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

by Curt Thompson

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?

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.

As I will suggest, this phenomenon is the primary tool that evil leverages, out of which emerges everything that we would call sin. As such, it is actively, intentionally, at work both within and between individuals. Its goal is to disintegrate any and every system it targets, be that one’s personal story, a family, marriage, friendship, church, school, community, business or political system. Its power lies in its subtlety and its silence,

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. Again, by shame I am not talking about something that necessarily requires the intensity of extreme humiliation. 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. The important feature here is not just the fact that I am not enough to change my life (though of course the fact is necessary as part of the experience), but rather the felt sense that I do not have what it takes to tolerate this moment or circumstance.

“Shamed people shame people.”

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.

But indeed this dance between hiding and feeling shame itself becomes a tightening of the noose. We feel shame, and then feel shame for feeling shame. It begets itself.

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

Shame both actively dismantles and further prohibits this process of integration, leading to disconnection between mental processes within an individual’s mind as well as between individual members within a community.

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.

We fear the shame that we will feel when we speak of that very shame. In some circumstances we anticipate this vulnerable exposure to be so great that it will be almost life threatening. 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.

In the same manner that God intends that our minds grow in maturity and connection, just as we do with each other, it is one of shame’s primary features to disrupt and dis-integrate that very process, functionally leading to either rigid or chaotic states of mind and behavior, lived out intra- and interpersonally.

I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:1-2)

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. Paul, in his letter to the Romans knows this, stating flatly, “Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires. The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace” (Romans 8:5-6). To have one’s mind set on something is essentially about paying attention. What do I pay attention to? Paul says that what we pay attention to doubles back and governs us. Hence our attention is deeply associated with either death or life.

Once shame begins its march from a small slight, growing to geometric expansion, my attentional mechanism goes offline and remains so. Reversing this shaming event is as much about getting my attention back on track as anything else.

emotion is something that both regulates us and that we regulate. Whenever we are thinking or sensing something, emotion is part of the process. It would therefore be more accurate to consider emotion as being woven throughout all human activity, albeit in degrees that are more or less perceptible to us in conscious ways. Therefore, there is never a time in which we are not “being emotional.”

The more I practice remembering things I am emotionally drawn to, the more I become that which I remember.

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. Awareness of this is crucial, for shame as an emotion is something we not only anticipate but also feel unable to change.

Emotion, then, courses throughout the entirety of our daily lives, giving rise to varying bandwidths of experience. We symbolize these different feelings with words such as joy, sadness, anger, surprise, disappointment and others, including shame. This implies that what is most primal and potent about shame is its emotional nature. It certainly can emerge in response to information provided for us, and therefore it seems to have its origin in cognition, but its power lies in our felt experience of it. It is important to keep this in mind, for when it comes to combating shame, if we are not attending to what we are feeling, it will be easy for it to have its way with us without our even knowing it.

of all the variables that encourage the development of secure attachment in a child, the single most powerful one is the degree to which the child’s parent has made coherent sense of his or her own story.

Secure attachment is fostered in environments in which there is a premium placed on empathy, attunement, mindfulness and the proper setting of limits—features that had not always been present in Justin’s childhood home. Rather, perfectionism, not only of how he performed in school but also what he believed theologically, was elevated above all other virtues. Justin even perceived following Jesus to be something that needed to be done perfectly, albeit without those words ever being spoken directly. It was more in the way he interpreted all the nonverbal cues that led to his assumptions about never revealing imperfections—and certainly never ones that involved sexuality.

