Freedom from shame through Jesus Christ
by M. K. Weston
As I was first approaching Orthodoxy in the early 1980s, I remember that friends were reading a book that advised Christians to stay away from psychology. It was called Psychology as Religion– The Cult of Self-Worship by Paul C. Vitz.1 The title was enough to convince me, and I continued my search for the soul’s healing through strictly Orthodox texts. “Psychology” means the knowledge and science of the soul, and the Orthodox Church has had true, spiritual psychology and soul therapy from the beginning. On the other hand, there was always the struggle to apply what was written for other generations and cultures and conditions. The particular genius of the Eastern Church is to seek and to “baptize” the good in every culture, and it can seek and “baptize” the good in modern psychology as well. In that spirit, I have drawn from psychology’s clinical experience and therapeutic techniques, but not from its vision of the nature of man and wellness, which do diverge significantly from a traditional, Christian understanding.
Psychologists since the time of Freud have been studying guilt—the gnawing feeling that we have acted badly—and its role in our lives. In 1987, Daniel Goleman began a New York Times article with this bit of irony– “Psychologists, admittedly chagrined and a little embarrassed, are belatedly focusing on shame, a prevalent and powerful emotion, which somehow escaped rigorous scientific examination until now.” Shame feels similar to guilt, but it has more to do with who we are than what we do. He continues– “Shame is emerging, in the view of some, as a ‘master emotion’ that influences all the others.”2 I’ve been pleased to discover that Christian therapists—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox—are now wrestling with this topic.3 Some are also including the Bible as an important point of reference.
I’d like this morning to discuss shame from the point of view of the Bible and other familiar Orthodox sources, as well as modern psychology and social commentary. To give an overview of what it is, its causes, its significance, its manifestations, and its resolution. The Church offers divine revelation to help us get a true perspective. Psychology, on the other hand, offers something which the Church cannot—case histories. Those who turn to the Church with suffering souls will unburden them to their confessors, who are then bound to the confidentiality of the sacrament. For that reason, there is much to gain from reading the case histories which psychologists can more freely offer. It will be beyond the scope of this talk to share those, nor do I wish to discuss issues so graphically that it might make people feel uncomfortable. But I will be happy to share references with those who are interested later.
Shame in the Bible
The Bible speaks about shame from beginning to end. I was surprised to find in the concordance that there were six times as many references to shame as to guilt in the Scriptures.4 The whole drama of the fall and salvation of man is couched in terms of shame, both in the Bible, and in the Divine Services of the Church. When we pray for salvation for our souls we say, “Let us not who put our hope in Thee be put to shame,” and similar phrases. When we pray for deliverance from the demons we say, “let mine enemies quickly be put to shame.” The story of shame starts in Genesis. We are told that our first parents in Paradise were “naked … and were not ashamed” (Gen 2:25). The only words used to describe the paradisal state of soul are “not ashamed.” Surely they were also joyful, peaceful, grateful…“not ashamed” though, seems to sum up that blissful state and imply all other blessings. After their fall through disobedience their shame is described by their actions—they hid and they blamed (Gen 3:7-13). Both the Church and psychologists recognize hiding and blaming as symptoms of shame.
We will draw from the Patristic understanding of Genesis to develop further our definition of shame. Our first parents were created to be immortal. They were wise beyond any human comparison. They did not suffer from hunger, thirst, heat, cold, fatigue, disease, injury, and did not need to suffer death. Their eating did not produce waste, and they lived as virgins.5 But Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and fell from all the goodness which had freely been given to them. For the first time they experienced shame. Shame is an emotion; it is also a state of being at odds with ourselves and with God. Shame says, “I have fallen from the good state in which I was created. I, who was just under the angels, am now like one of the beasts. The whole creation is cursed for my sake. I see my sin exposed—I deserve to be rejected by God and cast away from His presence.” Oh, what a painful feeling of rupture, of not-rightness! In the grips of an intense feeling of shame, we can hardly even stand to look at ourselves, at the exposure of our shortcomings. Shame not only makes us hide from God, and each other, but we hide our shamed state from ourselves by a myriad of smoke screens. The Church calls this hiding self-delusion. And it calls the smoke screens “the passions.” From its vantage point, psychology also calls this hiding self-delusion. And it calls the smoke screens “defense mechanisms.”
