Shame and Low Birth Rates -- Could there be a connection?
Nancy Hartevelt Kobrin, Ph.D.
Wikicommons Image: Japanese baby
Lack of Desire to Have Children
Lately I have been reading a lot about Korea and Japan’s low birth rates and their respective policy makers’ concerns. A series of reasons are usually proffered in order to explain the phenomenon. For ex. children are too expensive to raise, it takes a lot of time and energy to raise them, women are busy with their careers, etc. Yet deeper psychological studies have pointed to a different reason for the low birth rate -- depression. It has been named as a key contributor.
As a psychoanalyst who has been researching shame honor cultures for quite a while now and as someone who coined the phrase “shame honor families in the West,” depression does seem to present as a strong psychological reason. Depression carries the stigma of mental illness which has long been a taboo subject in shame honor cultures. People prefer to live their lives in denial. To even speak about depression, it is as if one could become depressed like a contagion. Yet should depression be the sole psychological “explainer” for low birth rates? Let’s now turn to the concept of shame within shame honor cultures.
Violence and Shame Honor Cultures
Shaming is the toxic tool to get children to behave in their families. It is exceedingly crippling for the soul of a young child to feel him or herself defective. Shaming practices are actually quite violent and destructive. I have written about this at length and refer you to my essay "The Violent Brutality of Growing Up in a Shame Honor Culture Predicated on the Destruction of the Mother and the Maternal Bond," which is downloadable here at my website.
Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma via Shaming Practices
Yet while I was writing the above essay, I had forgotten, indeed perhaps unconsciously to my embarrassment, to factor in one of the most important effects of shame namely how shame persists across generations if it goes unrecognized. Anne Ancelin Schutzenberger, the author of The Ancestor Syndrome: Transgenerational Psychotherapy and the Hidden Links in the Family Tree masterfully explains and demonstrates how unprocessed trauma recurs and echoes endlessly from generation to generation if it is not addressed.
In a way, unprocessed shame induced trauma becomes a kind of epigenetic inscription built into one's “personality armor” forged by the past in the present. Character armor is the psychological defensive demeanor covering over and hiding shame. It is all the more striking when one also considers the important role ancestors play in Asian cultures. Speech honorifics and its psychologically induced power structure of the hierarchy are linguistic manifestations of a throw over from ancient times all involving saving face i.e. shame.
Shame honor cultures transmit and value shaming practices in order to keep the collective going. Perhaps this is obvious but its “shaming tools” coerce its members into a tightly terrorized collective or what anthropologists like to call euphemistically a “collectivist” society. The collective is more important than the single person. In psychoanalytic jargon this fused group self is more important than the singular self. Notice that I hesitate to use the word “individual” because in shame honor cultures there is an unconscious social taboo against separating from the mother. Everyone is fused in one way or another and made to be dependent not self-sufficient. It is the rare person growing up in a shame honor culture who intuitively struggles to make it through the individuation separation stage from the devalued female who is now mother. This also happens in toxic families in the West.
Huge Unmet Needs, Killing the Capacity for Joy
In shame honor cultures its members have huge unmet needs. Why is this? Because it is very difficult to get one’s needs met in appropriate ways as there are no personal boundaries since the group is fused. Shame erases any attempt for a young person to set up his or her personal boundaries for personal security which is free from terror.
And so on, and so forth, thus shaming continues to be unconsciously transmitted across generations from ancestor to grandparent to parent to children. All of this is unspoken and unconscious causing a vicious sadomasochistic cycle – a manifestation of the repetition compulsion of the trauma of being shamed. (It is estimated that 94% of thinking is unconscious.)
The Underbelly of Low Birth Rates
Thus, the subject of depression which has been cited above has also become encapsulates within the personality. It is a creeping slow psychological “murder” of a child’s love of life. Children who study 12 hours a day and go to hagwon, i.e.cram schools, just to get ahead, have already become parentified children who have been forced to enter the adult rat race of a shame honor culture. They become burned out adults who have never learned how to enjoy life in order to create a new life as depression-free adults. Perhaps if Korea and Japan would like to see a rise in birth rates, it might be helpful to consider the role of shame in light of its impact across the generations. Denial of this could be the silent sign that shame continues to lurk in the shadows. Indeed, could it be that the greatest enemy of low birth rates is shame?
