The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

by Curt Thompson

The question, then, is not if we are or will be vulnerable but rather how and when we enter into it consciously and intentionally for the sake of creating a world of goodness and beauty.

We so thoroughly guarantee our physical safety that we believe vulnerability is abnormal, even pathological.

The act of creation was one of vulnerability, an act in which God was open to wounding, with the anticipated heartache that accompanies it. However, this openness was bracketed by a relational connection that prevents fear and shame from ruling its anticipated future. Although we can assume that God knew creation would bring trouble, he had confidence that his triune relationships would bear the weight of whatever trauma would come his way.

Thus, to be created in God’s image also refers to our having creative dominion within the world. And to be maximally creative also requires that we are vulnerable.

Only when we see Jesus do we begin to get a picture of what God may have been experiencing when his vulnerability was first exposed.

In God’s movement toward reconciliation, he envisions the process as something that we do together. He does not come initially telling us what to do. That requires no trust, no vulnerability on the part of either of us. He comes asking questions. Questions that genuinely seek interactive relationship. It is not a bait-and-switch operation in which God isn’t so much asking a question as making a statement.

one of shame’s most prominent features, and one that provides the emotional fuel of terror at the prospect of living vulnerably, is the threat of isolation, of abandonment.

For indeed, we see even in Genesis that if we trust ourselves to vulnerability, bad things can eventually happen.

But in the Trinity we see something that we must pay attention to: God does not leave. The loving relationship shared between Father, Son and Spirit is the ground on which all other models of life and creativity rest. In this relationship of constant self-giving, vulnerable and joyful love, shame has no oxygen to breathe. The ever-present movement of this three-part, shared relationship toward one another—working with one another, trusting one another, delighting in one another—provides the basis for why God created the world in vulnerability, and then made himself vulnerable in coming to it in Jesus.

to be known is necessarily to be vulnerable, to open ourselves to God’s love. It is to be asked questions. To be observed. To be seen.

those parts of us that feel most broken and that we keep most hidden are the parts that most desperately need to be known by God, so as to be loved and healed.

To be fully loved—and to fully love—requires that we are fully known. Absolute joy comes not just in my having some random joyful engagement with something or someone. Rather, absolute joy must eventually include my being completely known, especially those parts that in subtle, hidden ways have carried shame, often without my conscious awareness. This is the language of the new heaven and new earth. This is the work that God alone has initiated and in which he longs for us to join him. For God longs to be known by us as much as he longs for us to be known by him. He desires us to join him in his trinitarian life of being known.

He was more eager to be known and for them to be known than he was for them to be shamed.

The moment we are conscious of feeling vulnerable, we have activated our sense of being alone. But as he did when seeking Adam and Eve, God invites us to live as we were made to live—in relationship, with him and with others, in the state of being known, not in the state of isolation that shame desires.

Before being crucified, victims were usually stripped naked. It is difficult to imagine a more humiliating event. There is reason to believe this was true for Jesus. But we find it virtually impossible to look upon his naked form, or even consider it, given how embarrassing it feels. Our own discomfort is revealed even in the way we represent it artistically. With few exceptions, depictions of this event usually portray Jesus’ loins covered with a cloth. This is not to argue in favor of a different way to portray Jesus’ crucifixion, but rather to point out that although we assent theologically to how Good Friday delivered us from shame as well as sin, actually permitting ourselves to be there on that Friday, being with a naked Jesus, is an entirely different matter altogether. But only to the degree that we take the time to image, sense and feel what it would have been like to be there can we answer yes to the question “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”

We have seen how it means that we, in the safety of a trusting relationship, expose our real selves, the parts of us that we perceive to be shameful, in small or large degree. We have also witnessed that God does not ask us to do anything he is not willing to do himself. And in Jesus, he has come to us, revealing himself to us for all that he is.

the process of being known is necessary for the healing of shame.

isolation is one of shame’s primary methods.

