GETTING OUT FROM UNDER YOUR SHAME
By: Jack Guyler
Most of us have been told by someone else, “you should be ashamed of yourself.” This is usually said to us when we have done something bad or another person thinks we have done something wrong. And this carries greater weight with us when it comes from someone significant in our life. But this doesn’t mean we are bad as a person. We all do bad things. We all do things that hurt and disappoint others. In fact, we often disappoint ourselves – we may eat follow through on a diet we had committed to…we don’t keep our New Year’s resolutions…we break promises to our kids…we say things to our spouse in anger we later regret. These are bad things. They are also things that all humans do. But these don’t make us intrinsically bad as humans. There is a major difference between doing bad things and seeing ourselves as a bad person – as someone who can never get it right or who is just a failure as a person.
Let’s look at the difference. When we do bad things, we have the opportunity to acknowledge them, apologize and seek forgiveness. We can do this at three levels. Sometimes we need apologize to others and ask for forgiveness. We may even look to make restitution by trying to make things right with the other person. Other times we need to confess to God when we have done something wrong or bad. Confession is a powerful tool that the bible talks a lot about because it names what we have done, it puts words to it, and gives opportunity to feel remorse and seek repentance. And then there are times when we need to deal with ourselves – needing to forgive ourselves and giving ourselves another chance to make things right, rather than just falling into self-flagellation, blaming others or self-pity.
From the beginning, shame has been a part of the human experience. At the end of chapter 2 of Genesis (very first book of the bible), there was great harmony between the first man and woman, God and creation. And the chapter ends with, “and they were naked and not ashamed.” It was a glorious moment, but didn’t last long. By the time we are half way through chapter 3, the crafty serpent (many believe to be Satan) has lied to and victimized the first woman into doing something she was not supposed to do. She did a bad thing. But did this make her a person bad? We only need to look back to chapter 1 to see the answer. There it tells us that humans were made in God’s image, God blessed them and that everything He had created (including humans) “were very good.”
But something happened along the way…shame broke out and ruined this beautiful relationship between God and the first humans. And according to the rest of scripture and what we experience everyday in the world, shame has been shaping our lives and creation ever since. Now before you say, “this is just a made-up myth in the bible,” let’s pause and think about the reality we are talking about here – a message or story bigger than a debate as to whether this story happened literally as we read it in Genesis (keep in mind, this Jewish account of creation is not about literalism but about a bigger story).
Think about what the story is from this account. When Eve bit into the fruit, she was biting into something that she thought would give her even more meaning, significance, and joy than she currently had with God, her husband and creation. Is this not something we do all the time? Always looking for something more…more satisfying…more exciting…more pleasurable…a greater escape from our mundane life. This is the stuff of addictions and affairs.
And even more, both humans realize after pursuing something that God had told them not to do, their eyes were opened – perhaps to things that they would feel drawn to that really weren’t going to be good for them. That would cause them to become unsatisfied with themselves and each other. Marketing in our world does this all the time to us. We are going along pretty happy, and then we run into an advertisement online for something that we didn’t even know about. And by the time we are done watching the ad, we wonder how we ever lived without this product. Something within us rises up that says, “I just have to have that…I can’t be happy until I get that…I can’t go another day without that.” It begins to consume us until we get it. And then after we get it, we are happy – for a short time. And then the let-down comes and we going searching for the next big thing.
While we don’t know exactly what the writer of this account is saying that Adam and Eve experienced in its totality, we do know that after disobeying God and having their eyes opened, they realized that being naked was something to be ashamed of, and they hid behind fig leaves and hid from God.
Is this not what shame does to all of us? We may not use fig leaves, but there are many parts of our lives that we work really hard at hiding from others and God. We hide, we deny, and we isolate. Shame always make us feel less than what God has created us to be. It always makes us feel inferior and inadequate. And while the term “mental health” isn’t used in the bible, shame is. And it is often the root of many of the mental health issues we talk about in our contemporary world such as anxiety, low self-esteem, low self-worth and depression. And what we see in this story really is true about what happens in our lives when we feel overwhelmed by shame – it drives us into hiding and away from other people, God and even parts of ourselves.
Think about what shame does to us on a daily basis in our lives.
We blame others for feeling bad about ourselves
It causes us to hide from others and separate ourselves because we feel odd, like a failure, like our lives don’t matter or count as much as others
We compare ourselves to others and come up short
We may feel worthless and that we don’t have anything to contribute to life
We may fear abandonment because no one will want us or want to love us
As you can see, shame isn’t about us doing something bad, but rather ingesting badness to the point where we feel we are bad as a person – defective and flawed.
C.S. Lewis said this, “I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do. [1]
So, the big question is, what can we do to deal with our shame? As Curt Thompson M.D. reminds us, shame will never be fully resolved in our lives in this world, but it can be managed. So, what steps can we take?
