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

by Curt Thompson

But I believe we live in a world in which good and evil are not just events that happen to us but rather expressions of something or someone whose intention is for good or for evil. And I will suggest that shame is used with this intention to dismantle us as individuals and communities, and destroy all of God’s creation.

to combat shame is not merely to wrestle against something we detest. It is to do that very thing that provides the necessary space for each of us to live like God, become like Jesus and grow up to be who we were born to be.

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.

Shame is a primary means to prevent us from using the gifts we have been given. And those gifts enable us to flourish as a light-bearing community of Jesus followers who work to create space for others who wish to join it to do so.

it is reasonable to assume that shame as an interpersonal neurobiological process plays a necessary role in helping us develop proper self-regulatory behavior. However, it is equally true that many behaviors that are not deterred (but that we believe should be) emerge from established shame-based patterns of life that precede said behaviors.

invariably, on the way to greater freedom they must pass, as we all do, through a common place of suffering: the place of shame.

Emotion itself could be considered to be the gasoline in our human tank. If we were to take emotion out of the human experience, we would literally stop moving.

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.

sadness, though certainly not always, is often related to a lessening. A lessening of relationship (such as death or a betrayal), function or agency (unemployment or an amputation), or the nature of one’s story (discovering as an adult, for instance, that when you were a child your father had had an affair and fathered a child you have never known about, lessening the confidence you have in your place in your family).

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.

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.

In their hiding, people become disconnected from each other and within their own minds, and the process tends to snowball, caught in a self-perpetuating loop.

Given how compelled we feel to turn away, strike inward at ourselves or strike out at others in response to shame, it is not our intuition to then quickly turn toward the other as a means to resolve the problem.

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 addition to being fluid and emergent the mind is embodied. It is not some abstraction that exists somewhere in the subjective ether; nor is it merely limited to the brain, but rather via the brain’s extended nervous system the mind interacts with the world both inside and outside our skin.

The task of the mind, in terms of what we witness scientifically that it does most effectively (and not from a theological perspective), is to regulate the flow of energy and information. Energy refers to the literal electrochemical communication from neuron to neuron. And information refers to those meaningful perceptions, whether conscious or nonconscious, that are coursing through our lives every moment, that are correlated with that very neurobiological energy. Shame has a tendency to disrupt this process of “regulating the flow of energy and information” by effectively disconnecting various functions of the mind from one another, leaving each domain of the mind as cut off from one another as we feel ourselves to be disconnected from other people.

We must be clear at all times that although the brain and the extensions of the central and autonomic nervous systems are necessary for life, we who follow Jesus do not believe that our minds—and therefore the essence of who we “are”—can be reduced to the neuronal activity of the brain. Thus, when we feel anger, imagine the Grand Canyon, cheer for our favorite soccer team, create a new sculpture or pray deeply with a particular image of God before us, we are modifying and adjusting the interaction between what is happening at the interface of our neurons and our perceiving mind, which cannot be limited simply to have solely arisen independently from our brain cells.

who I am (i.e., what I tell myself about myself in visual images, sensations and feelings as well as words) is always going to be understood in terms of my current relationships—and by current I am referring to all relationships, past or present, that currently are influencing my mind’s activity. Thus, even people who are deceased can continue to have sway over my life, depending on how I continue to process my ongoing experiences with my memory of them. This is why I can continue to have feelings of shame when I have memories of events involving a parent who is no longer living.

This way of comprehending the healthy development of the mind reminds us of the Genesis narrative which declares that we mysteriously hewn creatures are both dust and breath (Genesis 2:7); we are inseparably embodied and relational. Furthermore, this feature of integration is reflected in the psalmist’s plea that God would give him an undivided heart (Psalm 86:11), and God’s deep desire to do so while transforming hardened, disintegrated hearts into flexible, connected ones (Ezekiel 11:19).

It is fair to say that although Paul was not a neuroscientist, he refers here to what we now see through the lens of neuroplasticity. Renewal of the mind, therefore, is not just an abstraction. It means real change in real bodies.

Neuroplasticity is the feature of flexible adaptation that makes possible the connection (or pruning) of neural networks and thus the formation and permanence of shame patterns. And attention is the function that drives the movement of neuroplasticity.

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.

One cannot speak about the mind without eventually wading into the amorphous world of emotion.

when it comes to the development of the mind, we find that logical, linear thought processing is one of the last features to emerge. Indeed, emotion holds a place of primacy in the realm of human behavior. By primacy I am not implying that emotion is the most important of our mental functions, but rather that it tends to be primal, or early in the course of our mind’s development.

