Why do some young people exhibit this behaviour, and how to respond therapeutically
What if the most effective way to reduce harmful sexual behaviour in young people isn’t tougher punishment, but deeper connection? I sat down with Alan Jenkins, renowned practitioner and author of Becoming Ethical: A Parallel Political Journey With Men Who Have Abused, and Invitations to Responsibility, to unpack why isolating kids often fuels the very behaviours we fear. Drawing on decades of practice at the Mary Street program, Alan shares how shame, when held with care, becomes a compass for ethical connection—and how guilt alone rarely moves the needle.
Harmful sexual behaviour among children is typically framed as a problem inside the child, but the deeper story lives in connection, culture and shame. Alan Jenkins argues that when young people feel like nobodies—disconnected, judged, and stripped of worth—they become vulnerable to behaviours that masquerade as connection. Punitive systems then isolate them further, compounding panic and shame and driving the very cycles we hope to stop. Real change begins when adults stop fixating on the behaviour alone and start rebuilding safe, supervised opportunities for belonging, where worth is recognised and curiosity can be guided rather than condemned.
In school settings, the default response has often been suspension and silence. Jenkins describes patterns where communities avoid facing harm: staff split into camps, rape jokes leak into break rooms, the victim is ostracised, and bystanders are ignored. This shame-avoidant culture communicates that the community cannot bear the truth, so it is erased. By contrast, a whole-of-school approach acknowledges impact, centres safety and dignity, and creates space for ethical learning. When kids can speak without being crushed by judgment, they begin to see the other person’s experience. That moment of seeing is not an imposed confession; it is a shift born of imminent shame, the felt realisation of “What have I done?” which anchors a genuine ethical compass.
Jenkins differentiates shame from guilt with surgical clarity. Guilt, he says, is largely cognitive and too easily tidied away by punishment or forgiveness. Shame, when borne safely, carries affective force: it alerts us to boundary violations and sustains ethical restraint. The work is to separate mistaken, imposed shame—messages of worthlessness—from imminent shame that arises when a child recognises harm. Practitioners should not coerce this awakening; they cultivate it by honouring the child’s protests, strengths and history of sticking up for others. As mistaken shame eases, the capacity to see the other grows, and repair becomes possible.
Many children arrive steeped in isolation, sometimes with driven curiosity shaped by prior exposure to sexual material or harm. Sexual behaviour can feel like low-demand “connection” that offers a counterfeit of closeness, competence or status, especially amid cultural scripts that conflate sex with dominance and success. Online pornography provides a blueprint for objectification at scale. Against this tide, interventions must privilege supervised connection, community accountability and language that restores dignity. Asking “Why did you do it?” rarely works; it signals adult discomfort more than child insight and sends the message “you are what you did,” which entrenches avoidance.
Supervision and practitioner care matter as much as technique. Urgency from workers is felt as demand and invites resistance; ethical practice asks us to notice our own panic and shame and to align our actions with the respect we hope clients will show others. Jenkins calls this the parallel journey: if we want a young person to consider the impact of their actions, we must consider the impact of ours. By trading moral pressure for ethical curiosity, we help children integrate stories of courage and loyalty already present in their lives, and from that ground, face the reality of harm. Seeing the other is the start of repair; connection is the condition that makes that sight possible.
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Colby: 0:00
Hello and welcome to the Secure Star podcast.
Alan: 0:05
And it’s my view that it’s the difficulties we have in understanding children’s sexual behavior and the difficulties in managing shame and responding to shame that keep these problems going rather than there being something particularly wrong with kids. The thing that we discovered in this work is that when children are feeling disconnected, they don’t feeling they don’t belong, they’ve got serious problems with connection when they’re feeling that they’re nobodies, that they don’t matter, that their lives don’t have much worth. These are conditions really where children are very vulnerable to engaging in harmful sexual behavior. The focus is put almost in some situations solely on the actual sexual behavior itself. When the issue is about connection and worth, shame helps us be attuned to the possibility of a violation of the boundaries of the other. See the other for the first time. And that’s that’s a form of otherness that to me, the antithesis of violence is really sort of a passionate interest in otherness. If we are hoping the person we’re working with will stop and think about the experience of the other, particularly the other, what does that mean if we don’t stop and think about their experience of the other? That sensitivity to the experience of the other, that helps us set limits, that helps us respect boundaries, that helps us form a discretion where we know where to trade or where not to tread. Guilt doesn’t have much effective force. Guilt is more a cognitive idea. I think guilt is often a shame avoidance thing. If I’m a client somewhere and my therapist starts to tell me what I should think or how I should, I should resist that. I should stick up for myself. That person has no right to do that. And I hear that statement, I didn’t hurt her. And I hear more than just a denial in that or a minimization. I hear this person probably has some sense of what hurt does.
Colby: 2:38
Hello and welcome to the Secure Star podcast. I’m Colby Pierce, and joining me for this episode is a highly respected former psychotherapist in my own hometown. Before we begin our conversation, I’d just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land we are both coming to you from, the Ghana people of the Adelaide Plains, and acknowledge the continuing connection the living Ghana people feel to land, waters, culture, and community. I’d also like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging. My guest this episode is Alan Jenkins. Alan has worked in a range of multi-undisciplinary teams addressing violence and abusive behaviours for more than 35 years. Rather than tire from the work, he has become increasingly intrigued with possibilities for the discovery of ethical, respectful, and accountable ways of relating. The valuing of ethics, fairness, and the importance of protests against injustice has led him to stray considerably from the path prescribed in his early training as a psychologist towards a political analysis of abuse. Alan’s most recent publication is Becoming Ethical: A Parallel Political Journey with Men Who Have Abused, published in 2009. Alan was the director of NADA, an independent service that provided intervention in family abuse, violence, and workplace harassment. He managed the Mary Street program for young people who have engaged in harmful sexual behaviour along with their caregivers and communities. And so much more. So, Alan, welcome to the Secure Start podcast. You refer to multi-undisciplinary teams. And I wonder if you’d just um tell us a little bit about what an undisciplinary team, multi-undisciplinary team is.
