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

by Curt Thompson

distress, the woman begins the analytic, left-brain-dominant mode of retelling the story of the tree at the center of the garden. Now, in the new narrative, instead of it being off-limits and the source of death by alienation, it becomes the potential source of life. Now she is able to tell her story without involving anyone else. No one else to make a mess of her life. No more disappointment. No more regret. No more hurt. No more limits. No more coauthors to contend with. It is far easier to live with a tree that is planted and fixed than with a God who can come and go as he pleases, leaving her vulnerable to a snake. More explicitly, the fruit of this tree becomes the source by which she can cope with the mounting wave of emotional distress, her awareness of her inadequacy, her isolation, her shame. And the new narrative she constructs (with all the imagined benefits while disregarding the cost) becomes the way she retells her story—and foretells yours and mine—all the while reinforcing, rather than resolving, the emotional and relational disintegration that was the source of her appetite in the first place. Shame has led to her replacing relationship with a pear. She walks away from engagement with Adam or God—a neurobiological state of “we”—and into the dark, blind alley of independence, all as a way of regulating the emotional disruption that has been introduced by her interchange with the serpent.