TOKENS PODCAST: S3E14
An interview with Curt Thompson, private practice psychiatrist, founder of Being Known LLC, and author of The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves. Lee and Curt discuss the how the mechanism of shame works as an impediment to joy and connection, and how shared vulnerability in the context of community can act as a counteragent which strikes at the root of shame.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Psychiatrist, speaker and author Curt Thompson connects our intrinsic desire to be known with the need to tell truer stories about ourselves — showing us how to form deep relationships, discover meaning and live integrated, creative lives.
Psychiatrist Curt Thompson, MD brings together a dialect of interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) and a Christian anthropology to educate and encourage others as they seek to fulfill their intrinsic desire to feel known, valued and connected. Curt understands that deep, authentic relationships are essential to experiencing a healthier, more purposeful life — but the only way to realize this is to begin telling our stories more truly.
His unique insights about how the brain affects and processes relationships help people discover a fresh perspective and practical applications to foster healthy and vibrant lives, allowing them to get unstuck and move toward the next beautiful thing they’re being called to make.
Through his workshops, speaking engagements, books, organizational consulting, private clinical practice and other platforms, Thompson helps people process their longings, grief, identity, purpose, perspective of God and perspective of humanity, inviting them to engage more authentically with their own stories and their relationships. Only then can they can feel truly known and connected and live into the meaningful reality they desire to create.
Curt’s relatable approach while unraveling complex topics (like how the brain affects and processes relationships) — combined with his ability to offer authentic, practical application — brings a fresh perspective that uniquely resonates with any audience, leaving them feeling understood, inspired and encouraged to move toward the next beautiful thing they’re being called to make. Curt gives keynote addresses presents at retreats, workshops and in breakout sessions as well as is a frequent podcast guest and organizational leadership consultant.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Curt: It's true that we were made for joy, it's true that we were made to create, and the creativity means bringing things together. We would see that shame actually violates that process.
Lee: That's Dr. Curt Thompson, a psychiatrist and the author of The Soul of Shame.
Curt: Most of how shame acts for us is not just because of some major cataclysmic event. Most of it occurs as the death of a thousand cuts, small looks, glances, tones of voices.
Lee: Today, an in-depth conversation in which Curt and I discuss the inner workings of shame: what it is, what it does to us, and what it takes to combat it in the context of community.
Curt: The shame in our head is like a locomotive.
And to stop that locomotive, I need a bigger locomotive. And that is where community comes in.
Lee: Learning to deal with shame was one of the great growing up and maturation processes in my own life. So I'm especially pleased to get to share this episode with you. It's an hour with a world-class psychiatrist. I challenge you: do not just listen to this one; maybe actually take some notes. This is a useful, highly practical, conversation. So get ready: it's coming right up.
Part 1
Lee: Kurt Thompson M.D. is a psychiatrist in private practice in Falls Church, Virginia, the founder of Being Known LLC, an organization that develops resources to educate and train leaders about the intersection between interpersonal neurobiology, Christian spiritual formation and vocational creativity. He's the author of two books, first Anatomy of the Soul.
And second, the book we're discussing today, The Soul of Shame. Welcome Curt.
Curt: Lee man. I'm thrilled to be here. Um, I could, I could not be more serious. I'm thrilled to be here.
Lee: Well, thank you. I feel so privileged to get to have this conversation with you because this topic around shame has been one that I have been ruminating on seriously for at least 25 years. And reading the soul of shame was a sort of. It simultaneously gave me a summary, a helpful summary of a lot of things I've learned through 25 years of thinking about this and experiencing various kinds of therapy and groups and so forth. But then it gave me new capacity to see even further, even with more breadth and more depth what's going on, I think with shame. So I'm really thankful for the book and to everybody listening as it's a wonderful book.
So thank you so much.
Curt: Oh, you're very welcome. I’m glad to be able to talk about it.
Lee: I wonder if it might be good if we start first, just with your definition of shame.
Curt: You know, Lee. I typically say I don't really have a definition as much as I have a description of it. Because I think we say that first and foremost before it is a thing that we can define it is an event that actually takes place in our bodies and between us, interpersonally.
And so the interpersonal and the intra personal, those kinds of things that are happening neurophysiologically within us are all part of what shame takes up. If we were to talk about that, we could go into detail about that. We think about shame being a disintegrating neuro affective event by neuro affective
What do we mean by that? We mean by the emotional state that we all kind of know, like nobody has it in some respects, we don't have to define it. Like we all know, like what it means to feel ashamed. I mean, I felt it like, you know, 30 minutes ago, like I, I bring it with me everywhere I go. It's like my underwear, I just wear it all the time. At the same time, if we were to be more explicit and pay attention, we would say that from a brain standpoint and from a mind functional standpoint, one of the things that jumps out at us right away is that when we're in the middle of one of those moments, we experience disintegration. And by that, I mean you know, one of the shorthand ways that we talk about what the mind does, that it senses images, feels things.
And we behave with our body. Those five things. We sense, image, feel, think, and behave. There's a quick little acronym. We sift via our mind. We sense, image, feel, think, and behave. And with all those five things, we bring together everything from this podcast to Tchaikovsky, to Van Gogh, to the interstate highway system, to all the things.
That's an integrated system. When we're flourishing, all those things are coming together. Like a beautiful symphony.
Lee: Huh.
Curt: And you need a conductor that helps bring that symphony all those different orchestral pieces together. They're practicing really well. They're differentiated, all those different pieces. But then they also have to be linked. They have to come together and they have to listen to the other parts of the symphony as well. We need a conductor to do that. For the human being, the prefrontal cortex, the part that makes us most uniquely human, serves that role as the conductor. So when I'm sensing, imaging, feeling, and thinking things in a holistic way, in an integrated way, in a flourishing way, my conductor is doing a good job of bringing all those well-differentiated parts, those functional parts together.