Alan: 5:27
Well, the teams like the Mary Street program and various um teams that I’ve managed, uh we are somewhat anarchic, I think, in our in our nature. We we uh we we tended to often take exception to some of the uh the kind of rules and imperatives and expectations about what a team should be, even even who should compromise it. Like we we tended to employ people because we thought they were really good at what they did rather than because they were of a particular profession or something that fitted. Um and I like the idea of people in a team that I’m in being innovative and experimental and trying out new things rather than being caught in a certain dogma uh that they were free to improvise. And we would work together, like we had a form of accountability, I think, that was really present. But I loved I loved it when people went off script and tried something new and shared it, and we often we developed a lot of exciting projects from that kind of notion. And I suppose it’s a bit of a take on the idea of a multidisciplinary team, which we were somewhat undisciplined.
Colby: 6:58
Yeah, yeah. I Alan, um, the other thing I would say is that as a psychologist, I kind of grew up in the knowledge of your work and in the knowledge of you uh practicing the profession. Um, well, I I won’t I I I’ll let you decide whether what you were practicing whether you were practicing psychology uh um or or something more um inclusive, I guess, uh of of various traditions. But suffice to say, I grew up as a psychologist aware of your work and um and in particular I think the one of your initial writings, uh Invitations to Responsibility. Um that’s going back. That’s going back. And that was and that was uh a publication that um related to your work with men who committed domestic violence.
Alan: 7:56
Yeah, it’s interesting. I I suppose it fits with the idea of the multi-undisciplinary, and the I never felt a very strong sense of belonging in the psychology fraternity, or it was largely a fraternity. Um and uh like I came into this work through more politics, through more a political understanding of how the world works. And of course, I began in the 70s, you know, when there was a time of uh political change and upheaval, and uh issues of uh family violence, of sexual assault were being named, and uh, you know, a woman’s movement was being developed. And to me, this was really exciting, and and it felt to me a political analysis of behavior around sexual violence, physical violence was far more helpful than a psychological analysis, which seemed to locate problems within people, within people’s either pathology psychopathology or deviance or whatever, where to me the work I saw was intensely political rather than psychological. Um yeah, yeah, so uh uh I I I I I look back at I to make sense out of it with this particular topic around harmful sexual behavior and children. I mean, we we set up the Merry Street program because we noticed um that a large percentage of children experiencing sexual harm, that harm was done by another child. You know, in fact, it in our experience back then we thought it was probably around 40 to 50 percent of what we knew about, and we didn’t have very good data generally in the community. And but it struck me as that the problems were not within these children, you know, there’s not something that you you know, people tended to think about it. Well, what’s wrong with that child, or why is that child doing that? The problem was much more within the networks, the sort of communities, well, I tend to call them the assemblages of uh the links between people and ideas and institutions that really had very limited understanding. They were very reactive to children’s behavior. And they with with this harmful sexual behavior, there was either a tendency to want to pretend it wasn’t there, you know, they’re not really, you know, and that’s a sense of shame. You know, we don’t want to see this, this we can’t bear this, that this is happening, or more recently, as it’s become more known about, to start to weaponize shame and to act in shaming ways, which uh um really are quite judgmental and and punitive towards children. So I I guess I’m interested in the politics of those networks and how they actually operate and what they do. And it’s my view that it’s the difficulties we have in understanding children’s sexual behavior and the difficulties in managing shame and responding to shame that keep these problems going rather than there being something particularly wrong with kids.
Colby: 11:46
And would you say that that’s the least well understood uh aspect of uh harmful sexual behaviours amongst children and young people? Or would you say that there are there are other aspects that are also very not well understood?
Alan: 12:04
I would say that’s the main thing that maintains that keeps harmful sexual behaviour going. And perhaps to look at like I guess some of these realizations, I uh it’s probably about over 40 years ago now. Gosh, it’s going back. Um, but I would we had the Mary Street program established, and I would have a number of referrals there from schools where where there’d been a sexual assault or a harmful sexual act taken place within a school community. And and and usually these were they might have been 12, 13-year-old boys generally, who it was generally uh a girl who uh was subject to that behavior. And you know, I’d have situations arise where I’ll try and combine examples so I don’t identify any particular school or anything, but um it you know it might be a uh 11, 12-year-old boy who’d um sexually assaulted a girl on the school oval, and there may have been a group of bystanders who had watched and had done nothing. And the school’s response typically was that they would in those days they would suspend the boys for perhaps four weeks and they’d contact us to see what we could do about it. But say, in the meantime, in this school, probably what tended to happen is there would be very little facing of what the impact of this was in a school community. So, like for example, it might be that the boy suspended uh was the local football hero. The school lost the grand final, and gradually the girl was ostracised within the school and almost seemed she was the problem that had caused. Um, and the girl would have to leave the school, you know, and go somewhere else. And I would go to the school and I would kind of notice shame, like I would notice that shame, but shame avoidance, people trying to erase it to try and try and rub it out or make things go back to normal. I’d I’d like I’d meet with the teachers group and I’d you know I’d find about say a third of the teacher group uh might be really hostile about the boy and what he’d done. Another third had the sort of attitude, oh, you know, boys will be boys, this sort of thing happens, you know, get on with it. Um and another third, perhaps in between somewhere like that. But I noticed in in a couple of these schools that rape jokes started to be present in the staff room. Like I see a school that was just not dealing with the impact of this in their community, like that girls were feeling unsafe in this place. What about the boys who witnessed this and were bystanders and did nothing? What how are they experiencing that? What you know, what looking at what’s happening in this school, people are saying, you know, or uh communicating in a way that we we can’t bear this, make it go away, let’s get back to normal. Let’s you know, there was that attitude of a sort of a shame avoidance of uh wanting to uh uh to just pretend this didn’t happen and it hasn’t had any impact. And of course, I I found well, how could you intervene in a school like that without having a whole school culture that started to look at what’s happened here? Yeah, which was quite a challenge in a number of schools. But then, you know, we we gradually started to have people take harmful sexual behavior and sexual assault more seriously. And then, and then of course you you start to find if you get what you wish for, sometimes you go and I look at current times where attitudes towards kids who engage in harmful sexual acts have become quite punitive, have become isolating of children, have become uh, you know, uh judgmental, of setting up forensic assessments that kind of almost demonize children, and um, you know, in in many ways have tended to our capacity to respond to this behavior has always been and still is extremely limited, extremely reactive, and often serves to simply reproduce the conditions that lead to that kind of behavior in the first place, where kids are feeling they’re uh judged, ordered, they’re nobodies, they’re disconnected from their peers. And of course, uh the thing that we discovered in this work is that when children are feeling disconnected, they don’t feeling they don’t belong, they’ve got serious problems with connection uh when they’re feeling that they’re nobodies, that they don’t matter, that their lives don’t have much worth. These are conditions really where children are very vulnerable to uh engaging in harmful sexual behaviour.
