Hanging ‘Shame’ Out to Dry

Dirty Laundry

“We don’t need to hang our dirty laundry out for all to see!”

Her words caught me off guard. I merely suggested a book for our Bible study striving for more openness and transparency which I felt other studies failed to provide. Her point was well-taken.

Sharing our personal struggles requires trust and vulnerability with each other. Many have experienced shame, and like the woman in my study group we concur – it’s too risky to hang our shame out for all to see! After broaching the subject with a friend, she admitted, “I don’t even like mentioning the word!”

What is it about this five-letter word S-H-A-M-E that is disturbing? I’ve been on a quest to know.

In January I wrote a short piece, Shame Walks Among Us, calling out what I believe to be the devastating work of shame in our lives. Viewing shame as a positive ‘thing’ never entered my mind.

Shame, from my experience, is someone’s behavior or action used to devalue, diminish, mock, embarrass, or exclude a person in private or in public. It is an action that empowers the shamer to reduce and destroy the one they shame. I did not consider it a private emotion of the self. Rather the person who shames another, whom I’ll call The Shamer, in my experience, seems to be motivated by intentions to exclude others in order to exalt themselves, even if need be to the point of death.

Scripture portrays Satan as the accuser, the one who works shame against us. We humans mimic that behavior whenever we shame others. The shaming action often results with the one being shamed bearing a sense of inadequacy – even though the shamed one knows that the claims of The Shamer are utter lies and unwarranted.

I would like to see the work of shaming others eradicated.

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Is Shame Good for Us?

Recently I came across the book, Defending Shame: Its Formative Power in Paul’s Letters by Te-Li Lau. The title caught me off guard. Seriously, how could shame ever be defended? And from Scripture, no less!

Apparently, more and more studies are being published claiming how dangerous eradicating shame would be for society and the world in general. Who knew!! I sure didn’t. How stupid must I be to have missed this, I thought, shaming myself!

So shame and shaming is a good thing now?!

I noticed Luke Timothy Johnson – a scholar I highly regard – wrote the forward. Although his memoir, which I read awhile back, didn’t exactly claim his life-situations caused him shame, he undoubtedly felt it. Since he recommended the book I chose to read it. ¹

So back to the book on Defending Shame. According to Te-Li Lau,

The extirpation of shame is ill-advised, if not impossible. As a human emotion, shame is part of who we are. It is an inevitable aspect of the human experience, just as fear, sadness, and joy are. [And shame … as] a moral emotion … functions as a critical component of our moral apparatus. It helps us discern what is noble and base and provides the motivational energy that impels us to do good, and to avoid doing bad … shame is the glue that holds relationships and communities together. It has the potential to construct a decorous and harmonious society – a society in which individuals are sensitive to the social norms of the community and who respect the honor of others. What we need is not the extirpation of shame, but a nuanced understanding of the complexity of shame that leads to human flourishing.

Defending Shame: Its Formative Power in Paul’s Letters, pg. 5, 6 (Italics mine)

So I am currently on a reading frenzy trying to get my head around views that present shame as a positive thing, a positive emotion.

According to Lau shame is just part of who we are as humans. We shouldn’t seek to ‘extirpate’ shame, we just need to have a “nuanced understanding” of it. Is there any validity in Lau’s claim that we are currently living in an “anti-shame zeitgeist … nourished in part by the current ethos of therapeutic individualism?” ²

Not all agree with this assessment of shame. In Shame Interrupted, How God Lifts the Pain of Worthlessness and Rejection, Edward Welch a licensed psychologist and faculty member at the Christian Counseling & Education Foundation, who “hate[s] shame” ³ writes, “If you think shame shouldn’t be part of the human condition, you are right. You are not intended to carry such a load. Shame is an intruder.” ⁴

But that’s not the case for Gregg Ten Elshof, author of For Shame. He claims good shame plays a needed role in establishing a well-ordered society and says shame is “an important moral emotion in both the East and the West,” similar to Lau. He cautions that any conversation must navigate between good and bad shame ⁵

For some, the reason Jesus cleansed the temple only once – in the minds of the temple authorities at least – was that their act of “[s]haming [him] … performed its function … Jesus had been shamed (and thus corrected). Case closed.” Shame establishes boundaries and Jesus complied. ⁶

After acknowledging that “[s]hame is a difficult and painful topic,” Ten Elshof hopes readers would find his book helpful, but if they didn’t “find it … enjoyable nor helpful … well… shame on [them].” ⁷ It’s left to the reader to decide whether he meant good shaming or bad shaming of his readers.

According to Ten Elshof, “except in the post- Enlightenment West, there is near perfect consensus among the great human wisdom traditions that felt shame has important work to do in healthy human psychologies and communities. ⁸.

He briefly introduces five popular writers – all recognized as shame-scholars – who side with Carl Jung who taught shame was a “soul-eating emotion.” He doesn’t cite any of their published work. All five sources he selected (shared below) view shame as harmful.

Most of us are familiar with Brené Brown. Brown “describes shame as the most powerful master emotion ⁹ … that leaves us living in fear.” ¹⁰.

Curt Thompson ¹¹ “characterizes shame as the neurobiological effect of evil’s assault on God’s good creation.”

