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

by Curt Thompson

But evil has other plans and uses shame as a primary emotional leverage not simply to entice humans to “do something wrong” or “disobey,” although that certainly is what they did in the Genesis story, but to disrupt relationships via its access to functions of the mind that do not emerge from the parts of the brain that make us uniquely human. Rather, it activates systems within the brainstem and limbic circuitry that, given our penchant for inattentiveness, wreak havoc on our prefrontal cortices. It utilizes contempt, even in the mildest forms, to create patterns of distress in response to which we create coping strategies—idols—that forgo relationships for things we believe we can more independently control and that will pose less risk for hurting us in the future. Unfortunately, this invariably leads to the isolation of hiding from ourselves, from each other and from God, continuing to make up our stories on our own, terrified of collaborating in the telling of stories with others for fear that our nakedness will be revealed and exploited. The eventual, inevitable outcome of this isolation is hell, the antithetical state of the we-ness and with-ness of life in trinitarian community. It is the counter echo of God’s mandate that it is not good to be alone. 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 wo...