited events from 9 years earlier. I was as bewildered after seeing that email as I was before because the examples of my “misbehavior” made no sense. There was nothing egregious in those events.
This person also wrote: “During my tenure as President, board members discussed with me several times
ongoing concerns with her contributions to our social media page that were deemed to
be offensive, off putting or not presented in a manner to generate conversation but
instead appeared to be the viewpoint of our organization.”
I am administrator of another organization’s public Facebook page, and had been double-posting; everything posted on one Facebook page was also posted on the other. That organization was happy with my work, and still is as I continue in that role. More confusion.
Another set of grievances came from an anonymous member who was hurt and offended by questions that I had asked her privately. I had no idea that she had been sitting with those feelings for years. I understand her behavior. I have been guilty of it too. It is easier to complain about someone to other people than it is to give direct feedback.
She made this comment: “More recently, in 2023, Nikki posted an extremely transphobic case study about one person who transitioned and had top surgery, proceeded to detransition and regret her surgery because it prevented her from breastfeeding. The study was written by transphobic midwives based out of the UK and is abhorrent.”
There’s plenty posted on the internet that is awful.What happened to scrolling past something that one doesn’t like, and moving on? What happened to professional discussion and debate?
Recovery from this painful event took a few years, and even today, its harshness still echoes within my soul. When I read The Cancelling of the American Mind by Lukianoff and Schlott, I found peace and understanding. This book shed light on 21st century human behavior. I am not unique in having been cancelled; it is a cultural phenomenon.
“Cancel culture is just one symptom of a much larger problem: the use of cheap rhetorical tactics to “win” arguments without actually winning arguments. After all, why bother refuting your opponents when you can just take away their platform or career?” https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Canceling-of-the-American-Mind/Greg-Lukianoff/9781668019153
Being cancelled was not new to me. I had a similar experience in the late 1970s, when I was dancing in weekly rehearsals of the local Morris team with hopes of becoming a member and performing publicly. I was told privately by a team leader that not only was I being denied team membership, that I was not to attend any public performances of the Morris team. No explanation was given. My questions were met with “This is what the team wants.” I was bewildered and hurt.
It wasn’t until 20 years later that another member of the team told me the reason for my exclusion. At that time, I had been breastfeeding my 3 year old toddler anywhere we both happened to be, including dance practice. This offended and outraged the directors of the team, so much so that I was banished.
Had I been told the truth in the moment, I would have had options: change my behavior, or not, and accept the consequences. The directors didn’t do that; it was easier for them to take away my career.
Life is full of lessons. I have learned to speak to people privately when something they do or say confuses or disturbs me. I’ve learned ways to do that gently, with the intention of opening a door between us, of being curious and respectful. Compassion and empathy always work.
