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May 4 - June 13, 2023
The premise of this book, then, is that shame is not just a consequence of something our first parents did in the Garden of Eden. It is the emotional weapon that evil uses to (1) corrupt our relationships with God and each other, and (2) disintegrate any and all gifts of vocational vision and creativity.
Shame, therefore, is not simply an unfortunate, random, emotional event that came with us out of the primordial evolutionary soup. It is both a source and result of evil’s active assault on God’s creation, and a way for evil to try to hold out until the new heaven and earth appear at the consummation of history.
Healing shame requires our being vulnerable with other people in embodied actions. There is no other way, but shame will, as we will see, attempt to convince us otherwise.
For in our deliverance from shame we are not simply liberated to be nicer, happier people; rather, we are redeemed to live into those multiple roles of calling—from parenting to teaching to engineering—with joyful creativity.
For indeed shame’s power lies not so much in facts that we can clarify but rather in its emotional state, which is so much harder to shake.
discussion. Shame is not something we “fix” in the privacy of our mental processes; evil would love for us to believe that to be so. We combat it within the context of conversation, prayer and other communal, embodied actions.
To be human is to be infected with this phenomenon we call shame.
when individuals do not address the shame they experience at a personal level, the potential kindling effect can eventually engulf whole regions of humanity.
One of the purposes of this book is to emphasize that what we do with shame on an individual level has potentially geometric consequences for any of the social systems we occupy, be that our family, place of employment, church or larger community.
life is not about not being messy but about being creative with the messes we have;
ruptures will occur but resilience and life is to be found in how we repair them;
One way to approach its essence is to understand it as an undercurrent of sensed emotion,
it is revealing that so many of what we would term “negative” emotions (i.e., those that we find generally to be distressing in some way) are actually rooted in shame. Again, by shame I am not talking about something that necessarily requires the intensity of extreme humiliation. Rather, it is born out of a sense of “there being something wrong” with me or of “not being enough,” and therefore exudes the aroma of being unable or powerless to change one’s condition or circumstances.
shame is certainly formed in the world of emotion, but it eventually recruits and involves our thinking, imaging and behaving as well.
shame is both ubiquitous in its presence (there is no person or experience it does not taint) and infinitely shape-shifting in its presentation.
Despite the fact that his relationship with Jesus was the most important thing in his life, thinking and reflecting on Scripture passages that admonished him to leave anxiety at the door only left him standing at the door’s threshold, right along with his worry. For him, it was not until we began to explore the nature of his experience as one that was felt, sensed and imaged as much as it was thought that he began to gain some traction in overcoming his problem.
Parents experience a similar result when we have to discipline our children, especially our teenagers, whom we believe we can reason with by the use of our impeccable logic (letting them know that ours is patently obvious and theirs is groundless). We believe we are merely correcting their actions, but fail to see that in offering what we consider to be necessary measures, shame enters the process.
the act of judging others has its origins in our self-judgment.
Long before we are criticizing others, the source of that criticism has been planted, fertilized and grown in our own lives, directed at ourselves, and often in ways we are mostly unaware of.
nidus
involution
we are only as sick as the secrets we keep. And shame is committed to keeping us sick.
Isolation and disconnection are natural consequences of hiding and resisting reengagement.
the fundamental neurobiology of the experience of shame disintegrates different neural networks and their corresponding functions within each individual brain, isolating them, causing the mind to be decreasingly flexible in its capacity to adapt to its environment.
I need the community in order for my mind to be integrated, and with a more integrated mind I will be more able to work toward a more integrated community, which reinforces the cycle. Shame both actively dismantles and further prohibits this process of integration, leading to disconnection between mental processes within an individual’s mind as well as between individual members within a community.
It is not so straightforward to see that exposure is the very thing that shame requires for healing. Given how compelled we feel to turn away, strike inward at ourselves or strike out at others in response to shame, it is not our intuition to then quickly turn toward the other as a means to resolve the problem.
part of shame’s power lies in its ability to isolate, both within and between minds. The very thing that has the power to heal this emotional nausea is the reunion of those parts of us that have been separated.
But what they found to be most helpful—and had them coming back month after month to the coffee shop—was that in admitting their embarrassment, they didn’t feel nearly as alone,
shame’s healing encompasses the counterintuitive act of turning toward what we are most terrified of.
Although it is tempting to hope that we can eliminate shame from our relational diet, it is futile to wish for this. Our hope is, rather, in changing our response to it as we journey together toward God’s kingdom, which is now but not yet in its fullness.
First, the mind—where shame originates and lives—is neither limited to nor should it be understood merely in terms of what or how we think.
Furthermore, the mind is emerging.
In addition to being fluid and emergent the mind is embodied.
Furthermore, the mind is as relational as it is embodied.
Thus, the way our neurological system wires its responses to various emotional experiences is significantly influenced by the relational contexts in which those emotions arise. This means that the “nature versus nurture” boundary is illusory when it comes to the development of the mind.
the nine domains of the mind as described by Siegel are as follows.
Consciousness.
refers to our general level of awareness of what we are sensing, perceiving, feeling, thinking and doing at any given moment.
Vertical.
Horizontal.
Memory.
Narrative.
State.
Interpersonal.
In other words, there is rarely anything I do that is not either influencing or being influenced by other minds. And shame has no trouble swimming in the current that is constantly flowing between us.
Temporal.
Transpirational.
In the same manner that God intends that our minds grow in maturity and connection, just as we do with each other, it is one of shame’s primary features to disrupt and dis-integrate that very process, functionally leading to either rigid or chaotic states of mind and behavior, lived out intra- and interpersonally.
Renewal of the mind, therefore, is not just an abstraction. It means real change in real bodies.
Take, for instance, when my wife asks, “Are you going to wear that?” Noticing the stung look on my face in response, she immediately follows with “I am just trying to be helpful.” (Excuse me? I think. Helpful? How in any universe is your commentary on the pants I am wearing “helpful”?) If my PFC is not engaged and I am not paying attention to the sudden rise in my body’s tension or the emotional sense of having been criticized or the thought, She thinks I’m stupid when it comes to clothing, which in about two nanoseconds leads to She thinks I’m stupid, period, I will soon be wishing to retract
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