The Soul of Shame Quotes

“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.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“Healing shame requires our being vulnerable with other people in embodied actions. There is no other way, but shame will, as we will see, attempt to convince us otherwise.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“In other words, we will be aware of (know) God, others and ourselves in the same manner as we experience God’s awareness of us. There is no hint of shame in his gaze or his voice. Our attention is drawn so irresistibly to him and how he is attending to us that we lose all awareness of the shame that has for so long kept parts of us hiding in the dark. Toward that end we need to pay attention to the things that are the summation of our lives: faith, hope and love. To live faithfully is to trust, to deeply attune to the presence of the Holy Spirit in whom we live and move and have our being. As we live faithfully, we actively imagine that he joyfully delights in being in our presence, and that all we do, we do with God, mindful that we live in dependence on him and each other.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“what we do with shame on an individual level has potentially geometric consequences for any of the social systems we occupy, be that our family, place of employment, church or larger community. It”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“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.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“But beyond this, and even more important, my problem is not just what I am sensing but that I do not feel adequate to respond to it. I 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.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“that life is not about not being messy but about being creative with the messes we have;”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“Narrative. As our minds develop, eventually we try to make sense of our lives. We take the input from our awareness of our conscious, vertical, horizontal and memory domains, and begin to tell our stories, with most of that content being nonverbal and nonconscious in nature. This narrative is highly influenced by our most intimate attachment relationships. Thus, 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.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“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. Robert began to see how the “facts” of his life were not immutable realities but were as much a function of the story he told himself on a moment-to-moment basis.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“It may be revealing to know that telling your story begins with someone else. Long before you arrive on the scene, before and then after you were conceived, people started talking about you: they talked about your gender, what you will be named, who they hope you will resemble in appearance and character (and likewise, who they hope you will not resemble). And even before this, perhaps your parents had months or even years of longing for you. Or perhaps no one longed for you, and you were eventually passed on to someone else for your care. We are all born out of preludes of beauty and tragedy, each of us with our own ratio of both. You began your life out of and into this narrative that others were already telling.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“In an environment where we are unafraid, mistakes are not our enemies but our friends.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“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.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“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. 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.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“that ruptures will occur but resilience and life is to be found in how we repair them;”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“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. Furthermore,”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“And whenever genuine acts of goodness evoke responses of distress, you can count on shame being at work, accusing those very neighbors, albeit unconsciously, of their complicity.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“When the time came for Carla to consider coming clean about her affair—and about her lifelong striving to be seen, to be heard, to be enough—I mentioned that 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.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“We also see that the serpent has no trouble talking about God rather than inviting the woman to have a conversation with God. This is one of shame’s most important means of creating the isolation that supports its affective gravitas. At this point the woman can begin to consider God in her own mind, by herself. She is given the opportunity to decide independently who God is and what he thinks and feels in response to her. She begins the process of analyzing God—of judging him from a distance, rather than interacting with him.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“Hearing the sharpness in her voice, which interrupts the child’s movement, he or she next hears it soften as Mom says, “Let’s go this way!” quickly moving physically to redirect the child elsewhere. Joy is not at risk of being undermined, even in the instance of limit-setting, when a parent’s mind is attuned to maintaining connection with the child.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“It is also important at the outset of this book to note that I do not consider this infestation to be neutral or benign. This is not merely a felt emotion that eventually morphs into words such as “I’m bad.” 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, and it will not be satisfied until all hell breaks loose. Literally.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“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). The notion that my mind comprises different parts that function well only when brought together in harmony and only with assistance from someone outside of myself is but one metaphor the writers of Scripture offer, a poetic expression of our embodied neural circuitry operating in an integrated fashion. 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.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“Those neurons that fire together wire together. In essence, the more we practice activating particular neural networks, the more easily they are to activate, and the more permanent they become in the brain. In his epistle to the church in Rome, St. Paul suggests that renewal is possible: 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) 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.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“Not surprisingly, therefore, 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.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“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”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“goodness and beauty can prevail in the face of overwhelming shame.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“Secure attachment is fostered in environments in which there is a premium placed on empathy, attunement, mindfulness and the proper setting of limits”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“As we age, our brains become more connected within themselves and mature in healthy ways as we also become more connected in healthy ways to other people.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“part of shame’s power lies in its ability to isolate, both within and between minds. The very thing that has the power to heal this emotional nausea is the reunion of those parts of us that have been separated.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“Vulnerability is not a question of if but rather to what degree. This does not imply that we have no choices of being more openly so, but it is an illusion to believe that we are not vulnerable. It is something we can hide but not that we can eliminate. The question, then, is not if we are or will be vulnerable but rather how and when we enter into it consciously and intentionally for the sake of creating a world of goodness and beauty.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

“In 1 Corinthians 12:4-11 Paul describes how the body of Christ develops as a gathering of people with different strengths and capacities. There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.”
― Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves