How does your shame, shame you? Do you shut down, freeze, fight, or flee? What is your pattern? Know how to restore a fully engaged self, one that can be clear, concrete, and concise in difficult moments, or when triggered. If nothing else, breathe in and out, nice and slowly. Your goal is the brain image that looks like a fist: the brain working with all its parts on board and talking to each other, sending signals and messages that you can decode.
The Effects of Shame
Shame also makes us want to hide. Genesis 3:8 tells us: “The man and his wife heard the LORD God walking about in the garden. So they hid from the LORD God among the trees.” How did Adam and Eve know to hide? God had given them clear and specific instructions: “You may freely eat the fruit of every tree in the garden–except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:15). Adam and Eve stood to fail as they manipulated and shamed each other. Adam blamed God by telling him that he had given him the woman. “At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness” (Genesis 3:7).
In his book The Soul of Shame, Curt Thompson discusses what hiding and holding secrets can do to our inner being: “Hiding is the natural response to shame.”[1] We hide from ourselves, our feelings, values and principles in every imaginable way we run as far as we can get away with. Furthermore, all the hiding we do starts with hiding from our own selves. There are multiple parts of self that we don’t want to know. It would be too shaming. This might include judging, lying, stealing, gluttonous, hoarding, lusting, adulterous, and arrogant selves, just to name a few. But as David Benner points out, quoting John Calvin, “We cannot expect to know God fully if we are not willing to know ourselves, for one depends on the other.”[2]
Shame is a vulnerable feeling and scary to expose. Sadly, perhaps, as a child, you told yourself or were told messages like, “I’m not good enough, I will never be as smart as my brother, you should be ashamed of yourself, you’re naughty, you’ll never amount to anything, you’re just a silly little crybaby.” We are most vulnerable to this type of toxic shame as children. It creates feelings of embarrassment and inadequacy. It only takes hearing these messages over and over in different settings of your life to become the toxic shame. Take the time to notice what it is like for you and what happens when you feel humiliated, defensive, fear of being judged or rejected. What is your knee-jerk reaction? Do you want to hide, run, collapse, apologize, get defensive, or run to addictive behaviors that you use to escape? I challenge you to slow down and be curious about the strong emotion that bombards you. These emotions may be trying to protect you from the overwhelm of shame. When fear or any other feeling is threatening to shut you down, use your skills that keep your brain intact, like SOS, because fear can be emotionally crippling when the hippocampus brings up a stored memory of a specific event you have experienced.
[1] Thompson, Soul of Shame, 108.
[2] David Benner, Sacred Companions: The gift of Spiritual Friendship and Direction, (InterVarsity, 2002), 47.