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

by Curt Thompson

He came to see how shame had the potential to taint virtually any moment of his storytelling process. When it joins us at early ages, and through the subtlety of nonverbal and verbal interactions, it becomes like a virus that spreads early and often until it infects the entire body. This does not mean that every single thought or image is a product of shame. However, it does reflect that shame does not limit itself to obvious parts of our story. It is not only the voice of our coach telling us we are the worst free-throw shooter she has ever seen. It is not restricted to the memory of the rape. No, it lives in our mind waiting for unexpected opportunities to color the feeling of a moment with its nondescript residue that we would barely identify as having anything to do with our subject.

And in those moments of either minimal or catastrophic disorientation, we sense the feeling that something is deeply inadequate about us.

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.

In this sense I don’t just tell a story, even a good one, for the sake of the story alone. Indeed, I tell it for my own sake, even if the story is not about me. I want to tell my story in no small part because I want to be known. For in so doing I experience what it means to be connected to people—which is what my brain longs for as much as anything.

much of the story we are telling is coming from parts of us that are deeply buried, associated with neural networks from the brainstem, limbic circuitry, temporal lobes and right hemisphere, circuits whose activity are not associated with immediate conscious awareness. This does not mean, however, that we cannot become more aware of these shifts in neurobiological activity.

Shame’s presence is ubiquitous and inserts itself into the genetic material of the human storytelling endeavor. One way to envision shame is as a personal attendant. Imagine that you have a completely devoted attendant attuned to every sensation, image, feeling, thought and behavior you have. However, imagine that your shame attendant’s intention is not good, is not to care for you but rather to infuse nonverbal and verbal elements of judgment into every moment of your life. The word attendant at first may seem counterintuitive, as it usually applies to someone who has our best interests in mind. But this is how shame works, a wolf disguised in sheep’s clothing. Hence, our shame attendant appears in language, feelings, sensations and images that may on the surface seem acceptable, common and normal, but its purpose is anything but being helpful. We each have our own who attends to every turn in our storytelling venture, no matter how large or small the moment. Our attendant is waiting to offer advice, suggestions and reflections with the intended purpose of disintegration.

She learned to wire together in her mind the desire for being seen with the inevitable outcome of harsh belligerence.

Over the years, not surprisingly, in order to meet her needs Maggie learned how to work hard to make people happy. This, along with her intelligence, had won her many friends and led to the life she knew. But whenever she was confronted with someone who was uncooperative, she became fearful, tentative and accommodating.

Although Maggie was able in the abstract to see that their behavior was not acceptable, her only way of seeing how to solve the problem was to work harder to change her behavior rather than to expect them to change theirs. She told herself that if she worked harder she would convince them to change. Shame may not come to us directly, but it always makes us feel solely responsible for the problem.

“Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame” (v. 25)?

would suggest that shame’s mention—juxtaposed to humankind’s nakedness—is significant not simply because of what follows but also, and perhaps mostly, because it is primal to what follows. 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 twist goodness into the seven deadliest versions of its opposite, shame is necessary and effective, and its virulence explicitly exploits our vulnerability.

In other words, Genesis 2:25 is not just a passing description of humankind before Genesis 3. It is drawing our attention to the emotional fulcrum around which the history of sin rotates, the fundamental source, harbinger and herald of what is to come. I 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. As such, in the biblical narrative when we experience shame, we are not simply encountering one of an array of possible emotions; rather we are engaging evil in its most fundamental mode of operation.

And to be fooled is to be shamed, if even at the subtlest nonconscious level of awareness.

To be told that you will be like God may seem like a good thing. I would love to hear that. But the subtle corollary to this idea is that, given the prohibition to the fruit of this particular tree, by implication God does not want you to be like him. God does not want you to have what he has. He does not want you to be as close and as connected to him as you might think he does. And by further implication, therefore, you are not as important as you think. You, as it turns out, are less than you think. You. Are. Not. Enough.

Of course, the most effective—and possibly the supremely threatening—way to prevent the slide into this trap is to talk with God, rather than about him. But this idea never gains an audience in the Genesis story. And as we know, to relationally confront our shame requires that we risk feeling it on the way to its healing. This is no easy task. This is the common undercurrent of virtually all of our relational brokenness. We sense, image, feel and think all sorts of things that we never say, because we’re far too frightened to be that honest, that vulnerable. But honest vulnerability is the key to both healing shame—and its inevitably anticipated hellish outcome of abandonment—and preventing it from taking further root in our relationships and culture.

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. Here, via the subtlety that only the craftiest wisdom can muster, the woman is accused of being undesirable, not enough.

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.

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.

