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

by Curt Thompson

These macroscopic, microscopic and in-between stories have no hierarchical status per se, and the borders between them are quite porous. The intended purpose of this model is simply to draw our awareness to the fact that we are engaged in the storytelling process at various levels simultaneously, each of them interacting with the others. And to the degree that we increase our awareness of these spheres, we equally become aware of when and how shame attempts to become part of our storytelling effort.

As we tell others our stories, to the degree they are helpfully attuned to us, our story is modified. The very act of attuning to someone nonverbally creates right hemisphere to right hemisphere brain connections that alter the experience in real time. In this way, good listeners energize the storyteller, and so encourage the story to be told more faithfully. They also ask good questions, and when necessary limit or redirect the speaker in order to get the best out of the story. Hence, storytelling is much more a dance between teller and listener than it is a monologue. In fact, it is fair to say that the story is what tends to emerge between speaker and listener, both playing a crucial role in its telling.

Shame interferes with good listening at every level and every opportunity.

It is common for people who are depressed to have a very different understanding of their past, as well as their future, compared to when they are well. Via neuroplasticity and Hebb’s axiom, practice tends to make permanent. 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.

Depression warps reality

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.

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.

Good description of shame

Shame may not come to us directly, but it always makes us feel solely responsible for the problem.

If we want to be part of God’s work in creating goodness and beauty in a world that is experiencing entropy, it is important to know which story you are actually living in. We may think we know, but our lives often betray that belief.

To combat shame we act in such a way that we live more robust, more confident and more creative stories. Such stories take greater risks of mercy and justice, which naturally make us more vulnerable. For the most human acts of creativity include the willingness to put the products of creation on public display, where they can be embraced or rejected.

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.

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.

By implication of the story’s context, the serpent’s question necessarily invites Eve to sort out the answer by herself. There is no indication that the creature was truly interested in acquiring information. Nowhere does the serpent suggest they go to God to check the facts. He is not at all concerned with the truth as a set of facts. He is far more interested in disrupting the relationships between the woman, God and the man.

How many times have I changed my remembered version of an interaction with someone when my underlying sense of confidence has been shaken if only ever so slightly? This is a hallmark feature of shame’s activity.

shame is primarily an emotion that undermines us not so much via our left-mode, rational processing but by eroding our felt sense of connection and safety, something that supersedes the linguistic, logical, linear, factual mode of mental activity. As such, in brain time, to be less than, to be inadequate, is felt, sensed and imaged long before we think it.

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.

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.

The first couple, disconnected and hiding from one another, have little if any reserve left to call on God when he comes walking into the cool of their day. Notice how shame gathers inertia as the couple hides together from God. This is one of shame’s most powerful characteristics.

The writer of the story does not presume that God is geographically challenged. God is inquiring of the couple’s internal, not their external, whereabouts. He is deeply curious about and invested in their individual and corporate state(s) of mind. This is what the God of the biblical narrative does.

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.

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.

As anyone who speaks with a mental health professional might know, when you use the word fine to describe anything, you’re asking for the full-court exploratory press.

To feel vulnerable is to feel, as did Eve and Adam after their fruit fest, naked and ashamed. For in the story of the world portrayed in the biblical narrative, shame is the tacit emotional payload that vulnerability carries. 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.

To allow yourself to be known is very hard work.”

In reality, vulnerability is not something we choose or that is true in a given moment, while the rest of the time it is not. Rather, it is something we are.

Given the myriad ways we protect our vulnerable selves, we eventually believe that we are not and should not be vulnerable. This is why our moments of emotional vulnerability are seen as episodic events that are not the norm. And they are often viewed as indicating that something is wrong.

Our vulnerability reminds us that deep relationship is the norm, not something we periodically require when we are in trouble or are lonely.

to be created in God’s image also refers to our having creative dominion within the world. And to be maximally creative also requires that we are vulnerable.

Vulnerability is not just a random state of neediness or openness to danger. It is built into the cosmic fabric of the world to provide the opportunity for discovery and creation, and for the emergence of beauty and goodness.

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.

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 God’s movement toward reconciliation, he envisions the process as something that we do together. He does not come initially telling us what to do. That requires no trust, no vulnerability on the part of either of us. He comes asking questions. Questions that genuinely seek interactive relationship.

To be fully loved—and to fully love—requires that we are fully known. Absolute joy comes not just in my having some random joyful engagement with something or someone. Rather, absolute joy must eventually include my being completely known, especially those parts that in subtle, hidden ways have carried shame, often without my conscious awareness. This is the language of the new heaven and new earth.