Interestingly enough, that conductor doesn't really get to do that job very well on its own. It needs to go to conductor school. My brain, my prefrontal cortex, needs the development of other people's brains. I need that kind of secure attachment that develops with my parenting, to the parenting that I received from my teachers, from my coaches, all those folks that are helping train my brain in how to conduct my brain. Shame is an event that takes place that is like bringing a four by four into the orchestra hall and running it all over the orchestra. It disintegrates all of those different things. Just think about it for a moment. If you've ever been in a classroom where you've been, like, shamed by a teacher, if you've been shamed by friends. Anymore, you're shamed on Facebook.
I mean, this is pretty routine. If you were to just pause and imagine, how easy is it for you to think clearly? How easy is it for you to marshal your capacity to change what you feel? If it feels bad, you can't do that very easily. How easy is it for you to be creative? How easy is it for you to move, physically, your body?
It doesn't do that very well. And so in this sense, it's disintegrating, it makes it really difficult for all of the pieces of the orchestra to be together as a unified whole. It goes on then to separate and cause a great deal of isolation and hiding. The very feeling of shame, when I sense it, I don't want to tell you I'm ashamed because the very act of my looking at your sight line evokes that same kind of emotional nausea that comes up.
So I don't want to look at you. I turn away. I hide from you. We hide from each other and we become immobilized. It induces stasis.
I can't move. I can't move in my cognition very well. I can't move literally in my body. You've seen a dog become ashamed. When a dog becomes ashamed, it puts its head down and tail between it’s, it just stops. And then we are loaded on with this cognitive rendition of condemnation. So we come up with some version of I'm not enough of this. I'm not enough of that. I should have done this. I should have done that. This cognitive element of this. And one of the examples I give to folks that helps us see why this is so important for us to recognize these different parts is that if I'm the guy who grows up in a house, taking care of a patient for whom this was their experience, I'm the guy who grows up in the house, who I bring as a ten-year-old.
I bring my 92% math score. I don't do very well in math, but I got a 92% because I've been studying really hard. I bring this to my dad. My dad says, where's the other 8%?
Lee: Hmm.
Curt: This is not child abuse. This is not someone throwing somebody across the kitchen, which some of our listeners have experienced. But if I'm the guy who lives in that house, and this is the kind of interaction that I'm having with my father day in and day out in these very, very minor, micro moment, ways, I'm going to have that feeling that there's something wrong with me for only having a 92%. I'm going to be in to tell a story by the time I'm 18. If you were to ask me, why are you ashamed? I would say I'm ashamed because I'm not a good enough son because I don't work hard enough at life. I haven't done well enough. I would say that's why I'm ashamed because of something that I've done. So at the end of the day, condemnation leads me to develop a narrative about myself that is factually inaccurate because the reality is that my shame in that moment when I was 10 or probably when I was eight or six didn't emerge because I wasn't working hard enough.
In fact, I was working, like, as hard as I could, the shame actually emerged because of something that happened to me.
And the story that I tell then becomes this kind of guiding force if you will. This narrative force in my life where, by which I start to understand and interpret and perceive all kinds of circumstances in my relationships, when I feel that shame, I assume automatically there's something that I didn't do well enough.
And so it becomes easy for me then to submit myself to other places, other coaches, and schools, and institutions, and so forth, where I will submit myself to people who are, like, never happy enough with me. And I'm still gonna think that it's my fault. And so we go from this neurophysiologic event to an entire narrative that I developed and a way of life with relationships that then gets extended into all kinds of things.
Lastly, which I will say is that we don't talk much about this notion, but shame at its heart is an act of violence. If it's true that we were made for joy, it's true that we were made to create, and the creativity means bringing things together. We would see that shame actually violates that process. You have a 10 year old boy who is creating, he has joy. He's actually wanting to create a new bond with his dad when he comes with his test score, he's coming, anticipating joy, and shame shears it off in an act of violence.
And we would say, well, come on, Curt. That's, that's not violent. That's just a Dad trying to like, or just get on. And in fact, if we were to ask the father, why are you so hard on him? And the dad was like, no, I'm just, I'm just trying to like, help him be better. But so much of what we do is being driven by the things about our lives that we're not thinking about, but it doesn't make them any less true. And so I would say, look, if you were to walk by a door frame and bump your elbow on it, and one day later you look down and you notice that there was just a little bruise there. You might not even remember how it happened, because it was so innocuous, so small.
And you would say, well that wasn't an act of violence. Nobody hits you. Nobody punched you. There was no firearms involved. If you were to take the microscope and look at the capillary beds underneath the skin, you would see nothing but carnage. As far as that small nickel sized piece of tissue on your elbows concerned. A serious act of violence has taken place even though for us, because we're humans, we're big. It's not that big of a deal. And this is how shame acts. Most of how shame acts for us is not just because of some major cataclysmic event. Most of it occurs as the death of a thousand cuts, small looks, glances, tones of voices that we live.
Lee: Yeah, yeah.
Curt: That's my definition.
Lee: That's quite a definition. But, so it's an event which leads to disintegration, leads to stasis, leads then to a cognitive process of judgment or condemnation. And that in turn leads us to a creation of a narrative that reinforces this kind of condemnation or not being enough.
Curt: Right.
Lee: Are those the four main elements you pointed us to there?
Curt: Yeah. And, and that then goes on to perpetrate violence.
Lee: Yeah.
Curt: We do it to ourselves and we do it to each other and we do it in micro-moment ways.
