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The Cure for Shame

This is an excellent article on a topic from which we too often shy away.


The Cure for Shame

Article by Sammy Rhodes September 2014
"Shame. Boatloads of shame. Day after day. More of the same. Blame. Please lift it off. Please take it off. Please make it stop." Those words are not just the lyrics to a famous Avett Brothers' song, they are also words under which a lot of us live. To live in this world is to experience shame. Boatloads of shame.

Shame is a word that's hard to describe. We've all experienced it on some level. It's the feeling you get when you suddenly realize you're underdressed for a party. When you show up late to a meeting thinking you're right on time. Or when your card gets declined buying coffee at Starbucks for your financial advisor. That last one hits a little too close to home.

Then there's the shame that never gets spoken. The kind that involves things done in secret. Compulsive behaviors. Hidden struggles. The shame of being abused, of being taken advantage of in a way that takes a little of the light out of our humanity, and our hope.

Maybe the best way to describe shame is to think of it as the residue of sin, both our own, and that of others against us. One author describes shame as "the subjective experience of our objective guilt." Both the guilt of what we've done (and left undone), as well as the guilt of what others have done (or left undone) to us. In this way, shame is like an onion. There are so many layers that when you begin to cut it open, it's hard to tell where some begin and others end.

Shame is what Peter felt when he made eye contact with Jesus just after denying that he even knew him. It's what David felt as he realized his own blindness before Nathan. It's what Isaiah felt in the temple when he felt overwhelmingly unclean. We're no strangers to it either.

R.A. Dickey is one of the best knuckleball pitchers to play the game in the last 20 years. After playing college baseball at Tennessee, he went on to play in the majors, most recently with the Mets and Blue Jays. He won the Cy Young Award in 2012.

That year he also began opening up about being sexually abused when he was younger. He had locked away what happened for years, tried to carry the weight of what had happened to him alone, hiding it from everyone, especially those close to him. The heaviness of the shame he was carrying almost crushed him. One day he decided he couldn't take it anymore, so he swam out into the ocean to drown himself. As he was drowning a boat happened to come up on him, and rescued him. That's when he began sharing about the abuse.

He opened up about it in an interview with NPR: "It had been locked away for 23 years and had wreaked havoc on my life and the relationships I had in my life, not only with my friends, who really weren't even my friends. I didn't trust anybody...my wife didn't know the darkest things about me. I had kind of conned her into marrying me almost. It's a tough admission. I loved her dearly so I projected who I wanted to be, but I would never let her inside, because I always feared if someone knew the real me, they would run the other way."

Dickey is describing the powerful effect that shame can have on our lives. We feel that even those closest to us couldn't possibly handle the truth of what we've done, and what's been done to us. The two are so closely connected that maybe it's better to say what we've done with what's been done to us. The ways we've been sinned against always affects the ways we sin. Shame thrives on both.

Read the rest of this excellent article HERE

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