The natural progression, then, of the development of integrated minds, relationships and communities is fully realized in the experience of joy—joy even in the presence of very hard places. For secure attachment is not primarily about the absence of pain but the presence of joy in the face of those challenging places. It is not about the absence of ruptures but the faithful repair of ruptures, even when repair seems beyond the reach of our imaginations. Shame of course will do everything it can to interfere with the emergence of joy, curiosity and the creativity that inevitably ensues—even in the face of difficult relational circumstances.

our patterns of attachment deeply influence the way we experience our relationship with God. For he has to deal with the same brain that we do; he engages the same proclivities we have for avoiding or being anxious about the intimacy of relationships. It is not as if we get to put our brains, which are wired in a particular way through our attachment patterns, on the shelf and somehow draw on a separate one when it comes to dealing with God. He comes to the same set of neural networks that our friends, parents, spouse, children or enemies do.

the dark side of being alone—really alone: isolated, deserted, forgotten, dismissed, scorned, pushed out, abandoned—is a potential that God recognized. And we will soon see how shame is deeply committed to exploiting the machinery of attachment in creating states of aloneness within us and between us, and most substantially between us and God. But just as this mind–brain–relational triad can be disintegrated by shame, so also are relationships, through earned secure attachment (an echo of God coming to us embodied in Jesus), the means by which shame is regulated and healed.

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

It 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,

Researchers have described shame as a feeling that is deeply associated with a person’s sense of self, apart from any interactions with others; guilt, on the other hand, emerges as a result of something I have done that negatively affects someone else. Guilt is something I feel because I have done something bad. Shame is something I feel because I am bad.

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. In this sense guilt tends to draw my attention to another and is often accompanied by a desire to resolve the problem by being closer to him or her [admitting a wrongdoing, seeking and being offered forgiveness]. Shame, on the other hand, separates me from others, as my awareness of what I feel is virtually consumed with my own internal sensations.

we can experience shame without guilt but are unlikely to experience guilt without shame.)8

Furthermore, in a shame encounter that takes place before language is fully developed, it is not as if the child thinks in terms of Mom isn’t happy with me—cognition is not yet developed enough for this. Rather, the child is being governed by the parts of the brain (brainstem, limbic circuitry and portions of the right hemisphere) that simply respond to emotional shifts. We first develop a felt sense of shame rather than a rational explanation of a series of events. With repeated exposure to events such as these, we pay attention to and, via our early neuroplastic flexibility, more permanently encode these shame networks. Thus, they become more easily able to fire later on, even when activated by the most minor or even unrelated stimuli.

Furthermore, my memory is inundated with old, implicit network activity, recollections of other times I have felt this, and I am unable to marshal the necessary memories of strength and confidence I desperately need at the moment. Shame is overtaking me. I then begin to construct a narrative that predicts a bleak and pessimistic future. I am unable to tell the whole story, certainly not one in which I am loved by God unconditionally and life, in the end, will be okay. My state of mind is fully disrupted, and transitioning back to one of coherence and peacefulness requires enormous effort. I can only see myself as being intolerable to others, and I sense the impossibility that this feeling will ever end.

The process of disintegration therefore follows a predictable, inevitable trajectory, one that begins with separation and ends in the hell of utter isolation. It begins with physically turning away, which takes place upon shame’s activation.

Certainly with minor incidents we sense little in the way of disintegration. But with overly toxic events, it can feel as if we are literally going out of our minds.

This movement toward virtual infinite separation is our desperate attempt to deescalate the awful emotional sensation that we are enduring at the moment. For instance, in turning our gaze and body away from someone, we seek as expeditiously as possible to reduce the acutely painful feeling of being exposed. We are not aware that we simultaneously reinforce the deeply felt notion, captured via implicit memory tracts, that we are in fact shameful. Little do we know that this neuropsychological response in the long run only serves to reinforce our proclivity to reactivate the very state we are seeking to escape, not least because we often find ourselves having to cope with this state by ourselves in isolation—a state that decreases the flexibility and resilience of the mind—the very isolation that shame has created in the first place.

When shame appears, especially in malignant forms, we are often driven to a felt sense of stasis. Our mind feels incapable of thinking. We may feel literally physically frozen in place when experiencing extreme humiliation, and if we are able to move, we feel like going somewhere we can hide and remain hidden without returning to engage others.

shame’s healing. What begins in the mind as the separation of its various functions, and leads to the isolation of each from the other, is eventually expressed in the world of relationships—from family to friendships to communities to nations—leaving them fractured and impotent to regain any sense of relational integrity. This is shame at its worst. No one needs to believe in God to know that this is the way it works. We have all been there and know this experience of disintegration to be true. The question, of course, is what to do when this storm front blows into our living room.