Lee: Yeah.
Curt: And we do it in large systematic ways.
Lee: Yeah. So central to the book you set forward a picture of human flourishing. And as you said, a moment ago, that shame cuts that off, but we talked to us a little bit more about the picture of human flourishing that should be natural growth or the natural process of being human?
Curt: I mean, you know, we as Christians, we have a particular anthropology that informs that. And so I don't think flourishing happens randomly, I think there's a certain way in which we can perceive a certain intention. What's the intention of God for us to flourish?
Was it just random? Like, gosh, there you are. I hope you flourish. I think my sense is that first of all, it involves intention. I do it on purpose. It doesn't just happen accidentally. And that intention requires a fair bit of work. Fair bit of effort.
We're going to do this. It's interesting, right? In the beginning, portions of the second chapter of Genesis, where this notion and God rested on the seventh day and observed the work that he had done. I hate, like, hard labor, but like, there's this effort, there's this intention, it's beautiful, this intention.
And we get to the end of the second chapter of Genesis. Again, whether we're a person of faith or not, it's a beautiful picture of here you have the man and his wife who were naked and unashamed. This sense that, A: to create beauty, to flourish in the world we. I don't think I have the corner on the market on this, but one way that I ought to describe is that A: we create beauty when first of all, we are differentiated. The man and the woman were differentiated. Like not so male and female is one way to differentiate. We have all kinds of other ways we differentiate with other people of other ethnicities, of other socioeconomic classes, of other political parties. We're differentiated.
We're different at different places. We hold. Which of course in and of itself can make it difficult. Cause I can in this world where we live now becomes very easy to equate a difference and shame operates in that narrative as well. If I'm different than there's something wrong with you or with me, or however, we're going to set that condemnation paradigm up. Different. They're naked. This sense of being vulnerable, this sense that if I'm going to make something beautiful, I'm going to come to you and ask you like, hey, I need you. You need me. My vulnerability requires your coverage of me. Human beings were the only animals in the world that have to put clothes on in order for us to survive.
Lee: Hmm.
Curt: You know, as I said, we put clothes on other animals, like dogs, like I don't get it. Right? Cause they didn't ask for this. They don't need it. Right? But like, but we put clothes on because we have to, because it's not a matter of like, I don't really know if I want to be vulnerable, like we are vulnerable.
Lee: Yeah, I, I liked that you talk about vulnerability as not just a moment, but it's the state of being human.
Curt: It is. The question is like, to what degree am I actually paying attention to that? And then how can I offer that in different grades with different relational situations in different, you know, events I'm in the middle of, I offer different levels of vulnerability in order to create, right?
I'm male, female, I'm naked. And shame is absent from the picture. So there they stand on the verge, right on the precipice of creation, of making new stuff, making babies, making culture, making all the things, all the things we're going to. Software, furniture, like that sweater you're wearing, beautiful color. All those things, but we're not just making things of beauty. We're also going to do things in such a way where we, in which we're going to make mistakes. We're going to hurt each other's feelings. And then comes yet the additional way of being vulnerable in the face of having been hurt, being vulnerable in the face of there having been a rupture.
I'm going to be vulnerable and say, I really screwed this up. Or I might come to you and say, when you said that it really hurt my feelings. Like that's a hard thing for me to do too, because like you might say, well, yeah, you deserved it.
Lee: Yeah.
Curt: And you know that the repair process there isn't going so well. But I think the point being that flourishing is not a mistake free environment. It's not a rupture free environment. It is an environment in which we are aware that we are vulnerable. Aware that we are differentiated from others and it is our differentiation that we can bring together to create the most beautiful thing.
When we look at Van Gogh, when we think of Tchaikovsky, when we think of all different things, there's so many different parts that come together. We create beauty in ways that we would otherwise never imagine. And when I'm wounded, when shame has me by the throat, it makes it really difficult for me to want to be vulnerable. And therefore I'm much less likely to want to be with people that are different from me. The more that I'm with people who are like me, the more easy it is for me to be vulnerable, to be able to say, because it's, because now I can talk with you about all those other people that are not like us. I can be vulnerable with you, but that's not really being vulnerable as much as that's just sharing my grievance with you. But to be able to do this in ways that bring me with those folks with whom I am greatly differentiated creates the opportunity for flourishing. And to know that, like, we can make mistakes. In fact, the mistakes that we make the detritus of our lives sometimes are the very places where the most amazing beauty emerges from.
Lee: And that's definitely true to my experience that it's out of those places of shame and vulnerability, that some amazing things can happen on the other side of those things. And another thing that just got spurred by what you said. I remember some years ago my wife and I have done, we've kind of treated marriage counseling as a sort of getting a regular checkup through the years.
And so we've done four or five, four or five seasons of that. And sometimes it wasn't so much checkup as, as much as we had things we really had to deal with, you know? But one of the, I remember one of those occasions where we were talking about parenting and the counselor said by this point she knew that I was a recovering perfectionist.
And she said something like, she said, look, you need to embrace the 85% rule. And I said, what's that? And she said, look, if you do it right with your kids, 85% of the time, that's really good enough. And she said, the 15% of the time you screw up allows one, you to teach your kids that they don't have to be perfect.
And two, it allows you to have a space to learn, to apologize to your own kids so that you can teach them in time to apologize themselves. And I just thought that was brilliant.
Curt: It's beautiful. It's absolutely beautiful. We talk about similar kinds of principles. I love that, that notion of 85 and 15%. And speaking of perfectionism, when when we talk about attachment, I'm introducing this notion of attachment into our conversation here, this idea that there is a particular way in which human beings, when they come into the world, as we'd like to say, I say a new baby comes into the world, looking for someone, looking for her.
