The Blog Archive: Shame and Vulnerability

Saturday, October 7, 2023

Shame and Vulnerability

I didn't connect as much with Anatomy of the Soul, but this one (Curt Thompson's second book) really made an impact! To paraphrase and summarize it, shame stems from relational abandonment, whether real or threatened... and our healing MUST come in the context of safe relationships - these wounds cut deep into our way of thinking and viewing ourselves, and we cannot work out shame wounds in isolation. Shame carries the fear of being inadequate, forsaken, or abandoned, the lie that we are not important enough for God to remain with us. Love and shame are opposing forces... the presence of the Holy Spirit embodying the voice of love, and our spiritual enemy pushing the messages of shame. Our indulgent sin and idolatry is an attempt to satisfy our hunger for relationships, our longing to be known and loved and desired. And vulnerability is the gate we must pass through to deepen our connections with God and other people.

"No one ever feels the sharp sting of shame apart from an initial encounter with someone else that, despite perhaps even having no conscious intention to do so, activates the shame response."
(We only experience shame in relationship, so it must be healed there, as well.)

"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."

"Of all the variables that encourage the development of secure attachment in a child, the single most powerful one is the degree to which the child's parent has made coherent sense of his or her own story." (Strong motivation for me to be intentional about healing.)

"Part of shame's power lies in its ability to isolate... Shame's healing encompasses the counterintuitive act of turning toward what we are most terrified of... we anticipate this vulnerable exposure to be so great that it will be almost life threatening. But it is in the movement toward another, toward connection with someone who is safe, that we come to know life and freedom from this prison."

"To be human is to be vulnerable... Honest vulnerability is the key to both healing shame and preventing it from taking further root in our relationships and culture."

-Curt Thompson, MD

Here it is again - how vital our relationships are and how important it is to have safe people you can talk to about past trauma or hidden sin struggles to find healing. Brene Brown is big on telling your story to safe people because saying it out loud takes away most of shame's power... but that felt like a worldly message to me until I read this book. The whole "shout your abortion" movement and other cultural things where people seek to minimize shame by pretending it's all okay and being proud of whatever sin they've chosen. This is not that.

This is admitting that our perspective is skewed by shame, and seeking healing and re-integration in the context of safe relationships. As Jennie Allen put it, "The only way to heal from trauma is to not be alone in whatever trauma happened to you... There's a reason you do that behavior, and it's a part of you that needs to feel seen, safe, and soothed."

So anyway, my close friends can probably expect some deeper conversations on this in the future. Someday. I paused the audiobook to think through how that talk might go, then I had to stop the imagined conversation in my mind to preserve my mascara before work last week. lol So I'll have to work up to it.

Anyway, here are a few of the latest memes I've saved, just to end with something lighter:

Snobby cats make me laugh...