Shame: What Is It Good For?

My face burned as I tipped over the big blue garbage bin and crawled inside, laying a towel on the “floor” as I mopped up the spilled fruit and watermelon juice with paper towels.

What was I doing inside a garbage can? Good question. I was at the end of renting a cottage on Lake Michigan and was cleaning up the place when I dumped a plastic clamshell of expired fruit in the cottage garbage can outside. In my hurry to get the place shipshape, I failed to close the lid properly, and somehow I missed the plastic bag, too. The fruit and juices spilled all over the inside of the can. I knew I couldn’t leave the fruit to fester in the heat, but what could I do?

It was awful—and the worst part was the shame.

Another story:

Within a few weeks of becoming a father for the first time, author Chuck DeGroat dropped his newborn daughter. Twice.

Once, while watching a football game, he was changing Emma on a soft ottoman, but as he reached for a diaper, she somehow rolled off face down on the carpeted floor. They both cried.

The second time, he was at a restaurant with his little family, enjoying their first meal out together. He rocked Emma to sleep and placed her in her baby carrier, but did not click the handle back into place for fear the click would wake the baby. Half an hour later, DeGroat grabbed the baby carrier, forgetting it had not clicked into place, and Emma flopped out, this time on concrete. “I shrunk in shame,” he said. “I wanted to resign from parenting.”

There’s that word again: shame. It’s one of the most primal emotions we experience. The only people who don’t experience it are those who lack the emotional range for empathy, such as narcissists.

This brings us to the third shame story—actually, the first shame story ever told.

After Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate from the forbidden tree, they slunk out of their perfect garden home, naked and suddenly acutely aware of it, disconnected from God and from each other. “Searing shame severed them from themselves, even their own bodies. ... They were not well,” writes DeGroat in his book Healing What’s Within: Coming Home to Yourself—and to God—When You’re Wounded, Weary, and Wandering.

Adam and Eve were not well, and neither are we when shame—greasy, pervasive, and stubborn—coats us like black crude oil covers a bird’s feathers.

“Shame,” writes Jenai Auman, author of Othered, “wasn’t part of the original created order. It is a signal—if not the signal—that creation isn’t what it should be and that life didn’t have to be this way.”

Shame vs. Guilt

It’s easy to confuse shame with guilt or embarrassment, but shame is way more toxic. We make a mistake that we would never chide a friend for (at least not out loud), yet we beat ourselves up. Shame is deep discomfort, a feeling of having done the wrong thing—again. Shame keeps us in defensive mode, hustling hard toward behavior modification. It makes us feel less-than, cracked, and unworthy of belonging and connection. We usually hide the thing we are ashamed of, pushing it into the darkest corners of our souls.

Therapist and author Brené Brown defines shame as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging.” That is to say, we didn’t just do something wrong, we are all wrong. Different from guilt, which Brown says can be “adaptive and helpful,” shame is debilitating and cuts us off from God and others. (In Eastern cultures, shame is strongly tied to the community, resulting in a more collective experience of shame compared to Western cultures, where shame is often thought of as an individual experience.)

Seeds of Shame

Sometimes shame is rooted in past trauma, in things done to us rather than by us. Irene Rollins, a pastor’s wife and author of Reframe Your Shame: Experience Freedom From What Holds You Back, writes about her addiction to alcohol and her great shame as a mother over passing out drunk on the bathroom floor.

After going to rehab, Rollins was able to connect the dots. The seeds of her alcoholism had started when she was much younger. “I was looking for love in all the wrong places,” she writes. “What I really wanted was for my dad to say how beautiful I was, check in on me, and say I was valuable.” Once she uncovered the roots of her pain, Rollins could seek help and healing.

Shame Lifters

How do we diminish the power of shame in our lives? We can’t do it alone. Wisdom from above can help us spot shame before it blights our spirits. Instead of shoving shame in a box in the basement of our souls, we can learn to identify it. DeGroat even recommends calling it out within ourselves:

“You may need to acknowledge the hidden part of yourself at the business meeting when you stumble over your words and a fire surges up through your chest and into your face,” he writes. Greet the dark emotion, and it will lose some of its power: “Hello, shame. I’m with you. It’s OK.” This might seem weird, but it works.

If we don’t admit our shame and process it with God and others, we will stay mired in the muck.

"Shame loves secrecy,” Brown says. “The most dangerous thing to do after a shaming experience is hide or bury our story. When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes.” Make sure the person you share your shame with is safe, or talk with a professional therapist who can offer healing empathy.

Shame, whether from something as big as alcoholism or as seemingly small as being careless with the garbage at a cottage rental, can do terrible damage if left unchecked. Satan loves it when we are bogged down in shame because then he has us where he wants us: feeling unloved and isolated. That’s exactly where Adam and Eve were until God came to the rescue, which God always does.

God Attends to Us

A middle-aged woman, feeling irresponsible, kneels in a garbage bin, trying to make things right. A new father, wondering how he can be trusted to care for his infant daughter, shakes his head in disgust. A young couple, heartsick that they had blown up their beautiful lives with one terrible choice, ask themselves how they got there.

But then, in all three stories, something unexpected happens—and it will happen in your story, too. God pursues them with care and gentleness. For Adam and Eve, God made tunics of skin and clothed them (Gen. 3:21). He covered their nakedness so they would be ashamed no more.

“Even in that ancient story,” DeGroat writes, “God compassionately attended to Adam and Eve, to anxious hearts and shame-riddled bodies.” And God, the shame-lifter, does the same thing for us.

Because of Christ’s work on the cross, we can, like Rollins, reframe our shame with God’s help. Rollins learned to say “I am not bad. I just have a problem with alcohol.” Insert your own situation here: “I am not messed up, but I did make a mess of this.” Or “I am not irresponsible. I just made a mistake.”

No matter our source of shame or how big or small our shame is, we belong to God, body and soul. We always have a rescuer to lift us out of miry pits, even those we have created ourselves. As the psalmist says in Psalm 34:5, “Those who look to him for help will be radiant with joy; no shadow of shame will darken their faces.” No shadow of shame, now and forevermore.