By Pastor Yomi OGUNTUWASE
(yomioguntuase@gmail.com, +447946506659)
1 Corinthians 4:3 (KJV)
“But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man’s judgment: yea, I judge not mine own self.”
The answer is shame resilience. Note that shame resistance is not possible. As long as we care about connection, the fear of disconnection will always be a powerful force in our lives, and the pain caused by shame will always be real. But here’s the great news.
In all my studies, I’ve found that men and women with high levels of shame resilience have four things in common. I call them the elements of shame resilience.
Learning to put these elements into action is what I call b”Gremlin Ninja Warrior training.”
We’ll go through each of the four elements, but first I want to explain what I mean by shame resilience. I mean the ability to practice authenticity when we experience shame, to move through the experience without sacrificing our values, and to come out on the other side of the shame experience with more courage, compassion, and connection than we had going into it.
Shame resilience is about moving from shame to empathy-the real antidote to shame. If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive. Self-compassion is also critically important, but because shame is a social concept, it happens between people-it also heals best between people.
A social wound needs a social balm, and empathy is that balm. Self-compassion is key because when we’re able to be gentle with ourselves in the midst of shame, we’re more likely to reach out, connect, and experience empathy.
To get to empathy, we have to first know what we’re dealing with. Here are the four elements of shame resilience-the steps don’t always happen in this order, but they always ultimately lead us to empathy and healing.
1 Corinthians 4:3 NLT
“As for me, Paul said it matters very little how I might be evaluated by you.
This man Paul has persecuted the church and tortured christians to death and has received the verdict of God and he said, I declare to you today that I am innocent of the blood of anybody.
Acts 20:26 NIV
Shame resilience is a strategy for protecting connection-our connection with ourselves and our connections with the people we care about. But resilience requires cognition, or thinking, and that’s where shame has a huge advantage.
When shame descends, we almost always are hijacked by the limbic system. In other words, the pretrontal cortex, where we do all of our thinking and analyzing and strategizing, gives way to that primitive fight-or-flight part of our brain.
In his book Incognito, neuroscientist David Eagleman de. scribes the brain as a “team of rivals.” He writes, “There is an ongoing conversation among the different factions in your brain, each competing to control the single output channel of your behavior.” He lays out the dominant two-party system of reason and emotion: “The rational system is the one that cares about analysis of things in the outside world, while the emotional system monitors the internal state and worries whether things are good or bad.”
Eagleman makes the case that because both parties are battling to control one output-behavior-emotions can tip the balance of decision making. I would say that’s definitely true when the emotion is shame.
Our fight or flight strategies are effective for survival, not for reasoning or connection. And the pain of shame is enough to trigger that survival part of our brain that runs, hides, or comes out swinging. In fact, when I asked the research participants how they normally responded to shame before they started working on shame resilience, I heard many commens like these:
- “When I feel shame, I’m like a crazy person. I do stuff and say stuff I would normally never do or say.”
- “Sometimes I just wish I could make other people feel as bad as I do. I just want to lash out and scream at everyone.”
- “When I feel shame, I’m like a crazy person. ! do stuff and say stuff I would normally never do or say.”
- “I get desperate when I feel shame. Like I have nowhere to turn, no one to talk to.”
- “When I feel ashamed, I check out mentally and emotionally. Even with my family.”
- “Shame makes you feel estranged from the world. I hide.”
- “One time I stopped to get gas and my credit card was declined. The guy gave me a really hard time. As I pulled out of the station, my three-year-old son started crying. I just started screaming, ‘Shut up … shut up … shut up!’ I was so ashamed about my card. I went nuts. Then I was ashamed that I yelled at my son.”
When it comes to understanding how we defend ourselves against shame, I turn to the wonderful research from the Stone Center at Wellesley.
Dr. Linda Hartling, a former relational-cultural theorist at the Stone Center and now the director of Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies, uses the late Karen Horney’s work on “moving toward, moving against, and moving away” to outline the strategies of disconnection we use to deal with shame.
According to Dr. Hartling, in order to deal with shame, some of us move away by withdrawing, hiding, silencing our-selves, and keeping secrets. Some of us move toward by seeking to appease and please. And some of us move against by trying to gain power over others, by being aggressive, and by using shame to fight shame.
*Oguntuase, a nutritionist and a reflexologist, is a Pastor of Christ in Me Ministry, Windsor UK.