My “problem,” as it turns out, is ultimately what I am sensing, imaging, feeling, thinking and doing. It is not my only problem, just my ultimate one. This is not to say that someone else may not be a problem for me, or that if someone robs me or hurts my child my distress is only a function of my own mind. Rather it identifies where the ultimate source of my distress lies: within my own mind.

perceive, beginning at nonconscious levels of awareness, that I do not have what it takes to tolerate what I feel. I am not just sad, angry or lonely. But ultimately these feelings rest on the bedrock that I am alone with what I feel, and no one is coming to my aid. Shame undergirds other affective states because of its relationship to being left. And to be abandoned ultimately is to be in hell. This terror of being alone drives my shame-based behavior and, ironically, takes me to the very place I most fear going—to the hell of absolute isolation.

We inhabit a world in which we have inherited, genetically, epigenetically, generationally and culturally, the tendency to hide in response to the fear that is evoked by awakening to our vulnerability. But not simply our vulnerability as a fact but rather the felt implication of shame that heralds the impending abandonment we are about to undergo. Notice that fear follows the anticipation of the feeling of shame: “I was afraid because I was naked.” 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.

“Have you eaten from the tree?” A simple yes or no would do. But the horse of shame has left the barn, and the man and woman respectively do what we all have a tendency to do when we are genuinely sought, even when sought in love. Our shame screams out in judgment of those closest to us. Sure, it is easy and common for us to judge those who are the furthest from us. But we reserve our most venomous moments for those that circle most closely in our relational orbits.

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...

The potential downside to never having anything to do with trouble in your family is the possibility that your family never suspects that trouble ever has anything to do with you.

As she reflected on all of her accomplishments, she stated that part of her was tempted to believe her “competence” was fraudulent. That it was all a lie. An untruth told to cover up her real self, which felt invisible and small.

In our minds, to be vulnerable is to sense the potential for danger. But this danger is not perceived as being merely that of physical annihilation, limited to the functions of the brainstem and limbic circuitry. It is the even more consciously terrifying prospect of relational disintegration, which eventually leads to the prefrontal cortex telling us we are not enough and the specter of our being left as a result. To be vulnerable is to recognize that we are at the mercy of those whose intentions we cannot guarantee, and who can leave us alone.

She was surprised to discover that this sense of vulnerability, which she interpreted as the sign of her greatest weakness—the greatest risk to her survival—when reframed in terms of being known by (in this case) me, and hopefully God and perhaps even her husband, was in fact the key to her healing.

We so thoroughly guarantee our physical safety that we believe vulnerability is abnormal, even pathological.

the idea of vulnerability brings with it both the hope of liberation and the terror of possible abject rejection.

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.

As we read about the triune God considering the possibility of creating humankind in his image (Genesis 1:26-27), we get the impression God knows that inviting humans to join him in this joyful life on earth would necessarily mean that God was setting himself up for a rough go of it. God put himself in harm’s way simply by making us. The act of creation was one of vulnerability, an act in which God was open to wounding, with the anticipated heartache that accompanies it. However, this openness was bracketed by a relational connection that prevents fear and shame from ruling its anticipated future. Although we can assume that God knew creation would bring trouble, he had confidence that his triune relationships would bear the weight of whatever trauma would come his way.

One could argue that the most powerful creative act of humans lies on the continuum between sexual intercourse and the birth of a baby. Nothing requires more physical vulnerability than this life-fashioning act. Nor can it be accomplished alone.

But what was God feeling as he inquired, “Where are you?” What must it have been like to have known, to have felt the rejection from humans? It is not hard to read this story and immediately conclude that the humans were rejecting God—for indeed they were. It may take more work for us to imagine that God actually felt that rejection, and though it did not keep him from continuing to seek us out, we have no reason to doubt that that moment was the first of many moments that would culminate on Good Friday. Only when we see Jesus do we begin to get a picture of what God may have been experiencing when his vulnerability was first exposed.

He is asking us to be as vulnerable as he was in creating us in the first place. He is looking for us because he longs for us to be with him even as he is with us, for us to know his delight with us which is present at all times, even in the presence of other things he may simultaneously feel. He is not asking the couple their whereabouts to acquire their geographic location, nor simply information about the state of their souls. 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.

In fact, from the beginning God has had to trust us as much as he asks us to trust him. In creating us he risks everything—short of his trinitarian relational connection—something we often have great difficulty imagining. In the story we tell as followers of Jesus, then, from its opening pages we find vulnerability—first without shame and then in the face of it—to be an essential aspect of God’s posture toward us and nothing short of a fundamental necessity for the healing of shame and the promotion of human flourishing.

