But what they found to be most helpful—and had them coming back month after month to the coffee shop—was that in admitting their embarrassment, they didn't feel nearly as alone, and many reported over the course of their year that the pressure to perform, and the fear of the shame of not performing well, gradually receded. The connection they experienced with Jordan and each other actually enabled them to feel more at ease as students. Eventually, word got out to administrators about what was happening in these gatherings. The administrators invited Jordan to talk more openly about the conversations, which ultimately led to a restructuring of the curriculum, including a reduction in the number of AP classes offered at the school. This is a rare story in education, but it began with one teacher courageously creating the opportunity for institutional shame to be exposed in the voices of those for whom the school ostensibly existed.
In this example we see how shame's healing encompasses the counterintuitive act of turning toward what we are most terrified of. We fear the shame that we will feel when we speak of that very shame. In some circumstances 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. And in Jordan's story, not just an individual but an entire institutional system came to breathe fresh air on its way to a more integrated state and liberation from shame.
Pilgrims on a Journey
Although it is tempting to hope that we can eliminate shame from our relational diet, it is futile to wish for this. Our hope is, rather, in changing our response to it as we journey together toward God's kingdom, which is now but not yet in its fullness. We would like to have it excised surgically from our brains, but instead find ourselves having to grow in our confidence in combating it. To do so requires that we strengthen our capacity to turn our attention to something other than shame. As such we do not execute shame quickly via some behavioral guillotine, but rather we starve it over time, not by avoiding it but by attuning to it as a component of a larger story. A story whose beginning is as much about how we were made as it is about why we were made. Part of that how is the subject of chapter two, a subject that will add a helpful layer of understanding in our pursuit of making sense not only of shame but of the story that the gospel tells in order to realize its healing.
Taken from The Soul of Shame by Curt Thompson. Copyright (c) 2015 by Curt Thompson. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA. www.ivpress.com.
https://www.ivpress.com/cgi-ivpress/book.pl/code=4433
[1]Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind (New York: Guilford, 1999), pp. 117-20.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In