The cause of shame, as we have seen, is original sin. Unlike the Western Church, which teaches that we inherit the guilt of Adam, the Eastern Church teaches that we inherit the shame of Adam. As the canon for the feast of Theophany tells us,
The Maker saw in the obscurity of sin, in bonds that knew no escape, The man whom He had formed with His own hand. Raising him up, He laid him on his shoulders, And now in abundant floods He washes him clean From the ancient shame of Adam’s sinfulness.6
Shame in Human Development
So far, everything we have said about shame seems negative, but actually there is healthy shame, and there is unhealthy shame. We begin to see its significance for us in terms of human development. Our sense of shame appears around the age of two. We learn the distinction that certain things are private, such as our hygienic activities—we learn boundaries. This is an important, positive lesson. The capacity for shame develops before guilt, and before rational thinking. For this reason our early lessons about shame become part of our deepest sense of self, and are hard to revise if they have been contaminated by poisonous shame. All our emotions are psychic energy—the energy of the soul. They are reactions given by God to help move us to make good responses to the situations around us. For instance, joy moves us to praise God. Fear moves us out of harm’s way. Interest moves us to study and to work. When we have completed our response, then the emotion is resolved. Our heart moves on to something else. Shame in small, healthy doses tells us to correct our mistakes —to stop, recognize our human limitations, and proceed with prudence. If the feeling is rational, it can resolve itself in wisdom and insight. Here is a perspective on healthy shame from Healing the Shame that Binds You by John Bradshaw–
It is necessary to have the feeling of shame if one is to be truly human. Shame is the emotion which gives us permission to be human. Shame tells us of our limits. Shame keeps us in our human boundaries, letting us know we can and will make mistakes, and that we need help. Our shame tells us we are not God. Healthy shame is the psychological foundation of humility. It is the source of spirituality.7
But in large doses, shame becomes poisonous. Rather than telling us to correct ourselves, it tells us that we are incorrigible. It is that shamed sense of self which we constantly seek to drown out—the feeling is irrational and so there is no way to resolve it. For example, if I feel rationally ashamed and guilty because of a thoughtless remark, that will prompt me to seek forgiveness and to watch my tongue in the future. The guilt is resolved by making amends, and the shame is resolved by a firm decision not to repeat that sin. But when I was a girl in school, I remember feeling painfully and irrationally ashamed of being intelligent. I was afraid that boys would reject me for being smarter than they were. What moral lesson could I learn from that? Occasionally I would attempt to resolve the shame by playing to lose in a competitive game. In this case, my shame made me hide my true self in relationship with others. With deeper shame, we try to escape the pain by hiding self from self. It is in this sense that shame becomes a powerful energy of avoidance—the avoidance of truth and reality about ourselves and our relationships. Bradshaw continues–
Toxic shame is unbearable and always necessitates a cover-up, a false self. Since one feels his true self is defective and flawed, one needs a false self which is not defective and flawed. Once one becomes a false self, one ceases to exist psychologically. To be a false self is to cease being an authentic human being. The process of false self-formation is what Alice Miller calls “soul murder.” As a false self, one tries to be more than human or less than human.8
“Soul murder,” as Alice Miller so aptly calls it, is exactly what happened at the time of the original fall. God warned Adam that if he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he would die. Adam lived in the flesh for a considerable time (Gen 5: 5), yet there is no contradiction here. The immediate consequence of his sin was the death of his soul—the departure of the Holy Spirit from it. Through his lack of humility, he passed a legacy of shame and spiritual death down through the generations even to our present time.
The Spiritual Effects of Shame
Healthy shame was anticipated in the Old Testament righteous ones, but it is truly made possible by Christ’s incarnation and baptism for our sake. Healthy shame is modeled by the Prodigal Son. That shame says, “I have fallen from grace, ungrateful wretch that I am. I deserve to be rejected by God, but He is full of mercy and loving-kindness. I trust in His mercy, and dare to pray to Him with hope!” Our unhealthy shame says, “Don’t look at me—I’m a mistake! I have a hole in my soul and I should never have been born. If people really knew how I was inside, they would hate and reject me.” In other words, healthy shame still remembers that we are God’s creation and that He loves us. We were created good, but have become filthy and diseased. We need cleansing and healing, not discarding. Unhealthy shame makes us feel that we, our family, or group have a defect that others do not share. That we have a hopelessly bad nature that cannot be fixed, cured, or changed. Again, healthy shame is the foundation of humility. Here is an example of healthy shame from Unseen Warfare—a repentant sinner is counseled to pray in these words:
“O Lord, my God! I have done this because I am what I am and so nothing can be expected of me but such transgressions or even worse, if Thy grace does not help me and I am left to myself alone. I grieve over what I have done, especially because my life has no righteousness responding to Thy care of me, but I continue to fall and fall. Forgive me and give me the strength not to offend Thee again and in no way to digress from Thy will. For I zealously wish to work for Thee, to please Thee and be obedient to Thee in all things.”9
This humble sinner recognizes that all good is borrowed from God, and so expects nothing good to come out of himself unaided. He is not afraid to look frankly at his failings and shortcomings, and is not scandalized by them. He does not get obsessed with them. After offering his repentance to God, he feels confident of forgiveness and goes on with life. He doesn’t say, “how could I ever have done such a horrible thing! I’m really not that kind of person.” Squarely shouldering the healthy awareness of shame is a big part of carrying our cross and following Christ. It helps us not to judge and disparage our neighbor.
