Healing Shame

My thoughts on ongoing healing from shame

I fear that for me self-reflection can become a trap. Like most things in life, there is a balance between too much and not enough. Certainly, the past five years I have not done enough self-reflection on where I am with my feelings and emotions outside of grief. This has been responsible. (As a recent widower I dove headlong into what I needed to preserve and nurture such as my daughters, my job, my house, and my family.) It has also been irresponsible. (I haven’t preserved or nurtured myself, my feelings, my emotions, and recently the girlfriend that could help me attend to those.)

As I have shared, shame, grief, and depression are part of my story. The title to this writing is probably misleading. I don’t believe you can be healed forever from shame, I think you can work to consistently be healing from shame.

My perspective on shame this go-around is different. As I mentioned in this writing, I was introduced to shame and its role on my feelings and emotions in college. Some “tools” were developed at that time to help in being “shame-aware.” Shame-aware for me is being a more active listener, both to what messages I am told, but also with respect to how I perceive those messages. But, I believe there is more to healing shame than simply being shame-aware.

For me the most important revelation in becoming aware of my shame is acknowledging that shame is part of my life’s story. I think this is the most difficult steps because a shame-burdened person is most often not going to be able to recognize their shame. If so, they wouldn’t find themselves in this place with months-upon-months or often years-upon-years of built up shame.

In the past few years I have struggled with feelings of indifference, anxiety, being overwhelmed, deep sadness, and depression. It has been hard to rifle through these feelings and come to a root cause. I was convinced it was depression. And, I still think depression is both connected (emotionally) and disconnected (brain chemistry) to what I now understand to be shame. Shame has been the underlying feeling driving indifference, anxiety, a feeling of being overwhelmed, and deep sadness. With this acknowledgement I accepted again, given my exploration of shame in college, that my shame was growing and impacting my ability to have a fulfilling life.

Having acknowledge and accepted shame in my life—the key first step—I have now set forth on the following steps. My trust is that these steps will help me as I address and continue healing the shame that will inevitably grow within me from time to time.

Self-Reflection

In both instances where shame has kept my life from being fulfilled, I relied upon a book to kick-start my reflection on shame. I read through Shame & Grace and underlined every word, sentence, and passage that spoke to me. When I hit chapter 11, it was is if the book was written for me. Other chapters were pertinent, too, but chapter 11 stood out.

In order to look back in a few years at my growth (hopefully), I wanted to get down on paper exactly why these underlined areas spoke to me. I then wrote out my thoughts on every underlined area. Sometimes it was a sentence or two. Other times it took a page or two to gather up all my thoughts. This exercise was powerful in allowing me time on specific areas within my shame-story to reflect and focus. The unpacking of self-reflection and repackaging it concisely in writing is a therapeutic process. I think without this I would have read the book and only reflected at the high level—oh yeah, shame impacts me. I can’t really recall why and how though.

As part of this, I have listed out numerous examples from my recent past where I felt shame and where that shame originated. Shame from the church, shame from my family, shame from myself, etc. For each of these examples I tried to explain what the shame-message was, how I interpreted the message when shame-burdened, and how I could re-interpret the message if actively shame-aware.

Reflect on Grace

The book Shame & Grace submits that shame is healed trough receiving God’s grace. I believe that and have written out my thoughts on what grace means to me. As it relates to healing my shame, I need to be consistently active in reflecting on grace. A reflection every few years is insufficient. I need to reconsider the cost of grace—Jesus’s death; the cost to me to receive grace—belief in Jesus; the freedom in grace—absolute; and the glory and honor I want to give God out of praise for grace.

As part of this reflection on grace and the praise for grace received, I want to actively think back on the abundance of grace I have received. How is it personal to me? What did it give me? What did it potentially protect me from? Was it easy or hard for me to receive grace?

Write

Everyone is different, but for me writing down my thoughts helps tap into my feelings. So, I am always more fulfilled when I write. As I mentioned earlier, I have written out my reflections on passages that I have underlined in the book Shame & Grace. I have also written out my thoughts and feelings on what sources of shame are prevalent in my life. How have those feelings of shame impacted my life? What would life look like if I didn’t heal from shame?

Shame has impacted my life. It contributed to a protracted depression in my senior year in high school and freshman year in college. However, at that time I didn’t write. All of my thoughts and feelings were tossed about in my dynamic brain, but never forced out onto static paper. I regret now not being able to revisit those precise thoughts. Revisit exactly what I was thinking, how I was feeling, and my plans for healing. I would like now to see how much I have grown, or backslid. I think that context would be helpful. That is another reason I am writing. To provide an unaltered account for future reflection.

