The Soul of Shame

Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

Curt Thompson

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780830898749
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

The Gospel Coalition Top BooksHearts Minds Bookstore's Best BooksOutreach Magazine's Resources of the YearWe're all infected with a spiritual disease. Its name is shame.Whether we realize it or not, shame affects every aspect of our personal lives and vocational endeavors. It seeks to destroy our identity in Christ, replacing it with a damaged version of ourselves that results in unhealed pain and brokenness. But God is telling a different story for your life.Psychiatrist Curt Thompson unpacks the soul of shame, revealing its ubiquitous nature and neurobiological roots. He also provides the theological and practical tools necessary to dismantle shame, based on years of researching its damaging effects and counseling people to overcome those wounds.Thompson's expertise and compassion will help you identify your own pains and struggles and find freedom from the lifelong negative messages that bind you. Rewrite the story of your life and embrace healing and wholeness as you discover and defeat shame's insidious agenda.

1

Our Problem with Shame

No, I’m not willing to do that.” He was succinct and clear. I inquired what he felt as he imagined telling his wife about the affair. “Terrified.” Of what, I asked? He could only describe in vague terms the abject sense of humiliation he would have to endure should this illicit relationship come to light.

She was the chief executive of a successful marketing firm and had relied on her hard-driving style to get things done. She was bewildered that her company was listing, and her effort to work harder was not effectively righting the ship. She was running out of ideas. I inquired as to whom she could ask for help. Without hesitation she informed me that to admit she needed assistance was tantamount to resigning. “I can’t afford not to have ideas that work. If I have to ask for help, I will be seen as incompetent and the board will fire me.”

“She didn’t get in, and I’m worried about what this will mean for her future.” This, coming from a mother who had worked diligently to do her part to help her daughter gain entrance to her top school choice. This might be understandable, except for the fact that her daughter was only three years old.

Why had no one protected her? By the time she was twenty-six she had slept with over fifteen men and endured two abortions. But the sex had begun when she was eleven, with an uncle who had first treated her as special, but eventually threatened her very life if she were to reveal the horror. This lasted until she was seventeen, when she left for college, where she was free of her uncle but imprisoned to the behavior that was the only path she knew to “intimacy” with a man. How in the world was she to tell her parents, let alone friends or anyone in her faith community? The only reason she was telling me was that her depression had become too overwhelming for her to function.

The hypothesis had finally been proven. The elegant biochemistry, the complex statistical analysis of the patients’ clinical responses to the drug, and a little luck had all added up. All the work, all the long hours away from his family, all the grant money spent—it was all finally worth it. Along with this discovery would certainly come the offer of a tenured position he had long coveted and that the university would be unable to deny him. Not to mention the potential earnings once the patent came through. There was only one problem. An ethics board that was tasked to make sure his lab’s research was beyond reproach had found some questionable data reporting. And before the week was over, his life was unraveling faster than he could have imagined, the result of someone’s need to make history fighting cancer.

He began drinking when he was thirteen. He had two DUIs by the time he was twenty, the second one landing him in jail for a month. That was more than two decades ago, before he met Jesus. But in the last five years the bourbon had begun to flow again most evenings after everyone went to bed. His wife had informed him that if the drinking didn’t stop, she was leaving and taking the children with her. Then there was the issue of his work. How, exactly, would he tell the people of his congregation where he had been the pastor for fifteen years? Jim Beam seemed to be the only thing that helped him hang on in the face of the burnout he felt shepherding such a challenging flock.

Our Stories of Shame

Stories. Each of us has one, and at some point the people in the previous scenarios sat in my office telling me his or hers. And theirs are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more, each with different screenplays, each that emerges from a different family of origin, each with its own particular joys and sorrows, victories and defeats. No matter what initially brings them to see me, their stories eventually lead to the moment when what I believe to be the lowest common denominator in human relationships makes its way into the room. It matters not if the person earns a two-comma salary or works for minimum wage. She may be married or single. He may be African American or Caucasian. Depressed, anxious or just plain angry; happy, sad or indifferent. He may be the father or the son, the employer or employee. It may be an individual, a couple, family, community, school or business organization. And you needn’t have ever darkened the office door of a psychiatrist. It doesn’t require the breakdown of our mental health to be plagued with it. It only requires that you have a pulse. To be human is to be infected with this phenomenon we call shame.

