Different Views
Women tend to view instances of sexual assault as examples of a systemic problem. Many males, however, listen to stories of sexual assault and hear isolated cases of women who need education and support.

While it’s tempting to attribute these differences to individuals, it’s valuable to realize that these are consistent and predictable roles in any hierarchy - whether it is based on gender, race, sexual orientation, wealth, or other criteria. Hierarchies are easiest to see when viewed from lower levels [in this case, females] and are difficult to see from the top [in this case, males].

Role Change
For a reality check of what’s truly fair and effective, let’s create a role change - a technique that often uncovers elusive hierarchies.

From 1993 to 2003, the United States encountered 142 attacks from terrorists who assaulted school children. The primary response by the military was to establish a network of advocates for children and their families, give children the option to report the attacks anonymously, and provide information to schools about how to obtain services following an assault. If the program included efforts to stop the terrorists, it doesn’t make the national news.

We’ve seen that military leaders can focus on perpetrators of violence when it’s terrorists. With sexual assault, however, this role change uncovers an opposite strategy - more attention on victims of violence [females] than on perpetrators [males].

Common Language
All of us participate in hierarchies - most have the common experience of being higher in some and lower in others. Therefore, when people can’t see the systemic hierarchies that create sexual assault, we can increase their awareness by pointing out the same political and social dynamics in another hierarchy they recognize.

We can use any of the thirty-two attitudes and behaviors that appear in most hierarchies (for a complete list, see www.cluelessatthetop.com). I’ll use three to illustrate how characteristics that effect sexual assault programs also support other hierarchies.

Characteristic #1: Lower people need fixing.

• An article discusses “battered women’s syndrome” but doesn’t mention a “battering men’s syndrome.”
• A man whose hairline is receding buys hair-recovery drugs and lotions, and feels he can’t leave home without his toupee.
• A teenage girl develops anorexia to “fix” her natural body. Her mother and aunts constantly talk about reducing diets.

Characteristic #2: People on the top are not accountable for the effects on lower groups.

• A police department’s rape prevention program offers self-defense classes for females, but no classes for males.
• When a girl confronts her friend’s homophobic comment, she is criticized by her peers.
• When the mother of a boy being bullied objects, her neighbors say her son just needs to toughen up, as “boys will be boys.”

Characteristic #3: Our “problems” support hierarchies, so we’ll have “problems” as long as we have hierarchies.

• A large number of unemployed/under-employed people is beneficial to a company looking to pay low wages.
• A governmental agency promotes drug sales in African-American neighborhoods to finance its own Central American military and espionage maneuvers.
• A United States president who launches a preemptive war depends on the belief that violence is a normal, necessary and manly way to deal with differences of opinion.

Alternatives
We can create effective solutions by reversing the specific hierarchical attitudes and behaviors we find. Here’s some examples using the same three characteristics:

Alternative #1: Lower people are valuable resources.
The primary role of military women moves from victim to resource. The men are trained to and expected to ask for, listen to, and act on women’s suggestions concerning what males can do to make the environment better for all. The results are assessed by both women and men (at least half women).

Alternative #2: People on the top are accountable for the effects on lower groups.
The military requires male staff at all levels to attend ongoing classes to reduce coercive and violent male behavior. A panel that includes a majority of females evaluates the results. Academy leaders publicly reward men who improve the culture for women and men.

Alternative #3: We remove the root, the source of our problems.
Professors use the academy’s sexual assault program as a case study for engineering/technology design classes (which many cadets take). These classes teach students how to define a problem correctly so that their solution will actually solve the problem. Using engineering design principles, the students determine: Have we defined the problem correctly in our sexual assault program, and if not, what needs to be changed?
With a new common language of hierarchies, males and females have a powerful tool to work together to remove the root, the source of problems that keep cropping up all around us. We can show that when we follow the predictable rules and roles of hierarchies, we only create more hierarchy. A hierarchical frame confirms that focusing on females has not and will not solve the problem of sexual assault.