STEPS TO MANAGING YOUR SHAME
Step one, we need to get in touch with our inner critic. Steve Cuss says our inner critic (what we have heard from others and what we have internalized and have looping in our brains) is what shames us and condemns us. [2] We need to break down these messages so we can really know what these negative and untrue messages are so when we hear them, we can identify them rather than just hearing them over and again. As we identify them, we can begin to counter them.
Step two in the process of managing shame is to study and reflect on what God actually says about us. We may want to write these down so we can see them and review them. Things like we are “forgiven, accepted, a son/daughter of God, loved and given gifts to serve others.” Then the other part of this step is to write down what shaming messages we are carrying around and saying to ourselves. As Steve Cuss states, you will want to make both lists (what God says about you and what shame says about you) and begin to work on closing the gap between these.
Herbert McCabe (a Dominican priest) once said, “sin doesn’t change God’s view of us, but rather sin changes the way we see God seeing us.” Satan loves nothing more than shaming you and driving you away from God and others (just as he did in the garden with the first man and woman).
It is Satan who reminds us over and over of our failures and then they become looped in our brain, and then we view them as barriers to God loving us or approving of us. He is referred to as the “accuser.” Revelation 12:10 reminds us that it is Satan who accuses followers of Jesus when they have been forgiven by the blood of Christ and have a testimony of forgiveness and power over sin.
Steve Cuss reminds us that we need to be working at being as kind, patient and loving toward ourselves as God is. If we will do this daily work, we will begin to change our brain by embracing God’s truth rather than Satan’s lies (or other people who have lied about who we are).
The third step is to find a community of people (it might be a friend, a group of friends, people you share a hobby with, a group of people you work out with or play sports with, a small group, life group or support group) who you can hang out with and begin to see that while you have idiosyncrasies, flaws and failures in your life, so do others. You might be different from others, but we all have odd things about our lives, thing that we struggle with, things that make us feel different or strange, that we have all failed at things that have been important to us and that we all struggle to feel like we matter. It’s not important that we reveal every secret or failure in our lives; but rather these groups be a place where we are received and feel a sense of belonging, even though we aren’t perfect. When we find a group that admits they aren’t perfect and struggles with wanting to count and belong, then we have found gold. Because it is within this group that we will come to relax in our humanness and help others do the same.
A fourth step is to embrace the gifts and abilities that we do have. We can always go on social media or see people who seem so much more successful than us – some times it is true, and sometimes it is just what people are falsely projecting to cover over their own insecurities and shame. But as Stephen Covey talked about in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, there are two spheres that we live in – one is the sphere of concern (mostly about what other people are doing and things we have no control over) and the other is our sphere of influence (those things we can directly do something about). Most people spend most of their time lamenting about things in the sphere of concern, which ends up not only being a waste of time, but can actually drag us down mentally and emotionally and keep us from actually doing what we can do something about. An example of this is scrolling on social media and eating our hearts out because we don’t have someone else’s life…money…house or something else. However, if we would spend the majority of our time in our sphere of control, we would actually use the God given gifts and resources we do have (limited as these might be) to do good for others and our world. This would empower us to feel better, make a real difference and begin to alleviate much of our shame and the sense that our lives don’t matter. Curt Thompson puts it this way, “Shame is a primary means to prevent us from using the gifts we have been given.” [3]
Finally, something that helps wrap all of this together is to get counseling. A professional counselor/therapist is trained to listen and then help you dig into your past to understand not only what has happened to you, but why and how it is affecting your life today. As you do this, you will uncover things that once named and addressed, will be released from you permanently or you will be able to manage much better. Naming what you are feeling is vital in the healing process. Alison Cook says as we name the things that we are dealing with, “clarity gives birth to action.” [3] We can’t really address shame and the residual affects from it, until we name it. This will help you live lighter, and with greater
insight about yourself, which in turn will help you be a healthier person not only for yourself, but for others and in your relationships. Counseling may be a short-term or long-term process in your life. But it is always a good thing to enter into because you have a trained voice speaking into your life, helping you sort things out, and to help you think about things in your life from a different perspective.
God doesn’t want you to live with shame, and I’m sure you don’t want too either. I know I don’t. I also know it is a reality to deal with it in this life, but at the same time, through the presence of Christ and taking action steps in your life, you can reduce it’s power so you can be a person who loves others well, makes a meaningful contributions in your little corner of the world, and find peace in the person God is helping you grow into.
I leave you with these words from Herbert McCabe reminding us that God’s door is always open to us to remind us of who we really are:
“Repentance is coming back to how God has always seen us.”
[1] C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, p. 9
[2] Steve Cuss, The Expectation Gap
[3] Curt Thompson M.D., The Soul of Shame, p. 13
[4] Alison Cook, I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, p. 14
