4: Shame
unwanted you are. No one would want to be with you if they knew the real you.” Shame can make us feel all of that, and at the deepest possible level. But shame is more than just a feeling. It’s also an interlocking and reinforcing set of beliefs and messages, telling us that we deserve to have those kinds of feelings, Why? Because, truth be told, we really are un- worthy, unwanted, unclean, and unacceptable. Some of us believed that we were unacceptable, and then we came to feel that way, which only made us believe it even more. And some of us first felt (or were made to feel) ashamed and unacceptable, and then we came around to believ- ing it over time. Either way, it’s a vicious cycle. Either way, it’s hard to break free. And so most of us just try to cope the best we can, on our own, because shame tends to drives a wedge between us and others and between us and God. Most of us end up using what researcher Donald Nathanson called the “compass of shame”: four main strategies for coping with our shame. In a way, they line up with our primal responses to threatening situations: fight, flight, or freeze. So, for example, one way of coping with our shame would be to attack ourselves—beat up on ourselves, be habitually disgusted with ourselves. Another way would be to attack others—lash out in anger, shame them down to our level or below, so we don’t have to feel so bad about ourselves by comparison. Those are the fighting responses. But those are only two points of the shame compass. More often than not, we cope by going in other directions. Usually, our first response is to hide from others—to isolate ourselves, to cut others off, or at the very least, to cover up and pretend. This is as old as Adam and Eve, who tried to hide from God (Genesis 3). But there’s another way of hiding: hiding our shame from ourselves. We try to repress our shameful side,
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SHAME
Shame is different.
That’s something we missed in our diagnosis of what’s wrong with us in the first edition. Guilt and shame often go together, but they’re not the same thing. Shame is a different experience, a different kind of feeling and thinking, a different kind of brokenness, a different kind of wound that needs a different kind of healing. Shame makes us feel deeply flawed, inadequate, inferior, incompetent, unwanted, unliked, unacceptable. Shame can make us feel disgusted with ourselves. It can make us feel anxious around others—worried that we’ll be found out and found wanting, that our dirty secrets will be exposed for the whole world to see. Shame makes us feel isolated and rejected and alone, like a disgraceful outsider who doesn’t belong and who will never belong. Shame feels like a darkness that we carry around deep inside, like an emotional black hole that sucks up the light, like a smothering heaviness on our spirit, like a deeply buried anchor on our soul, saying, “Never forget how worthless, how not-good-enough, how
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