There is a profound state of imbalance and loss of perspective that is characteristic of the false self in fallen man. Our fall, the tasting of the tree of knowledge, opened us up to the experience of both good and evil, but tragically left us still without discernment. As we became coarse and material in our fallen nature, became confused about the issues of pleasure and pain, good and evil. This undiscerning condition is so severe that the Church counsels us never to trust ourselves—our thoughts, our motives, our instincts, our judgements. The Church calls the false self the “old man.” It is a death-like sleep of the soul that causes us to identify ourselves with our lower nature and our senses. To side always with the irrational, sensual will, and not the higher, godly will. It is that false self which begins to wash away in baptism, and is the very reason that we must be born again.
In one of his homilies, St. Nickolai Velomirovic´ further explains,
…there is a trinity in the interior heaven of man, which must become not just an association, but a unity, that he may be blessed both in this world and in that which is to come; that is the unity of mind, heart and will. While these three are only in association, man is at war with his own three parts and the heavenly Trinity.10
In the fallen state, the mind, the heart, and the will are out of balance with each other, at war with each other and with God. Poisonous shame encourages us to feel ashamed of some parts of our threefold make-up—sometimes to the point of not acknowledging that they are there, and to over-identify with other parts. For instance, a person could be over-identified with the mind, and ashamed of his feelings, or some of his feelings. A Western upbringing tends to give the sense that some feelings are intrinsically good and some are intrinsically bad. Love, joy, and excitement are “good,” while sorrow, anger, and fear are “bad.” In truth, all that God put into our make-up is good, but we need discernment—we have to know when and how to use it. If we are brought up to believe that all anger is bad, then how will we be angry against the demons and our passions? If we believe that all fear is bad, how will we develop fear of God? If we believe that all sorrow is bad, how will we sorrow for our sins and repent?
The Manifestations of Toxic Shame
As we have defined shame, both healthy and unhealthy, and looked at its significance, we have done so in universal terms. To look at the many manifestations of toxic shame, we will resume our creation story, and then move on to particular circumstances. The first beings to be shamed were the spirits who fell from heaven due to their over-weaning pride. Man was created a little lower than the angels in order to grow and to fill the void left by the fall of a third of them or more, according to some traditional Church sources. God shamed the demons in an ultimate way by casting them down from heaven, and from all that is good. The demons try to retaliate by shaming God. Shame for a creature is one thing—shame for God, impossible of course, would mean something entirely different. Shame for a creature results from choosing unwisely to trust the creation rather than the Creator—it means being cast away from God’s presence. Shame for God would mean proving that He was unwise in His counsels, fallible in His foreknowledge, foolish in His generosity. In particular, it would mean showing that He had made a tremendous mistake in creating man to replace the fallen angels. All the ranks of demons are motivated by consuming and unquenchable envy. They try to tempt us night and day to prove that God was foolish ever to create us, and to prove that man, like the demons, is inherently an enemy of God. In this pursuit, they are constantly blaming us before God, ourselves, and each other. In tormenting us they feel that they somehow ease their own torment. That is why the shameless ones provoke in our hearts the feeling that we are a mistake—that we shouldn’t have been born. If we ever feel this way we need to know that the demons are tormenting the wound of original sin in us. They want to provoke us to blaspheme our Creator Who formed us to share in His goodness and bliss.
We mentioned earlier that shame causes hiding and blaming. So far, we have looked at the response of hiding, but we have said little about blaming. The nature of shame is such that the feeling of it can be shifted from one individual or group to another. The demons proudly teach us to participate in their ruse of shifting the hurt of shame onto others. They take great delight if we begin to grumble and to blame God for our miseries. Or if we dull our distress by crowing over our supposed superiority over our neighbor. This could be moral superiority—a feeling of self-righteousness, or physical superiority—greater strength, or mental superiority—greater intelligence. It is often the inverse superiority of feeling that we are the worst at something—the most delinquent, the most rejected and unloved, the worst failure. Still having the log in our own eye, we try to take the speck out of our neighbor’s eye (Matt 7:3–5). We blame and judge our neighbor for our own unacknowledged faults and desires, which some therapists like to call our “shadow traits.” Family relationships, racial and caste relationships, ethnic and national relationships—in fact all relationships that I can think of—involve rituals either for maintaining a balance of shame or transferring shame.
Here is a simple example of maintaining the balance—a friend was with me in the monastery kitchen. As I finished the dishes, I looked down at my faded, black habit and remarked that it was full of stains and grease spots. My friend looked quite nice, but she immediately began pointing out minor stains on her own clothing, too. She tactfully brought herself down to my level so that I wouldn’t feel embarrassed. My heart felt lightened because of her kind gesture. In a different vein, if someone has criticized you, you may have noticed an insurmountable urge to find some “helpful” criticism to offer him in return. These are the little exchanges we are involved in every day. But they reveal our ancestral wound—our fall and our subsequent search for balance.