Colby: 17:56
Yes, uh it’s that um that that that observation of the importance of connection and disconnection, I guess that’s really um stood out for me in reading about your views about harmful sexual behaviors. I do remember going back 30 years or so, that um research into adult harmful sexual behaviour or pedophilia basically taught the the importance of connection was known, at least perhaps in some in some places. I think there were program there was a program in New Zealand that I remember hearing about in my in my training that um saw connection as being really important in um a really important mediating variable, for want of a better way of putting it, in um sexual uh uh sexual or harmful sexual behaviors or in fact pedophilia um amongst adult men.
Alan: 18:59
Yeah, but in fact, there’s a reasonable amount of evidence around now that if you’re going to intervene and make a difference with these groups of men, that uh the establishment of support circles they’re often called, or that that uh uh structures that provide a connectedness and that uh are one of the critical factors that if that’s not there, um many of these programs are quite ineffective. And when it comes to children, particularly children as they’re uh developing, some of the uh some of the notions that like what often happens when a when a it’s discovered or it emerges that a child is engaged in a you know in a sexual act that has the potential for harm, that the responses that we have are well they’re not responses, they’re they’re reactions. Like the first thing that’s put to a kid is um, why did you do it? What’s wrong with you? How could you? Now the children don’t know why they did that, they can’t answer that question, and when they don’t answer, somehow it’s almost seen as evasive, or they won’t talk, or or get the forensic expert to find out what’s wrong with you. But the message a child gets in that situation is that they what they’re hearing is that you’re disgusting. You are what you did, um you’re bad. And so that question of why did you do it, it reflects a lot more about adults’ difficulty in accepting that this behavior happens in the first place. It’s our own shame avoidance in a sense that has us, you know, uh, we can’t bear it. Why did you do it? As though there’s something that will reveal a magical answer here. Um and of course, the the next thing that happens is the child’s told to stop doing it. But it’s stopped doing it on our terms, it uh it with an urgency that we put, and for many children, they’re not quite able to just simply make that decision to stop doing it. So the message they get is that they’re not trying or that they’re being deceptive. In other words, you kids being told you’re weak, you know, that you know there’s something wrong with you. And then the the third message is really to stay away from other children. You know, so in the name of a safety plan, uh a child is um often often safety plans are set up and there’s no There’s no taking account of the fact that what this child needs is opportunities for connection. They might need to be supervised opportunities. They might need to be opportunities that have some guidance with them. But very often children are isolated. And the message they get is that you know you’re dangerous. You know, stay away from other children. You’re not wanted here in a sense. A message of disconnection. And so we we tend to have children in that situation becoming increasingly disconnected and isolated, and increasingly feeling that there’s something bad about them. And when a kid feels I don’t belong and I don’t matter, that’s a very dangerous, a very vulnerable, I guess, context to uh to place a child in.
Colby: 23:01
And then expect them to behave.
Alan: 23:04
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And so, you know, you wind up with with children who becoming increasingly dysregulated, you know, their sense of you know, when when kids, when any of us are not fitting in or are not connecting, we panic. You know, there’s a there’s a panic loss that’s that’s felt. And then when we feel well, there’s we’re judged, there’s something wrong with us, then shame becomes apparent. And those two panic and shame, those two affects, when they’re dysregulated and kids are desperate to avoid them, um yeah, we we have all sorts of problems.
Colby: 23:47
I love hearing what you’re talking about. I think it’s um re so relevant in a number of endeavors. I’ve already just touched on um adult um sexual uh problematic sexual behavior, including pedophilia. Um but even in the child protection system, um the judgment and and shame that is um incurred um by birth parents really, I guess flies in the face. I’ve long felt that it flies in the face of what we know to be the most powerful regulating influence over people’s behavior, and that is their connection with their connection with themselves and who they are, their connection with the significant people around them, and their connection with the community. And it’s community attitudes and mores and the desire to maintain connection that is a powerful regulating influence.
Alan: 24:49
Yeah, and and that connection is the central uh the panic about loss of connection is probably the biggest animating factor in uh in leading to inappropriate uh harmful kind of connections that that children try to make. I mean, I think people this is this is one of the problems now is that um there’s a tendency to want to forensically examine children and sort of categorize their sexual behavior on what do they call them, continuum, they’re not really continuums, but they’re called continuums from uh normal to moderately harmful to like the focus is on the sexual behavior itself, rather than on looking at what’s happening for that child in terms of their levels of connection with others and and their sense of their capac of sufficiency, of worth, you know, of competence. Uh these are the things that we need to be assessing, and yet they seem to be the focus is put almost in some situations solely on the actual sexual behavior itself, when the when the issue is about connection and worth.
Colby: 26:20
Is it too simple to say it’s about um what’s regulating and what’s dregulating the children?
