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

by Curt Thompson

For all that convinces me that my mind is limited to “me,” the truth remains that a great deal of my mind’s activity is wrapped up with thinking about or interacting with other people’s minds.

Rather, it refers to our ability to give meaning to the things we remember. As such, we are aware that we had a beginning and that we will die at some point in the future. This awareness of time and its passing has great influence on how we respond to the present moment.

Over the course of the development of these nine domains we move from relatively lesser to greater degrees of complexity in our connections both intra- and interpersonally.

Evidence accumulated in the last three decades indicates that brain cells have greater capacity for adaptation and regeneration than was previously believed.

This is popularly recounted in what has become known as Hebb’s axiom, in honor of Canadian neuropsychologist Donald Hebb: Those neurons that fire together wire together. In essence, the more we practice activating particular neural networks, the more easily they are to activate, and the more permanent they become in the brain.

Neuroplasticity is the feature of flexible adaptation that makes possible the connection (or pruning) of neural networks and thus the formation and permanence of shame patterns. And attention is the function that drives the movement of neuroplasticity.

Ultimately we become what we pay attention to, and the options available to us at any time are myriad, the most important of which being located within us.

So much of the biblical narrative is the story of God working hard to get our attention.

One cannot speak about the mind without eventually wading into the amorphous world of emotion. I say “eventually” because when the word mind is mentioned, many if not most people first associate it with the process of how we think.

Indeed, emotion holds a place of primacy in the realm of human behavior.

emotion is the mental activity that most fundamentally alerts us to transitions from state to state. And although researchers have not developed consensus on how to characterize it,6 they do agree to emotion being the energy around which the brain organizes itself.

Developmentally, emotion is present far earlier than cognition. Many researchers believe that it is present and active even before birth. Hence, emotion is of primal significance when it comes to our doing anything.

As such, emotion is something that both regulates us and that we regulate.

One particular way that emotions affect us is via our memory. We tend to attune to and thereby remember things that have emotional salience.

Another important aspect of emotional salience involves its role in our anticipation of the future. Indeed, when we imagine our future state, whether five minutes or five years from now, we are not merely thinking comprehensively about events, as such. The most salient feature that our brain anticipates is our emotional state. For example, if I am worried about what diagnosis the doctor will give to my child, I am not only worried about the fact that she may have cancer. Rather, my mind is anticipating what I will feel when I hear the news. Moreover, it is not only that I anticipate the feeling of deep sadness; even more important, I anticipate being powerless to escape the feeling.

Emotion, then, courses throughout the entirety of our daily lives, giving rise to varying bandwidths of experience.

Attachment is the process that we each undergo, either relatively securely or insecurely, whereby as we are born we connect—attach—to important caregivers in our lives in response to their particular approach to

Technically, attachment refers to the process by which the immature infant brain accesses and utilizes the strengths of the mature adult brain in order to learn how to organize and regulate itself.

I tell myself, silently or out loud, in words, images and feelings about everything I believe about myself and the universe:

But recall that so much of the mind’s activity, and our way of telling stories, is done beneath the radar of consciousness, let alone language, immersed in sensations, images and feelings along with thoughts.9 But shame wants very much to infect every element of the mind in order to distort God’s story and offer another narrative.

In the last twenty years, research spearheaded by the work of psychologist Allan Schore and others persuasively suggests that of all the primary tasks of the infant, there is none more crucial than the pursuit, acquisition and establishment of joyful, securely attached relationships.

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

is crucial to note from the outset that 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, although we do not think of it in those terms, and certainly not at very early ages.

Guilt is something I feel because I have done something bad. Shame is something I feel because I am bad. In fact, when in its grip, it is quite difficult for us to separate our self from the shame that we are feeling. 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. Furthermore, a necessary element of the emotion we call guilt includes empathy, if even in primitive form. In order for me to feel guilt, I must in some way simultaneously feel the pain I have caused for another.

One way to think of this is that we can experience shame without guilt but are unlikely to experience guilt without shame.)

Hence, despite shame being mostly about me, it is never only about me, even when my experience of it seems to emerge fully and only from deep within the dungeon of my own mind.

Small or microscopic stories are ones that insert themselves in ways that are so temporary we barely notice them, and they may have little impact on our life. Or they could change our day completely.

Therefore, as Peter Berger and Lesslie Newbigin attest, we must be careful and wise regarding the tacit cultural assumptions that shape the stories of our lives that we tell.

The vulnerability of nakedness is the antithesis of shame. We are maximally creative when we are simultaneously maximally vulnerable and intimately connected, and evil knows this.

would suggest that the writer wants us to pay attention to shame not just because it happens to show up later but because of its central role in all that ends in a curse. It is the emotional feature out of which all that we call sin emerges.

