what do you do with shame?

I'd just finished my talk at a retreat and as I ended a wave of shame seemed to reach from my gut up through my chest and into my face, pulling my eyes down and away from anyone's gaze. I made a beeline for the exit, avoiding eye contact.

I thought it best for my activated nervous system to take a walk. As I walked, the voices emerged: "Who do you think you are? They're all laughing at you." I had a sense that most, if not all, had returned to their rooms at the retreat center and were packing their bags, disappointed that their time had been wasted.

I returned and began journaling. As I often do, I was identifying parts of me that were in conflict. An inner bully chastising me. A little boy who'd shrunk himself into a ball, but who couldn't quite disappear like he wanted. A numbing part of me that wanted to pour some gin and veg out on Netflix. A fawning part of me that wanted to ignore my shame by making small talk with the retreatants, pulling for a kind word from them.

I often say that we live between two dances - the dance of intimacy and the dance of hiddenness. And when I'm in the dance of intimacy, I feel so alive, so loved by God and free to live vulnerably in the world that even if I flop or fail, it's ok. After all, I'm loved. But when I'm in the dance of hiddenness, even the sound of God "walking through the garden in the cool of the day" doesn't feel safe, nothing feels safe. I want to shrink, hide, and even disappear.

I've noticed that I'm more prone to social anxiety and shame since emerging from the days of Covid shut-down. I'm back on-the-road, so to speak, doing in-person speaking engagements again. And so, with journal in hand, I'm engaging inner work that I duped myself into thinking would be done by the time I crossed the threshold of 50.

A brilliant neuropsychologist named Allan Schore notes that we need to metabolize shame. But we've developed sophisticated psychic defenses to wall it off, instead. In our dances of hiddenness, we may fight it off, flee from it, freeze in its face, or fawn to fit in. To metabolize shame is to face and embrace it, to bear witness, to experience God's kind gaze amidst it. By opening my journal and honoring the voices in conflict within me, I'm at least attempting to do that. But Lord knows, my body knows a thousand other ways to escape its grip.

In her extraordinary work on shame, psychologist Patricia DeYoung writes, "We don't have much patience with vulnerability, others' or our own, and our capacity to metabolize the shame of our mistakes and failures is fragile." Yes, fragile is a word that fits quite often. But the invitation is to join the dance of intimacy, to dare to open ourselves to an inner conversation in those moments when we'd rather just run, to dare to let a friend know exactly what it feels like, to dare to lift our heads and receive the gaze of the One who "makes his face to shine upon you."