Lee: Hmm.
Curt: And it never stops.
Like I'm going to be 86 years old, if I get that far, and I'm going to be looking for someone, looking for me.
Lee: Yeah.
Curt: That looking for someone is they're looking to attach, they're looking to connect. In fact, that little newborn and infant needs that external brain of their parent in order for them to have a sense of who they are.
So that little prefrontal cortex can develop. And there are different ways that we can attach either securely or insecurely. And to the point about the 85% rule, this notion of attachment is such that if for every 10 minutes a parent is with a child, let's just say for argument's sake, for every 10 minutes, a parent really only needs to be attuning to the child, paying attention to the child in a way that is really, really meaningful about four out of those ten minutes, about 40% of the time.
Lee: Hm.
Curt: Because, I mean, because that child is going to need to have a way to go on and do their own thing as well, whether they're just laying there on the floor, you know, playing with rattles or if they're, you know, a teenager right the whole nine yards. And that coincides with that, that 85% of, like, we don't have to be perfect. In fact, it is in our working to be good enough. And then with those moments where we're not good enough, they give us the opportunity to be even better for the very reasons that your therapist was describing. It gives us an opportunity to apologize to repair ruptures and gives our kids a very, like, this crucial experience that I need to know that I can try things and do things and make mistakes and screw up and life will be okay.
Lee: Yeah. And that relates to near the end of the book. You talk about how perhaps counter-intuitively a parent saying to a child, we only expect you to do your best might actually be highly problematic.
You know, I think for a lot of us, we think we're not being perfectionistic by saying we only speak to you to do your best, but as you note there, nobody can do their best all the time with everything. Right?
Curt: I know, I first heard this concept when I was in a freshman psychology class and my professor who, one of the most influential people in my, you know, early adult life made that comment. He said like, yeah. I mean, just imagine if all you were doing was your best in everything that you had to do. I'm there sitting, like, as an 18 year old thinking like I'm so screwed if this is what has to happen, right?
Cause like I'll never sleep. Again, just tell me to do my best at everything. Which implies that there is this benchmark I've done my best or I've acquired the A or whatever it is. That reminds me of the work of Carol Dweck, who you may be familiar with her work?
Lee: A bit, yes.
Curt: Psychologist, this notion of mindset that she writes about this beautiful idea that all kind of hinges on this one particular set of experiments that they did, that they replicated over and over and over and over again.
And then they extended it to all kinds of other different environments, but it begins with two groups of middle school students. One that would be considered to be the kind of gifted and talented, and the other would be considered to be the average to below average student. And they would give each of these cohorts, each of these groups the same set of problems to solve, and they could do them on their own or do them together. And they each had a proctor, you know, a teacher who would guide them in that effort. And everything about everything that they were doing was the same, except for one thing. The one variable was when the gifted and talented group would accomplish a task, solve the problem. The teacher would say, you've done really well. You must be really smart. Which of course they already know because they're in these classes, right? The teacher and the other group would say you've done really well, you must've worked really hard at that. And time after time after time, eventually when both groups approached moderately to difficult problems, the gifted and talented kids would start to wane in their ability to do it.
And the average students would start to outpace them. And if you think about it, the gifted and talented students are banking on knowing that they have solved the problem, because they need to know that they're smart. And the only reason that they know that they're smart is if they have successfully done the problem. And that connects them to their teacher.
This connects them to their teacher, if I'm smart, because I've done this well. With the other students, what connects me to the teacher is my awareness that I'm working hard. Like you're dang right, I'm working hard. Like, and I, I like somebody said like you're working or yes, I'm working hard. And when I have someone who can acknowledge, gosh, I'm just really impressed with how hard you're working.
I'm not addressing how well you've done, how well you haven't done. I'm addressing how hard you're working when they really are. All they know to do is just to work harder.
And the hard work produces ongoing gains in this problem solving set.
Lee: Yeah.
Curt: I think the Dweck is really pointing out that when we are connected to someone who's actually acknowledging the deep reality of what's taking place, I'm working really hard and that's a beautiful thing.
Shame has no place to come. It's got no material on which it can burn.
Lee: Yeah. I did read some of her work, I think, is her main book called Mindset?
Curt: Mindset. That's right.
Lee: Yeah. Yeah. I read in that book a number of years ago and it did change the way I started giving feedback to my students. And I started paying attention to that and I think it's very helpful. It makes me flashback and I've told a number of my friends this. I can see it's kind of my roots of my own perfectionism, developing very young.
And I've laughed. I've laughed about, you know, I made my first, A in fourth grade and I was so emotionally distraught about that A that B. I made all A's and my first B I should say to make was in fourth grade.
Curt: I just, I just want to point out, I just want to point out the imperfection of your statement. I just want to point to the inaccuracy of your statement.
Lee: Oh.
Curt: I don't know. I don't know how you can live with yourself.
Lee: So I was, I was so distraught with that B as a fourth grader that by the end of the day, my teacher came back to me and she said, oh, I messed up on the calculation. You actually made an A.
Curt: Oh my gosh!
Lee: Yes. So I don't know if she was doing the classic codependency thing or if in fact I had made an A, but I found that report card in my attic a couple months ago.
And I could see where she had erased the B and written the A in there. And then I remember in fifth grade, the PE teacher had us do tests, you know, so you're doing push-ups and sit-ups, doing basic physical education, sorts of tests to see where you ranked, you know. And I remember this bizarre instance where I did sit ups and I did like a hundred sit-ups but I was, I was third in my class and because I was third in my class, I at that moment told myself I am no good.