Here is an example of how we begin to transfer shame to others—I went to fill up my car at a time when the gas prices were fluctuating wildly. The cashier made me feel really stupid for not knowing in advance how much it would cost to fill the tank. Next thing I knew, I was hunting in my mind for an excuse to chew out someone else, in order to relieve my own stinging embarrassment. Yelling, put-downs, or any abusive behavior will make the victim feel shamed. Why? In reality, the person who behaves abusively ought to be the one to feel ashamed of himself. But somehow, we believe that we deserve what we get according to our this-worldly sense of the fairness of the universe—if we are treated shamefully we feel ashamed.11 We learn to assess our worth from how others treat and see us. We learn who we are first from our parents and those in our families, then from those in society around us. Our sense of identity comes from agreeing with the most important people in our life about who and what we are or should be.
Shame in the Practice of Slavery
Beyond the family, the transference of shame in society has happened through the universal practice of slavery. From as far back as sociologists can trace history, it has always been there. Slavery seems to have its genesis in making the slave the carrier of toxic shame. He begins as a conquered warrior. He is ashamed because he couldn’t defend himself or his women or his tribe. Then he is given a different name, distinctive dress or haircut, or some other mark. He must shoulder the work which his master scorns, and he has no recourse against the ridicule of society.12 Or again, he begins as a debtor who cannot feed his family. He shamefacedly sells himself into bondage and passes a growing debt onto his children and his children’s children. The legacy of debt becomes a legacy of shame as the “free” people mock, cheat, and abuse them. Looking at American history, Dr. Aphrodite Matsakis discusses this transfer of shame in terms of “shadow traits”:
Many of our racial stereotypes originated in the need to project the shadow traits away from ourselves onto a distinct group. Hence, white slave owners made much of the unbridled sexuality of their African-American slaves, when in reality it was the white slave owners who were taking sexual advantage of their slaves. They projected their own uncontrolled lust onto their victims, calling them “seductive” or “oversexed” or “immoral,” when the problem wasn’t the sexual desires of the slaves, but the sexual desires of the slave owners.13
In every slave culture the bondwomen are raped, and their children are born into slavery. I used to think that this was an anomaly of American history, but I have learned rather, that it is the norm.
Rape is one of the most standard procedures to ensure that women feel totally shamed and submissive.14 I have gained insight into how it works from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.15 He describes how Soviet prison guards used to deal with the hunger strikes of the political prisoners by force feeding, which he likens to rape in that it is a violation of the will. He observes that a person’s will has to be violated only once in this way to induce a state of apathy, because he is made to feel like his own betrayer. The nerves of the stomach, or any other part of the body cannot tell the source of stimulation. They register pleasure on a purely animal level. On the other hand, the heart and mind can react with strong disgust to things which are morally degrading and sinful. To make a person feel intense disgust and pleasure at the same time is to rip his soul in two. The most shaming thing one person can do to another is to accentuate the disharmony, originally caused by the fall, between the trinity of the mind, the heart, and the will. Or the trinity of the spirit, the soul, and the body. This is what the foul demons want to do to us.
I experienced that sort of violation recently on a much milder scale. I was sitting in a hospital waiting room. There was the inescapable presence of the TV, with a big, handwritten note, “Do not change the channel.” I waited for six hours with my prayer rope, but nothing to read, nothing else to occupy my mind, and with that inane TV blaring in front of me. To escape boredom, I tasted the entertainment. It was truly disgusting. Someone was trying to resolve marital conflicts by subjecting husbands to lie detector tests right there in front of an audience, if you can imagine. Yet my eyes, ears, and brain experienced some pleasure in being stimulated, in spite of the debasing content. Inside my soul was howling. I was angry with myself for watching, but too weak with boredom to resist.
Shame and Needs
Abuse in families is like that experience. Perhaps the abuse is verbal—it is shaming, but on the other hand, being yelled at is a form attention. In the case of children, they become torn between the conflicting needs for attention and safety—some will sacrifice attention for safety, and some, safety for attention. Either way, the unmet need causes them shame. Because our natures provide for us to learn types of behavior that meet our needs, that sort of conflict may teach us to act in ways that encourage abuse or neglect, and it becomes a vicious cycle. Our nature is equipped for survival, and if we are unable to meet a need well, we will always choose to meet it poorly. Later, the opportunity may arise to meet it in a better way, but we have to unlearn our unconscious habits—which is very difficult. It’s difficult because it’s bound up with our sense of identity—who we are. It’s bound up with the creation of a false self that we spoke of earlier. Once our identity is formed, we constantly seek to affirm it, even if causes us shame. To admit, if only to ourselves and God, that we were wrong about who and what we thought we were, brings up even more powerful feelings of shame.