Shame is something we all experience at some level, more consciously for some than for others. Of course there are the obvious examples that come to mind: times we have felt everything from slight embarrassment to deep humiliation. The tabloids are rife with cover stories of the latest follies of celebrities or politicians who have behaved badly. But many of us carry shame less publicly, often outside the easy view of even some of our closest friends. Unemployment. Having a family member whose alcoholism is displayed in front of your friends. Losing a major account at work. The breakup of a marriage. Our child’s seeming disinterest in school. A boss whose motivational tactic is to regularly compare your work to that of someone else who is outperforming you. Any of these more common scenarios carry the burden of shame in ways that we work hard to cover up. And our coping strategies have become so automatic that we may be completely unaware of its presence and activity.

Shame can vary in its range from the most relationally subtle ways—the condescending glance or tone of voice from one spouse to another—to wholesale cultural movements that involve groups, communities and eventually nations that war against nations—the biblical story of Dinah in Genesis 34, racial bigotry and suppression, or the murder of a woman for having publicly shamed her family, known commonly in some cultures as an honor killing. It is therefore not merely a function of the things I think or say about myself or others, nor is it limited to what happens between two individuals. It can move stealthily from the bedroom or kitchen to the playing field to the boardroom to the Situation Room, where decisions are made on a global scale. In this way, even the slightest shaming interactions between individuals can eventually grow into conflagrations that involve multiple parties. Longstanding conflicts such as those in the Middle East or East Los Angeles are evidence that when individuals do not address the shame they experience at a personal level, the potential kindling effect can eventually engulf whole regions of humanity. One of the purposes of this book is to emphasize that 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 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.

Over the last ten years I have been privileged to walk with people as they have been courageously engaging their stories, moving to places of greater depth and connection with God and others while applying new insights that have emerged from the field of interpersonal neurobiology, which I explore in Anatomy of the Soul. They have learned about various domains of the mind and what it means to love God and others with all of it. They have realized what it means to pay attention to what they pay attention to; the overarching role of emotion in human activity; how memory is as much about predicting the future as it is about recalling the past; how their patterns of attachments with their primary caregivers and current intimate relationships shape their experiences of God; that our awareness of God’s deep, joyful pleasure with us at all times everywhere changes everything about how we interpret what we sense, image, feel, think and do; that life is not about not being messy but about being creative with the messes we have; that ruptures will occur but resilience and life is to be found in how we repair them; and that Jesus has come not only to show us how to do all of the aforementioned but to empower us to do so on the way to God’s kingdom coming in its fullness.

All this has been very good news for many. However, invariably, on the way to greater freedom they must pass, as we all do, through a common place of suffering: the place of shame. It may be cloaked in the minute details of one’s narrative or on public display. It may be obscured in the language of other emotions we are more familiar with such as sadness, anger, disappointment or even guilt. Or it may be a deeply, consciously felt presence in many of our waking hours. We may have different events, images, words or explicit feelings that represent it. It may be consumptive or we may barely notice its activity in our day-to-day comings and goings. Eventually, however, we all come face to face with this specter, the (virtually) unspoken, primal obstacle to our growth and flourishing, and it seems there is no getting around it.

What then exactly is this thing we are calling shame? How do we distinguish it in the moment it occurs? From the countless hours spent with people on their respective pilgrimages, it seems that even defining it is no easy task, which, as I will invite you to consider later, is part of shame’s intention. For its elusiveness is a key element of its power. We can use various words such as humiliation, embarrassment, indignity, disgrace or more. And though these words get close to what we really mean, ultimately they are essentially symbols that represent the actual neuropsychological state we enter when we experience it.

It is not easy to wrap a simple classification or explanation around our topic. However, despite the challenge of developing such a universally accepted definition of shame, there are particular qualities about it that we immediately recognize as being common to our experience of it.

More Than a Feeling

One way to approach its essence is to understand it as an undercurrent of sensed emotion, of which we may have either a slight or robust impression that, should we put words to it, would declare some version of I am not enough; There is something wrong with me; I am bad; or I don’t matter.

But we would be mistaken if we thought that the story of shame begins with those words or that they tell it in its entirety. For although we come to understand much of who we are via the medium of language as a way to make sense of reality, our lives emerge most primally in the forms of bodily sensations and movements, perceptions, and emotions. 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. Hence, although the description of our experience of shame is often couched in words, its essence is first felt. Though I may say, “I should have been better at that” or “I’m not good enough,” the power of those moments lies in our emotional response to the evoking stimulus, be that a comment, a glance or a recollection of that day in third grade when your teacher pointed out in front of the rest of the class that you weren’t that bright.