To “fix our eyes on Jesus” means watching him and doing what he did. It is to intentionally seek out our shame, expose it and reframe it in light of our Father telling us that we are his daughters and sons in whom he is well-pleased.

we all are born into the world looking for someone looking for us, and that we remain in this mode of searching for the rest of our lives.

When we acknowledge our shame, it resonates with the shame carried by all of us. With confession, it is given the opportunity for resonance, exposure and healing in the life of the listener as well as the speaker. True goodness and beauty emerge when healing takes place at all levels of human awareness, which necessarily includes our individual as well as communal life. They are inseparable. This is what it means to be made in God’s image. And this is what it means for us to live like God: to practice asking questions, the mission being not to find the right answers, important as they are, so much as to be more connected.

To scorn or disregard shame is to acknowledge it and turn away, as if we think nothing of it.

It is significant, then, that as we listen to someone expressing shame associated with truly wrong behavior that we not turn a blind eye to such real relational breaches, or, in the language of the biblical narrative, to sin. The confession of shame is not a shortcut for hard work, some easy way to being let off the hook.

And like Peter, we need to take responsibility for our actions that prove to be disintegrating. Not because God wants us to grovel or rub our noses in our brokenness, but that we learn and grow in our awareness of just how important our lives and connections to others really are. Again, we take the significance of our relationships far less seriously than God does.

I need to hear that my behavior was really as bad as I think, if not worse, while simultaneously sensing that the person I am confessing to is not leaving. Shame has the effect of coaxing us into pretending that sin is not as bad as it seems; for if it really is that bad, and I have to face it, it would be too much and I fear I would be overwhelmed. When someone seeks forgiveness for the wrong they have committed, we who have been wounded must be able to acknowledge the reality of the pain inflicted if forgiveness is to be real, and if the offender’s shame is to be effectively healed.

First, shame is not something that infests only individuals. It is endemic in systems, and any system run by it will seek to maintain its equilibrium. Shame will not share its authority.

to a second discovery. Because shame is an embodied affect, we need more than facts in order to undermine it.

Third, we assume that whenever shame is dealt with properly, all interested parties will be happy about it. Our story from John 9 reminds us that this is not always the case. Naming and despising shame, while liberating, will also necessarily reveal all who are actively responsible for propagating it.

whenever genuine acts of goodness evoke responses of distress, you can count on shame being at work, accusing those very neighbors, albeit unconsciously, of their complicity.

possibly one of the least helpful things a parent can tell his or her child is “We only expect you to do your best.”

For if relationship with Jesus is as much about being known as it is about knowing, we soon learn that life with God is not about being right but about being loved.

In their urgency to not make any mistakes themselves, they found that they were inadvertently passing on to their children the notion that mistakes were forbidden.

it is not enough to simply see shame as a bad thing that needs to be eradicated. Rather, with its healing comes the freedom to more fully live like God in every way he intended, not least being what and how we create in every realm of life.

Shame would like nothing more than for us to believe we should be able to work out our problems on our own, to do our best at everything and limit our mistakes—we must in order to prevent being abandoned.

But evil does not tempt us most effectively by offering opportunities for blatant wrongdoing. Rather, it does so through our being so committed to doing our best that we fear we won’t be enough.

When we invite our children to talk about their uncertainties and to honestly share our own with them, we make possible the integration of their minds, bringing them not to certainty of knowledge but confidence in relationship. We teach them through our own naked vulnerability that when we suffer—even as Eric did in his existential angst—we learn to persevere, which culminates in the development of resilient character, which leads to hope that does not put us to shame.

The family of God is the crucible in which we learn what real family is about and in which the what and how of education is ideally imprinted into our souls, transforming both our life in our biological families as well as all that we learn about our world and our place in it.