Our needs themselves are humbling. An angel, being immortal, has no survival needs—he lives by the presence of God alone. That is exactly how we were originally created, and how God wants us to become, by virtue of spiritual rebirth. All the daily survival needs we have are as a result of the fall. The need to work to fulfill our needs is a result of the fall. Wealth and poverty are a result of the fall. God gave us the penance of neediness and hard work for our disobedience. Those who struggle to meet their needs feel it more keenly—they feel ashamed. But it is properly the shame that belongs to all of us. The author and poet Wendell Berry says–
I believe…that the root of our racial problem in America is not racism. The root is our inordinate desire to be superior—not to some inferior or subject people, though this desire leads to the subjection of people—but to our condition. We wish to rise above the sweat and bother of taking care of anything—of ourselves, of each other, or of our country. We did not enslave African blacks because they were black, but because their labor promised to free us of the obligations of stewardship, and because they were unable to prevent us from enslaving them.16
We stigmatize want and need. We also stigmatize “work that is fundamental and inescapable,” to use Berry’s phrase. Ordinary human work—housekeeping, farming, maintenance and such. We glory in work that is optional to survival—in entertainment, higher education, trade in luxury items. To deny someone what is necessary to meet his needs, either materially or psychologically, is also deeply shaming.
In slavery the shaming of basic needs and of necessary work is as much a part of the transfer of shame as the beatings and the sexual abuse. In the slave system, the master is allowed to have needs—the slave isn’t. The slave exists solely to minister to the master’s needs. He is used as an object, valued solely for what he can do, and not for who he is. The fiction is maintained that to have many needs, and to have them all met by someone else is a source of pride, while to have few needs and to meet them poorly by oneself is a source of shame. People whose needs are routinely denied come to feel ashamed when they feel the needs arise. They come to feel ashamed of their needs as if the needs were the culprits. They may eventually come to disown their needs, and not to acknowledge them consciously, even to themselves.17
The Scars of Slavery
Because slavery did create such a deep wound in our nation, let us examine more closely the scars that it has left in family life and society. What emotional habits would the slave system foster in the slaves, or indeed, in the owning class? The dominant race successfully transferred its feeling of original shame to the slaves. The slaves would react both by accepting the assessment that they were an inferior race, and by rebelling against it. The masters would feel pride in their ascendancy and power. The slaves would feel ashamed of their powerlessness, especially as family members were beaten and abused in front of one another. They would suffer from slow-burning resentment, and hot-flashing anger. Anger, which could not be safely expressed against the masters, would sometimes be turned inward against self or against other slaves. Some would hear the Word of God imperfectly preached, and by grace, turn the energy of anger into powerful prayer—prayer for deliverance, prayer for their soul’s salvation, and even prayer for their abusers.
What happens to this emotional legacy with emancipation? Is it just written off? The legacy of shame is unfortunately like an enormous, inherited debt—not easily written off or paid. Efforts are made through politics, business, and education, but little change is seen. Almost a hundred fifty years later, gunshots are still heard in the neighborhood streets. There are still coffeehouse readings of the poetry of black rage. We still nurse our wounds with the myth that the slavery we experienced was the most bitter and brutal on the face of the earth—that no one has suffered as we have suffered.
To follow one thread, the slave mothers found it dangerous to bond with their children and mates because they could and would be sold away at any time. They couldn’t expect stable and supportive relationships with husbands. Slave women were valued as breeders, and only informal marriages were tolerated by the system. Deprived of protection and bred like animals, would they not feel resentment mixed with their maternal love? In those generations and later, the mother who’d never had her emotional needs met would perhaps feel resentful when her children clamored to have those same needs met. The basic needs to be valued in and for themselves, the needs for love, bonding, affirmation of their feelings. What makes them feel they’re good enough to demand the things she did without? A child’s cries for attention might get met with a sharp put-down, as the mother tried to put down the rising feelings from her own shamed childhood.
The stamp of the particular type of shaming experienced through slavery is still strongly imprinted on the African-American community. It has been passed from generation to generation, waiting to be recognized and addressed. There are scars of self-hatred shown by the desire to change hair texture and color, and other physical traits. There are the more obvious signs of addictions and violence. There are the scars of chronic abandonment of families by both fathers and mothers. But the legacy of shame can be passed down in any family from any ethnic group in a similar variety of ways. In one, it will be eating disorders, in another, physical abuse, in another abandonment, either physical or emotional. In another, it will be the less obvious quest for superior achievement. Over-achievement can also be driven by a desire to reduce the feeling of toxic shame. Where psychology differs from the Church is that psychology still views shame as an issue involving this patient or that, this family or that. The Church teaches that it is at the core of the question of our fall and salvation. Salvation is precisely salvation from shame.
Freedom from Shame
Jesus Christ paid the debt of our sin on the Cross. In paying our debt, He freed us from the legacy of shame, and made us joint-heirs with Him (Rom 8:17). Every commandment in the Bible, every counsel of the Holy Fathers is a liberation from shame. However, if an individual labors under a mountain of poisonous shame, it may be hard at first to take advantage of what Christ is freely offering when He says, “Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt 11:28). If our identity is based on toxic shame, “I am a mistake,” rather than healthy shame, “I make mistakes,” it can be hard to believe that Jesus loves us. The false identity begins to form long before we can think rationally. The Church urges us towards saving humility, but when we try to say the penitential prayers in the services, or even the Jesus Prayer, we may feel that they shame us even more. We may want to edit out certain parts of the prayers—to omit phrases such as “sinners, of whom I am the chief.” Or we may agree with those sentiments in the wrong way. We may be saying in our heart, “mistakes, of which I am the chief.” Sinners are not mistakes. That is what the demons want us to believe. Sinners are feverish children, who in their delirium, often project onto God the rejecting attitude that they have experienced from others.
