How to Overcome Shame
Shame doesn't come from our beliefs, it comes from fractured relationships
The LORD God then called to the man and asked him: Where are you? He answered, “I heard you in the garden; but I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid.” Then God asked: Who told you that you were naked? (Genesis 3:9-11)
Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith. For the sake of the joy that lay before him he endured the cross, despising its shame, and has taken his seat at the right of the throne of God. (Hebrews 12:1-2)
Some things can only be understood from the heart.
If that sounds squishy or sentimental to you, consider this: could a person who has never seen the color blue understand what it means for something to be blue? Admittedly, they could know a great deal about the color blue, and blue things. Reams of information exist about blue’s position on the color spectrum, the historical significance of its impact on art, fashion and culture, how and why it appears in rocks and crystals, how and why it appears in flowers and fruit, the various ways it appears in humans and in animals etc.
You could know all of this, and yet not understand the color blue. The Wikipedia page for the color blue has 5000+ words. Not one of them would help you if you’d never seen the color blue.
In a similar vein, imagine I memorized Tom Cruise’s Wikipedia page. I’d probably know more about him than many of his friends - probably even more than much of his extended family. Would this mean I know Tom Cruise? Of course not. I’d know about Tom Cruise. But unless I’d met him and established some sort of acquaintance, I wouldn’t know him in any true sense of the word. Theoretical knowledge does not translate to true knowing.
A chess Substacker I enjoy named Nate Solon drives this point home in a post where he encourages people to not rely so much on books for their improvement:
Imagine I tell you that I’m trying to get better at basketball by reading a book about how to play. Well, okay. The culture of basketball doesn’t generally focus on transmitting information through books, but it seems plausible that someone could put down some helpful tips in a book format.
But now imagine that I tell you I’m actually reading not one, but many books on basketball. And when you ask if I’m supplementing all this reading with lots of practice, I say no, I’m waiting until I finish my stack of books before setting foot on the court. By this point you already know that my strategy for getting better at basketball is totally insane and has virtually no chance of working.
The strategy Solon describes would obviously fail, because knowing how to play basketball can’t be separated from the muscle memory and intuitions built up from actually having played basketball. No amount of books or film study can bring your muscles and coordination up to speed to the level of actual basketball players. There’s no substitute for the thousands of hours they’ve spent taking tens of thousands of practice shots along with other drills to build their instincts.
To return to the idea of knowing from the heart, I think this explains why someone can go their whole life believing that God loves them, and yet still be filled with shame, bitterness, and despair. They understand and accept the proposition “God loves me.” But they simply lack the muscle memory of the heart necessary for this truth to make any practical impact on their sense of security, identity, and self esteem. They’ve done all the film study, but when they step onto the court of life, they gas out, heave bricks, and trip over their shoelaces.
Unless we see the color blue, anything we learn about the color blue will be empty and disconnected from the actual reality of blueness. Unless we meet God, and walk with him continually in our daily lives, anything we know about God will be empty and disconnected from the actual reality of the divine life we are called to. We must actually experience God; teaching and dogmas are the film study, the heart is the basketball court.
One of the most dramatic areas this impacts is our experience of shame. A few months ago I read a book called The Soul of Shame but Curt Thompson. One of several life changing insights from this book is that shame is pre-rational; it is not an intellectual reality, but a physical, emotional, and relational reality.
Thompson challenges the conventional wisdom of much of modern therapy, which assumes that we feel shame because we tell ourselves bad stories about ourselves. On this view, if someone rejects you, you don’t feel shame because of the rejection itself, but because of the conclusions you draw from it, e.g.: ‘I am unattractive,’ ‘I don’t deserve a good relationship,’ ‘how could I have been so stupid?’
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy proceeds by deconstructing these stories. To be clear, I think it’s extremely helpful - even a basic life skill - to be able to identify and articulate the reasons why you feel shame, and to think critically and compassionately about them. More often than not, when you bring these reasons out into the light, you’ll find that they’re obviously false, misleading, exaggerated, self-defeating, or self-fulfilling.1
But Thompson turns this thinking on its head: we do not feel shame because we tell bad stories about ourselves - shame is the reason we tell bad stories about ourselves.
As the saying goes, you cannot reason someone out of a belief they didn’t reason themselves into. You did not reason yourself into shame, you cannot reason yourself out of shame. Shame is a deep, primordial reality, which Thompson traces all the way back to the garden of Eden. The serpent deceives Eve into eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil by asking “Did God really say, ‘You shall not eat from any of the trees in the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1)
Eve knew full well what God had said. Her doubt had nothing to do with data, it had everything to do with her fractured relationship with God. So it is with us: shame comes from the disintegration of our relationships with God, ourselves, and others. Isolation is the oxygen of shame. The only way out of shame is the lived experience of being known and loved by ourselves, by God, and by other human beings.
Thus, Thompson argues that the main way to overcome shame is through vulnerable sharing. Just as mold grows best in darkness and dies off in sunlight, so shame flourishes in isolation, but dramatically recedes when we experience true, loving connection.
At the heart of shame is the fear that we are unlovable, and the driving force behind that shame is the belief that ‘no one would love me if they really knew me.’ You are especially vulnerable to shame and the deception of the enemy if your response to guilt is ‘no one has to find out about this’. When we hide, we allow our lives and self-image to be dictated by the fear that we cannot be both truly known and truly loved.
This is not to say that we should tell everyone everything. Sadly, many people can’t be trusted to respect our vulnerability. Beyond avoiding people who would abuse us, vulnerable sharing requires relational infrastructure that we haven’t established with most people. This is why counseling, support groups, sharing gatherings, and twelve-step recovery meetings are so tremendously valuable to society: they supply a context for vulnerable sharing and relationship building for people who lack one in their daily lives.
This is also why the Catholic Church insists on the sacrament of confession. God can and does forgive sins without this sacrament; but under normal circumstances the Church requires confession to a priest because our relationship with God is not an intellectual conviction. It is a relational reality which God has designed to be experienced primarily through flesh and blood humans, and, in this case, through a minister of the Church.
If you have lived your whole life in shame and hiding, revealing your true self to others might seem terrifying, even impossible. You face an uphill battle: you have trained, and even rewired your brain to believe the lies of shame through thousands of decisions which have validated and reinforced your conviction that hiding is the answer. But do not lose hope. One decision to come into the light is worth a thousand decisions to hide. Jesus revealed the ultimate emptiness and impotence of shame through his death and resurrection.
In Christ there is no condemnation, nothing can truly hurt us because of God’s love and care for us. Let us lay hold of that reality by letting God and others truly know and love us.