Do you ever feel like people are counting on you to have the
answers? To have it all together? To be strong? Do you feel like you fall
short? Like you aren’t enough? Like if anyone found out what you’re really
like, you would be pushed aside and forgotten? This is the feeling of shame.
Aristotle defined shame as “pain or disturbance in regard to
bad things, whether present, past, or future, which seem likely to involve us
in discredit.” This definition meshes well with the way Curt Thompson talks
about shame in his book The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe
about Ourselves. Shame is the feeling that you’re not enough, will not be
enough, cannot be enough. It’s a fear that you can never meet the expectations
that people have for you, or that you’re not good enough for people to care for
you.
According to Thompson, shame is a key component of the lives
of all people. While shame comes in many forms and in varying levels of
intensity, it is always there, whispering in your ear, causing you to reshape
the story you tell yourself about your life and relationships with others. The
main fear that shame promotes is the anxiety of separation from others, the
fear of abandonment and lonliness. Paradoxically, shame causes us to hide who
we really are in response. We can’t show our weaknesses. We have to appear
strong, with it, and put together lest people reject us as not good enough for
fellowship. As this shame creeps like a pernicious weed into every part of our
lives, we can end up withdrawing from people altogether and experiencing the lonliness
that we feared at the beginning of our shame journey.
Thompson points out that shame is different from guilt.
Shame can exist alongside of guilt, but unlike guilt, which can be good for us,
shame is always negative. Without guilt, shame separates people. Because of the
fear of separation, shame drives us to hide ourselves from one another, not
willing to be vulnerable and weak. Alongside of guilt, shame causes us to hide
from God, wearing our fig leaves and avoiding confession. Shame coupled with
guilt also prevents us from confessing our sins to one another for fear of the
rejection we may experience from others if our sin should become known.
This book shows how shame begins to have its effect on us
from our earliest childhood experiences. It is inculcated, usually unknowingly,
in our families. It features strongly in schools for both students and
teachers. It infiltrates all organizations and workplaces. It can especially be
prevalent in church communities, the one place one would expect to find freedom
from shame.
Through the course of this book, Thompson talks about how to
be attentive to shame and deal with its lies that it feeds us on a daily basis.
He gives a reaffirmation of vocation the way God intended it to be, and shows
how we can combat the way shame strips us of joy and fellowship in our lives.
This was an excellent book in every way. Thompson does great
research into the neuroscience of shame. There is a lot of information about
the brain and how the experience of shame affects the operations of the brain.
Apparently shame can actually shear off neural pathways and affect our ability
to form accurate memories of events that we experience. Shame is a state of
mind that we slip into unconsciously, and by being consciously attentive to the
process when it happens, we actually alter the physical functioning of our
brains to combat shame. Thompson pays special attention to what it means to be
humans, embodied creatures with body and soul. While our mind and our brain are
not identical, the functioning of our brain has a great effect on the health of
our souls.
I appreciated Thompson’s numerous expositions of Scripture. He
shows how shame was present and active at the fall of man in the Garden of
Eden. He shows how shame was active in the early church communities and
addressed by Paul. He shows how Jesus dealt with shame and guilt in the way he
talked to others and interacted with individual sinners.
I also appreciated the numerous case studies of his patients
and clients. As a practicing psychiatrist, Thompson has a wealth of personal experience
to draw on. It would be very surprising if you were to read this book and not
find a situation that connected with you directly.
For me, this book has already changed the way I talk to my
children on a daily basis. From finding ways to encourage hard work and
creativity without the fear of falling short, to finding ways to deal with sin
and bad behavior in order to restore fellowship rather than shame, this book
would be helpful to any parent. I think this book is going to greatly affect
the way I deal with students as a teacher as well. Schools, especially schools
with a strong academic reputation, are hotbeds of shame. This book definitely explains
the burnout I’ve seen in many students over the years. Oftentimes shame is a
chain reaction in educational environments affecting administrators, teachers,
parents and students. And this holds true from large schools to homeschool
co-ops.
In conclusion I don’t think there is a person, family,
school, organization or church community that would not benefit from this book,
and I’m going to be recommending it like crazy to everyone I know.
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