Alan: 26:29
No, well uh that when when panic and shame become dysregulated, when they uh um perhaps if I look at what we learned about children at Mary Street, we um we soon discovered as we started to listen to children, which was a novel concept of the time, rather, to react to their behavior. Um, you know, we and when children felt safe, you know, when they felt we were not going to be coming down and judging them and uh relegating them as losers in the loser bin, um, we discovered that most most kids, the pathway to inter harmful sexual behavior was generally curiosity. It was generally something that you know we think kids should be curious, they should be interested in the world and looking out. And sometimes it was driven curiosity, like when a child had been exposed to some sort of well, you you know, you you could have a child that had been exposed to um sexually harmful behavior themselves by uh by another, or you could have a child that had been exposed to some sort of sexual stimuli of some kind, or that they were not able to make a whole lot of sense of in a way. I mean, that leaves an affective impression with a kid, and and um so sometimes the curiosity was somewhat driven. But we noticed that it was for the kids that we saw, they were kids who presented. They were isolated, they were they were they had very little secure connection, often even within their families sometimes. But um, and they they felt, you know, so their sense of panic around that was high. And this and the sense of shame, they were steeped in shame, they would kind of be almost folded up into themselves, and any mention of their behavior would just fold them up even more. And and we looked at how kids, it wasn’t anything about a desire to uh intrude or a desire to uh harm, or you know, most kids in that situation are quite vulnerable to forms of connection that have low social demand. Um and and of course, sexual behavior is is exactly it masquerades as connection. It um and it’s not surprising that a vulnerable or a younger child will become targeted in this. And if you if you ask a kid, you know, why you chose that person, and when they’re in a space where they can be honest about that, they’ll say something like, well, he or she was easy, you know. Um and uh the interesting thing is often in a safe space as that say that, you’d see a different kind of shame emerge, the realization that what I did was take advantage. And that’s a very different, which we can talk about later on, I guess, form of of disgrace that that’s felt, that that’s quite ethical, you know, sort of seeing that other child. But coming back to what I was saying, the um the vulnerability to these kinds of forms of of connection that masquerade, and they masquerade as connection, they masquerade as uh things that build competence. And of course, the thing we don’t look at, you know, we can be shocked at children engaging in this behavior, but we don’t look at the fact that this doesn’t arise out of the blue. Well, you know, we have a a cultural sexual history in in our communities that that conflates sex, particularly for males, with success, with conquest, with dominance, um, you know, with intimacy, yeah, sex as an anaesthetic, how to deal with troublesome and worrying feelings, you know, sexual behavior. And and of course, we’ve got on the uh the internet, we’ve got blueprints for how to objectify, how to do objectifying sex or how to do sexual harm are freely available to kids. So, I mean, you know, it it’s it’s hardly surprising to me that um these forms of behavior emerge in this kind of situation. And of course, if we if we don’t understand that or we don’t find ways where we can be responsive to that, uh we we wind up becoming judgmental, we subject these kids to the same social hierarchical order that causes the problem in the very first place. You know, our efforts to try and intervene in a problem very frequently uh exacerbate that that particular problem.
Colby: 31:57
Yes. There’s a lot I could say about that, but Alan, I want to pick up something that I think you said that was really important just a moment ago, which what’s really important I think to pick it up, which is that um when when confronted with the their reasons for why they why the children um identified a certain target, there was there was uh a reaction that reflected a sense of of personal ethics about um about how you you treat others, which I think which I would I just wonder what your thoughts are about how surprising that would be for people to know that that that notwithstanding that they’ve engaged in harmful sexual behaviour, there’s there’s that reaction to their own behavior.
Alan: 32:59
Can I answer that with a story?
Colby: 33:02
You can.
Alan: 33:04
One that is uh not a specific case, but um well I’ll I’ll I’ll make it a combination of uh of uh so there’s nobody identified, I’ll combine it because it it’s typical and it cut it cuts right to the very question you’re asked asking. Because these are typical of kids that are we’re referred to Mary’s too. They might be 11, 12, 13-year-old, and that harmed a child. Uh perhaps it was in in daycare, you know, where this kid had been in a number of placements. Actually, we’ll make him we’ll make him an aboriginal kid uh in in this situation, who um was seen when when when he’s referred, he’s seen as um he’s uncooperative. He he’s he’s done this terrible act to this little child, and he won’t talk about it. He in fact, you know, he doesn’t say he didn’t do it, but he just doesn’t say anything, you know. He doesn’t seem to care. Um he’s had all these forensic assessments over time that suggest, and as I read the as I read them, I I see words like sex offender, you know, I see words like uh uh lacking in empathy, I see self-centered, I see um uh and eventually I see the word conduct disorder, which seemed to be a kind of a nice rubbish bit to put to put somebody who didn’t fit anywhere else in. This we’ll we’ll we’ll say this particular kid will will he’s perhaps been removed from his family when he was, you know, eight years old. Um he’s been in about five different placements. In some, he’s actually been subjected to abuse himself. He’s had to be pulled out of the placements. Um he’s uh uh his school reports are really interesting because he he starts off at school when he’s not learning, you know, and he um and they wonder why, and you know, and they they don’t think that maybe something with his style of learning doesn’t fit here, and that he’s being racially harassed every day as well. But but he’s seen initially as having a learning problem, and they bring in the experts, and that doesn’t work, and then he’s seen as having some sort of perhaps emotional difficulty, and then he’s seen as having a bad attitude, and then he’s seen as having a conduct, as it were, in the end, and uh and he’s he’s aggressive because he’s always in fights with other kids, you know. And I meet this kid, and and he’s he’s steeped in shame, like he’s you know, like a Francis Bacon painting, it’s sort of almost folding in on it as though it might disappear, you know, like um, and um of course I’m not gonna ask him about the sexual harm of this child. I but but but I became a bit interested that um he got into a lot of fights, and you know, and I I find myself a bit intrigued with the kids we meet with because protest is something like from my early political days, protest was kind of the central political thing that I thought was important. And I saw this kid, and I asked him, I started