Let's Talk About Shame

summerleighguidanc
Sep 10, 2024
10 min read

Yeshua despises shame! Hebrews 12: 1-2

I have been studying suicide, it’s causes and preventions since I lost my husband to suicide in January of 2015. I have come to the over-simplified conclusion that a root cause of suicide is guilt and shame. These two topics sound very similar, but they are very different.

-Guilt says, "I have done something bad"

-Shame says, "I am bad."

Throughout my studying, I have come across a woman who has researched shame for over 20 years now with experiments and interviews, and she gets into the depth of the issues around shame. Her name is Brené Brown. Brené said that if you put shame into a petri dish there are three things that can make it grow exponentially…

S E C R E C Y , S I L E N C E & J U D G E M E N T !

Let’s think about that for a minute. What does the Word have to say about this?

Hebrews 12:1-2 says that Yeshua despises shame.

Luke 12:2-3 says, "And nothing that men hide in a cover up is concealed which will not be revealed, and nothing held nistar (hidden) which will not be laid bare. So then, what things you said in the choshech (darkness), will be heard in the ohr (Light); and what you whispered in the ear bchadrei chadarim (in a most secret place) will be shouted from the roof tops. (Jewish Orthodox Bible)
Matthew 7:1-3 says “Judge not lest you be judged. For with what gezar din (verdict) you judge, you will be judged, and with what measure you measure, it will be measured to you. And why do you see the speck in the eye of your Ach b’Moshiach (brothers in Messiah) eye, but you do not consider the beam in your own eye.” (Jewish Orthodox Bible)

When I was growing up, my family was prominent in Little Rock. So, I could not go anywhere without someone knowing my parents or my brother. Which was super annoying because I could not get away with anything. However, the worst part about it was that I felt like I could not talk to anyone about anything I was going through at home or otherwise because we had a “reputation to uphold”. I felt like I was not allowed to share things I was struggling with, under the guise that we could not “air our dirty laundry in public”.

Things got really bad my senior year of high school when I lost my grandfather, who I pretty much lived with. Then when he passed away, I physically moved into his house to take care of my grandmother who I was extremely close to, and then she forgot who I was. I was in so much pain and was afraid to talk to anyone about it so I self-medicated. I attempted suicide multiple times in different ways and thankfully none of them worked.

Not talking to someone about my pain, my shame, my life… almost took me out.

Please note: It is very important to be careful about who we talk to about our stuff because everyone has their own filters that they see through, and it can do more harm than good to talk to someone just to have them say the wrong thing back. They may mean well, but adults, leaders, even your friends have their own stuff going on and those "things" can seep through when “trying to help you.”

It is best to talk to a licensed professional therapist!

Therapy is not just talking to someone about your problems and having them tell you, you are right and everyone else is wrong. That is not therapy at all! Therapy is getting to the root cause, processing it, dealing with it, and overcoming it! You need to speak to someone who is unbiased, non-judgmental, with no agenda or opinion about your situation. A well-educated mental health professional! And let me tell you, everything I was taught about therapy growing up is 100% inaccurate! There is a major misguided stigma against therapy, because the enemy does not want you to deal with anything. He wants you to shove it down deep so that it affects you for the rest of your life! He does not want you to heal. He wants you to live in shame, forever.

The Word says that Yeshua is our Great Counselor, whom we are to come to with 100% transparency and openness. He is the one who started the field of counseling & therapy. However, just because He is our Great Counselor does not mean we do not need one in human form. He is also our Great Physician, does that mean we never need a doctor? I believe in supernatural healing, but I also believe He gave us doctors for a reason.

As much as non-licensed professionals (a.k.a "Christians") try to help, they can sometimes use the Word to shame you into “feeling better”. For example, here are some things I have been told by spiritual leadership... “Well, you should be joyful, because you have the Holy Spirit.” Or “We are not always going to feel good, sometimes we have to suffer for Christ.” While those may be Biblically true statements, they should never be used to minimize your suffering at the hands of others.

Take the word “sin” for instance. It is overly used to shame people into “being good”. However, Yeshua came in and demolished that argument when He said it is a matter of the heart! So, let’s try a little experiment. For just a minute, let’s remove the word “sin” from our vocabulary and replace it with “is this healthy for me or is this unhealthy for me? Will this cause me or someone I love harm?” Bear with me. Just trust me for a minute!

Let’s try this with the 10 commandments just for fun!

No other gods before Me. – So, in other words, put Elohim (plural, Hebrew name for the one true God) first! Ok, so let’s say you put Him first each day. Seek His face, talk to Him, spend time with Him, read His word, worship… how does that affect your day? Does it improve it? It most certainly improves your relationship with your Heavenly Father, right! Let’s say you don’t put Him first, you get bogged down with the demands of the day and the more and more that is piled on you, emotionally or otherwise, stresses you out and overwhelms you. Is that healthy? Or is that harmful to your mental health?
No idols. – What are some idols we may have? Money, power, routine, working out, power, people, our reputation? When these are put above our relationship with our Heavenly Father, what happens? Is that healthy or harmful?

Honor your father and mother. – When you do, you foster and protect your relationship with them, when you do not it causes strife. Now, I am aware that some parents are the ones causing the strife in the relationship which is why it is imperative to have a therapist to process through it all! However, with healthy boundaries, you can still honor them with the way you treat them in front of their faces, and behind their backs.
What about killing? What happens when you just straight up murder someone? The people around you will be frightened of you, they will not be able to trust you and it builds up a wall between you and those you love and hurts your relationships.
What about cheating? This causes people not to trust you and it builds up a wall between you and those you love and hurts your relationships.
What about stealing? This causes people not to trust you and it builds up a wall between you and those you love and hurts your relationships.
What about lying? This causes people not to trust you and it builds up a wall between you and those you love and hurts your relationships.
What about coveting? This causes jealousy to grow in your heart and it builds up a wall between you and those you love and hurts your relationships.

