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

by Curt Thompson

the more pressure you use to seize it, the more evasive it becomes.

Of all the things that set us apart from the rest of creation as humans, one feature stands out: we tell stories. No other creatures we know of tell stories the way we do.

Whether we know it or not, and whether we intend to or not, we live our lives telling stories; in fact, we don’t really know how to function and not tell them.

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.

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.

Rather, it is just the opposite. I am deeply aware of how difficult it is to directly confront this problem. I am living proof of this. In fact, the very act of writing this book has revealed more spaces within my inner life that shame inhabits than I would like to admit.

To be human is to be infected with this phenomenon we call shame.

And our coping strategies have become so automatic that we may be completely unaware of its presence and activity.

In this way, even the slightest shaming interactions between individuals can eventually grow into conflagrations that involve multiple parties.

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.

What then exactly is this thing we are calling shame? How do we distinguish it in the moment it occurs?

We can use various words such as humiliation, embarrassment, indignity, disgrace or more. And though these words get close to what we really mean, ultimately they are essentially symbols that represent the actual neuropsychological state we enter when we experience it.

am not enough; There is something wrong with me; I am bad; or I don’t matter.

But it is revealing that so many of what we would term “negative” emotions (i.e., those that we find generally to be distressing in some way) are actually rooted in shame.

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.

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

She would not necessarily be aware that such self-talk was primarily about coping with shame, despite this being the most fundamental thing she is doing. And so, out of the feelings of shame come the words I don’t work hard enough.

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.

But further exploration revealed that under all of this was a deep sense that he simply did not have what it took to be effective, a sensation that was not reducible to a statement but rather something that seemed to have been woven into his DNA.

One of the hallmarks of shame is its employment of judgment.

may say to myself, I should have done better at that assignment.

much of what passes as “reasonable observations” about ourselves or others is merely cloaked judgment.

It never occurred to him that his penchant for managing people in this way was rooted in his own sense of inadequacy and shame, which he had learned to cope with by turning it outward toward others.

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. Suffice to say that our self-judgment, that tendency to tell ourselves that we are not enough—not thin enough, not smart enough, not funny enough, not . . . enough—is the nidus out of which grows our judgment of others, not least being our judgment of God. The problem is that we have constructed a sophisticated lattice of blindness around this behavior, which disallows our awareness of

Eventually, judgment, and the shame that is its master, can become the source of an ever-en...

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.

We recognize early and often that shame tends to be self-reinforcing. When we experience shame, we tend to turn away from others because the prospect of being seen or known by another carries the anticipation of shame being intensified or reactivated. However, the very act of turning away, while temporarily protecting and relieving us from our feeling (and the gaze of the “other”), ironically simultaneously reinforces the very shame we are attempting to avoid.

Isolation and disconnection are natural consequences of hiding and resisting reengagement.

In order for us to flourish, we need to be able to connect with others, but this connection is deeply rooted in our ongoing work to increase the degree of connection we experience within our own minds.

In all these features of shame, emotion is at the heart of the matter; judgment is actively in play. In their hiding, people become disconnected from each other and within their own minds, and the process tends to snowball, caught in a self-perpetuating loop. Is there hope for us? Fortunately, there

remains one response to shame that can begin to point us in the right direction.

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.

they didn’t feel nearly as alone, and many reported over the course of their year that the pressure to perform, and the fear of the shame of not performing well, gradually receded.

shame’s healing encompasses the counterintuitive act of turning toward what we are most terrified of.

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.

In addition to being fluid and emergent the mind is embodied.

Furthermore, the mind is as relational as it is embodied. By this I mean that the very emergence of the mind’s capacity to do what it does is crucially dependent on the presence of relationships.

Energy refers to the literal electrochemical communication from neuron to neuron. And information refers to those meaningful perceptions, whether conscious or nonconscious, that are coursing through our lives every moment, that are correlated with that very neurobiological energy.

Consciousness refers to our general level of awareness of what we are sensing, perceiving, feeling, thinking and doing at any given moment.

Our brains develop from the bottom up;

Horizontal. The brain also develops laterally as two halves, the right and left hemispheres, with the right’s growth in connection of its neurons tending to outpace the left’s in the first eighteen to twenty-four months of life, the left quickly beginning to catch up soon after.

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: Where did I put my keys so I can find them when I need to leave?

Narrative. As our minds develop, eventually we try to make sense of our lives.

The phrase state of mind, as it turns out, represents a real, embodied phenomenon. Neuroscientists think of mental states as being highly correlated with specific neural network activity.