Not everything is being spilled out here; I am also writing in a journal. This journal has the intensely personal details of my grief, depression, and shame. That journal is where I can expose fully the anger and frustration, the wrongdoings that I fear I will never forgive myself of, and the shame of my heart that I am fighting to banish from the house of my heart, even though it has become a perversely comforting housemate.

Shame Awareness

Acknowledging and accepting that I am burdened by shame is the first step. I have accepted the shame, reflected on my shame, and tried to understand how I receive shame. This has been an exercise over the past couple of months that examined the past few years. Recalling doing this in college, the intermittent nature of it feels like someone who diets by fasting and exercising every few years and loses 50 pounds only to relax and then resume their unhealthy eating until they gain all the weight back. Rather, shouldn’t they build in the discipline to be vigilant on a daily and weekly basis? Easier said than done.

So I want it to be for me. To develop the tools of shame-awareness. Meaning active listening to both the messages others tell me and the messages I tell myself. I am working to:

1. Actively listen to the messages from others and run them through a “shame-aware filter” in attempt to reshape or discard the message.
2. Actively “listen” to how I interpret messages from others and from myself. Being cognizant of my proclivity to transform messages into shaming messages.

It has been powerful to start practicing this and feel it working. I first started with my writing and journaling and going through prior conversations where I was shamed or self-shamed. I reflected on these and wrote how I would often twist compliments into shaming messages, how my desire and striving for success is driven by or can bring on feelings of shame, etc. Now I am intensely aware of the messages I am receiving. Just last week my boss was leading a conference call and said, “I share this only by way of example. If you think or do differently you should not take that as doing it incorrectly.” He guarded the team against feeling bad/shame. I recently talked on the phone with a women I previously worked with. In that conversation she complimented me on how thoughtful I was in my work. In my mind I immediately said to myself, My “thoughtfulness” was out of selfish desires to get them to work more with me so that we could succeed. I then thought to myself, Just because it was helpful to you and to your colleague doesn’t mean it was selfish; and if it was selfish, that isn’t something to feel shame about.

My hope and expectation is that through consistent intentional practice my ability to be shame-aware and to filter messages from a shame perspective will become almost second-nature.

Shame & Grace Partner

One negative aspect, amongst many, of losing my wife to cancer is the lack of a partner. Bridget was my partner in many respects, one of which was as what I’ll call my “shame & grace partner”. While we never really defined it as such when we were dating and married, she filled this role well for me.

For me a “shame & grace partner” is someone who cares about me and actively seeks to asses if:

1. I am being an active “shame-aware” listener
2. I am being receptive to God’s grace

I am now working on finding and nurturing a shame & grace partner. The person should be trusted, someone I can be honest with and open up with. Someone that is curious and will probe on specific shame issues to see how I will respond. They too will need to be an active listener to hear if our conversations are consistent with low-shame. This shame & grace partner won’t be perfect and shouldn’t be relied upon to keep me from feeling shame. That is my job and God’s job through his grace. But, this partner will hopefully serve as a safety-net of sorts; someone to encourage and/or direct me to “get back to it.”

As I think over the time since Bridget died, and in particular the past couple of years while I was dating my former girlfriend, I see how much I atrophied in my shame-awareness and the difficulty I had in “getting back to it” when my girlfriend didn’t assume this role—she never knew about the role or was introduced to it! To have someone you care about, who cares about you, but doesn’t know how to, or even know to, care about your shame and how it damages your sense of worthiness is very disheartening.

Counseling

I have been seeing a counselor for a few months now and have seen counselors on-and-off in my past. It has been very helpful to share thoughts and emotions, hear from the counselor on his perspectives, and generally be made aware of areas to focus on, areas of correlation in actions and feelings, and areas where I might be backsliding.

There is a bit of a belt-and-suspenders approach to having a shame & grace partner in addition to a counselor. But, I think they each bring different insights on my personality and perspectives on my shame. The counselor obviously is a professional and can spot the meta-trends and the nuanced nature of my shame. I plan to rely upon them to guide me in restoring my shame-awareness and building my tool-kit for healing shame. The shame & grace partner is more to offer support and encouragement to “get back to it” should I loose my steam on being vigilant in shame-awareness.

To do this I plan to have an ongoing relationship with a counselor. Someone that I will eventually meet with periodically—maybe monthly—rather than the intensive meeting schedule I currently am holding with my counselor.

Freedom

Finally, as part of healing shame I desire to embrace freedom. (You can click here to read what I mean by freedom.)

The opposite of being enslaved is freedom. Unhealthy shame enslaves. Freedom is having the power, the rights, and the ability to say, do, and think without hindrance or restraint. I believe that my faith in Jesus provides great freedom. Freedom is a gift from God to believers giving them the power, rights and abilities of the Holy Spirit whom God sent at Pentecost. If I am chosen by God and given the helper in the form of the Holy Spirit, then what greater freedom is there?