Charlotte Childress, co-author of the book Clueless at the Top can be reached at www.clulessatthetop.com. She has volunteered for sexual assault prevention programs in Cincinnati, Ohio and Eugene, Oregon.

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Breaking the Shame Cycle – Moving Toward Empowerment

If we don’t actively intervene, shame can feed upon itself and pull us deeper into a pattern of negative thinking and behavior. David Decker describes the following cycle.

1. Something sets you off -- a shaming look or statement, a situation that triggers fears from childhood, some abusive or compulsive behavior on your part that makes you ashamed of yourself.
2. You over-react and slip into a despairing or hopeless thought process; your negative self-talk surfaces: Here I go again, I’ll never learn, What a jerk.
3. You move from reacting to your behavior to judging your core essence, viewing yourself as inadequate or defective.
4. You feel raw and unabated terror that you are powerless and immobilized.
5. You cannot bear this for long, so you hide behind masks or rely on defenses like control, blaming, denying and distorting.
6. This works only temporarily, and eventually, only creates more fear that the masks will be ripped away, the defenses revealed, exposing your worthless core.
7. Fear mounts, stress rises, and crying for relief, you act out again, this time more destructively or compulsively, triggering yet another round in the cycle, and a deepening sense of powerlessness and unworth.

The key to breaking the cycle is self-talk. Just as when you slow down and intervene in your escalation process, just as you re-frame your view of stressful situations, so you break the grip of the shame cycle. You slow it down, look at what you’re saying to yourself, and start changing your self-talk. Decker offers the following example.

1. As before, there’s a triggering event. Say your child forgets the house rules and leaves his shoes and toys in the middle of the living room. Coming home from a busy work day, you trip over them and yell and swear at Johnny, who cries.
2. You feel terrible and lapse into negative self-talk: There I go again, I’ll never learn.
3. But you’re aware of how you operate. You slow down and catch yourself. This is a bad time of day for you, and you’re mindful of all the stressors in your day pushing on this moment -- you’ve identified these things in your time-out plan.
4. You’re aware of your negative self-talk and how it’s contributing to the escalation. You listen to the actual words, and examine the thought distortions and unrealistic core beliefs behind them: the over-generalizing, catastrophizing, the belief that you have to be the perfect parent, that you can never make mistakes. This act of awareness robs the self-talk of some of its power.
5. You change your self-talk, make it more realistic and positive: I don’t like what I just did, I don’t have to behave this way, I made a mistake, I’m human, I’m over-reacting and not letting Johnny be a kid. You focus your comments on your behavior, not your core self.
6. This brings a sense of relief, in contrast to the terror of the shame cycle. You think, I have the confidence and ability to figure out what to do differently. Note that this is the opposite of shame-based thinking; it is the language of empowerment that assumes you have choices.
7. Instead of defenses, there’s recognition of responsibility. You think, What I need to do is apologize to Johnny and tell him my yelling wasn’t his fault. I need to be more aware of how frustrated I feel when I get home, and maybe take some time to relax.
8. You take care of yourself. You say, “Johnny, I’m sorry I was so mean when I got home today. It didn’t have anything to do with you. It was stuff that was bothering me from work. I’m going to start taking a walk after a bad day before I come home so I don’t blow up. I don’t want you to feel bad.” You feel empowered to make amends and set a new course. This is being pro-active rather than reactive.
9. You learn and let go, instead of spiraling into deeper shame. You think, I need to be more careful in the future about this situation, but I feel good about how I handled it with Johnny and what I’ll do differently next time. Empowered, you give yourself credit and forgive yourself, which leads to higher self-esteem, more self-respect and greater potential for future change.

Maybe the above process doesn’t happen in an instant; maybe it occurs after a time-out to cool down. But as you get more familiar with this approach – slowing down and examining your thought process and re-framing your view of situations through positive self-talk -- you will become more adept at it, be able to handle conflict in real-time, and the process will unfold almost instantaneously.

