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?

But I believe we live in a world in which good and evil are not just events that happen to us but rather expressions of something or someone whose intention is for good or for evil. And I will suggest that shame is used with this intention to dismantle us as individuals and communities, and destroy all of God’s creation.

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. And those gifts enable us to flourish as a light-bearing community of Jesus followers who work to create space for others who wish to join it to do so.

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.

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.

But it is important to be aware that the act of judging others has its origins in our self-judgment. 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.

shame leads us to cloak ourselves with invisibility to prevent further intensification of the emotion.

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.

When we are in the middle of a shame storm, it feels virtually impossible to turn again to see the face of someone, even someone we might otherwise feel safe with. It is as if our only refuge is in our isolation; the prospect of exposing what we feel activates our anticipation of further shame.

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. Instead, it is, 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.

An integrated system is one in which its subset parts reflect differentiation and linkage: each part is differentiating or maturing in a proper way while growing in its linkage or connection to the others.

Attention is the hallmark feature of this domain. How truly conscious we are depends on how well we are paying attention to what we pay attention to.

Memory is, among other things, as much about anticipating the future as it is about recalling the past. We remember things in order to predict what our futures will be like:

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 by current I am referring to all relationships, past or present, that currently are influencing my mind’s activity.

Much of what creates trouble for us in life is related to our unexpected movement from one state to another or our inattentiveness to that type of transition.

a great deal of my mind’s activity is wrapped up with thinking about or interacting with other people’s minds. 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.

we mysteriously hewn creatures are both dust and breath (Genesis 2:7); we are inseparably embodied and relational.

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.

The most salient feature that our brain anticipates is our emotional state.

Awareness of this is crucial, for shame as an emotion is something we not only anticipate but also feel unable to change.

We symbolize these different feelings with words such as joy, sadness, anger, surprise, disappointment and others, including shame. This implies that what is most primal and potent about shame is its emotional nature. It certainly can emerge in response to information provided for us, and therefore it seems to have its origin in cognition, but its power lies in our felt experience of it. It is important to keep this in mind, for when it comes to combating shame, if we are not attending to what we are feeling, it will be easy for it to have its way with us without our even knowing it.

perfectionism, not only of how he performed in school but also what he believed theologically, was elevated above all other virtues. Justin even perceived following Jesus to be something that needed to be done perfectly, albeit without those words ever being spoken directly. It was more in the way he interpreted all the nonverbal cues that led to his assumptions about never revealing imperfections—and

The natural progression, then, of the development of integrated minds, relationships and communities is fully realized in the experience of joy—joy even in the presence of very hard places. For secure attachment is not primarily about the absence of pain but the presence of joy in the face of those challenging places.

In Genesis 2:18 God says, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” The idea of being alone, or in this case, “incomplete,” was something that God cared about and remedied by making and bringing a woman to the man (Genesis 2:22). This text also, however, is a harbinger of what is to come later in the story, suggesting that the dark side of being alone—really alone: isolated, deserted, forgotten, dismissed, scorned, pushed out, abandoned—is a potential that God recognized.

what it means to be known, to be understood, to be loved.

In 1892, writing in his diary, Leo Tolstoy wrote, “Life cannot have any other purpose than joy and goodness. Only this purpose—joy—is ultimately worthy of life.”

The common theme these voices herald is joy. They assume that the delight of God in trinitarian fellowship is nothing if not an invitational that he longs for us to join. 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. It is not to do our best or to guarantee that our children will have a better life than we had. It is not about being right or the acquisition of power. Each of those (and other visions like them) play into the hand of shame’s anxiety.

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.

of all the primary tasks of the infant, there is none more crucial than the pursuit, acquisition and establishment of joyful, securely attached relationships.

It is to the world’s advantage that the parent, teacher, coach, pastor, police officer, emergency room nurse, middle manager, CEO, boat captain and farmer cultivate cultures of joy.

shame most primitively and powerfully undermines the process of joyful attachment, integration and creativity.

In response to this traumatic, shearing interaction with another person, the signature feature of shame is set in motion. When an individual, relationship or community is touched by it, the mind moves toward a more disintegrated state. Sensations, images, feelings, thoughts and behaviors have a more difficult time flowing as a coherent whole.

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.

when I experience shame, I find it virtually impossible to turn my attention to something other than what I am feeling.

With disintegration and isolation comes another feature of shame that we don’t at first recognize. When shame appears, especially in malignant forms, we are often driven to a felt sense of stasis. Our mind feels incapable of thinking.

What begins in the mind as the separation of its various functions, and leads to the isolation of each from the other, is eventually expressed in the world of relationships—from family to friendships to communities to nations—leaving them fractured and impotent to regain any sense of relational integrity. This is shame at its worst. No one needs to believe in God to know that this is the way it works. We have all been there and know this experience of disintegration to be true. The question, of course, is what to do when this storm front blows into our living room.

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.

The notion of being accused, in its most malignant form, leads to a state symbolized by another word: contempt. This word represents deep derision and condescension. The research data on marriage offered by John Gottman is replete with evidence that one of the most powerful predictors of the likelihood that a marriage will not survive is the presence of contempt displayed by one partner toward another.

For though we eventually carry the burden of shame by ourselves, we must never forget that there will always be someone outside my experience playing a collaborative role in the disintegration of my mind.

This notion of there being another involved in the dance of shame highlights the natural outflow of having been accused: judgment. I am not speaking of the word as it applies to wise discernment. Rather, to a posture of criticism and condescension that so easily and stealthily winds its way around our minds in response to our having felt accused. With little to no awareness, we seamlessly respond to shame with judgment, which emerges as words. But more significantly, these words carry the emotional arrows slung as much at ourselves as they are at others.

We were introduced to the primary task of developing joyful relationships that lead to the creative exploration and discovery of our world.

storytelling is the feature that ultimately sets us apart from the rest of the earth’s creatures—and the feature that shame intends to most powerfully exploit in order to lay waste to any attempts we would make to join God in creating a world of goodness and beauty.

For Robert, therefore, his conflict was not reducible to believing a lie; it was more complex than that. For he found himself quite unable to simply disbelieve the lie he had practiced believing for so long.

Despite my knowing as a fact that someone has said or done something to me that has evoked this awful feeling, shame’s neurobiological tendency is that I quickly take personal ownership for it.

it tends to represent lasting, salient emotional memory that we have implicitly encoded as part of our ongoing narration.

to the degree that we increase our awareness of these spheres, we equally become aware of when and how shame attempts to become part of our storytelling effort.

we are always interacting with other people. And their versions of the world—our world in particular—continue to shape and influence the way we understand and tell our unfolding narrative. First our parents, then teachers, friends, coaches, spouses, children, employers, employees and even panhandlers on the street are writing in the margins of our autobiographies. We are tempted to believe we are solo artists, but we are more like featured soloists in a symphony. The question, of course, is what kind of music we will play together.