How Does Shame Keep Us From Loving Others?
February 3, 2006
For the past month the Harbor Community has been talking about becoming more loving people. Jesus says that all the law is summarized like this . . . Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind….and love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew22:36-40).
This month we are focusing on the “as you love yourself” part of loving your neighbor. When Jesus says to love your neighbor as you love y yourself, he is giving a command and stating a universal truth. Love your neighbor as we love yourselves (the command), and you will love your neighbor as you love your self (the truth).
Let’s say it clearly. Jesus says that it is important for us to love ourselves. In my life experience, coming to a place of appropriate self-love is directly related to my ability to love others. If I am filled with insecurity, fear, self-loathing, guilt or shame . . . those things become barriers that stand in the way of my reaching out to love others. Does that ring true for you?
As a kid I was deeply shamed by my body image. My dad was a big man who did all the stereotypical things a man in the Deep South did. I was a small, frail little boy who disliked most of those stereotypical activities. From my earliest memories the message I believed I was flawed at the deepest level. It wasn’t that I had done something wrong. It was that I was wrong. I was broken beyond repair in a way that made me unacceptable and caused others to reject me. And I was so deeply ashamed.
It was many years later that I learned that a certain type of shame can be an important, healthy dynamic in life. Shame helps us to realize that we are human. It cultivates humility. It tells us that we are limited – that we don’t have unlimited power. So, healthy shame signals us about our limits.
Like all emotions, shame is an energy in motion. Like all emotions, it moves us to get our needs met. But, like other emotions, sometimes shame can be real – we are really feeling it - but it is not valid. In other words sometimes we feel shame but we are deceived. One writer that I read refers to this deception as toxic shame (John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You). It is shame that we take on at the deepest level of our being in an inappropriate way.
Inappropriate or toxic shame usually develops in childhood. Things happen around us and because we have not developed the capacity to distinguish our experiences from ourselves, we internalize what happens. For instance, parents get divorced or dad abandons us and I believe that they did so because I am a bad person.
Or something happens that evokes the normal human emotions of anger, fear or sadness – and when we express those emotions we are told by the adults around us that we are bad people because of what we feel.
In a healthy family, parents help a child own their feelings, talk through them, process them. In an unhealthy family, when a child expresses these feelings she is ignored, punished, or ridiculed. Sometimes love is withheld. The message is strong that you are flawed as a person. If you weren’t you wouldn’t feel this way.
So, shame is normal and helps you remember your limitations – it develops healthy humility - but toxic shame is when your shame becomes your identity – it’s who I am.
In toxic shame, I build a way of life around the core belief that if I am myself around others I will always be rejected and condemned. That way of life involves a complex series of behaviors and feelings that are designed to keep people from connecting to me at an intimate level. I am confident that if people discover who I truly am, they will reject me. So I am diligent – sometimes obsessive – about keeping you at a distance. I do that by physically isolating myself, by being aloof, or judgmental, or passive-aggressive. Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, I become super-human…always serving and taking care of others, but never allowing them to know about or meet my needs.
The problem is that we are designed for intimacy. So the longer we live in violation of that design, the more pain emerges in our life. Believing that we have no legitimate way of getting the intimacy we need – with parents, with friends, or a potential life mate – we turn to illegitimate means of meeting this need. By illegitimate, I mean a source that makes the pain go away for a period of time – drugs, sex, money, power. However, eventually the pain returns and the addictive cycle is underway. And in toxic shame this becomes a reinforcing cycle because I feel shame for who I am and then for what I have done.
Can you see how it would be hard – almost impossible – for a person who thinks like that to love others or to receive love from others? So Jesus says love your neighbor as yourself. If you are filled with shame and the fear of rejection, you will fear connecting, and you will engage in behaviors that ultimately separate you.
So, it seems to me that a fundamental, foundational intervention that helps me become a more loving person is to address this underlying shame – to root it out of my life. What does the Scripture say to us about that? What can we learn from each other as we share our journey into freedom from shame? How will the Holy Spirit speak as we open our minds and hearts to him? In our gatherings this Saturday night, we will start a conversation about shame. We want to begin asking Jesus to reveal our shame to us and in us. And we want to ask him to help us engage the journey of freedom from shame.
Wouldn’t it be nice if simply giving mental assent to these teachings of Jesus could make things right? In fact, in our culture we foster a belief that seeking illegitimate ways of masking or medicating our pain is socially acceptable. And in our churched culture, we have fostered the belief that mental assent is all that is needed. We have cultivated a life style that pursues ease and convenience. We teach about a God who magically removes these deeply rooted beliefs that have been formed over a life time without any suffering or pain.
Some questions for thought and dialogue?
1. What role has shame played in your life?
2. How would you describe the constellation of behaviors that you engage to prevent others from connecting to you at a deep and authentic way.
3. In what ways do you hide so that others won’t discover how unlovable you really are?
4. What strategies have you engaged that have helped you get some measure of freedom from toxic shame?
Next week we will talk about the relationship between guilt and shame. For now, I encourage you to let the questions above shape your prayer life and your conversations in our community. Open a small amount of time and a little space in your heart to tell yourself and the Holy Spirit the real answers to these questions – and ask Him to change you.