Christine Caine, he notes, calls shame “toxic waste that leaks from wounds and wounded people.” ¹² Ten Elshof, continues quoting Caine who said, “Jesus, came to shame our shame.” ¹³

Shame, according to Alan Downs, “disrupts our ability to self-evaluate.” ¹⁴ He closes out the list of those who think shame is harmful with Nadia Bolz-Weber’s book, Shameless, which he claims portrays shamelessness as a virtue. ¹⁵

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Misunderstanding Shame

Have I mistaken shame as an action when it’s another one of our emotions? Te-Li Lau claims it is “uncontroversial that shame is an emotion” while admitting it is “hard to define” emotions. ¹⁶

According to Ten Elshof, to come to terms with this “near-universal valuation of shame” but we must distinguish between the differences in meaning of the following terms that fall under the category of shame: guilt, felt guilt, shame, felt shame, feeling ashamed of oneself, embarrassment, dignity, self-respect, low self-esteem, and self-loathing.

If we fail to get the terms right, he says, we “all but guarantee that [shame] is toxic – that it has no place in healthy human psychologies.”¹⁷ Ten Elshof, like Lau, recommends that we move forward in the discussion by applying “greater nuance and clarity” when using the word shame, aware that the other terms “name different phenomena … different (even if interestingly related) experiences.” ¹⁸

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I guess we’re stuck with a word that causes many of us to cringe whenever it is spoken!

Whenever I hear someone say, “shame on you”, how might I discern if it was meant to benefit or berate me? That is still the question bothering me.

What if we found suitable words rather than having one word do all the lifting for a concept that is difficult to define? I’m all up for that. Rather than using a word that requires so much work nuancing – that readers may miss – is there a way to call it what it is: hate, rejection, embarrassment. And if we can’t do that, then perhaps the shame is on us. But what do I know!

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Shame – a Five-Letter Word

So, after reading on the subject of shame, I wondered if the problem is more about the terminology.

I pulled a book I purchased over a decade ago off a shelf in my study: Shame: Theory, Therapy, Theology by Stephen Pattison. Little girls with smudged faces stare out from the yellow cover, eyes big as saucers. Those little faces evoke memories of my own childhood. It stayed on my bookshelf all this time. Yes I was too busy with undergraduate and graduate studies to read it, but I knew the subject would cause an emotional melt down, so I avoided it. ¹⁹

But this week turned out to be the right time, growing stronger through the years.

Right away I learned that Pattison researched the subject of shame to understand his own experiences of shame. Clearly a book that would be helpful to read.

I plowed through the first 64 pages – underlining, highlighting, scribbling notes in the columns. Pattison evaluated psychoanalytic approaches, self-psychological approaches, bio-psychological approaches, sociological and philosophical approaches, literary and social constructionist approaches and arrived at a conclusion that I find this most reassuring:

Hereafter, … I shall remain agnostic as to the ‘essence’ of shame, or the ‘best’ methods for determining its fundamental nature. My working assumption is that there is no such ‘thing’ as a shame, but that there is a set of discourses, both everyday and scientific, that deploy this concept in family resemblance terms. It may be possible to see or create links between different uses of shame. However, it is not helpful to try and pin this concept down to definitely. Shame means a great deal to many people in different places, cultures, and discourses. Unfortunately, it does not mean the same thing. Users of the concept ‘shame’ are divided by a common concept, or rather, by the family resemblance between a number of different but related concept, all noted by the same five letter word [S-H-A-M-E].

Shame: Theory, Therapy, Theology, p. 64

For someone who wants to get it right all the time – who doesn’t want to be found stupid because she failed to turn over every rock for answers – this is revolutionary. For me, the shame of not knowing, is the worst of conditions.

For now this one thing I know is that five-letter word S-H-A-M-E is filled with meaning and trauma.

We who’ve experienced it, know it.

No matter what name we give it, shame still walks among us.

1. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Mind in Another Place: My Life as a Scholar (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2022.
2. Defending Shame, p. 2
3. Edward T. Welch, Shame Interrupted: How God Lifts the Pain of Worthlessness and Rejection, (Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press, 2012) p 1.
4. Shame Interrupted, p. 42.
5. Gregg Ten Elshof, For Shame: Rediscovering the Virtues of a Maligned Emotion (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Reflective, 2021), 7, 8.
6. E. Randolph Richards, “The Shaming of Jesus in John,” in Honor, Shame, and the Gospel: Reframing Our Message and Ministry, ed. Christopher Flanders and Werner Mischke (Littleton, CO: William Carey Publishing, 2020) 73-86.
7. For Shame, p. 9
8. For Shame, p 77
9. Took a while to find where this quote from Brené Brown came from. Perhaps this is where Ten Elshof’s quote of “master emotion” from Brown is found. On pg. 81 of Shame, written in 2000, Pattison cites Thomas Scheff, who decades before Brown, identified shame as a ‘master emotion’ in 1995.”
10. For Shame, p. 51
11. Thompson is a psychiatrist and author of The Soul of Shame, Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves. Downers Grove, IL, 2015.
12. Author of, Unashamed – Drop The Baggage, Pick Up Your Freedom, Fulfill Your Destiny. This quote took awhile to find. It may come from pg 124 on books.google.com
13. pg. 165, books.google.com
14. For Shame, p. 51; Alan Downs is a clinical psychologist and author of The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man’s World, 2006, 2nd ed. 2012
15. p. 51
16. Defending Shame, p. 13.
17. Chapter 5, Definitional Interlude, 73-78.
18. p. 78
19. . Stephen Pattison, Shame: Theory, Therapy, Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)