How do we resolve unhealthy shame and learn to trust in Jesus’ love? Of course this is a deeply personal and pastoral question for each one of us. Fortunately, He makes the first step for us toward healing. Nothing is more efficacious than the grace of the Holy Spirit, conferred by the Orthodox sacraments of Baptism and Chrismation. Since our original shame was the loss of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, then the Incarnation, Baptism, and Passion of our Lord and God and Saviour Jesus Christ are the remedy. We must pray that He will show us that all our worst sins are as a handful of dirt cast into the ocean of God’s love. That our pain is from the wound of our common enemy, and not at all God’s doing.
Healing Work
In our healing work, psychological techniques are useful if they help us to hold out our hand and to receive the grace which God already desires to bestow on us. The approach for each soul is unique. A good beginning is to realize that shame is an issue for everyone, because shame is the emotion that tells us all that we are all fallen. It helps to know that it is not only “me or my family or my racial group.” We have to feel secure enough in supportive, therapeutic relationships for shame to begin to ease out from its hiding places. By therapeutic relationships, I don’t necessarily mean formal counseling. Any relationship is potentially therapeutic where both parties try to live and love according to the Gospel. Where both parties try to be sensitive not to increase the other’s unhealthy shame. Since we reject the parts of ourselves that we are ashamed of, and don’t like to acknowledge that they are part of us, it may help to affirm our love and acceptance of the very parts that we don’t like.
The sin of self-love is really the sin of self-indulgence, of loving the sensual side of ourselves, and of ignoring the spiritual. God wants us to love ourselves correctly. That is to work towards our salvation by following His commandments. To acknowledge that we are His handiwork to treat ourselves with respect for His sake. Just as we love our friends and family members in spite of their physical and moral defects, we have to love ourselves. As silly as it sounds, we can say “I love myself for having a big nose, or big feet.” “I love myself for having a temper or being a coward.” The issue here is not to get mixed up between faults and virtues, but rather to accept and embrace our whole self so that our whole self can come to Christ the Physician. Then the elements that are misdirected can be redirected.18
St. Paul said, “be ye angry, and sin not…” (Eph 4:26). It is better to love myself for having a temper and getting angry—which I’m known for—than to be ashamed to acknowledge that I have the full range of human feelings. God created us all with the reactions of anger, fear, and sorrow. Anger or fear is elicited when we feel our wellbeing and safety are threatened. They are there to motivate us to protect ourselves. The problem is when we misunderstand the nature of the threat, because then our response is misdirected. Unacknowledged anger can seep out in a host of destructive ways—anything from a stubbornly uncooperative character to a major addiction. But if I love myself for feeling anger, then I can ask God to help me redirect my anger from my neighbor who certainly does not deserve it, to the demons who most certainly do. My healthy shame will urge me to apologize for my slips, and to be more prayerful and vigilant.
Forgiving our Families
Perhaps our parents’ emotional needs were poorly met, and they struggled imperfectly to meet ours. All people have had a fallen upbringing to some extent. It may seem as if we were there to meet our parents’ emotional needs—to parent our parents—while no one was there for our needs. Or we may feel that we came from a model, loving family, but then why do we feel so messed up inside? In reality, all our family members have sinned against us, and need our forgiveness. But how can we forgive if we don’t acknowledge the hurts? Some people have to begin shame resolution by acknowledging their hurts. Young children blame themselves when they are hurt. They must deserve it, or their parents wouldn’t hurt them. To admit that the parents were at fault seems to breech a taboo. But to remember that our parents were sinned against by their parents, who were sinned against by their parents, all the way back to Eden, puts things in a right context. Our parents sinned against us, not because they were terrible people, but because they are fallen human beings, tempted by the devil, just like everyone else.
Our parents and family members need our forgiveness, but not just the cheap forgiveness of saying, “It’s not a big deal. Why remember the past. Live in the present.” Real forgiveness requires acknowledging the hurts and grieving for the hurts. Grief resolves pain and loss. Grief involves retrieving pent-up, unconscious feelings and releasing them in a safe way—by writing them in a journal, crying on the pastor’s shoulder, expressing them through a work of art. When the buried emotions are resolved, then we can tear up the grievance sheet against our family, and forgive them from the heart. We remember the past in order to set safe boundaries for ourselves, but we remember without rancor.19 This step by step housecleaning of the cluttered rooms of our souls needs the guidance of an experienced and willing pastor, in the context of our ongoing sacramental life.