Shame and Empowerment – A Slightly Different Tack
– By Bob Anderson
(Note: The following builds on David Decker’s course but differs in that it treats shame, like anger, as a primary emotion, neither good nor bad in itself, but only as it is processed and expressed. It distinguishes between “shame” and “shame-based.”)

Shame
We all have shame. It’s a fundamental human emotion that lies at the heart of our identity. It affects who we are, how we develop, and how we relate to the world and achieve intimacy and community.

Our sense of shame -- wanting to feel good about ourselves, avoiding the feeling that we are somehow defective -- affects almost everything we do. It colors our internal self-talk process, and therefore influences how we express anger, escalate, manage stress and conduct relationships. Understanding shame is therefore an important part of anger management.

Like anger, our sense of shame is vital and useful, a signal that something is amiss and requires our attention -- some need is not being met, some value or boundary is being violated. But also like anger, a healthy sense of shame can be distorted. Shame can become so deeply ingrained in our personality, so central to how we respond to the world, that our identity and behavior become skewed. They are then said to be “shame-based.”

This can happen if we are excessively shamed as children, when we are vulnerable and lack the self-protective capabilities of adults. We may be ignored or abused, not treated as persons but objects, or given negative messages about ourselves. The sources of shame in our lives are many -- family, school, church, advertising, cultural role expectations, our own destructive behavior, etc. If we don’t learn to deal with shame constructively, our feelings, desires and behaviors can become so bound up with shame that we start to doubt our basic competence and value as human beings.

This core self-doubt can result in negative behavior patterns, such as the need to over-control or be perfect, an inability to finish anything, or a compulsion to blame or denigrate others or prove one’s own superiority. It can also result in serious addiction in an effort to numb that sense of unworth at the core.

We want to avoid that feeling at all costs; this need drives and distorts much of our behavior. Men are conditioned to be strong; feelings of sadness, vulnerability, fear or powerlessness are threatening. Anger, a more acceptable masculine emotion, often masks these other, more questionable feelings; it often derives its destructive energy from pent-up shame.

It’s important, therefore, to let yourself feel your shame -- not to identify with it, but simply to experience it, let it flow through you, know it for what it is, and let it go. That, in itself, can be liberating and healing.

Until we learn what shame is, how it functions in our lives, where it comes from, how to recognize and deal with its distortions, and how to break the shame cycle that has become so deeply ingrained in our behavior -- until, in short, we move toward empowerment -- we cannot deal adequately with our anger.

Empowerment
When you act in an empowered way, you don’t need to hide from yourself and the world; you don’t need to protect yourself by relying on a battery of defenses, or by escaping into addictive, compulsive or destructive behaviors.

You can be open, vulnerable and real because, at the core, you believe in yourself and your capacity to act responsibly and constructively. You make mistakes, you’re human, but you have the capability, relying on your own inner resources and working with other people, to make things right.

This is an adult view of the world based on not hiding, taking responsibility, not shirking from accountability. The shame-based approach, by contrast, is childish. It assumes you are weak and powerless and flawed -- that you cannot be known for who you are because that would leave you exposed, revealed in your weakness and worthlessness.

The shame-based way of living, therefore, requires masks and disguises, conformity, playing the game, and a whole arsenal of defenses -- minimizing, justifying, blaming, etc. -- to protect the vulnerable self. It shrinks from responsibility and accountability. It holds back, is silent, lets things happen, blames others, anything to avoid responsibility.

You can learn how to break the shame cycle and move toward empowerment. Giving you the knowledge, tools and attitudes to accomplish this is one of the purposes of the Men Helping Men with Anger program. Like everything else in this course, what you learn here is only one of many steps in a life-long learning and healing process. You will come back to these lessons many, many times, each time experiencing and understanding them at a deeper level.