The more of me that is exposed to another, the greater will be my wounding when I am betrayed. We deeply long for connection, to be seen and known for who we are without rejection. But we are terrified of the vulnerability that is required for that very contact. And shame is the variable that mediates that fear of rejection in the face of vulnerability.

Paul indicates that being known by God is the signpost that we love him. And to be known necessarily means that we are willing to expose each part of us, especially those parts that feel most hidden and that carry the most shame. For to know as in verse 2 is not unlike what Adam and Eve sought in the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It is to ask all the questions and do all the observing and analyzing. In contrast, to be known is necessarily to be vulnerable, to open ourselves to God’s love. It is to be asked questions. To be observed. To be seen.

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.5 These are the parts that contain our shame. And our shame attendant incessantly draws our attention to them.

For only in those instances when our shamed parts are known do they stand a chance to be redeemed. We can love God, love ourselves or love others only to the degree that we are known by God and known by others.

To the degree that we practice being known in this age, we will be that much more ready for its full expression in the age to come. But again, this requires work unsurpassed in difficulty by any other human undertaking.

he revealed himself to us in exceedingly vulnerable ways: “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30); “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35); “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). It is easy for us to hear these as words of comfort and calling. But what did it mean to Jesus to say them? What emotion coursed through him as he revealed these deeply intimate parts of who he saw himself to be? These words were not mere declarations of truth. They were acts of vulnerability, for in his context he opened the door to ridicule, rejection and eventual subjection to torturous death.

our refusal of relationship, our turning away from love and our commitment to making our way in the world by ourselves.

I imagined Jesus, far from looking at her with impatience, might more likely tell her that he knows, despite its necessity, just how painfully hard it is to expose herself, given shame’s power.

We don’t avoid hard conversations in our marriages without our conviction that we don’t have what it takes to tolerate what will inevitably be said, which will lead to someone leaving, someone living out in words or actions that we are not enough.

But their journey out of their shame and into a life of flourishing joy was realized not least because of their willingness to be known. It is not difficult to suggest, therefore, that the process of being known is necessary for the healing of shame. But what practical steps do we take to address the mind-body state of shame, given that it so thoroughly infects and disintegrates every functional domain of the mind? How do we confront it, given that it is highly resistant to efforts that are often limited to changing what we think rationally?

In each case, Satan questions God’s pleasure with Jesus.

Carl Rogers and Henri Nouwen have said that those things that are most personal are most universal. There is no greater evidence for this than when someone reveals the shame he or she carries while gathered in a group of safe, expectant listeners. I have said elsewhere that we all are born into the world looking for someone looking for us, and that we remain in this mode of searching for the rest of our lives. When we acknowledge our shame, it resonates with the shame carried by all of us. With confession, it is given the opportunity for resonance, exposure and healing in the life of the listener as well as the speaker. True goodness and beauty emerge when healing takes place at all levels of human awareness, which necessarily includes our individual as well as communal life. They are inseparable. This is what it means to be made in God’s image. And this is what it means for us to live like God: to practice asking questions, the mission being not to find the right answers, important as they are, so much as to be more connected.

The purpose is not to analyze what led to the shame or the larger story surrounding it. That form of analyzing, ironically, tends to feed the shame cycle. The purpose is to draw your attention to the fact that it has occurred. Remember, shame uses clandestine operations. It would be happy for you to experience it without it taking any credit. Its objective is not to be famous but to destroy you.

When we wound others, creating either minor or gaping ruptures, it is necessary to repair them. This requires the admission of responsibility for our role in the rupture. Shame is the emotional energy behind our resistance to this. It does so by fueling our anticipation of being forsaken upon our admission of guilt. As we recall, one of shame’s features is as a harbinger of abandonment, of catastrophic collapse of relationship. Even in small doses, when my left brain knows that my wife is not going to leave me when I admit to her that I have not done something I promised I would do, there still is the faint fear that redounds from hell. Lurking deep within us is what Satan convinced our first parents to believe—that we are not important enough for God to remain with us. Who looks forward to and enjoys the prospect of confessing to anyone a wrong committed? We might be able to imagine the relief in the absolution of guilt, but this requires that we work past shame’s penchant for questioning whether we will be scorned rather than forgiven.

I need someone to be able to say to me, “You’re right. You were wrong to have done this.” I need to hear that my behavior was really as bad as I think, if not worse, while simultaneously sensing that the person I am confessing to is not leaving. Shame has the effect of coaxing us into pretending that sin is not as bad as it seems; for if it really is that bad, and I have to face it, it would be too much and I fear I would be overwhelmed. When someone seeks forgiveness for the wrong they have committed, we who have been wounded must be able to acknowledge the reality of the pain inflicted if forgiveness is to be real, and if the offender’s shame is to be effectively healed.