The Memory of Paradise
When we grieve for the imperfections of our upbringing, the imperfections of our family’s expression of love for us, when we acknowledge that these things cause us deep pain, we are really grieving for the loss of Paradise. We are grieving for our fallen condition and the loss of our first estate. When our ancestral parents were cast out of Paradise, God settled them in a place nearby where they could constantly see it and remember the good from which they had fallen through disobedience (Gen 3:24, Septuagint).20 We make a great mistake when we idealize our family, our upbringing, and our past for the sake of supposed loyalty. We need to see the difference between how things truly were, and how our heart longed for them to be. That longing is a remembrance of Paradise, without which we cannot be saved. That longing is intended to encourage us to seek fulfillment in God, and not to be satisfied with the things of this earth. The Lord said, “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matt 5:4). We mourn for our sins, but we also mourn for the sins committed against us. We mourn for a paradisal childhood that was lost to us. But this redemptive mourning is with hope. For Christ also said that we must be born again, and become as little children in order to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt 18:2–3, John 3:3–8). A second childhood is given to us through baptism, and if a second childhood, a second upbringing. The first upbringing by our families, in spite of their best intentions, is passionate and unbalanced. The second upbringing is by Holy Mother Church, directed by the Holy Spirit and aided by grace.
While psychologists say that we must mourn if we want healing from our shame, it is a mourning without real hope, as those who mourn their dead without expecting the resurrection. While they would have us mourn the love we never experienced and the destruction of our souls in childhood, they only extend to us the hope of adjusting to the painful truth of the past and finding fulfillment in the present. But we mourn with full hope that all of that for which we mourn will be fully restored and resurrected. Truly, through divine grace there is a resurrection of the soul, a restoration of the balance of heart, mind, and will, and a development of discernment between good and evil. In that state we are no longer tossed about like rudderless ships in a storm. St. Nikolai Velimirovic´ describes this mature state of soul in his inimitable way:
A true Christian is a mature man,…who is distrustful of sensuality, who has a finer judgement and makes a finer distinction between the value of what is and what passes away. To the Christian, surely, clear guidance is given by the revelation of God to distinguish between good and evil; but he has need of long and serious study to reach perfection, to be able to know in every given situation what is good and what is evil. His knowledge must move inward to his feelings to be reliable and unmistaken. And both good and evil seek to touch the heart of man. It is therefore essential for a man to be practised in recognizing at once by the feeling of his heart what it is that approaches him, in just the same way as the tongue can immediately perceive the salt and the unsalted, the sweet and the sour.21
The heart that is shamed is blinded by shame. It cannot see good from evil. The heart that is liberated by Jesus Christ is free.
Summary
We have looked at shame as an emotion—both healthy, where it leads to humility, and unhealthy, where it leads to unbalance and to self-delusion, which is the first step of every sin. We have seen how toxic shame causes the formation of a false self—a cover-up, which the Church calls the “old man.” We have looked at shame as banishment from God, and salvation as freedom from that shame. We have looked at shame as a social phenomenon—both in the family, and in society, especially through the phenomenon of slavery. We have looked at shame as the unique, personal experience of original sin, and how its legacy is passed from generation to generation. We have looked at how the feeling of shame gets transferred from one person or group to another, through the projection of “shadow traits.” And lastly, we have begun to look at the resolution of shame. That resolution entails fostering our healthy shame, and learning to recognize the symptoms of our unhealthy shame in our thoughts, our feelings, and our behavior. As we see it crop up in our lives, we shame shame by exposing it. We seek honesty with ourselves, with God, and in our relationships.
We still have disjointed parts of our make-up that war against themselves and God because of our fallenness and our unhealthy shame. As we walk the path of Christ, these parts will be balanced and healed, and discernment will begin to form. “His knowledge must move inward to his feelings to be reliable and unmistaken.” This expresses the full healing of shame—the healing of shamed emotions and the flowering of humility. St. Nikolai finishes his earlier passage by telling us that when the mind, the heart, and the will become whole and reunited,
when one is not dominant and the other subservient, then that man is filled with the peace that passes all understanding (Phil. 4:7), [that passes] all speech, all explanation, all fear and all sorrow. Then the small heaven within man begins to be like the great heaven of God, and the image and likeness of God then become clear within him.22
Shame can truly be a master emotion holding us in the bonds of slavery. We want to “bind the strong man” (Matt 12:29) concealed within us so that he will not bind our God-given capacity for love, for creativity, and for joy. It is for that reason that Jesus Christ our Liberator came down to earth. He was not afraid of mockery and rejection. He was not afraid of deceit and treachery. For thirty pieces of silver, He was sold as a common slave. Hunted down by the law, He was crucified among common criminals. Having no guilt, He embraced shame and rejection so that we who are enslaved to sin, need fear rejection no more.