What do all these have in common? Relationship!!! The most important part of our journey on this planet is building and protecting our relationships. The relationship with our Heavenly Father and with the one’s He has placed in our paths that hold a special position in our lives. This is not everyone you meet or see! Boundaries are key… again, why a therapist is needed. I mean, I cannot harp on that enough!

What about the 4th commandment?

Remember the sabbath, keep it holy and DO NOT WORK!

They go into great detail on this one. Don’t make your kids work, don’t make your servants work, don’t make your guests work, don’t even make your animals work! They were serious about this, and I have learned the beauty and importance of this commandment in my own personal life! What if we do not rest? What if we just work 24/7 and never take the time to take care of ourselves, or do fun things? The result to that lifestyle is called burn out, and the we are no good anyone or ourselves. Our mental health and physical health will slowly (or all at once) plumet! Society, for as long as I can remember, spreads the devil's lies that we need to work, work, work, strive, strive, strive, earn, earn, earn or we are looked at as what…lazy. That is a LIE! There is BALANCE to EVERYTHING!!!!

Your productivity does not determine your worth!

What about sex before marriage? Is it healthy for you? How is it unhealthy for you? Well, let’s just assume the two partners are physically healthy for starters. We know sex creates a blood covenant between the two partners. There is a soul tie that takes place when the two become one. When you are no longer together that soul tie does not just go away. Not only that, but sex too soon in a relationship can create a trauma bond and create confusion in a relationship. 1 Corinthians 14:33 says that, God is not a god of confusion, but of peace.

What about eating pork? Is it a "sin"? No, but it is very unhealthy. Pigs do not have a filtering system, so we eat what they eat which is disgusting. Therefore, it's not "wrong" morally, it is literally unhealthy!

These are just to name a few. There are many reasons why the Word says for us to "not do things", because it could cause us harm! Not to keep us from having fun.

The point in all of this is to point out how all these things, regardless of their “morality”, can cause us pain. It is more than just dos and don’ts. It is about relationships and our health! Will this cause me pain later on? The enemy wants to keep you in pain! He wants you to stay silent, keep all the bad things that have happened to you a secret, and to tear yourself down for even being bothered by them. To make you mad at yourself for even being triggered by something in the first place.

See, if we talk about them, we can cure our shame… with empathy! That is probably one of the most important aspects of relationship… empathy. Just being there! Listening. Not giving advice, but hearing someone, seeing someone. Being heard! Being seen! Not criticizing or trying to fix!

“It is not the critic who counts, it is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better, how he falls and stumbles. The credit goes to the man in the arena, whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat. But when he’s in the arena, at best he wins, at worst he loses, but when he fails, he does so daring greatly!”

Theodore Roosevelt

Sometimes, even meaning well, with a good-intended heart, our critics can be our parents, our teachers, our leadership, or friends. We must counter act these critics' voices with open communication with our Heavenly Father. Meaning to listen and be 100% honest and transparent with Him. Seeking Him every single moment of every single day, because throughout the day we have dagger after dagger after dagger shot at our souls. We are told to “overlook them”, “get over them”, “don’t let them get to you”, but that’s just because they don’t know how to help us process them, deal with them, and overcome them.

There is a story in the book Sacred Romance by John Eldridge and Brent Curtis that stuck out to me, and I still remember to this day. They called these daggers shot at our souls “arrows”. Brent tells of a time when an arrow had entered his soul.

“One of the arrows I remember came out of a fall morning when the green choruses of summer were no longer there to comfort me. I happened upon my mother standing by the stove one morning before school began, stirring oatmeal. She had been crying and the tears still welled up in her eyes. They were not the kind of tears shed in anger or even pain due to a momentary spat with my father. They were not due to some recently delivered message about illness or death in the family.They were the tears of a frightened girl in her mid 20s who could find no meeting place between the life she found herself living as wife and mother and the needs of her own wounded heart that never felt a connection with mother and father so necessary to living with courage and hope. I couldn’t have put that into words back then, but I felt the fear as a palpable enemy that needed to be quickly defeated. If there was an adversary of the heart that even adults did not know how to handle my world was much less safe than I had thought. I moved quickly to help my mother vanquish this foe in the best way I knew how. I think I put my hand on her arm and said something like, “it’ll be alright”. I remember feeling a separation within myself and from her even then that kept me from addressing her as Mom or Mommy. I didn’t understand that the arrows were already inside both of us. She looked angry that anyone could believe anything so foolish and said something like, “It’s not alright. You kid’s just don’t know what it’s like.” My stepfather was not there to show me how to fend off arrows such as these and so they entered into me as I later came to know, lodged into a deep place.”

This may seem like such a small encounter to us, one that would not stick with us forever. However, this was something that struck him so deeply that it stayed with him even into adulthood, so much so that he wrote about it in a book. See, that is our learned behavior trying to squash someone else’s experience to help “fix it.”

No one has any right to tell someone else what is and is not trauma!

Brené Brown says, “we dismiss others pain focusing on our own peril.” We compare one arrow to another. If it is not large enough in our opinion, we dismiss it. We feel that it should not be fret over and should just be let go. Most often our pain can come forth in anger. Then we hold onto that anger for as long as we can because once we let it go the pain sets in. It is easier to be angry than to feel pain! After all, anger is just a side effect of the pain, shame, or trauma.

Speaking of trauma…