Dr. Henry Musoma and Dr. Robert Carter
Beating back fear and shame. At StoryCorps, psychologist Robert Carter talks with Texas A&M Mays Business School professor Henry Kasonde Musoma about his blindness, his approach to life and his career as a psychologist.
- [Dr. Carter] Well I think fear and shame are really two traps that we very, very often and very easily fall into in our society. Sometimes Brene Brown talks about the web of shame, we get entangled in this shame and we start kind of believing the stories that other people would have us believe. You know, that we're not tall enough or we're not strong enough or we're not handsome enough or we're not enough in any way, anything you want to plug in there. And when we start believing those stories then we start struggling with our own self-esteem, our own confidence, our own ability to motivate ourselves. And so we have to work hard. And people who are blind, I think, have to work really hard not to fall prey to the stereotypes. A blind person can't do this or that thing. And yet is that really true? I have spent my entire life, I think, challenging and testing and in a lot of cases proving the stereotype that would have led me down the road of shame and the road of fear but instead led me down the road of success because I'm unwilling to just take it at face value. And we need to learn that they way we test it, the way we figure out what's true is by listening to ourselves but to hear ourselves we have to be able to go underneath all that noise that comes in from the outside, all that fear and shame that other people would place on us. And it starts early, you know, like I mean in elementary school, junior high, high school, college. I don't know what it was like for you but kids were great at shaming each other, embarrassing each other, putting people in difficult situations that we would just go home and worry about and perseverate on and struggle with. And then we almost seem to need to spend the rest of our life kind of untangling that. Like, did I really deserve that? Was I really bad in that situation or wrong in that situation or unworthy in that situation? And it's very hard sometimes to untangle the myth and get to the bottom where the truth is. But when we do get to that truth, the shame begins to lift. You know, it's so interesting about shame, shame doesn't do well in the light. It does great in the dark. You keep it hidden, you keep it inside. It'll eat you alive.
- [Dr. Musoma] That's good.
- [Dr. Carter] But you bring it out into the light and you start talking about it and you start saying, this is how terrible I feel about this or that thing and someone says, well gosh, you know that's interesting that you feel terrible but it seems like you were just trying to survive the best way you could. It seems like you were doing the best you could at the moment. And then that shame begins to dissipate and you feel a whole lot lighter when you're done because you've gotten to the truth, you've gotten to the bottom of it.