C. S. Lewis’s sense of the place of this emotion in our day-to-day lives: “I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.”

Doubt not only about God (“Did God really say . . . ?”) but also about her recollection of history and by extension—and more importantly—doubt about the nature of her relationship with God. As Michael Polanyi has pointed out, in order for us to doubt anything, at the moment we do we simultaneously put our trust in something else.4 We are invariably made for faith, to operate out of a need to trust something we cannot control.

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

Or we may doubt that there is a God, let alone one who is with and for us. Doubt, though concerned with facts, is not primarily about them but rather about our emotional sensation of connection, security and confidence. It is noteworthy that we often attempt to solve our problems of doubt by acquiring more information—and this is not to be despised. If we doubt our knowledge of the proper medication to give to a patient, it is a good thing to double check. In this sense, doubt is a mental function that serves the purpose of our greater good.

So often when we doubt ourselves, especially in the face of what we consider to be important events in our lives, we are actually doubting our sense of connection with others, not least with God. We doubt that we will be okay. To be okay as a human is first and foremost about being connected to God and others. It is not ultimately about having enough information, skill, intelligence or experience. Neither is it about being youthful, svelte or ripped, nor having enough money, sex or power. And when doubt involves any of these, you can be confident that shame is the emotional feature that is deeply at work.

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. In so doing, it bypasses my logical, thinking brain such that I am hardly aware that judgment is even taking place. Before I know it, shame has taken root while I am oblivious to its presence.

It is a hallmark of shame that though I experience it as something being fundamentally wrong with me, I draw that conclusion only as a byproduct of my emotional sense of it as a harbinger of abandonment, as a function of the potential for a catastrophic rupture in relationship.

Adam’s felt sense of vulnerability—expressed as shame—drives the engine of the story as it unfolds. And so it is with all of us. Our vulnerability, ultimately to potential abandonment (of which shame is the herald), is simultaneously both the source of all that is broken in our world as well as its redemption.

Shame’s power lies in its subtlety and silence, embedded in mental functions of implicit memory that we carry individually and corporately, and is quite content to remain in the shadows while we go on to do its dirty work. It extends and nourishes itself, devouring us in the process, as our individual shame mushrooms into its various corporate expressions. We remain in its self-perpetuating cycle of judgment and hiding, continuing to fulfill the prophecy of the curses that God has foreseen.

Like shame, vulnerability is understood to be an artifact of the human condition. The work of Brown and others has drawn the public’s attention to its potential to enhance human flourishing.

But the biblical narrative tells a different story. One so different, in fact, that in seeing the place of vulnerability in the pages of the Bible we cannot help but be amazed at its place and purpose. It begins in the beginning, where we are introduced to a vulnerable God. Vulnerable in the sense that he is open to wounding. Open to pain. Open to rejection. Open to death.

His question is a means of connecting. He is not inviting them into a place of vulnerability merely for vulnerability’s sake. Rather, vulnerability is the state we must pass through in order to

deepen our connection with God and others, given our condition. There is no other way.

Our brains are wired with a deep suspicion of anything that might leave us alone in the ultimate sense.

And as David Benner points out, those parts of us that feel most broken and that we keep most hidden are the parts that most desperately need to be known by God, so as to be loved and healed.

Rather, absolute joy must eventually include my being completely known, especially those parts that in subtle, hidden ways have carried shame, often without my conscious awareness. This is the language of the new heaven and new earth. This is the work that God alone has initiated and in which he longs for us to join him.

This is not to argue in favor of a different way to portray Jesus’ crucifixion, but rather to point out that although we assent theologically to how Good Friday delivered us from shame as well as sin, actually permitting ourselves to be there on that Friday, being with a naked Jesus, is an entirely different matter altogether. But only to the degree that we take the time to image, sense and feel what it would have been like to be there can we answer yes to the question “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”

It entails creating communities around us who are reminding us of the same thing that Jesus heard at his baptism. Our struggle against shame is begun not by ourselves but in the company of trustworthy friends, family members and spiritual mentors. Remember, isolation is one of shame’s primary methods. We therefore must be cautious of thinking that we can do this by ourselves through sheer force of will.

To “fix our eyes on Jesus” means watching him and doing what he did. It is to intentionally seek out our shame, expose it and reframe it in light of our Father telling us that we are his daughters and sons in whom he is well-pleased. For this to happen, we must practice embodied acts of imagination that enable all our sensations, images, feelings, thoughts and physical actions to reflect our sense of God’s delight with us.

First, it takes great courage to share something shameful (especially if the person has done something he or she is guilty of and feels shame as a matter of course). We see it in the person’s face and body language—we have all been there.