The following meditation was written for a teaching on the scriptures from Matthew 6:24-34 and is inspired largely by the teachings and writings of Brené Brown, LMSW, PhD.
Shame Story
Let me tell you a ‘shame story.’
Once upon a time, only a few months ago, I volunteered to do a training for a group of therapists. Each of them paid the YWCA $50 to come and hear me talk, for three hours, about attachment theory and couples counseling. This is a topic near and dear to my heart and I believe a good way to learn something is to teach it, so this could only make me a better therapist.
I was excited and nervous. I had never tried to give a training for such a long period of time. I knew I had a tendency to think and talk theoretically instead of practically and anecdotally. I wanted to be seen as knowledgeable, competent, skilled, charismatic. I wanted to share my excitement for the topic and to provide value.
The charisma did not happen. I got explicit messages from some that I was going too slow and to get to the meat of the topic. About 2/3s of the way through some of the people had left already. When I got to the part of trying to do exercises to experience the work, the group decided to share their own stories instead.
By the end, I knew I hadn’t connected as I wanted but felt like I had at least shared important information. That was until I read the evaluations. I read a couple comments that said I was unprepared and incompetent.
I suddenly felt like a waste of space, I was ready to believe that I had no business doing therapy at all. I wanted to personally pay a refund to everyone who attended. I felt sick in my stomach and I so desperately wanted their forgiveness and approval. I was caught in the depths of shame.
Shame: the intensely painful emotion or experience of believing that we are flawed or inadequate and therefore believing we are unworthy of love and belonging.
Brené Brown, author of The Gifts of Imperfection, has chosen fear and shame as her focus of academic study. She has stimulated my interest in and excitement at learning the dynamics of shame and the healing process. She defines shame as
the intensely painful emotion or experience of believing that we are flawed or inadequate and therefore believing we are unworthy of love or belonging.
As I was caught in my storm of shame, I believed myself unworthy. I believed (at my fearful core) that I was unworthy to practice psycho-therapy and couples counseling. My internal critic was saying “who do you think you are trying to teach, much less practice psychotherapy?” “You don’t belong in this profession.” “You may not belong anywhere.” “You deserve their contempt.”
Sin: Disconnection for God, Self, Others, and Creation
I want to reflect on the parallels between our understanding of shame and sin. In a Bethel Bible Study I took years ago, we were taught that
sin is that which separates us from God, from ourselves, from others, and from creation.
The Hebrew Scripture’s word translated as sin means missing the mark or falling short of the mark. Sin is those things where we miss the mark resulting in the consequences of disconnection.
Sin can also be understood as the condition of being separated from God, ourselves, others, and creation. It’s not necessarily things done or left undone but our fallen state where we lack and long for connection with God, neighbors, and selves.
So sin both causes or is the state of disconnection. Shame is the emotional experience of fear of that disconnection.
Love, Belonging, and Worthiness
“A deep sense of love and belonging in an irreducible need of all men, women, and children.” (Brown) We are neurologically hardwired to seek love and connection. It is essential to our survival as an organism. It is part of our God created nature.
The intense pain of shame leads us to try to conform, to try and appease, to pretend to be someone other than who we are. We worry if our house measures up to our neighbors’, we worry if we are too fat, too weak, too light, too dark. Are my hors d’oeuvres satisfactory? Am I dressed fashionably enough or too much? [And everything is a fashion statement.] We chase externally defined (and contradictory) standards of perfection.
Matthew’s scripture tells us these external standards are false standards and cannot get us what we want and need.
Even more radically than that, they tell us that we are worthy, valued and loved just as we are, right this moment. Do you believe that? Do you believe that you are worthy and valuable just the way you are, right now? Do you know that you are worthy, valued and loved, just the way you are, right this moment? It’s hard to believe and accept but the evidence of God dying on the cross proves it.
Path of Shame Resilience
So what is the path out of our false belief that we are unworthy, fatally flawed, and unlovable? What is the path out of shame?
The facile answer we hear through things like the Four Spiritual Laws, and Campus Crusade, and Sunday morning evangelical television preachers sum it up so simply:
- we need to confess our sins, and
- we need to receive Jesus Christ into our lives.
While I know those words are true, I sometimes find them meaningless and un-actionable.
I would like to explore the steps Brené Brown outlines for the path out of shame and explore how those steps parallel our experience in, and as, a healing community and the Body of Christ.
First, back to my shame story. As I was suffering through my feelings of shame, and belief in my unworthiness, I tried to do my psycho-therapeutic best Cognitive Behavioral disputation of my thinking errors. I challenged my tendency to maximize a couple of comments as if they were everyone’s comments. I challenged myself to admit I did get positive comments on the evaluations too. I reminded myself that the critical comments may be coming from their own hurts and brokenness. I reminded myself that I couldn’t honestly know what and why they were thinking what they thought. I reminded myself that just because I feared it, it didn’t mean it was truth that I would become a pariah in the Austin counseling community. But, I still felt stuck in the grip of shame.
I shared my feelings of hurt and shame with my wife and with my Cursillo 4th Day group. I tend to share them just like I’m sharing it here, intellectually and breezily. These steps helped me limp through but I still hurt.
Finally, I shared it with my professional peer support group. They affirmed how painful such narcissistic wounds are. And then, my colleague, friend, and former supervisor, Paul Boone, LPC offered me feedback that he was hearing a painful story but I was telling it with smiles and ironic jokes and he found that confusing. I wasn’t really owning my story. He shared with me his history of observing me discounting myself, and he assured me that I am a good therapist and he assured me that I am enough. I broke down in tears, he helped me connect with my pain, acknowledge my pain, and credibly affirm that I am enough. My healing accelerated. I felt lighter. I felt a huge burden lifted. I felt strong enough to courageously serve my clients. I felt gratitude and in that gratitude, joy.
Brené Brown’s steps for healing shame are:
- Learn to recognize our shame
- learn to critically analyze and dispute the shaming messages we hear from ourselves and others
- reach out to trusted others to own and share our story
- speak ‘shame’
Reflecting back, I see how I followed these steps: I knew I was in the grips of a shaming demon by my negative self-talk, the fearfulness, and the sick feeling in my stomach; I practiced using my rational brain to dispute those harmful messages, I reached out to my family, community and peers, and especially my psycho-therapeutic community helped me find the language of ‘shame’.
Path of Salvation
I’m arguing that salvation means freedom from sin and one aspect of that freedom is freedom from shame.
Salvation, our eternal life starting right now, means living in loving compassionate connection with ourselves, our neighbors, and with God.
Brené Brown argues, and I agree, that our capacity for compassion and love of others is limited by our capacity for compassion and love for ourselves. I’m arguing that if God loves us unconditionally, right now, for exactly who we are, we can start reaching to be imitators of God and start practicing compassion and love for ourselves, others, and God.
We can start doing that by telling our story to trustworthy others. We might start with God during our private prayers and journalizing, with a Cursillo retreat, with an accountability group, with a Spiritual Director, through the sacrament of Reconciliation of the Penitent (Confession), through talking to a therapist, through a 12-step program, through talking to our spouse, through talking to a trusted friend. There are so many possibilities
This is an invitation to start practicing Salvation by claiming our own story and claiming our God ordained worthiness.
This is also an invitation to be come persons, and a people, worthy of the sacred trust of having people share their stories on their path to newness of life.