That I am not as good as the Camp men at athletics and I'm not any good at this. And so from that point forward, I focused on brainy stuff rather than trying to do. I still played some sports and I was terrible at it, but, but you know, it was that sort of odd way that perfectionism was rooted in me. Uh, it's just fascinating stuff.
Curt: Yeah. And I think, you know, Lee, it can come to us in so many different ways. I mean we don't have to grow up in households where our parents are, you know, monsters. I mean you know, for many of our listeners they grew up in houses where that was the case, but that doesn't have to be the case.
We can have our own temperament. I mean, I grew up in a house where I had two parents who loved me lavishly. I don't have any question in my mind, but I'm also aware that I had a particular temperament that did not mesh very well with a father who, as much as he loved me, was also someone who you didn't cross.
So for instance, there wasn't any room to be angry in my house. You couldn't be angry at your parent and get away with it. And I also grew up in a house where my mom could be pretty anxious about things. And as I aged, I became kind of the codependent manager of that anxiety, at least in my own mind. Now if my parents were alive and you were to ask them these questions they might say, man I don't know what you're talking about. And I don't think that they would be lying. Right? But that tells us a little bit about like how much we are aware of what we're not aware of, or, you know.
Lee: Right.
Curt: And so my temperament in particular, like, was one in which I was pretty sensitive to certain things.
And so the whole notion of like, there'd be some people who would get their first B and they're like, oh, look at that. And it makes a nice little curve. Like, it's like, I'm tired of those A-frame things I keep getting, like, I gotta be, hey, just keep going. Right? Others like you and me, like, we get our first B and I'm like sticking an ice pick in my eye. I mean, it's just, I can't can't tolerate this.
Lee Camp: You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We’re most grateful to have you joining us.
You can subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Stitchr, Spotify or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And we'd be most appreciative if you'd wander over to Apple podcasts online and give us one of those glowing 5 star reviews, and tell folks what you like about the show.
Always love hearing from folks. Recently heard from Randy Hohf in Kalispell, MT, Dan Miller listening down in Florida, Drue Clark, Donelson TN, and Rob Ryden in Northfield, Minnesota.
You've been listening to our interview with Dr. Curt Thompson on his book The Soul of Shame. Coming up, we'll hear from Curt about the ways in which the practices of vulnerability and community act as a counteragent to shame; as well as some practical ways to combat shame in day-to-day life. Again: I say unto thee, I challenge thee: take some notes, and try this stuff he's about to discuss.
Part two in just a moment.
HALFWAY POINT
Lee: Another counterintuitive element in your book is this repeated insistence that the way to deal with shame is to turn and face it, or the way to deal with shame is the practice of vulnerability, which is precisely that terrifying moment of having to approach a situation in which we're afraid of being rejected. That shame itself tells us the solution to this is to be fearful and isolate, when that's precisely the wrong thing that we might need. You know, and again, this is another thing I remembered in reading the book. I was probably in my late twenties. I may have been 30 at the time as a graduate student and walking across the campus at Notre Dame.
And I remember I was right there underneath the golden dome on campus. And I remember it just hitting me at that moment. The thing that I am most terrified of, I said to myself, is being shamed. And so I began to realize in that moment the power of that, and the fear of being known and the fear of being known about the things I especially didn't want people to know about me, right? That in time, you know, this man that met with me at that time began to say, look, the way you’re gonna have to deal with this is you have to be honest about yourself. And of course that's a terrifying sort of practice to begin.
Curt: Are you kidding me?
Lee: Can't we do anything else? I'm good at working at a lot of stuff. I can write you a paper. I could write you a paper, a research paper, a dissertation on it, but you want me to be honest about myself?
Curt: Oh heavens. Yeah. Well, you know it is counterintuitive because of the very physicality of it, right? What I feel literally in my chest, when I imagine having to acknowledge something to you about myself, that I'm sure that when you see it, you're gonna, like, want to leave. And yet the way the world is, would seem to indicate that that is how we are called to live. You know, there's some interesting research on the difference between shame and guilt in terms of how they emerge developmentally neurobiologically and developmentally. And then what we tend to do in response to them. Shame tends to emerge much much earlier in our development, 15 to 18 months of age, a child can begin to experience the nature of what this thing is that we call shame, which is why we say that it's not just a cognitive thing, right?
Because their little brains aren't cognitively really up and running yet in that way. They sense it in their bodies. They sense a tone of voice that they hear, the physical handling of them that they feel and so forth. So we've been practicing shame for a long time, developmentally. Guilt, or the thing that we experience cognitively, interpersonally, biologically, that we call guilt doesn't really seem to begin to emerge for most kids until they're about three to four years of age, maybe five years of age. What's different? Well, for one thing, my prefrontal cortex in my brain has now much more fully come online. And that enables me to experience the world and myself in some ways that are unique and different than what I could experience when I'm 15 to 24 months of age.
One of those things is that I am aware that I am in the world and that you are in the world as well. When I'm 12 months of age the world is just me. We're not interviewing a lot of 12 month old babies and they're reporting to us that, like, this isn't what the world is, but we're presuming this. A four or five-year-old. If I do something wrong, I have the sense that I've done something wrong. There's something wrong, but there's also another person involved. I've done something wrong. And my teacher's going to be upset. I've done something wrong and my father or my mother. Other people are involved in this thing that I'm feeling.
And there's some action that I've committed. I'd done something. So the adage of guilt is I've done something wrong, done something bad. Shame being I am bad. But what else is interesting is that fairly commonly, if I do something that is a problem between me and somebody else that I have an intimate relationship with.