We don’t find ourselves shaming others loudly in the staff meeting apart from our own shame telling us that we are not enough. We do not embezzle unless at some deep level we believe we are not enough without the money. We continually look at pornography in no small part as a coping mechanism for our inadequacy that long precedes it. 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. In all these and hundreds of other seemingly innocuous moments, shame begins with a whisper and crescendos to a roar,

It repeatedly tells a story of the world that is made up of “we” and “they.” And “they” are always the bad guys. And the bad guys always end up on the open end of the barrel of a gun. Judgment, as it turns out, comes easily in the form of fiery words or hot lead. Both leave bodies on the field with no one to tend the wounded. Shame, as we know, is no respecter of persons; we who follow Jesus often find that we have as much difficulty with this as anyone, I being the chief among sinners.

Shame, as evil’s vector would like it to be, keeps itself hidden among life’s everyday events. It wants to be known merely as an artifact, something that we dislike intensely and would work to change, but that has no fundamental purpose. However, it intends to dismantle a world that was destined for goodness and beauty.

It requires great effort, however, to keep before us this vision of being part of a great gathering of people cheering us on, telling us “Well done!” as we move through life. This is one of the first and most helpful steps in combating shame. It entails creating communities around us who are reminding us of the same thing that Jesus heard at his baptism. Our struggle against shame is begun not by ourselves but in the company of trustworthy friends, family members and spiritual mentors. Remember, isolation is one of shame’s primary methods.

Shame functions first, as Satan did with Eve, by drawing our attention, even in minute moments, away from our focus on God’s voice telling us that we are loved and that he is pleased with us, along with the necessary sensations, images and feelings that accompany it. Remember, attention is the key to the engine that pulls the train of our mind; shame’s first priority is distraction.

we must practice embodied acts of imagination that enable all our sensations, images, feelings, thoughts and physical actions to reflect our sense of God’s delight with us.

When I see my friend’s face, hear his voice, sense his empathy for my plight in real time and space, I am given the opportunity to imagine a different way of telling the story of what has been only shame, isolation and stasis. To imagine a different story requires my brain to be in a position to do so; for I cannot imagine a future if I have no memory on which to base it. Embodied acts of this kind provide the basis for imagining new possibilities. But this takes effort and perseverance.

With practice listeners become aware that their responses to the speaker are as much about them as they are about the speaker. This is what being known in this way does: it moves people to greater places of connection to and greater integration with one another while each member simultaneously experiences enhanced integration within his or her own mind.

For example, months after her confession, as Carla and Preston worked to rebuild their marriage, Carla reported that whenever she sensed Preston to be distant, she was overrun by images and feelings of her former boss, along with a sinking sensation in her chest, accompanied by the thought I wish I weren’t in this marriage. This was soon followed with the self-judging thought I made such a mistake! All of this occurred in less than three seconds. It was not just words of accusation that she thought; it was the full complement of the mind’s functional domains being assaulted by shame’s attack.

It is important for us to remind each other and ourselves that putting shame to death, as in crucifixion, is a slow process, and we are partnering with God as its executioners. Our mission is to continue in relationships that are arenas of light and safety in which confession of those parts of us where shame lurks becomes the norm.

the right

It is equally true that in order for me to be liberated from the shame I carry, 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.

To put shame to death requires being part of such a community.

For we must remember, we are dust and breath, and healing shame will necessarily mean we act differently with our bodies. We will move when before we were literally unable to due to our emotional paralysis. We will speak when before we were silent. We will demonstrate physical agency in the real world, as God did in Jesus by telling people to stretch out their hands (Mark 3:5), take up their mats and walk (John 5:11), and to go and wash (John 9:7). Healing shame is never only an inside job.

the light that comes to heal also hurts our eyes too much and we want that flame to be put out.

Regarding the story in John 9.

Healing always requires vulnerability and exposure of our sick and wounded parts, parts often kept hidden and away from our awareness—just

And in any of these places, that healing may be met with resistance. For this reason we must routinely engage in confessional communities where we can tell our life stories, reminding ourselves of the joy found in the practice of shame-free emotional nakedness.

The family of God is the crucible in which we learn what real family is about and in which the what and how of education is ideally imprinted into our souls, transforming both our life in our biological families as well as all that we learn about our world and our place in it.