It has likely been your story in some fashion at some time in your career. This is the story shame wants to tell. It is the story of hiding fragility. The story of showering those who are smart, gifted and charismatic with approbations, and those who are less so with, well, less. The story in which we have conflicts but are too afraid to face the emotions we anticipate will be waiting for us. These emotions have their source in the shame whose attendant tells us that we are not enough and that Jesus is not enough for us to have this conversation.

unless leadership of an organization is open to curiosity, open to the idea that unless we are known, what we know doesn’t matter, and open to seeking where shame hides, exposing the reality of our naked, vulnerable selves, and disregarding the shame that wants us to hide, we will continue to repeat the interaction that took place in Eden, eventually foisting on our pastors, elders, deacons and staff members what Eve and Adam foisted on each other. “And their eyes were opened . . .” Between our ignorance of and unwillingness to expose our shame, we end up with leadership that turns a blind eye to sexual abuse, interactive styles that foster the maintenance of unspoken caste systems (not least being that between men and women) and doctrinal positions that hold that the proclamation of the gospel leads with the story that we are shameful sinners and follows up with the story that God loves us, rather than the other way round. We often cope with these undercurrent themes in the same way the first couple did. We seek knowledge. We want to “know.” And to know in this case is as much about power as it is about knowledge. Power enables us not only to cope with our deep awareness of weak vulnerability, but also eliminates that weakness from our consciousness.

shame hides most effectively in environments where it ostensibly should be absent.

But acquiring knowledge depends on admitting that we do not know many things, that we need help from others in order to learn. Learning, in fact, is a declaration of vulnerability.

It is challenging to create a culture of vulnerability that encourages curiosity in a world so wrapped in shame. But curiosity is an important starting point. It begins in the home, with parents guiding their children’s natural inquisitiveness and interpreting the world for them as they go. Curiosity depends on being relationally safe (which assumes physical safety). And relational safety rests ultimately on the experience of being known. When we sense the safety engendered by being in the presence of someone we can trust, we are launched into new areas of interest. We are not motivated by the belief we will not fail, but by the conviction that when we make mistakes they will not be our ruin. In an environment where we are unafraid, mistakes are not our enemies but our friends.

an important predictor of long-term learning effectiveness is the praise of effort rather than outcomes.

In other words, it will do a student (or a child at home or an athlete or my patient or a factory worker) more good when he or she hears something to the effect of “What you are doing is really difficult. I am pleased with how hard you are working at this.” Or “You did well—you must have put a great deal of effort in to your work.” From an IPNB perspective, this approach addresses the mind as it is truly functioning. We know that learning is about apprehending things we do not know or are not skilled at. For most of us that process entails some degree of work, and the more complex the ideas or tasks we have to complete, the more effort is required. When we hear praise only for having been successful, a curious thing begins to happen in our mind. We begin to associate feeling good with success. Of course, the problem is that we will not always be successful—and we know this, or at least common sense allows us to suspect this. When I am faced with a problem that I cannot immediately solve, I may become more anxious, because my brain realizes I may be at risk for not being enough, for not being successful and for being shamed because I have failed. If, however, each time I attempt to solve a problem or answer a question my teacher recognizes my effort, I begin to anticipate a different future. If my sense of well-being and connection with my teacher is related to her or his praise for my effort (rather than outcome), even when I am facing a problem I cannot easily solve, I te...

When what I am expected to know is limited to the dates of the War of the Roses or the names of its combatants, I stop wondering about all the other things from that conflict that might actually have something to do with real life here and now.

This is not to say that facts are unimportant to daily life (e.g., giving erythromycin instead of penicillin to a patient; a steel beam can hold only so much weight). But the learning process must create the necessary space for movement of our attention and openness to novelty.

In order for me to judge someone, I must create enough distance between us in order to analyze him or her. With that judgment the distance grows. And with enough distance comes isolation.

Shame’s mission is to disintegrate all institutions in the same way it intends to disintegrate individuals, and isolation is no small part of its tactical arsenal.

one of shame’s most acute byproducts is the fear of exposure, the very thing that, paradoxically, is required for shame’s healing.

This is how shame works, viral in nature as it is. It creates a deep fear of vulnerability. When our response is to retreat and hide, working harder to demonstrate our impenetrability, shame spreads to other regions.