to ask him a bit about whether, you know, we got talking into whether he’d stuck up for himself, and and a lot of his fights at school, you know, were you know, were in there was an element of protest. Yeah, there was more than protest. I mean, he sometimes did some kind of mean things himself, but but there was an element of protest there that I became interested in, and we talked about sticking up for yourself when things feel unfair, and um you know, and I talked a bit in my life about sticking up for things. I kind of agree with stuff like that. And then I just started to become interested in like he’d he’d got through these five placements, he’d been taken away from his family as a little kid, you know. Um, and I and I discovered that as a seven-year-old, he um he’d tried to, his dad had left, his mum had a real big alcohol problem and couldn’t manage things in the family. And as a seven-year-old, he he he would go out and get food, he would look after his younger siblings, he would try and look after his mum. When a man came into the house and um was gonna hurt his mum, he would try and stick up for his mum, and and sometimes this guy would kind of uh call him a waste of space and knock him away when he tried. And of course he felt he felt ashamed, he felt he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t, he couldn’t look after his mum, he couldn’t, he he just wasn’t, he couldn’t manage it. Um but I also became really interested in why he tried to stick up, why he tried to do those things, and I started to learn because he loved his mum, you know, he really he he he saw his siblings, they needed him, you know, to to get food and stuff like that. And so, you know, we we we and this to me is where shame comes into this because we hold we hold the sort of shame he felt at not being able to, you know, stand up to these men to be able to manage looking after his family and things like that as a little boy, but we also hold this the story that he he tried to protect his mom, he’s he made sacrifices at times, you know. He and I I became really interested in why he did that and why that was important and what that said about him, you know. And so we’re having these kind of stories that help to resettle, you know, instead of trauma being processed and winding up with all it says is that you’re a shameful, worthless person, culpable person, that there’s something else about this young man. Of course, what happens then is you can have all sorts of other conversations, and that’s where this in coming to your question about other forms of shame, of how they work. And I discovered, I discover with this boy, we we start to talk about something comes up around the girl that he’d abuse, and then I noticed his head falls, he folds in on himself, he’s clearly feeling you know, feeling intense shame. And I say, I ask him, What are you what are you seeing? What’s going on? And he says to me, he says, she was only a little kid. And I said to him, and that’s not you, is it to pick on a little kid? You know, you’ve tried to stick up for little kids in your life, and he started to cry. And um, and I’m full of wonder because I’m thinking, how the hell is this boy who’s been through all of this crap, who’s been done to most of his life, who’s not really had anyone stick up for him much? How is he able to stop and feel ashamed about what he did to that little girl? How is he able to find that when he’s had so much done to him? How has he been able to survive the five placements? How has he been able to try and do his best to look after his mum and stuff like that? Now, I that form of shame that he feels at that moment is transformative. That form of shame is imminent. It’s not coming from being judged as lesser than, it’s coming from a sense, my God, what have I done? How could I have done that? It’s an imminent form it’s an imminent form of disgrace. And it’s really what shame is there for. Shame is there to help us to kind of establish boundaries, to establish, to establish, it’s part of establishing connection with others. Shame helps us be attuned to the possibility of a violation of the boundaries of the other. Shame is about connection. Shame is the shadow of love in that particular kind of notion. And here’s here’s this boy, despite everything he’s been through, he’s able to see that little girl. Shame enables, that kind of shame enables us to see the other, to see the other for who that and and when we do that, if we can help a child or an adult, whoever it is, to hold that in a way, what does it mean that this boy has been able to stop and to be able to see the harm that he’s done, to be able to see that child, to be able to see the other? What would it say if that boy could see what he’d done to the other and he didn’t feel bad? What would that say about him? Yeah, this is about integrity in a way. And and now, obviously, in working with children, I’m really mindful of not overloading them with a kind of a um that bit by bit, um, when some of that what I call mistaken shame, you know, the shame that’s attributed by others, you’re not good enough, you’re too fat, you’re this, you’re not man enough or whatever, the kind of uh that children become oversensitized to and dysregulate. This when that is managed a bit, then a more imminent form of shame, I think, is uh able to be accessed. In fact, I don’t need to bring it up. Uh I don’t shame. If I put shame onto that kid, or if I tell him, you know, you’ve got to face up to what you’ve done, you’ve got a man up here, well, that is a shaming intervention. But if he’s in a space where He’s recognized what he believes in. He’s tried to stick up for his family. He’s tried to tries to stick up for himself in fights. In fact, he has stories of sticking up for others. When there’s something ethical comes forward about that, then inevitably he will be more likely to experience that kind of imminent shame, that sense of disgrace that comes from you’re able to see the other. You’re able to, and that moves you in a way uh which is consistent with ethical connection. So I hope that makes sense. I’m trying to sort of move into a space with a story that looks at shame in that way.
Colby: 44:47
Look, it make it makes perfect sense to me. Um I do wonder that, well, there’s there were so many questions I could ask, but one was, um how would you respond? I guess, and this is a question without notice, and I apologize for that, but the people who refer have a very have a very clear idea or very clear expectations about what they think you should be doing when you accept the referral. And so in these circumstances, often enough, what people would expect you to talk to the young person about their behaviour in therapy. And um and yet, and I totally agree with you, the therapeutic work is not done through through directly addressing that behavior head-on to the exclusion of anything else. The therapeutic work is about is to get to know, have a much more complete understanding of the young person or child, and acknowledgement of the kinds of things that you’re talking about. And in those circumstances, the child is uh is often, if not always, able to accept um that what they did went against their own sense of personal ethics or of ethics. Um and and there you said there’s a there’s a transformative shame associated with that. So there’s kind of two questions in there. What do you say when people say you should be talking about that? Um and maybe what you also think is um the tr is the transformation that occurs with that shame.