One particular way that emotions affect us is via our memory. We tend to attune to and thereby remember things that have emotional salience. Not that something need always be pleasant. Rather we attend to important and relevant things, and so practice remembering them. The more I practice remembering things I am emotionally drawn to, the more I become that which I remember.

Our first means of learning how to regulate our attention, memory, emotion and many other functions of the mind depends on another brain, and to some degree this continues for our entire lives. Over the course of our lives the relative health of our attachment has far-reaching implications for our flourishing, and strongly influences the eventual nature and health of the relationships we develop and maintain into adulthood. It shapes the way we interact with others, what kind of friendships and marriages we will have, and then reinforces the cycle by influencing how we parent our own children.

Secure attachment is fostered in environments in which there is a premium placed on empathy, attunement, mindfulness and the proper setting of limits—features

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.

of all the primary tasks of the infant, there is none more crucial than the pursuit, acquisition and establishment of joyful, securely attached relationships.

a secure base, no matter how old a “child” is, creates the context for exploration, proper risk and extension into realms of imagined experience that is, as the Victorian poet Robert Browning hints in Andrea del Sarto, beyond the child’s and then the adult’s grasp.

There is no domain that the creative power of joy, given the right nutrients in the soil, cannot grow in.

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, although we do not think of it in those terms, and certainly not at very early ages. However, our problem with it is generally that we tend to respond to it by relationally moving away from others rather than toward them, while experiencing within our own minds a similar phenomenon of internal disintegration.

This is something that initially is translated as something sensed and a child responds to primarily as a function of the body. It is not something a child first responds to by thinking rationally with words, for often his or her brain is not yet so well-developed to comprehend them. Rather a response will be generated largely from neurons in the child’s right hemisphere, where so much of his or her world is being lived in the first eighteen to twenty-four months of life.

Shame shows up early

Furthermore, 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.

In terms of mental processes, the distinct feeling of shame, one we all know but sometimes find hard to put into words, quickly arises. A deep sense of self-consciousness emerges; cognition becomes fuzzy as our thoughts are disabled; words may be hard to find (if we are old enough to form them); and the mind becomes caught in a vortex of images, sensations and thoughts that recycle and feed on each other at light speed, reinforcing the experience. It becomes difficult to imagine a way to halt the internal state of affairs, feeling trapped in a mind-body maze of emotional nausea. Usually, this state will persist until we are able to extricate ourselves from the situation, the circumstance passes or someone acts in such a way to intervene on our behalf.

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.

In the same way that a destructive weather system (e.g., tornado, hurricane or flood) disrupts the connected infrastructure of power supply and people, so shame does to the mind and relationships.

when I experience shame, I find it virtually impossible to turn my attention to something other than what I am feeling. I can become overwhelmed with the activity of my brainstem (the no-clutch phenomenon), and my PFC goes offline. I am not able to think coherently, and my logical thought processes, which usually help me make good choices, are unavailable to regulate my right brain, from which all of the emotion is pouring.

With shame, we involuntarily move out of the sight and the mind of other people as the sensations, images, feelings and thoughts of our own mind move out of the sightline and awareness of each other. 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.

With disintegration and isolation comes another feature of shame that we don’t at first recognize. 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. We don’t necessarily experience this with minor insults, but there is no question that our ability to move creatively in our mind is slowed. This general idea that shame leads the world ultimately to a point of paralysis, vis-à-vis the movement that is required for creative engagement, will become more important when we explore the nature of God’s movement and its necessity for shame’s healing.

it is important to note (especially later as we explore the world of storytelling) that no one ever feels the sharp sting of shame apart from an initial encounter with someone else that, despite perhaps even having no conscious intention to do so, activates the shame response. Hence, despite shame being mostly about me, it is never only about me, even when my experience of it seems to emerge fully and only from deep within the dungeon of my own mind.

There is no better place for shame to hide than in those stories in which it does not seem to be that prevalent.

Paradoxically, then, shame is a leveraging affect that anticipates abandonment while simultaneously initiating movement away—leaving. And we can leave in a hundred ways, some of them unknown to us,

First, we can experience shame by virtue of what does not happen in our lives,

at any given moment we are either moving generally toward or away from relationship with others or within ourselves. 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.

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

For we use language, among other things, to help us solve problems by explaining and making sense of them. This making sense process includes not just the logical explanation of events but also an emotional shift toward a state of less distress. We don’t want to know how things are because we are logical; our logic helps us regulate our emotion, which is the energy around which the brain organizes itself.

But 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.