Jesus is not afraid of our wounds; Jesus is not afraid of our needs; Jesus is not afraid of our sorrow. Let us come to Him with boldness and tell Him everything on our hearts. As we sacrifice our pain on the heart’s altar, He will receive every offering as One Who has sweated His very Blood for us. He will free us from the legacy of shame and help us take on His easy yoke of humility. He will walk us step by step, as we can take those steps. From His overflowing goodness, He will give us His courage, so that we may see ourselves with dispassion. From His overflowing kindness, He will give us His love, so that we may see our neighbor with compassion. From His overflowing wisdom, He will give us His light, so that we may see God with the purified vision of our heart! To Him be glory and honor and victory and praise, together with His eternal Father and His life-giving Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen.
Glory be to God!
1 Paul C. Vitz, Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship (Grand Rapids, Michigan– W. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1994).
2 Daniel Goleman, “Shame Steps Out of Hiding and into Sharper Focus,” New York Times, Tuesday, 15 September 1987, sec. 3, p.1.
3 For example, John Bradshaw, Aphrodite Matsakis, and David Stoop.
4 Ashamed—121 occurrences, shame— 99, shamed—3, shamefacedness—1, shameful—2, shamefully—4, shamelessly—1, shameth—1. Total—232. Bloodguiltiness—1, guilt—2, guiltiness—1, guiltless—10, guilty—25. Total—39. From James Strong, Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (New York: Abingdon Press, 1973).
5 Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision (Platina, California: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000), pp. 149–153, 442, 444, and many other references.
6 The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, (South Canaan, Pennsylvania– St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1990), pp. 372–373.
7 Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You, p. vii.
8 Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You, pp. vii–viii.
9 Unseen Warfare: the Spiritual Combat and Path to Paradise of Lorenzo Scupoli edited by Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and revised by Theophan the Recluse, trans. E. Kadloubolvsky, and G. E. H. Palmer, (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978), p. 279.
10 St. Nikolai Velimirovi@, The Prologue From Ochrid: Lives of the Saints and Homilies for Every Day of the Year, part 1, trans. Mother Maria, (Lazarica Press, Birmingham, England, 1985), p. 33.
11 Aphrodite Matsakis, Trust After Trauma: A Guide to Relationships for Survivors and Those Who Love Them (Oakland: New Harbinger Publications, 1998), p. 26.
12 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 5–6 and 105–131.
13 Matsikis, Trust After Trauma, p. 77.
14 Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, pp. 173, 260–261. See also Samuel Cotton, Silent Terror: A Journey into Contemporary African Slavery (New York: Harlem River Press, 1998), pp. 51–56.
15 Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956; An Experiment in Literary Investigation, I–II, trans. Thomas P Whitney, (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 470.
16 Wendell Berry, The Hidden Wound (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989), p. 112.
17 Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, trans. Ruth Ward, (New York: Basic Books, 1997), pp. 30–33. See also Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You, pp. 56–58.
18 Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You, pp. 115–116, 157–160.
19 David Stoop and James Masteller, Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Our Selves: Healing Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Servant Publications, 1996), pp. 317–320.
20 Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision (Platina, California: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000), pp. 214, 217–222.
21 Velimirovic´, The Prologue From Ochrid, p. 49.
22 Velimirovic´, The Prologue From Ochrid, p. 33.
Berry, Wendell. The Hidden Wound. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989.
Bradshaw, John. Healing the Shame that Binds You. Deerfield Beach, Florida: Health Communications, Inc., 1988.
Cotton, Samuel. Silent Terror: A Journey into Contemporary African Slavery. New York: Harlem River Press, 1998.
Kadloubolvsky, E. and G. E. H. Palmer, trans. Unseen Warfare: the Spiritual Combat and Path to Paradise of Lorenzo Scupoli edited by Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain and revised by Theophan the Recluse. (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978.
Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, trans. The Festal Menaion. South Canaan, Pennsylvania: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 1990.
Matsakis, Aphrodite. Trust After Trauma: A Guide to Relationships for Survivors and Those Who Love Them. Oakland: New Harbinger Publications, 1998.
Miller, Alice. The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, trans. Ruth Ward. New York: Basic Books, 1997.
Patterson, Orlando. Freedom, vol. I: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. New York: BasicBooks, 1991.
Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Rose, Fr. Seraphim. Genesis, Creation and Early Man: The Orthodox Christian Vision. Platina, California: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000.
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich. The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956; An Experiment in Literary Investigation, I–II, trans. Thomas P Whitney. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.
Stoop, David and James Masteller. Forgiving Our Parents, Forgiving Ourselves: Healing Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Servant Publications, 1996.
Vitz, Paul C. Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship. Grand Rapids, Michigan: W. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1994.
Velimirovic´, St. Nikolai. The Prologue From Ochrid: Lives of the Saints and Homilies for Every Day in the Year, part 1, trans. Mother Maria. Birmingham, England: Lazarica Press, 1985.
Wilson, Stanley D. Rising Above Shame: Healing the Family Wounds to Self-Esteem. Rockville, Maryland: Launch Press, 1991.
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