One word (certainly not the only or necessarily the best) that is deeply associated with the feeling of shame is accused. It is no wonder, given that despite our sense of shame being within us, we often endure it as something that has been foisted on us by virtue of the accusation of someone else. The notion of being accused, in its most malignant form, leads to a state symbolized by another word: contempt. This word represents deep derision and condescension.

The research data on marriage offered by John Gottman is replete with evidence that one of the most powerful predictors of the likelihood that a marriage will not survive is the presence of contempt displayed by one partner toward another.

As it turns out, humans tend to experience no greater distress than when in relationships of intentional, unqualified abandonment—abandoned physically and left out of the mind of the other. With shame, I not only sense that something is deeply wrong with me, but accompanying this is the naturally extended consequence that because of this profound flaw, you will eventually want nothing to do with me and will leave. Paradoxically, then, shame is a leveraging affect that anticipates abandonment while simultaneously initiating movement away—leaving.

And to move away to any degree carries with it the potential risk of eventual abandonment. There is no more powerful siren call that warns us of this than shame. As such, any movement away without a clear indication of return—which is how Miriam’s brain interpreted her father’s silence—works harmonically with shame. Hence, not only does shame warn us of the potential of leaving, but leaving with no indication for the intention of reappearing also activates shame, even in deeply hidden and quiet ways outside our conscious awareness.

Despite what appeared to others as obvious, logical solutions, Miriam’s PFC was not regulating her life. Instead, her mind was constantly racing into an anticipated future in which she would be indefinitely imprisoned by the sensation and feeling of shame. She was not thinking this consciously and rationally, but rather sensing and imaging this as she drowned in the quicksand of emotion.

We have observed shame’s character as a powerful, unexpected emotional shift that catches us off-guard, leaving us with a deep sense of feeling cut off, pushed out and, in the worst moments, contemptible. In its wake is left the debris of broken dreams and lost relationships, the evidence of joy that has been unexpectedly sheared off.

storytelling is the feature that ultimately sets us apart from the rest of the earth’s creatures—and the feature that shame intends to most powerfully exploit in order to lay waste to any attempts we would make to join God in creating a world of goodness and beauty.

Shame wants to alter our stories by telling its own version, one that is sure to bring trouble wherever it goes.

We don’t necessarily have to have words to know that we are happy, sad or tormented. Words are extraordinarily helpful, but they are not the source of our torment. And so our narratives begin with sensations, images and feelings; merge into a word or thought;

This is critical in understanding how shame begins to weave its way into our lives. It does not wait for us to acquire language to insert itself. It primarily amounts to a shift in sensory-affective tone, an emotional shearing

to believe anything, let alone a lie, is not a one-step mental process of engaging in a singular act we call “belief.” For to believe something involves the mobilization of multiple realms of mental activity, including sensations, images, feelings, thoughts and physical behaviors, all of which converge mysteriously into what we eventually believe.

Recall that when it comes to emotional distress, especially something as off-putting as shame, the brain will do whatever it can to reduce that distress as expeditiously as possible. In this way our response to shame, whether turning away physically or constructing our narrative, only reinforces it.

And with this we catch a glimpse of what evil is up to, using shame as its proxy. It wants us to tell our stories in such a way that we are the sole responsible party for what we feel; it wants us to live in isolation rather than in relationship. I feel shame, then, because I am shameful. I sense this because there is something wrong with me. It does not strike me that the reason I feel what I do is because of something that has happened to me as a function of my being in relationship with someone else. Despite my knowing as a fact that someone has said or done something to me that has evoked this awful feeling, shame’s neurobiological tendency is that I quickly take personal ownership for it. But how could I possibly know this? I was so young when the whole process began.