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

by Curt Thompson

In the same way that a destructive weather system (e.g., tornado, hurricane or flood) disrupts the connected infrastructure of power supply and people, so shame does to the mind and relationships.

I can only see myself as being intolerable to others, and I sense the impossibility that this feeling will ever end.

This movement toward virtual infinite separation is our desperate attempt to deescalate the awful emotional sensation that we are enduring at the moment.

We have all been there and know this experience of disintegration to be true.

shame’s tendency to be self-referential. I not only feel bad, I have the sense that I am bad, independent of any role played by someone outside of me.

there is deep connection between what the Hebrew language refers to as “the Satan” as accuser and the notion of shame.

her mind was constantly racing into an anticipated future in which she would be indefinitely imprisoned by the sensation and feeling of shame.

However, shame becomes a more complex problem when the attunement part of the equation—whether from parent, spouse, teacher, friend or employer—never arrives.

the nonverbal sensory data emerging from within and outside our mind-body matrices soon fades into the realm of nonconsciousness. These are not unavailable to us but are largely overtaken by the efficiency and effectiveness of language

We might conceptualize Robert’s problem as one in which he believed a lie, an experience in which he absorbed a false reality.

For he found himself quite unable to simply disbelieve the lie he had practiced believing for so long.

And with this we catch a glimpse of what evil is up to, using shame as its proxy. It wants us to tell our stories in such a way that we are the sole responsible party for what we feel; it wants us to live in isolation rather than in relationship.

It does not strike me that the reason I feel what I do is because of something that has happened to me as a function of my being in relationship with someone else.

The very act of attuning to someone nonverbally creates right hemisphere to right hemisphere brain connections that alter the experience in real time.

when necessary limit or redirect the speaker in order to get the best out of the story.

If I did not ask what he felt in his body when he described being anxious, he would not consider it important.

Shame interferes with good listening at every level and every opportunity.

while in conversation with someone, found myself only superficially attuned to what he or she is saying as I prepare what I want to say, sensing that if I do not get to offer my contribution I will feel a lessening?

It is common for people who are depressed to have a very different understanding of their past, as well as their future, compared to when they are well.

the purpose of stories: they are a medium by which we are connected to others.

Our attendant is waiting to offer advice, suggestions and reflections with the intended purpose of disintegration.

Shame may not come to us directly, but it always makes us feel solely responsible for the problem.

It is the emotional feature out of which all that we call sin emerges. As

Nowhere does the serpent suggest they go to God to check the facts.

Doubt is one of the more common occurrences in the human experience, one that has various levels of emotional intensity, depending on the topic at hand.

each involves the reality that I am inadequate on my own—I am not enough—to guarantee the outcome I desire.

Often this judgment is not made first as a function of logical, language-based cognition. Rather, it emerges from the brain stem and limbic circuitry as something I sense and feel subtly but effectively.

to relationally confront our shame requires that we risk feeling it on the way to its healing.

When

left-brain-dominant mode of retelling the story of the tree at the center of the garden. Now, in the new narrative, instead of it being off-limits and the source of death by alienation, it becomes the potential source of life.

Hiding is the natural response to shame.

And to be abandoned ultimately is to be in hell. This

We see that he desires people to live as he lives, further exploring, stewarding and creating within the world.

The fingerprints of God’s intention cover every square inch of our experience.

Begins list of longings that shame seems to block or disrupt

We deeply desire, even if we are not conscious of it, to be able to explore new things without worrying about making mistakes.

coping strategies—idols—that forgo relationships

“It makes complete sense that you would feel so vulnerable,” I said. “This is the feeling that shame activates and that everyone feels to some degree when they are on the verge of being known in what they anticipate may be an unsafe space. To allow yourself to be known is very hard work.”

Created

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 fact, from the beginning God has had to trust us as much as he asks us to trust him.

The more of me that is exposed to another, the greater will be my wounding when I am betrayed.

For to know as in verse 2 is not unlike what Adam and Eve sought in the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It is to ask all the questions and do all the observing and analyzing. In contrast, to be known is necessarily to be vulnerable, to open ourselves to God’s love.

He desires us to join him in his trinitarian life of being known.

looking for a way—any way—to avoid being stripped naked, being seen for who he was and left alone to die. He does not require anything of us that he does not first do himself.

We must literally look to Jesus in embodied ways in order to know how being loved in community brings shame to its knees and lifts us up and into acts of goodness and beauty.

we believe we are not enough without the money. We continually look at pornography in no small part as a coping mechanism for our inadequacy that long precedes it.

This is one of the first and most helpful steps in combating shame. It entails creating communities around us who are reminding us of the same thing that Jesus heard at his baptism.

This is helpful because so much sin begins as a function of attention. Shame functions first, as Satan did with Eve, by drawing our attention,

In each case, Satan questions God’s pleasure with Jesus.

For any first-century Jew, what “is written” is shorthand for “God says.”