PicoBlog

In 2019, that waning year of the pre-pandemic era, I was asked to speak at a conference for writers where Fr. Stephen Freeman was also presenting. 

I forget the topic of my presentation, but Fr. Stephen talked about shame. 

That was the first occasion I heard him explore the connection between shame and faith as well as the first time I became aware of his forthcoming book on the topic. I recall being deeply affected by the talk—crying and laughing my way through most of it, along with the rest of the room. 

On the final morning of the conference, feeling relaxed now that both our talks were behind us, we got a chance to catch up. The topic of shame being “in the air” since his talk, I shared how paralyzingly vulnerable writing for public audiences can be. Although I’ve been able to work through this struggle somewhat in the years since, at the time, nearly every blog post or speaking engagement would leave me with a crippling sense of exposure, sadness, and frantic inadequacy. 

“I call those shame storms,” he told me. “I get them too.”      

My shoulders loosened. Maybe my hidden turmoil was not, as I’d long assumed, the result of some inner defect on my part. Maybe I wasn’t just being oversensitive or thin-skinned. Maybe other writers, even writers I very much looked up to, sometimes struggled under the same shame I did.   

Nearly four years—and a pandemic, and the breakdown of my marriage, and a thousand more encounters with shame both great and small—would pass until the book Fr. Stephen had mentioned in 2019 made its way into the world, in March of this year.

I bought Face to Face: Knowing God beyond Our Shamethe first day it was available on ebook, and savored it throughout much of the Lenten season. 

“Shame is experienced as a break in communion,” he writes. 

“[O]ur bodies and minds undergo a disruption in the presence of shame. When communion is interrupted, anything is possible. We have no assurance of how things around us will unfold, nor of our own selves and our ability to cope. We experience all this in a moment, not as a train of rational thought but as a response to our brokenness.”

As in the conversation with him I mentioned earlier, in Face to Face, Fr. Stephen counters the destructiveness of toxic shame by offering his readers not merely content, but also a sense of connection—the same connection shame so often cuts us off from.

Despite the ample research and thought he put into this work, he writes not from the heights but rather the trenches of his own battle with shame:

“[A]lthough I know something of textbook definition for shame, I had no idea how pervasive it was in my own life, in the lives of others, or in the culture at large. About ten years ago, a range of personal issues came together for me that forced me to see what I had not seen before and to understand the nature of the invisible forces in my life and personality.”

And so, even before we get very far into the book, we are supported in the knowledge we are not alone. This, I think, is crucial. 

When I was completing the manuscript for my first book, which also tackled a seemingly “depressing” topic, a member of my publisher’s marketing team advised me to lead with hope.

“Your readers will follow you anywhere in the book, even through the darkest parts, if they know there’s a reason to hope in the end,” she said.

Reading Face to Face, it strikes me that readers will also follow an author anywhere if they know they won’t have to face the hard parts alone. That the author won’t just leave them shipwrecked with their own demons. This is especially true in a book about shame, because by its very nature shame both produces and thrives in isolation and alienation. 

Rather than regarding shame as a categorically negative phenomenon, Fr. Stephen distinguishes between healthy and toxic forms of it. 

Healthy shame, borrowing from researcher Gershen Kaufman, is essentially a break in communion with others (Kindle reading loc. 47). 

The archetypal examples of this are Adam and Eve. They didn’t experience shame—that is, they weren’t aware of their nakedness—until after they transgressed. In doing so, they broke fellowship with the God who had once walked beside them in the Garden, and they experienced this fracturing of relationship in the form of shame, which prompted them to cover their nakedness with leaves.  

However unpleasant and grievous, healthy shame serves an important purpose.

Just as physical pain indicates we have touched something sharp or dangerous, shame is the inner pain that tells us a boundary has been breached, a relationship has been fractured or at least put at risk (cf Kindle p. 9).

This isn’t a bad thing, as Fr. Stephen posits, “or even sinful. Rather, it is an emotional signal that accompanies severed communion” (47).

Healthy shame is what tells us there is work to be done in order to repair a connection. We may need to apologize, make some kind of amends, or just endure a twinge of embarrassment now and again to remind us we’re a mortal human whose jokes don’t always land.  