So I've done something for which I feel guilty, the feeling of guilt tends to have me respond by moving toward that person in order to repair the relationship. I want to go and say that, I'm sorry. I want to go and make things okay with you. I want to turn toward you. I want to pursue to resolve my guilt. When I experience what we call shame I don't do that. I turn away from you. I turn away from myself.
Lee: Right.
Curt: Which is why one of the most important things that we know about shame is that initially when we are beginning to practice this practice of being honest with ourselves, about telling the truth about where we're shamed, we need people to come and find us because we're not very good at just coming to people with our shame.
Lee: Yeah.
Curt: We need to have something in that relationship in which you have come to find me enough, that creates enough of a bridge that I can trust that I can reveal this to you. Otherwise, I'm not going to. We need people to come and find us in our shame.
This of course is one of the reasons why the gospel is such a big deal. Lesslie Newbigin is really wonderful and articulated these kinds of things. Like we are a people who construct our gods, we make we're going to work our way.
It's going to be, it's either going to be, you know, the temple, you know, 2000, 3000, 4,000 years ago that I'm bringing my sacrifices to, or it's going to be my Tesla now. Right? Whatever it's going to be, or it's going to be, you know my stock market, whatever it's going to be, like, I'm going to make it. The gospel is God is actually coming to find us. He's coming to find us. Not only that, but we would say that in Jesus, God does the very thing that he makes us to be. He's vulnerable, he's naked. He is differentiated from us and he's not going to let shame stand between us.
Hence, you know, we have good Friday.
Lee: Yeah. I was thinking as you, spend a good bit of time at a passage in Hebrews. I reminded myself that, Western traditions, we've focused much more upon guilt and theories of atonement. Whereas in the Eastern tradition, they focus more on shame. And I think it's terribly helpful to re-narrate what's happening in the incarnation, in the crucifixion, through this understanding of shame. You gave me some new insight as well in saying that one of the things happens in the gospel is this intentionality to scorn the shame, to enter into the shame the pursuit of us. You make this kind of turn where you say that, I don't remember exactly quite how you said it, at least what I heard you pointing me to was Christian discipleship then means that we began to learn how to face shame, scorn, shame to be present as well.
And that's very different, I don't know that I've ever had anyone suggest, well, Christian discipleship means a willingness to enter into shame for the sake of the other.
Curt: Which I think is exactly part of what happens at the crucifixion. I mean, this is, that's exactly what's happening. He's, he's entering into it. And you know this is the thing when we enter into it in the context of community, so I'm not just turning into my shame. I'm not just going to, like, go home and find the vat of shame that's in my basement and just, like, go sit in it. No, I'm going to reveal my shame to you. That's how I'm going to look at it. But I'm not going to look at it, we are going to look at it. And the beautiful thing about this Lee is that my brain sees your brain being with me as we look at this. And it changes categorically, even my neurophysiologic experience of what it is that we're encountering.
Lee: Yeah. That's fascinating.
Curt: And so this is what we mean when we say that we're going to look shame square in the face, by looking at each other and in so doing, this is our cloud of witnesses, right? Our cloud of witnesses is with us in this, and in so doing, we are transformed. And we're saying that when we tell our stories, truly including the truth about my shame, and I see you hear that, I see it in your eyes. I hear it in your voice. All that's taking place. I am transformed by this because, like, you know, the story that I tell in my head is that I'm an idiot. You know I am bad. But that's not what my brain is sensing, imaging, feeling, thinking, as I witness you witnessing me.
Lee: Right. Yeah, I mean, I've gotten to sit in rooms both, my own experience and then watching the experience of others, where people exercise that sort of gut wrenching vulnerability. And it does, I mean, it just fundamentally changes the nature of that human being's experience, right?
Because it, all of a sudden, reframes, it allows them to have a new narrative. They're literally experiencing the opposite of what was anticipated, you know, so we anticipate rejection. And instead what happens is a sort of acceptance. And that, obviously that doesn't mean that we accept, you know, or celebrate wrongs or damages or harms or whatever, but still are accepting the person and we're still with the person.
And it's amazing to watch that kind of stuff happen.
Curt: Right.
And I would say, you know as we're talking here and as I've encountered patients and others in audiences where we have the opportunity to explore these things, it is important for us to recognize it in that same passage in Hebrews, the writer gets to this point where he says, since we had this great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off the sin that so easily entangles and run with perseverance, the race set before us.
And that word perseverance is really a big deal. We do this work in our practice in these groups that we call confessional communities in which people are telling these stories. And these stories are liberating people to become different people. One of the phenomenon that we warn people about is what we call a vulnerability hangover. People will have an encounter where they share their story, quite vulnerably, something that they'd never said to anyone, let alone to a group of seven or eight other people. And as they share their story, they find this great sense of liberation and acceptance and warmth. And they're like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. And they go home that night and their old life rolls in upon them. And they think to themselves, oh my goodness, what have I done?
Lee: Yeah.
Curt: I've now told these people about my story and it will be in the post tomorrow morning.
Lee: Yeah.
Curt: I'm so shafted and there is this felt sense of like, oh my gosh, what...
Lee: Yeah. The new terror.
Curt: Right, exactly. Because we've been practicing protection for such a long time. Our brain doesn't yet have enough experience, with this new form of life, of transparency and vulnerability. We don't have the experience with that. And so they might come back the next time they come back and they're like, I just felt awful. Like why would anybody want to do this? And we say, in fact, we will warn people when they're like, don't be worried, don't be surprised if this kind of thing happens. But part of what's also true is that we can sometimes think that, gosh, I've had that experience. I've shared that. Why then the following week or a month later, why do I still continue to be playing with the shame that seems to keep coming back around and coming back around. Despite the fact that I had that amazing moment of liberation two weeks ago, or three months ago in this group.