We use many different words to convey various bandwidths of emotional tone. We know that pleasure and sadness are different, that disappointment and anger are not felt to be the same. 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. There are other examples of this. Qualitatively, we would not usually associate sadness with shame. If I lose my best friend to cancer, I do not initially anticipate that shame would be anywhere close to what I would feel. But 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). In each case, we inevitably encounter the moment when we are not enough to change our reality as we are currently imagining it. As such, this “not being enough” to tolerate this moment is the grounding for how shame operates, albeit in dimensions of mental activity that may escape my immediate awareness of it as shame.

The purpose here is not to prove that all emotion that we experience as uncomfortable is rooted in shame, but that we notice many of the emotions that represent distress within us are an extended development of this particular emotional state. Out of this state, then, arise words that we use to make sense of it, so that we can do something about it. When Alison brought her test result to her mother showing a score of 92 percent, her mother asked, “What happened to the other 8 percent?” It doesn’t take much to imagine what Alison sensed and felt, nor would it be a surprise if you were to learn that in the wake of multiple interactions like this one Alison developed a knack for telling herself (among many possible options) that she simply had not worked hard enough. Furthermore, she would go on to tell herself that she needed to work harder in order to improve her scores. She would not necessarily be aware that such self-talk was primarily about coping with shame, despite this being the most fundamental thing she is doing. And so, out of the feelings of shame come the words I don’t work hard enough.

However, soon enough, the words we use double back to reinforce the feelings. Alison, by repeatedly telling herself that she is never working hard enough (and therefore needs to work harder) deepens the felt sensation of shame. Hence, an unending loop is created: sensations and feelings beget thoughts that in turn strengthen the felt experience. And so we see that shame is certainly formed in the world of emotion, but it eventually recruits and involves our thinking, imaging and behaving as well.

Thus, from the outset we come to the realization that shame is both ubiquitous in its presence (there is no person or experience it does not taint) and infinitely shape-shifting in its presentation. If it were a member of the Periodic Table of elements, it might be carbon, the element common to all living organisms. That it is so fundamental within our existence also makes it quite challenging to root out. If we approach it as a problem that we can solve merely by changing how or what we think, we are likely to limit our effectiveness in combating it. This is what Matt discovered.

As a marketing executive he had developed a successful business and now had several employees working for him. He was conscientious and cared about his workers, treating them generously and justly. But he worried that at any moment the economy would shift enough that he would have to lay someone off or, worse, that the business would fail outright, which at times kept him up at night. He was insightful enough to recognize that he could not control all the variables that determined whether his company would survive; furthermore, he easily admitted that he worried too much about, well, just about everything. He came for help because he saw his problem primarily as one of anxiety; it was not debilitating but present enough to get his wife’s attention. It was not making sense to her (and eventually to him) that despite the steady progression of his business, Matt sometimes would find himself ruminating about how he and his family would one day end up living in a box under a bridge. One noteworthy caveat was how effectively he compartmentalized all of this. Anyone who knew him, apart from his wife, would never have guessed that he had a care in the world, as he had practiced how to effectively manage his concerns when in the presence of just about everyone, ironically, because as he would later tell me, he worried about what people would think of him if they knew about how much he worried. Go figure.

He came to see me to explore the possibility of using cognitive therapy to restructure his thinking about his life. This was a reasonable goal, as cognitive-based interventions have been demonstrated to be effective in treating a number of emotional problems, especially anxiety. But despite Matt’s best efforts, he continued to feel wrapped around the axle of an imagined catastrophic future. One of the most glaring troubles for him was the reality that his life with God did not seem to be able to budge his incessant trend toward ruminating about disaster. Despite the fact that his relationship with Jesus was the most important thing in his life, thinking and reflecting on Scripture passages that admonished him to leave anxiety at the door only left him standing at the door’s threshold, right along with his worry. For him, it was not until we began to explore the nature of his experience as one that was felt, sensed and imaged as much as it was thought that he began to gain some traction in overcoming his problem.

For instance, we quickly uncovered that what he felt as worry was often correlated with thoughts such as I won’t be able to figure out what to do if the work starts to drop off. (This, despite his having navigated effectively more than one downturn in business over t...