What is Shame?

By Community Contributor

We want to live fully alive. However, there are ways that we get stuck or stopped in relating with God, ourselves, and others. In order to live our lives more fully, we enter into the journey of transformation. To experience transformation at the deepest levels, at some point we will have to deal with and overcome shame.

Learning to recognize when we are living out of our shame is the first step in conquering it. We all have default reactions to shame, protecting ourselves from being exposed. Shame thrives in the dark, feeding off our self-imposed condemnation. Shame says, “I am worthless, I will never be good enough, and if you really knew me-you wouldn’t love me.” Shame robs us of joy, gratitude, and happiness. Shame holds us back from meaningful relationships. Ultimately, shame leaves us empty, alone, and afraid if left unaddressed.

Brene Brown defines shame as the “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” So, we feel unworthy of receiving love from God, from others, and from ourselves.shame

Living in shame denies grace and refuses forgiveness. Instead of living authentically, we hide. Clinging to our unworthiness, we reject the message of Christ that, in Him, there is no condemnation.

Coping with our shame, we search for ways to numb the pain. We may numb the pain with shopping, eating, drinking, drugs, medicating, or a number of other outlets. One problem with this approach is that you can’t selectively numb emotions. You can’t numb the painful feelings without also numbing the positive feelings for which we live.

Numbing the pain of shame is not the only way we attempt to ‘manage’ our shame. When we live in shame, our default way of being is to hide it. How we hide our shame changes from person to person. But, in her TED Talk The Power of Vulnerability, Brene Brown shares three common ways people resist being vulnerable in an attempt to hide their shame.

1. Making the uncertain certain. Uncertainty makes us feel vulnerable and the more vulnerable we are, the more afraid we are. In an effort to mask our shame, we use right/wrong and win/lose thinking to feel in control and safe.

2. We perfect. From our personal appearance to our children, we try to make everything perfect, or at least appear to be. Perfection is our fortress, “protecting” us from anyone noticing our brokenness.

3. We pretend our actions do not have an affect on other people. We ignore the impact of our actions to avoid the pain that comes with getting present to our integrity gaps.

We learn these ways of dealing with shame from an early age and they become firmly established patterns in our lives. This isn’t something we consciously do, but it is a part of our default way of being.

Just because we have default ways of living out of our shame does not mean that we have to continue living that way. Through her research, Brene Brown discovered three ways to conquer shame:

1. Courage

2. Compassion

3. Connection

Shame can be debilitating, robbing us of the things we live for. Over the next couple of weeks, we will dive into each one of these ways to conquer shame, and hopefully will provide new tools or fresh reminders in your journey to live a more authentic, passionate, and vulnerable life.

**In Brene Brown’s TED talk, she covers much of what I’ve written about above. Her speech is definitely worth a listen. You can check it out here**