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

by Curt Thompson

It enables us to conveniently remain separate from those we disagree with and who make us feel uncomfortable, while keeping to those who will only tell us what we want to hear.

what if it is being actively leveraged by the personality of evil to bend us toward sin?

From the beginning it has been God’s purpose for this world to be one of emerging goodness, beauty and joy. Evil has wielded shame as a primary weapon to see to it that that world never happens.

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.

shame not as a socially constructed finding but rather an interpersonal neurobiological event.

is there not a clear difference between the shame felt by a woman who commits adultery and a woman who is raped?

our awareness of God’s deep, joyful pleasure with us at all times everywhere changes everything about how we interpret what we sense, image, feel, think and do; that life is not about not being messy but about being creative with the messes we have;

part of shame’s intention. For its elusiveness is a key element of its power.

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.

Emotion itself could be considered to be the gasoline in our human tank. If we were to take emotion out of the human experience, we would literally stop moving.

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 felt sense that I do not have what it takes to tolerate this moment or circumstance.

In each case, we inevitably encounter the moment when we are not enough to change our reality as we are currently imagining it.

And so, out of the feelings of shame come the words I don’t work hard enough.

Telling ourselves we shouldn’t be ashamed often only reinforces it.

the act of judging others has its origins in our self-judgment. As I often tell patients, “Shamed people shame people.”

a great deal of his work was energized by his longstanding worry of being found out to be wrong. Wrong about a case. Wrong about his choice of profession. Wrong about his ideas about politics or theology. Wrong about his ideas about God.

It is as if our only refuge is in our isolation; the prospect of exposing what we feel activates our anticipation of further shame.

part of shame’s power lies in its ability to isolate,

in admitting their embarrassment, they didn’t feel nearly as alone,

in the language of interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB), a fluid, emerging process that is both embodied and relational, whose task is to regulate the flow of energy and information.

the mind is embodied.

via the brain’s extended nervous system the mind interacts with the world both inside and outside our skin.

How truly conscious we are depends on how well we are paying attention to what we pay attention to.

One way to think of this is that, over time, the left brain works to make sense of what the right brain is sending it.

Thus, who I am (i.e., what I tell myself about myself in visual images, sensations and feelings as well as words) is always going to be understood in terms of my current relationships—and

This points to what Siegel refers to as “the neurobiology of we.” In other words, there is rarely anything I do that is not either influencing or being influenced by other minds.

the more we practice firing neurons in a particular way, the more easy it is to activate that particular pathway, and thus the more entrenched those patterns become, desirable or undesirable though they may be.

Ultimately we become what we pay attention to,

To have one’s mind set on something is essentially about paying attention. What do I pay attention to? Paul says that what we pay attention to doubles back and governs us.

most of what brings people into my office is a function of the degree to which they do not pay attention to much of what their mind is doing.

If attention is the ignition key of the mind, then emotion is the fuel in the tank the engine runs on.

To the degree that parents have done the necessary work to develop their own integrated minds, they will be able to foster secure attachment in their child.

Secure attachment is fostered in environments in which there is a premium placed on empathy, attunement, mindfulness and the proper setting of limits—features

the nature of relationships contingently affects the wiring of neuronal connections in our brains,

influence the way we experience our relationship with God. For he has to deal with the same brain that we do;

shame is deeply committed to exploiting the machinery of attachment in creating states of aloneness within us and between us, and most substantially between us and God.

The defining relational motif for humankind is not that we need to work as hard as we can, or at least harder than we are.

we were created for joy. Not a weak and watery concept of joy that merely dilutes our sadness and pain. Rather it is the hard deck on which all of life finds its legs, a byproduct of deeply connected relationships in which each member is consummately known.

joyful relationships develop as parents attune properly to the needs of the infant in such a way that it fosters secure attachment.

Thus, when babies feel emotionally safe (which necessarily presumes physical safety), they are free to engage their surrounding environment, learning not only about the world but their responses to

a secure attachment provides for the healing and repair of that distress or rupture.

There is no domain that the creative power of joy, given the right nutrients in the soil, cannot grow in.

shame as a neurophysiologic phenomenon is not bad in and of itself. It is, rather, our system’s way of warning of possible impending abandonment,

Shame makes its way into our stories at an early age. So early, in fact, that we usually have no conscious memory of our initial encounters with it.

Researchers have described shame as a feeling that is deeply associated with a person’s sense of self, apart from any interactions with others; guilt, on the other hand, emerges as a result of something I have done that negatively affects someone else.

Guilt, on the other hand, only emerges when a child’s brain is mature enough [around three to six years] to be aware that his or her behavior negatively affects the emotional state of another.

In this sense guilt tends to draw my attention to another and is often accompanied by a desire to resolve the problem by being closer to him or her [admitting a wrongdoing,

there is a certain shearing off of joyful anticipation,

A deep sense of self-consciousness emerges;