Lee: Right.
Curt: And this is where neuroscience is also, I think really helpful for us because we like to say in the game, it's those neurons that fire together wire together. And if I've been practicing, firing these shame network states of mind for a long time, they don't magically go away.
They are at the ready, ready to be activated at a moment's notice at any kind of priming. And so I've had this one experience with this group, but now I'm going to go home and I'm still going to have to contend with my old brain that has plenty of shame payload.
Lee: Yeah.
Curt: We're not getting rid of old neurons as much as we are creating new ones. And the reason that that's important to know is that we then say, perseverance. We're going to practice this over and over and over again, because like you've gotten really good at you. Like you're a pro. What I want now though, is for you to feel confident in learning, to love, to do the work of perseverance. So that gradually over time, you do begin to pay more and more and more attention to the voices and the images and the sensations of those who are helping you tell your story more truly. Then you are paying attention to the accusation that is built up in your head over a lifetime. I'd say to folks, look, if you were standing on a sidewalk and you looked up and suddenly you were being approached on the sidewalk by an empty radio flyer, red wagon at three miles an hour, you would simply put your foot out and stop it. It is a little red wagon.
If you were standing on a railroad track and you were being approached by a locomotive at three miles an hour, you couldn't stop it. It's not because of its velocity. It's because of its mass.
Lee: Yeah.
Curt: The shame in our head is like a locomotive.
Lee: Hmm.
Curt: And to stop that locomotive, I need a bigger locomotive. And that is where community comes in. You see, I can't just do this by myself. I need to borrow a community set of brains. I need the mind of Christ, which when Paul writes about this, right? His whole notion of like mixing pronouns, like your, in your, and all that, that you and you meaning singular or plural, like there is this sense of like, we have the mind of Christ.
I don't just have it in my own brain. I have it by virtue of my being part of a community that collectively pushes back against the dark against the shame that would say you're just not enough. But what I want to do is now I want to pay attention to the voices of my good friends, Neil and Rich, Byron, and Jerry and Kristen and Phyllis who are going to say, no, you belong to us. You belong to us.
Lee: Yeah. So imagine that somebody is listening and they say, okay, I can see all of this stuff. I can see some of this stuff in myself and I'm either very new to beginning to try to deal with this, confront this turn towards this, or haven't even begun at all. What would you say would be some first steps or practices you would suggest?
Curt: I think none of the practices are complicated. But I think any number of them can be really difficult, but they're not difficult because they are complicated. The first one I would say is that if you're not used to doing it it's a good idea for you. One of the things that we have people do is to write their autobiography because writing my autobiography and as I do it's pretty straight forward. You know, I tell people we're not looking for War and Peace. We're really just, I'd say like, you know, take an hour and write about, start with your first memory of your first decade of life and write.
And don't keyboard it, long hand it.
It allows the brain to do work that it otherwise is disallowed from doing when you're keyboarding. Long hand it, write about the first 10 years of your life and pay attention to those things that we talked about: your sensations, your images, your feelings, your thoughts, your behaviors. But in particular, because we're talking about shame in particular, start to pay attention where does that message start to show up?
Where do I sense these different things that shame represents for me? And who are the people that are involved? And by involved, I don't mean we're not trying to blame people. We're not throwing people under the bus.
Lee: Right.
Curt: But we do want to recognize who those parties are that are a part of my story that strengthened that. Because like, if it's my dad or my mom and I'm going home every Thanksgiving to the same thing, like, you better believe that, like, every time I go home for Thanksgiving, my shame attendant is going to show up. Like it's going to be a party,
Lee: Right.
Curt: for my shame. So writing my autobiography is one thing. You write for an hour about the first 10 years of your life. Then you go back, you get the second decade, third decade, and so forth. The point is not to cover all the ground. That is the point is for you to start to pay attention to how you tell your story, how do I do it? What are the things that I pay attention to?
What are the things that I leave out? I have a story that I tell of a patient that I took. First time that we met, you know, I asked standard questions that psychiatrists ask. I said, you know, tell me what it was like growing up in your house. And the first words out his mouth were, I grew up in a loving Christian home, which I tell people is sometimes just code for saying, well, life sucks, but I'm not really allowed to say that. Grew up in a loving Christian home. And I said, then the next question that we follow with is, like, well, tell me a little bit what that was like. And specifically like who as a kid who was in charge of discipline in your house? This is an extraordinarily, like, this dude is effective in the world.
Right? He's bought and sold three companies, you know. I mean, this guy, and he's calm, but he's in my office cause he's anxious. Right? And people would look at his life like what do you have to be anxious about? And when I asked that question, who was in charge of discipline, he paused and he said, well, now that you mentioned it, I guess ultimately it really my mom needed to be in charge.
So tell me about that. Well, I guess, because anytime my dad got involved and things got dangerous, his father who was a deacon in the church did not get on well with my patients' sibling and things became violent in the house, not infrequently. And so how is it that when I asked the question, tell me about what it was like growing up in your house? That the standard answer is I grew up in a loving Christian home.
How is it possible that that's the story that I tell? Well, this person has done just a ton of work and he would say now, well, I needed to tell that story because otherwise he was too ashamed. It was too shaming. Otherwise to tell the truth, I had to come up with a narrative that would enable me to survive. And so doing this autobiographical work actually allows us to begin to maybe pull the curtain back on some things that we otherwise wouldn't necessarily tell somebody true. Like, nobody's going to say, like, hey, where'd you grow up? I grew up in a brutality infested house in Franklin, Tennessee.