Or we may need to offer someone else the chance to restore communion. God, after all, provided humanity garments of skin to alleviate their shame, and ultimately a way to return to Him through Christ (indeed the whole of salvific history could be read as God’s sustained effort to repair the communion that sin fractured). 

Shame becomes toxic, among other things, through abuse or trauma, “both of which magnify the normative experience of healthy shame into a relentless identity that begins to smother our ability to manage shameful feelings” (Kindle p. 9).

Abuse and trauma can inhibit the formation of healthy or reasonable boundaries. We may have little sense where we—our perceptions, needs, preferences, capacity, dignity—end and others begin.

Without a natural, organic sense of boundaries or differentiation from others, we instinctively erect walls that are either artificially high or inflexible (an effort to shield ourselves from any possibility of pain or oppression) or nonexistent (also an effort to avoid pain, by involuntarily appeasing or ‘fawning’ to others). 

In cases of trauma, writes Fr. Stephen, victims “can take up the positions of their tormenters, blaming themselves for what took place, internalizing the pain in such a manner that lack of safety becomes the default position of the inner life” (Kindle p. 32).

While recovering from healthy shame may involve repairing communion and moving back into connection with others (or God, or oneself), healing from toxic shame may look like the opposite. 

We may need to reinstate a healthy, circumscribed sense of self and our boundaries. This is how we begin to disentangle ourselves from shame we carry that isn’t our responsibility to bear or fix.  

“Adults recovering from [toxic shame] often need to undertake the difficult task of creating boundaries. They need to find the self that lies beneath the various shame-induced strategies and begin to affirm and nurture it in the inherent dignity given to each of us by God. At the same time, they need to establish inner and outer rules that govern what and who will be allowed to enter into relationship or conversation with them. Often, establishing boundaries involves the painful work of dismantling the habits of a lifetime. It cannot be done alone—we need assistance.” (Kindle p. 32)

Reading this book, I think, is a start for many people who may need to undertake this kind of work for the health of their souls and their relationships to others, including God and the Church.

My favorite portion of the book was the penultimate chapter, “The Shame of Gratitude,” particularly its treatment of the hymn of thanks offered by the three holy youths in the furnace. 

“It is as though, standing in the flames, they are directing all of creation like an orchestra, calling forth the sound of its praise to the God of all. This eucharistic offering is the priestly offering, the role intended for Adam in paradise. As the youths take up this role, the fiery furnace is transformed. On the one hand, its flames can be seen as the flames of hell, the terrible image of human suffering. However, in this priestly context, the furnace becomes Eden, the center of the world and the place from which all praise arises.” (Kindle p. 131)

The Three Holy Youths respond in thanksgiving before they are rescued from their hell, and in doing so, their hell is transformed. So it is with shame, even (in my experience) toxic forms of it. 

To be clear: the task of giving thanks from within the shame of trauma and its body-soul imprint isn’t something I would ever “push” on someone else. Nor do I condone giving thanks for trauma experiences or the often evil acts that cause them.  

Still, in the wake of trauma, we have a choice of how we wish to live. One option is to give thanks for whatever good we can see, to seek and find Christ even while surrounded by the flames of our darkest experiences. 

This act must always remain a choice for each person, and it is delicate to do in a way that is life-giving rather than driven by the impulses of toxic shame. 

Still, it is a choice, a cross that we can voluntarily accept as God gives us strength. 

To give thanks for God’s presence with me in the flames before they have abated, before I understand it all, or have overcome the shame of my wounds, can allow “the victory of the Cross becomes manifest within the depths of our souls” (Kindle p. 134).  

Speaking of thanksgiving, I’m thankful for this book, the ways that it has fed my soul and (I pray) others. I’m grateful for Fr. Stephen and the careful, life-giving words he’s written on a tennuous, but widely resonant, topic. And I’m grateful for the ways our paths crossed back in 2019, when I needed encouragement to keep writing in the face of shame’s torments.

It’s part of why I’m still here, writing, showing up the best I can.

“I don’t think the shame ever fully goes away,” I remember Fr. Stephen saying that morning. “I don’t try to resist or fight against it anymore. In those moments, I try to pray: ‘O God, comfort me.'”

Amen.

NOTE: In this Substack, “In the Books” posts explore specific books that have given me something to think about when it comes to trauma, healing, theology, and/or faith practices after trauma.

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