Alan: 46:36
See, I’m when it comes to uh repositioning shame, I’m interested in how to uh how to deal with the mistaken shame, with the you know, that little boy who’s tries to help his mum, his dad knocks him aside, says you’re a waste of space. How how do we find, how do we acknowledge that shame is there? He feels he’s not capable, he’s not up to it, he’s not good enough. But there’s also more to him, as I said. There’s something about his efforts in trying and his uh his courage, his loyalty, and so we’re we’re looking at creating a space that is relevant to him, not what I want him to do, not that I want him to face up to what he’s done because that’s what he should do, that’s my moral imperative for him. I’m interested in what he’s capable of. And I’m interested in the fact that if he is in a space where he can identify that he does value, he values fairness, he tries to stick up for himself, he um he values loyalty, he loves his mum, he misses her incredibly. He might have a grandma somewhere who has had his back in the past that’s been really helpful. Um, and out of bringing forward or helping to name, that there’s more to him than him being a loser. There’s more to him than him feeling ashamed, that he’s not good enough. In fact, there’s strivings that he has, that out of that will probably come some awareness that this behavior is not okay, that he’s engaged in. And he will he will see that, like this boy did. Um, he will he will have a moment where he notices, like, like I I see that with you know with with adults who’ve hurt their children, you know, like who know that that behavior’s wrong, but then there’s a moment sometimes where thinking of one particular man who uh was really trying hard to forge a less aggressive kind of relationship with his son, you know, and he was at an access visit, and he went to shake his son’s hand in a moment of wanting to show respect for something his son had done. And the son saw the hand coming and flinched. Yeah. But this man saw the flinch. For the first time, he saw his son’s fear and that these moments they don’t come from somebody dictating, you know, you’ve got to face up to what you’ve done to your boy. They come from an imminent sense, from a they come from that form of shame that is uh that kind of enables the seeing, I see the other for the first time. And that’s that’s a form of otherness that like to me, the antithesis of violence is really, you know, sort of a passionate interest in otherness. If we become interested in the other, and we we need to do that out of our own ethics, we can’t have somebody tell us you should be interested in the other, um, then the possibilities for that arising are present. And that that is purely ethical. It’s not moral, it’s not exp, yeah, it’s not you know, sort of pushed from outside or demanded or as an imperative. It’s something that’s imminent that that arises. And even some of the most, you know, the the kids that seem to be you know limited in their capacities around thinking or whatever, the sense of being able to see the other is something you can generally engage with uh if there’s a respectful and resonant connection there. You know, that what it it’s really based on if we if we are hoping the person we’re working with will stop and think about the experience of the other, particularly the other that they’ve heard. What does it mean if we don’t stop and think about their experience of us? There’s something in the nature of the relate, there’s a parallel journey that we’re on here. And if we start to expect, well, there’s a cartoon I love which um uh I think it’s Kathy Wilcox, um, and it’s got a got a child talking to the parent, and the the child saying, How come it’s evil and underhanded when they do it, but heroic and wonderful when we do it? And the parent says, without missing a beat, what part of us and them don’t you understand? And uh and and and and I kind of think um, you know, this this to me about a relationship we have with a whether it’s an adult or a child, um, it’s not what we say, it’s what we do that is relevant here. And if I’m hoping that the man I’m working with or the boy I’m working with um will realize something about the impact of his actions upon another, then I want to be absolutely attuned to the impact of my actions upon this child. Uh otherwise it’s a kind of a uh it’s an overload. It’s uh it’s somehow expecting something that we’re not providing. And to me, the that that is a critical part, I think, of well, I think of any therapeutic work in any field, to be honest.
Colby: 52:57
Yeah. We’ve you’ve talked about shame. Another um emotion that is prominent, I guess, you could call it emotion, you could call it a process, I guess, as well as guilt. And I wonder how you would distinguish the relative places of shame and guilt.
Alan: 53:17
Yeah, yeah. So that’s a good question because because guilt gets tossed around. Guilt is sort of shame-light. Um the to understand something about shame, like from the place I come from is really uh uh affect theory and the people like Tompkins Panksap Shaw, who kind of a neuroaffective science mob who I think have that have the clearest understanding of that, and they see panic, panic loss, they see shame often working together as kind of primary affect systems. They’re the systems that animate behavior. If we’re looking at at, you know, Spinoza talked about um bodies connecting, he talked about the canatus of a body, which is its uh uh its tendency, its capacity to endure, to exist, to continue to continue its own existence. And it’s through connection with other bodies affect and be affected by other bodies. Now, if we look at how bodies move in an assemblage or in a network, how they connect, um, there are politics that set directions, you know, the social ordering politics, the various kinds of requirements and demands, but but bodies move through force, through affect, and it’s affect that animates this kind of movement. And some of the primary affects associated with connection, panic loss, shame, um, that are vital. How could we have connection with how could we have ethical connection without shame? I mean, look at some of the leaders around the world who demonstrate a seemingly shameless kind of way of operating. You know, shame, shame, shame is that attunement, that sensitivity to the experience of the other that helps us set limits, that helps us respect boundaries, that helps us form discretion where we know where to tread or where not to tread. And to have to have connection without shame. I heard a German guy, Schneider, said to extirpate shame from relationships would be like taking the brakes off a car because they slow it down. You know, like it it this is kind of a vital aspect, and the formation of an ethical compass is really contingent on imminent shame. Now, the if we look at shame has an affective force to it, it can feel toxic, you know, like it’s not easy to manage, as we know. You know, we we we experience, you know, Raymond Gator talks about remorse. He says, you know, when we have that sense of the shock of wrongdoing the other, that my God, what have I done? How could I have done that? I mean, it’s a horrible feeling, but yet it’s a vital feeling in a way, like of of forming, uh, forming discretion in connection. Now, now compare that with guilt. Guilt doesn’t have much affective force. Guilt is more a cognitive idea. It’s more it works well in courts of law and things like that. Guilt can be um guilt can be uh dealt with through forgiveness or punishment, you know. You can the guilty can then let it go. Shame actually engages our bodies. Shame holds us in a place, in fact, we might run away from it, but it will follow us, you know, it kind of until we find a way to actually hold it and address it and recognize the the you know the uh the importance and the necessity of it. I think I think guilt is often a shame avoidance thing. You people like to, in this area, people like to say, well, no, guilt is good because um you can say to people, uh, yeah, you’re a good person, but you’ve done a bad thing. And uh now I I don’t mind the concept of a person recognizing that there’s goodness and that they’ve done a bad thing, but it’s how you get to that point. You don’t get to it through cheap guilt, you get you get to it through a struggle, and it need you you need to be able to see the other to be able to really recognize there’s something of integrity in feeling shame. You need to be able to hold the hurt that you’ve done, you need to be able to hold shame in a way and to bear it, to uh you know, to be able to genuinely um I suppose move into that space of recognizing that there’s integrity in that, and yeah, there’s a suffering in that too, but it’s real, whereas I think, and then people can work to a point of recognizing that as this boy I was talking about, he he um he starts to think. I I I ask him things, I I’m helping him to hold this. See, if you could see that little girl, you didn’t feel bad, what would that say about you? And he says, I’d be I’d be just a shit, you know. Um, what does it mean that what is it taking for you to be here with me and we’re looking at that little girl together? What is that taking? Uh is it courage? Is it like how much? Where where do you feel that in your body? Where do you feel shame? How big is the feeling of courage there? You know, so we’re we’re looking at how at repair in a way. We’re looking at um a notion of integrity, of being real, of being true to the values. Like you couldn’t do this if he hadn’t identified the fact that he’s a kid who’s stuck up for other people, who’s tried to look out, who loves his mum, who loves his siblings, who misses them incredibly, who’s tried to help them. You couldn’t you couldn’t do that work then with shame without that first bit being there, you know, that is about him. And again, it’s where it’s important, it’s not about me. It’s not about that I think he should feel this way, or it’s the fact that when he does, of helping him make sense of that, of helping him see what that says about him, what it means about him as a person, how it fits with the man he wants to be, you know, that of helping him hold that in a way that has ethical integrity to it. That that to me is where, and and I don’t in my mind, the the idea of guilt doesn’t really cut it because it doesn’t have the emotional force, doesn’t have the affective force in it. You can move into it, but um to start there is not is not is not um authentic to my mind.
