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

by Curt Thompson

But what if shame is embedded in a story that does have purpose? Even more troubling, what if it is being actively leveraged by the personality of evil to bend us toward sin?

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 is a primary means to prevent us from using the gifts we have been given.

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.

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.

One way to approach its essence is to understand it as an undercurrent of sensed emotion, of which we may have either a slight or robust impression that, should we put words to it, would declare some version of I am not enough; There is something wrong with me; I am bad; or I don’t matter. But we would be mistaken if we thought that the story of shame begins with those words or that they tell it in its entirety.

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.

The important feature here is not just the fact that I am not enough to change my life (though of course the fact is necessary as part of the experience), but rather the felt sense that I do not have what it takes to tolerate this moment or circumstance.

And so we see that shame is certainly formed in the world of emotion, but it eventually recruits and involves our thinking, imaging and behaving as well.

Thus, from the outset we come to the realization that shame is both ubiquitous in its presence (there is no person or experience it does not taint) and infinitely shape-shifting in its presentation.

As I often tell patients, “Shamed people shame people.” 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.