The Story of Shame

We’ve all felt it. It begins with a tingling sensation around the scalp, a weight on the stomach, a difficulty drawing breath, and a lightning bolt through the nerves. Arms suddenly turn to rubber and every step forward is made through an ankle-deep mud. That’s when we start to hear it, a voice that bypasses the ears and speaks from within, so calmly and confidently that we wonder if it had always been there. Its message is simple and relentless: I have done something very wrong.

This is the onset of what we call guilt. Under normal circumstances, guilt arises as a sensation that alerts us to moral error. It is the clarion call of a faculty of the soul called the conscience, that within us which perceives and coherently imagines what we ought to do and what we ought not to do. Like a canary in the mineshaft, guilt is designed to grab our attention in the presence of moral danger. Were our condition to go uncomplicated and unconfused, this would be the status quo.

Unfortunately, our experience is not so simple. Our experience of life is afflicted in every way by the corruption of sin, which as it applies to our conscience means that the coherent imagination of right and wrong is often distorted, ambiguous, or opaque. When guilt perks up, it may be over something that is perhaps not even a sin. When guilt remains happily asleep, it may be in the presence of a monstrous evil. If we are the kind of people that determine to remain attentive to this part of our souls, we may experience a kind of perplexity and weariness that comes with constantly squaring our perceptions to an objective plumb line, never quite able to lay down that labor. If we’re the kind of people who relinquish that struggle, we may begin to ignore guilt altogether or find a way to absorb it into a kind of rationalism or emotivism. Despite the reality that guilt can raise a false-alarm, it remains a necessary thing in those situations when we are in error. For that reason, prudence suggests that we not ignore the sensation of guilt when it arises, even if we must then interrogate it.

Around the sensation of guilt, though, a story begins to form. It is driven by our inherent search for meaning, the connection between sensory inputs, the constellation that orders otherwise scattered points. This story begins, even before we detect it, to situate the guilt in a narrative so that we can better understand what to do with it. This is the story of shame. Curt Thompson, a researcher in the science of shame, characterizes this story as one that is at once ours and not ours. The stories that make sense of shame do not originate with us. As he writes in his seminal work The Soul of Shame: 

“It may be revealing to know that telling your story begins with someone else. Long before you arrive on the scene, before and then after you were conceived, people started talking about you: they talked about your gender, what you will be named, who they hope you will resemble in appearance and character (and likewise, who they hope you will not resemble)...You began your life out of and into this narrative that others were already telling.”

The story of shame is a way we individually and collectively explain what our guilt means and what we are to do with it. While there is much to say on the genesis of this story, I want to highlight two forms that it takes in our lives and how that interacts with the experience of the Chrisitan life.

The first form that the story of shame takes is what we might call ‘helpful’ or ‘healthy’ shame. Assuming for the moment that our sensation of guilt is correctly identifying something truly awry in our moral life, the story of healthy shame says something like I have done something wrong, and that means I am capable of wrongdoing and in need of forgiveness and restoration with those that I have wronged. As we pray in the Collect for Lent II, we have the realization that ‘we are not enough of ourselves to help ourselves.’ Responding attentively to this looks like surveying the scope of the wrong done, naming and describing it as specifically and accurately as possible, and then confessing and apologizing to those affected by the wrong. Healthy shame always points to a need for relational reintegration, telling us that there is a community to which we must return, a God to whom we must be reconciled, and that both are ready to receive us with forgiveness. 

Even as I write about healthy shame, I can feel the pain of remembering those ways that shame goes badly. In what we might call ‘toxic shame,’ the story about our guilt collapses that impulse to reintegration into a tragic spiral of permanent alienation. When shame turns toxic, the message that I need to return to my people becomes my people will not or cannot receive me. The call of I need to repent and return to the Lord becomes I am now beyond His ability to save. The story of toxic shame is made more plausible externally by the wounds we receive through relational encounters that were haphazard, unhealthy, or even abusive. The more our hearts have suffered in the hands of those who were careless or violent with them, the more difficulty we will have in imagining a gracious and forgiving community and, ultimately, God. Internally, the story of toxic shame is propped up by the temptation to despair–the ultimate aim of the great enemies of our souls. Despair speaks of the impossibility of goodness in our present circumstances, and then spreads like a cancer to consume our future potential before, finally, effacing the memories of good in our past. 

Shame will turn toxic unless acted upon and held in health by a power beyond itself. Individuals and communities will repeat cycles of toxic shame until someone intervenes. Regrettably, churches are not immune from perpetuating these cycles. Even so, churches have at their heart the very thing that defeats the falsehoods of toxic shame because, ultimately, the story of shame can only be answered by the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the encounter with Jesus in a life shaped by prayer and lived in healthy communities that brings us all back from the precipice–no other gospel can indefinitely withstand the pull of despair. The Lord alone can reconcile us to the Father, and the Spirit He breathes on us alone can unify us as a Body in such a way that resists the tempting power of coercive shame.

In my next post, I will unpack how the ancient practice of sacramental confession is the anchor of healthy shame and the answer to proper guilt in healthy Christian communities. If a church wants to become a place of reconciliation and healing, it must cultivate a regular habit of making confessions among its members. As Thompson writes: “...[F]or me to be liberated from the shame I carry, I need someone to be able to say to me, ‘You’re right. You were wrong to have done this.’ I need to hear that my behavior was really as bad as I think, if not worse, while simultaneously sensing that the person I am confessing to is not leaving.” In the meantime, it will do us well to listen for how guilt, healthy shame, and toxic shame are speaking because those matters will make, as we learn to bring them out of darkness and into the light of Christ, the material of a good confession and a more profound experience of forgiveness.