Colby: 1:01:07
Yeah. Previous guest, uh Lisa Etherson, author of Shame Containment Theory, was talking about um in her research, she had what she had noticed is that Freud pretty quickly moved away from shame into guilt.
Alan: 1:01:23
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and and and it may have been a shameful move. I don’t know if you but um there’s a number of stories about possibilities there that we won’t I won’t go into, but um but yeah, it’s been ignored. Like, well, I mean I I started my career in the 70s, and um, you know, that shame back then was seen as just a problem, it gets in the way, you need to get rid of it, you need to throw it off, uh, because it it stops us from flourishing and from doing the things that we we want to do. And yet, you know, you look at the processes of working with the kind of shame that yeah, we need to stand apart from. Um this is this is another this this this young man I do have permission to tell stories about. So um he um he’d been as a as a sort of uh early moving into adolescence boy, he’d been sexually abused by uh a church youth group leader. And um he felt incredible shame. He liked he felt this sense of I shouldn’t have let this happen, I should have stopped it, I should have, you know, I’m just a bad person, you know, like a the sense of culpability and worthlessness was incredible. But he made a statement at one point that said, as he was working on this stuff, oh he he just he this just followed uh a suicide attempt where he’d taken all his mum’s tablets and wound up being in hospital, and they were saying to him, it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, but they weren’t engaging with his shame. You know, this was an imperative. Take take the shame away, it’s not your fault because I think it’s not your fault. But you know, for this boy, um he had there was a moment where he he was looking at um, he made a statement that said, uh now um now I think the abusing person was trying to bribe me. And then he said, but I still wanted the things he bought me. Okay, so he’s now his emphasis is on I still wanted the things he bought me. So his the sense I had from it was mistaken shame. You know, this is I’m and and I I thought rather than tell, you know, if you tell him it’s not your fault, what’s that gonna mean? It’s just my opinion. But instead, I I asked him, when you know, tell me about this bribe. What do you mean now I think he was trying? This was the minor part of his statement. It is to me, it was the major part. What do you mean, bribe? You know, what is a bribe? How how was he trying to bribe you? Why do you think he was giving you those? What do you think he had in his mind? You know, so we started to. This is not psychological work, this is political work. It’s looking at the politics of uh grooming and and and the setting up here. And then as he was thinking, you could see his eyes go up, and he and this look of disdain came across his face. I said, What are you seeing? And he he had an image of this man giving him his car keys. So you know, as a 12-year-old, he let him drive his car, that was so cool. Um and but he was seeing he said, I said, What are you seeing? I see he said I can see his smirk. And the smirk, you know, and I said, What’s that smirk? What what’s it saying? What and then he kind of looked enraged, and he um he said, he knows and like this is an affective moment here where another connection around shame is actually operating, where from that point there was a real difference. He was able to start to discriminate whose shame. Shame is this? Where does this shame lie? You know, who is culpable in this particular situation? Yeah, so I’m I’m particularly concerned about how we engage with shame effectively. And looking at where guilt and things like this come into it are not, they’re not, they don’t have the affective force that shame does, but but they also are not easy. You know, this this kind of work is never, never easy to to hold. And we all know, like when we’ve felt ashamed about something that we’ve done, we know what it’s like to carry that and how to try and repair and what that means. And sometimes things you can’t undo. There are things we can’t repair. There’s damage done that can’t be undone. Uh, there are all sorts of things that come with this, but um yeah, sorry, I’m I don’t know whether I’m staying with your question even now. Well, I think what your question was.
Colby: 1:07:08
I I leave you lead me to be um wondering, I thought yeah, you lead me to be wondering what what advice would you give, or um what do you think it’s really important for people who are working professionals who who are working in this space to have a to understand to know. And I I guess when you said it’s really difficult work, and it is, I I wondered particularly about your thoughts about supervision and what that would look like.
