SHAME ISSUES

SHAME ISSUES

Unresolved shame issues are effectively sabotaging the human species. And the thing that allows this sabotage to prosper is that shame leaves us feeling isolated and vulnerable to an existential threat. Thus, it becomes almost impossible for us to notice that our entire species is being threatened and disenfranchised by shame. If we could see this fact clearly, we would understand that shame is not our friend, waiting patiently in the wings for us to seek its help in dealing with our evil. It is the thing that generates our evil.

There is another aspect of shame that is important to grasp. Shame is tailored for introverts differently than it is for extroverts, and for males differently than it is for females. And because it is, and because shame is the greatest existential threat we can ever face, including physical threats to our existence, shame renders us afraid of our counterparts. And this fear works in us to divide us.

Consider the shame men and women contend with. A man feels shame over how he initiates contact with a woman (or his significant other). A woman feels ashamed of how she responds. Both long to see that a happy unity can exist, and yet fear that it can't. And we fear both that our counterparts' issues will destroy all hope of unity, and that the things in us we are deeply ashamed of will as well.

And this fear of our own shame then causes us to become divided from essential aspects of our own humanity. Shame causes us to lump together what is good and necessary in our human drives and emotions with the bad, until we feel only afraid of those human aspects of ourselves. And in this state of fear, we generally move to suppress those aspects of ourselves.

The isolation mentioned above prevents us from seeing that men have the very same longing to believe in the possibility of unity as women. The same is equally true of every natural set of complements that make up our species, such as introverts and extroverts, males and females, political conservatives and liberals, religious and humanist people, members of Eastern civilization and members of Western civilization, etc.

If we can see this longing in each other, we have the emotional security required to pursue and endure the means to experience unity. If we can't, we don't. 

Even our political, social, and sexual fantasies point to this longing to believe the union of compliments is possible. And the evil, the destructive forms that many of our fantasies take, also point to this longing, by showing us how we have been doing hurtful things to those aspects of our humanity we are most ashamed of. Those evil imaginings we have are there to show us the evil we are currently doing to ourselves, to the aspects of ourselves we are ashamed of and afraid of.

And of course, because we are ashamed of our fantasies, we never even think to ask what they are trying to say to us, and so only ever become increasingly dominated by them. And in this place of our species becoming increasingly divided from each other and from themselves, our continuing existence as a species is progressively growing to a state of collective suicide.

Fortunately, the God who formed us saw this issue arising before it ever manifested, and had the cure for what ails us: a cure for our unresolved and growing shame issues and the division this generates in us. God woos us to focus on the division we feel with God, and the solution to this division, then becomes part of the healing of our connections with ourselves and finally with others.

This solution is divinely produced atonement (at-one-ment). And here is the psychological nuts and bolts of this cure. First, let's define shame. Shame is us hating ourselves for what we do. It is not simply that we hate our malfunctioning. Shame says I am worthless because I do this or cannot do that. So, when God, via a gift of atonement, essentially tells us that He loves (values) us enough to forgive our malfunctioning behavior, the very source of our shame is addressed. That source is the delusion of PERFORMANCE_BASED_ACCEPTANCE. 

PFA essentially holds that our value is based on how well or poorly we function. This is the delusion pointed to in the biblical account of the fall of man. By feeding on the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we were basically attempting to gain enough information about what constitutes good and evil behavior to improve our behavior and, thereby, improve our value. 

Through the gift of atonement, of God telling us I love you enough to forgive your sins, this delusion is directly addressed in us. This raises the obvious question: if atonement is the cure for what ails our species, why are we still so evil? The answer to this question is perhaps the most important one to ask and answer for a member of our species. 

The answer is this: we humans have an aspect of consciousness we call our memory. Our memory, or our heart, as the Bible refers to it, holds our memories of life's experiences. And each of those memories and the experiences they store in us teaches us something about life. If we try to eat some fruit that makes us sick, we learn that we must be careful in selecting which fruits we eat. Thus, memory is designed into us as something that will greatly affect our behavior. And when we hold memories of unresolved experiences of pain and fear, those memories actually damage our behavior. Those experiences effectively teach us lies about life, about what we want, what we desire, and how we feel.

This unresolved aspect of our memories is what the bible refers to as the heart, which is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it? And the God who authored the bible very clearly means to bring healing to our hearts so that our behavior ceases to be adversely affected by its memories of unsolved fear and pain. The Bible speaks of God creating a clean heart in us. 

This is an immensely important aspect of the religion of the bible. It implies God means to take us through emotional therapy in connection with our memories. It means (unlike we humans have come to believe) God does not simply tell us what is right and wrong, good and evil, and then expect us to be able to do good. He knows that unless and until He mends our hearts, we will not be able to mend our behavior. It is this idea in the biblical religion (embedded deeply in both the Old and New Testament scriptures) that separates it from the prevailing, dominant Performance-Based - Acceptance idea that the vast majority of human religious thought embodies. 

Unfortunately, the changes God brings by introducing us to the idea of Him loving us enough to forgive our sins are limited and opposed in us by our experiences with painful existence, which teaches us that PBA is the reality of our lives. And so, God must progressively address those unresolved experiences with life by healing them and calling us to then let go of the ways we have come to cope with the lie of Performance-Based Acceptance.

And just as He must patiently work in us, individual humans, God must patiently work in our collective species to perfect our trust in His forgiving love.  It is this internal work that we are seeing playing out in our lives, corporately and individually. This therapy process looks like us both being made more aware of just how dysfunctional we are, and thus we feel even worse than we did before God began to heal us, and being made capable of loving better than we ever have before. 

This is a very strange state of things for us to contend with, and can be a source of great discouragement if we are not apprised of what exactly is going on in us. And our entire species is experiencing this same thing. We are both more aware of our dysfunction as a species and more capable of genuinely loving others. I bring up the ability to love because when we feel loved by God, we can be one with Him, and when we feel loved, we love others, and are thus unified with them.

When Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the knowledge of what constitutes good and evil behavior, it is said that they felt naked for the first time. The reason they felt naked was that the delusion of Performance-Based-Acceptance rendered them feeling uncovered by God's love for them. Their nakedness was a sign that they felt unloved by God. And what did God do to cover their nakedness? Did He tell them to simply do what is right, and I will then love you? No, God killed a lambkin and covered them with its skin. 

Jesus is referred to as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. It is the forgiveness of our sins that God gives us through His sacrificial, forgiving love in the crucifixion of Jesus, which covers our human consciousness with a progressively embedded sense that God loves us enough to forgive our sins.

It is our choice to trust in God's forgiving love, and reject the delusion of Performance Based Acceptance (what the Bible refers to as self-righteousness), that is now at work in you if you are a follower of Jesus, and is at work in our species as a whole as the influence of God's healing therapy takes effect in His spiritually reborn ones. This work in believers is like an antidote working in our species' collective psychological system. 

And things will get worse before they get better, as God brings to the surface those aspects of our human experience that oppose the reality of His unconditional forgiving love, so that He can heal us decisively.

I hope this helps you trust in God's forgiveness, as embodied for us in Jesus sacrifice for the sins of the world. I know that trust in God's loving forgiveness will work in you to heal your heart and your memories of fear and pain. And this will free you to live like a child completely loved by your heavenly Papa, God.

© John Brusseau, 3/16/2026