Your dad says he’ll pick you up Friday afternoon and the two of you will go camping for the weekend. You don’t see him much because your parents are divorced and you live with your mom. The thought of your dad taking you camping feels so great. In fact, it makes you feel normal because your friend’s parents aren’t divorced and their dad does things with them all the time. So you tell them that you and your dad are going camping this weekend. You pack your things and get your sleeping bag out. Friday is here and you sit on the doorstep waiting for your dad. He never shows. He never shows. “What is wrong with me?” you ask over and over.
Or, how does it feel to be told that you are worthless? What else are you to think when no one says anything positive to you or about you. “You’re fat!” “You’re ugly.” “You’ll never amount to anything.” “You were a mistake.” All your life you have heard these comments and after awhile you begin to believe the lies. They don’t really sound like lies because they come from people who supposedly love you. They must be true, right?
This pervasive recording plays in the background of your mind and heart and all you hear is how unworthy you are. Most of the time you repress it or drown it out in other ways like work, or alcohol, or busyness. But it never seems to go away. Eventually you get used to it and it becomes a normal part of your day. You adjust to it like a commuter adjusts to the traffic each day on their way into work. It just is. But it feels hopeless. It is shame and shame feels like it is always exposed.
All the self-talk in the world does not cover the stain. Ignoring it doesn’t work either. Denial is overrated after awhile. Psychiatric drugs merely hide it.
Welch says in his book “Shame Interrupted,” that this shame is not a mirage, but is in fact, very real. Shame causes us to feel contaminated and the reality is that we are contaminated. The early steps out of shame are the hardest, he writes, because these are the steps that don’t allow us to deny the shame, but, instead, call us to name it. This is difficult, but we must not give up because as Welch writes,
“After that, you will hear God’s words to the shamed, and you will discover shame’s opposite: You are acceptable. You will receive honor, value, worth, even glory, and it will go public.”
He goes on to say,
“Listen for the love, hate the shame, and have no tolerance for the resignation. That’s the plan.”
There is hope. There is a way out of the shame.
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Shame Interrupted: How God Lifts the Pain of Worthlessness & RejectionBy Edward T. Welch / New Growth Press |