Alan: 1:07:44
Um about supervision of practitioners. Practitioners. Um I I think my focus is always on um becoming attuned with our own effects, our own, our own panic loss, our own, you know, when we’re working with somebody and we we start to worry, are we are we connecting properly? Are we getting through? And and how our panic and the panic of the person that we see who often feels this person’s gonna shame me, is gonna put something or have an expectation of me. How how we attune our uh our affective experiences, how how we attune to our own shame too, that when one of the biggest things in this work when I’m supervising people is the tendency to the urgency that um often uh workers have, the I’ve got to get in there, I’ve got to make a change here, I’ve got to make this happen, and how that urgency is picked up as a demand by the client who then rightfully resists it. If if if I’m a client somewhere and my therapist starts to tell me what I should think or how I should, I should resist that, I should stick up for myself. That person has no right to do that. Um and then how often as a worker that we become then worried about our own adequacy, our own capacity. Am I doing well enough? Am I getting through? Now, these are the exact same affects that are experienced by clients who are panicking about the connection and and and and worried about feeling judged, you know, by us. And and we listen to our clients and how we attune in there is probably the biggest thing. When we start to hear, when we like, for example, that boy I’m talking about, if if I if I start to get urgent about needing him to face up to the fact that he’s abused, I mean that’s important. There’s the, you know, I guess the work is about helping him to be able to do that very thing. But if it becomes at my urgency and my, you know, I’m I’m pushing that, uh, you know, I become a kind of colonizing force to some way in that person’s life. I I start to uh I start to the the resistance that he might build, the protest is what I prefer to call it, um, I’m this is a two-way street, I’m encouraging that, you know, and and it can escalate, you know, and that’s why you often have men, you know, come into a therapy, you know, and they pick up judgment, yeah, you know, and they react. You people, you’re always on the woman’s side, you know, like it, you know, there’s that we contribute to that. And we need to be able to step back and listen and find out what’s important for them. But with that boy, I was I was not interested in making him face up to something. I knew he wouldn’t be able to do that, and it would be putting an impossible demand on him. But I saw that there was some energy, and I often find that around protest. Yeah, sometimes people protest a bit about even being there and kind of having been sent to see me and things like that. And I’m interested in that. I like that. I like the fact that a kid will stick up for himself, and even though his mum’s saying, No, no, you talk to Mr. Genius, you know. And and I engage with that because I love, you know, and often because, in a sense, for young people to break out of a social ordering process that diminishes them and makes them feel like losers and disconnects them, I think it needs protest, it needs sticking up for yourself. And of course, the initial protest is often a bit misguided, you know, it might even be harmful to others. Um so I I guess my sense in supervision is much more geared around the what I call the parallel journey of how we’re aware of our own reactions and responses, and how we how we become interested in the other. How we don’t let our urgency or our shame or whatever stop us from becoming interested in what’s important for the other person. And most people I work with, beyond their um blaming or contemptuous behavior, whatever, abusive behavior, whatever it may be, there’s generally something more. There’s generally something else that um that they’re interested in. And I often find I get all of that. Um if if I’m getting all of that sort of uh reactive behavior, I’m asking myself, what am I doing? That perhaps is inviting that in a way. You know, how am I participating in this in a way? How can I step out of that and notice what else is there? Like I I have a lot of kids might say to me, you know, I don’t know what all the fuss is about, I didn’t hurt her. And I hear that statement, I didn’t hurt her. And I hear more than just a denial in that or a minimization. I hear this person probably has some sense of what hurt does. And he and what would it mean to him if he realized that he really had hurt? What would that mean? So I file it away, and it’s there at some point where I know it’ll be a useful thing to, you know, a boy who tried to protect his family, who he he some kids do incredible things like you imagine a uh, you know, the stepfather’s come home as drunk, starting to fight with mom and this nine-year-old. He um he’s hearing this happening, and he has an idea, and he uh gets his little brother to hide in a trunk. Then he runs into the room where dad’s about to hurt mom, says, Mom, mom, mom, uh, David’s run away, David’s run away. And and the fight stops, and everyone, where the heck is David, and goes out searching. And I hear I hear a story like that, and I think of a little boy who’s come up with that brilliant, kind of smart idea. And um, you know, and and and and I’m intrigued with um what that’s about and and this protect and and I hear that um his uh he he looked after his he’d get his sister and his little brother to uh hide away, protect them when uh there was alcohol around the house and stuff. And I hear that, in fact, his little sister saw him almost as a bodyguard. And then some years later, he sexually abuses her. Now, you think if you don’t know the story of this boy who’s tried his best to look out for his sister, and so once I understand something about there’s a lot more to him, you know, he’s another kid that says he doesn’t have any empathy in the reports. How’s he done all of this around his sister? And you know, but um you know that at a later point, um, when we’ve established something about what’s important to him, about and I can ask him uh something like can I ask you something about you what what happened with your sister? Um how did she see you? How did she look to you before this happened? And then there’s a sense of shame because this bodyguard thing is in his mind, you know. Um I was her bodyguard and then I went and did this to her. You know, there’s there’s uh it’s not me uh shaming him, it’s me uh asking him to step into a space where he can see her, where he can experience something, and then helping him hold that of what what it means to be a brother who realizes when you’ve hurt your sister that hey, that’s not okay, of seeing her, what this says about you, what you want to do about it, um, become really important issues.
Colby: 1:17:03
Yeah. I’ve really enjoyed speaking to you about these things. Yeah, these matters, Alan. I hope you’ve enjoyed uh the process as well. I really a lot of what you said very much aligns with the work that I do as well, and um so I feel I feel validated uh l listening to you speak in the way that you have, and I hope uh other people in the sector listening to you feel the same way. Um there was such a lot to draw from and think about conversation as much as I could. I think a bit of a rapist have a history of sending up some body and discipline. Well thanks Alan. That was great and um thanks for the opportunity, Kelby. It it it may well be great to it well, it’ll undoubtedly be great to perhaps catch up with you again in a little time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Enjoyed it.
Alan’s Bio:
Alan has worked in a range of multi-undisciplinary teams addressing violence and abusive behaviour for more than 35 years. Rather than tire from this work, he has become increasingly intrigued with possibilities for the discovery of ethical, respectful and accountable ways of relating. The valuing of ethics, fairness and the importance of protest against injustice has led him to stray considerably from the path prescribed in his early training as a psychologist, towards a political analysis of abuse.
Alan’s most recent publication is ‘Becoming Ethical : A Parallel Political Journey With Men Who Have Abused,’ published in 2009.
He was a director of Nada, an independent service that provided intervention in family abuse, violence and workplace harassment. He managed the Mary St. Program for young people who have engaged in sexually harmful behaviour, along with their caregivers and communities.
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Lisa Etherson:
Vicki McKeown:
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Disclaimer: Information reported by guests of this podcast is assumed to be accurate as stated. Podcast owner Colby Pearce is not responsible for any error of facts presented by podcast guests. In addition, unless otherwise specified, opinions expressed by guests of this podcast may not reflect those of the podcast owner, Colby Pearce. Finally, all references to case examples are anonymised to the extent that the actual case could not be identified, or are fictional but based on real-life examples for illustrative purposes, or have client consent to talk about in an educative context.
