What's the matter with 'Shame'?

Lately I've seen some advertisements for workshops purporting to be in the service of banishing shame from people's lives.  The reasoning seems to be something like "If it feels bad, it must be bad".  I think this is a gross simplification, perhaps to help people or perhaps to provide a salable product. I propose to take a deeper look at shame and how it functions.  

Firstly, shame is a phenomenon that only exists in group settings.  If you were hopelessly alone on an island in the middle of an ocean, would shame be relevant to your experience?  Would you blush if you were nude in the open?  Would remembering some social gaffe you perpetrated earlier in your life embarrass you?  Probably not.  If you were giving a lecture to a hundred people and discovered that your fly was unzipped (assuming only for the moment that you are male) or loudly farted, would you be humiliated?

Shame appears when the unacceptable behavior is known to other people in your group.  To feel shame you would have to have done something others in your group would find unacceptable.  When you are a young adolescent, for instance, wearing the "wrong thing" can be catastophically shameful.  If nobody notices you would not be embarrassed.

Shame is experienced when we deviate too far from the norms of our group.  Partially it includes fear, fear of rejection in the form of being laughed at or jeered.  It is an emotion that operates to push our behavior back within the range of acceptance of our group.  It encourages conformity to our particular group norms.  Deviating from the norms of a group to which we do not belong is not shaming.  Something in us tells us that being excluded from our group is awful-bad-dangerous.  We are urged to change our behavior to fit in.  Think of The Scarlet Letter, for instance.

What happens in a world in which there is no shame?  There is nothing to encourage conformity.  There are few prohibited behaviors, and we can do pretty much what we want.  But do we want to live in a shameless society?  We would be confronted with behavior that is now strictly prohibited.  We would live in a world in which little is forbidden other than those things we prohibit by law.  Our behaviors would be wildly divergent. Breaking the law would still have consequences, but shame would not be among them.

It would be a lot like it is now, only more so, wouldn't it?  I leave you to decide if this is a good thing.

A therapy problem

At an out-of-state convention I was talking with another therapist who presented an interesting treatment problem.  I had no really adequate answer, and after having been a therapist for 60 years that's at least a little unusual.

His patient told him that many years previously he had committed some terrible crimes.  Without going into detail, the patient stated that he had accepted money to kill several people. More recently he had gotten sober for the first time in many years and had subsequently fallen into a severe depression.  He had become suicidal and been hospitalized.  

His therapist told me that later on in the therapy his patient recognized his nearly unbearable guilt as undoubtedly the driver for his suicidal impulses and depression.  The patient's depressive thoughts were severely self-blaming, and in some ways even appropriate.

Here are the questions the other therapist asked me.  Should he even be assisted in recovering from his depression?  Isn't his guilt an appropriate response to his behaviors?  Is it an appropriate use of psychotherapy to be relieved of the guilt for his crimes?  Is it acceptable to kill people and then expect to be relieved of the psychological cost of committing such awful crimes? Is that even ethical?

I thought a long time before I was able to give the other therapist any answer at all.  After some thought my initial response was that the first and second principle of the psychologist's ethical code is:  Do no harm. Act to help the patient.  There are no exceptions to those principles, and to me there should be none. 

That being said, the other questions are open for your answers.  I'll be glad to hear any comments.

So before that was what?

 I apologize for my ignorance of physics.  However, ignorance doesn't stop me from puzzling over the larger mysteries, such as the state of the universe at the moment of the Big Bang.  In fact, ignorance seems assist me in being puzzled.  So if you are knowledgeable in this area, you have my apology, and you might want to spend your time reading something more useful to you.  Nevertheless I will appreciate any comments.

In the universe entropy always increases, which is to say the universe gradually becomes more disordered, ultimately resulting in a state of maximum entropy or disorder in which nothing can happen.  Time has even been defined as taking its direction from increasing entropy, i.e. that time is the rate at which entropy increases.  

The point-universe at the moment of the Big Bang was in minimum entropy, or maximum order.  Since that moment. entropy and disorder have increased as we move slowly toward total disorganization.   At the end of the universe, it will become a "soup" of undifferentiated states of energy in which nothing can happen.  Time will have stopped since there can be no events. All the little fires will be out.  Like a giant firework display, the Universe will have happened. 

Prior to the Big Bang, what can be said of the nature of the universe?  Probably we can't use the concept "prior" since there would have been no time in existence.  Time requires events which it can discriminate between.  A famous physicist (whose name I can't recall) said that time was what kept everything from happening all at once.

At the moment of the Big Bang, an event occurred and thus time began.  We can't conceive of a prior universe existing without time.  "Prior" requires a preceding time.  Events require an increase in entropy, so there could be no events in a timeless universe.  We do know that the universe at the moment of the Big Bang must have been in a state of minimum entropy/maximum order.  

How did a state of maximum order occur, and how can it be described?  The Big Bang was an event, and therefore it happened within time and space.  How did that event happen prior to time? Once it has happened we can consider the order of events. But "before" the Big Bang nothing can exist. Time begins with the first event, the Big Bang.

To fall back into the supernatural and posit an agent who starts the Big Bang seems to me a cheap and superficial way of avoiding the problem.  The Big Bang is itself a causeless cause.  Since event history began with the Big Bang, it is pointless to assume a prior event.

Someone out there, please enlighten me.  I also recognize that it may be impossible to do that, but I will appreciate the attempt.