Like nobody's going to, we're not going to say it. And so that's one practical step. Another practical step is, and this is where things are also difficult, but they're not complicated. And that is, I want you to find one person that you can trust enough to tell one thing that nobody else knows too. One thing. And it doesn't have to be your deepest, darkest secret, but one thing, one thing that you're ashamed of. One thing that might be just sticking your toe in the water a little bit. Of course, when I give this suggestion to people, they're like, god, like, where am I going to get that person?
Is there like a dating app sort of thing that like, like people who like help with shame, like that kind of app, like, yeah, call me up, you know, we'll have drinks and you can tell me your worst nightmare, you know? And so I want to say to our listeners that perseverance includes the possibility that you might ask one, two, three, four, five people before you find someone who will say yes, when you ask, I would like to really find someone that I can tell the truth of my story to and who I can listen to them, tell the truth of their story to me, because I really believe that not letting shame run the world could really be helpful for us in ways that we don't yet anticipate. If you were to just ask, pick one or two people that you might think would be close enough to try that with and see what it would be like. And sometimes to do that, you know, you don't just ask those people out of the blue. What would you do? Say well here, listen to this podcast, read this book.
And then I want you to, like, after you do that, if you read the podcast and read the book, I want to ask you a question about someone to see if you'd be willing to try something with me. And those are two things that are not complicated to do, but they're not easy to do.
Lee: I think that practices like that, like you say, they're not complicated, but they're not easy, but they have fundamentally life changing possibilities. Until one has done some of it, I think it's hard to imagine the sort of possible changes that can come to oneself through that.
Curt: We were talking before we started, I've got this new book that's coming in September and in the book we talk about this notion eventually of inquiring of God, Psalm 27:4. This notion of like to be in his temple and inquire of Him.
And there are four questions. And these are also questions that can be part of this venture if you will, to tell our stories truly. The first question is where are you? This is God's question to Adam in Genesis chapter three. Where are you? Which means what is the state of your affairs like where are you really?
And without judgment, right? don't have some forgone conclusion of how you're supposed to answer that question. I really just, I really want to welcome wherever you are. It's welcome here.
Lee: Yeah.
Curt: I want to hear everything. That's question number one, which is intended to open our hearts to ourselves and to the other. The second question is, the second question always just gets me. And it's a question that comes from John 1:38. Jesus is talking to John's disciples who've come after him, after John the Baptist says behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And they approach him and Jesus turning, seeing them coming and said to them, what do you want? What do you want? And I'll tell you this Lee, I can think of no question that we're getting more mileage out of, than this question, over and over and over again. What do you want? Well, I can name what my problem is, or I can name what I wished that my wife or my husband would do differently.
I can name all the people who are racist or the people who were thinking they're not racist or all the things. Like it's not hard for me to identify the problems that, of course, all of which exist outside of my own. But if I ask the question, what do I want? If I explore that question it turns my attention away from where shame can operate. Instead I'm actually naming what, what is the beauty? What is the goodness? Where is the good way that I really want to go? Now I might have all kinds of reasons for being worrying and worrying that I can't go there.
But I'm not asking you what the problem is. I'm asking you, what do you want? What do you long for? The third question is this, this comes from Matthew chapter 20, where James and John's mom has asked Jesus, hey, like, when you come into your kingdom, my boys, they'd like to see it on your right and your left.
Can you, you know, can you help a mother? And, uh, he gets around to saying to them, can you drink the cup? Can you drink the cup, that I’m about to drink from? Oh yeah, we can read the cup. You see, if we're going to do this work, Lee, it's not going to be easy. It's gonna be painful. It's going to be difficult. It's gonna require a sacrifice.
It's gonna require us to become things like to throw this old self off. This part of us that is so easily battered by shame and has worn it like several layers of code. It will take real effort. That is a cup I may not want to drink. I'd like life to be easy. I'd like to not have shame, I’d just like to not have it. I don’t want to have to do the work of creating a new narrative.
And the last question is, do you love me? So this is Jesus to Peter in John 21. And the point of this is that Jesus is getting at, what he's getting at, is not just do you love me, like yes or no. He's really getting at this unfinished business of shame that's inside of Peter that Jesus is not willing to, like, be left alone, but he's coming for us. And so this is what we do. We were saying earlier in our time, like shame disallows me from telling you, like, I need somebody to come in and find me. And so not only are we in need of coming to find us, we need somebody to come and find us. I also can be the conduit of going to find somebody else.
Lee: Hm.
Curt: I don't want to say that there are those people in your circle of relationship right now, who need you to come find them. Who need you to ask, do you love me, as a way to say what's underneath, what's underneath the shame? You know, I want to come find it because when we pull that back, Jesus follows this quickly. I have work for you to do. I want you to feed my sheep. I want you to start to pay attention to me and my gaze at you and stop paying attention to the shame that tells you that you're not enough.
Lee: Yeah.
Curt: Pay attention to me, let the shame go. Now that we've looked at it, and we know that it's here. Now we can know that we can let that go and pay attention to me instead, because I have work of beauty and goodness, those works that have been prepared for you before the foundation of the world. And when people can do that, I mean, even though it's hard, really good and beautiful things follow.
Lee: We've been talking to Curt Thompson, psychiatrist in private practice in Falls Church, Virginia, about his book, The Soul of Shame. Curt. Thanks so much. It's been wonderful to be with you today.
Curt: Lee, it's been a real pleasure and I look forward to being in your presence sometime soon.
Lee: I look forward to that as well.
Lee Camp: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Ashley Bayne, Leslie Thompson, Brad Perry, Tom Anderson, and Cariad Harmon. Music beds by Zach and Maggie White and Blue Dot Sessions.
Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
The Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.
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