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

by Curt Thompson

Though I may say, “I should have been better at that” or “I’m not good enough,” the power of those moments lies in our emotional response to the evoking stimulus, be that a comment, a glance or a recollection of that day in third grade when your teacher pointed out in front of the rest of the class that you weren’t that bright.

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

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.

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.

But it is in the movement toward another, toward connection with someone who is safe, that we come to know life and freedom from this prison.

some behavioral guillotine, but rather we starve it over time, not by avoiding it but by attuning to it as a component of a larger story.

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.

This is important as we wade into the neuroscience of shame, for shame most primitively and powerfully undermines the process of joyful attachment, integration and creativity.

Thus, if we tell ourselves, using imagery and sensations as much as words, that our life isn’t going anywhere, we literally wire our brain to continue in that pattern of storytelling. It becomes an embodied reality, and no amount of theological facts that state otherwise, apart from equally embodied action, will necessarily change the story’s outcome.

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. To

And all sin, all idolatry, all coping strategies in which I indulge are ways for me to satiate my hunger for relationship, my longing to be known and loved, my desire to be desired.

But as David Benner points out, quoting John Calvin, we cannot expect to know God fully if we are not willing to know ourselves, for one depends on the other.

1 Corinthians 8:2-3, where he points out the difference between knowing in order to master the universe and being known by God: “Those who think they know something do not yet know as they ought to know. But whoever loves God is known by God.”

These parts will know the greatest joy in healing as they are known. In 1 Corinthians 13:12, Paul, writing in the poetic language of a hymn, reminds us that “now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” To be fully loved—and to fully love—requires

We often say in psychotherapy that we name things to tame things. Simply naming the moment as a shame event shifts our attention, taking us out of its vortex, allowing us to observe it more dispassionately and preventing us from unwittingly and automatically acting out of our Hebbian networks only to reinforce shame’s message.

One idea in particular that speaks to the issue of shame is her suggestion that real learning takes place when the answers to questions are presumed to be possibilities rather than certainties.