Tag Archives: Shame

“Bad Faith” gets Exposed Again!!!

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Mike Huckabee is demonstrating again what John Paul Sartre described so eloquently as “bad faith.” One of Huckabee’s tribe (conservative, evangelical Christians) has again gotten “caught with his pants down.” Huckabee and many others of that tribe are seeking to comfort the offender, Josh Duggar, and minimize the pain that comes from having your baser nature exposed to the public. Now Huckabee’s benevolent response is not without some merit as we should offer comfort to those of our tribe…and others…who have encountered duress even if it is self-imposed. But that comfort does not include overt or subtle excusing of the behavior, attempting to mitigate the offense with lame explanations such as “he made a mistake” or “God has forgiven him.” Yes, he did make a mistake and yes God has forgiven him but what he and many other evangelical Christians fail to see is the real offense—using one’s faith to hide behind and cover up one’s intrinsic human-ness, including “baser instincts.”

Huckabee’s “bad faith” demonstrates the biblical “form of godliness” that “denies the power thereof.” Though I don’t doubt his sincerity, his faith is a suit of clothes that he dons each day and makes him very appealing to his friends, confidantes, and political base. Of course, he sincerely does not know this. He thinks he is a humble Christian servant. But he needs to keep in mind that the Islamist extremists who are beheading people are equally sincere in what they are doing! It is often that which we are most sincere about that hides our darkest secrets.

And that brings me to a core issue in this most recent sexual scandal that is rocking our culture right now. In spite of their “innocence”, evangelical Christians need to wake up and embrace that fact that they are instinctual creatures like God created them to be and if they use their faith in an attempt to obliterate their instinctual nature, it will rise up occasionally and bite the in the butt. I do not think that Jesus intended his teachings to be used as a way of hiding from our instinctual nature but as a way to embrace the whole of our “human-ness” and express it in a mature, responsible manner. But attempting to repudiate these baser impulses always leads to projection and at times to “acting out”—“They call it Reason, using light celestial, just to out do the beasts in being bestial.” (Goethe)

I do not excuse Josh Duggar for his “mistakes.” But I understand! I remember being a horny teen-age boy and having learned that these sexual impulses were “nasty” and “of the devil.” I guess I was blessed/cursed with more guilt than was Josh and managed to not let my youthful lustfulness go quite that far. And I can identify with the response of Josh’s parents who sought to cover up this “indiscretion” for they too were, and are, but human and had this Christian “face” to maintain. But what Mr. Huckabee and the Duggar family need to learn is that their Christian faith needs to seize this opportunity to deepen and to learn that the “Grace of God” that they purport to believe in is providing them an opportunity to lose this Christian “face” and learn that they can then join the human race and still be a Christian. Then there is “forgiveness” that is not just a self-serving, postured contrition which allows one to continue in his/her blindness, to wake up again the next morning and say, “Someone wind me up again and watch me be a Christian.” I know. I’ve been there most of my life and am even now far short of “perfection.”   I have not learned even yet to live with these occasional gut-wrenching bouts of “imperfection.”

Once again the “tee-hee” part of my brain wants to smirk and ridicule when another one of the self-righteous crowd gets his hypocrisy exposed. But my “tee-hee-er” does not work as well as it used to as I feel sorry for the Duggar family in some way. It is so painful to face disillusionment and my tendency has always been to “cover my ass” and not learn what is staring me right in the face…and has always been apparent to those that know me the best.  I’m reminded of the wisdom of Shakespeare who noted, “Give every man his just deserts and who would escape a whipping.”

SNL Video Vividly Illustrates Shame

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Shame is so powerful yet it is an elemental force in our psyche. If we “have no shame” will find ourselves knee-deep in psychopathy but if we are overwhelmed with shame we will find ourselves cowering through life like the two characters at the counter in this old Saturday Night Live skit. Watching this skit is almost too painful as it resurrects old recordings in the depths of my soul. But, it is just so funny! And, having our haunts laughed at can be helpful as it helps us look at them openly.(http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/brenda-the-waitress/n9922)

For my international readers, if you are not familiar with SNL, you should check out the clips on You Tube. They are so funny and so insightful about our culture, including our dark and ugly side. I hope you enjoy this one.

D.H. Lawrence and Shame

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D. H. Lawrence is one of my favorite novelists. He was consummately talented in delving into the human soul and exploring its intricacies. In The Rainbow, he eloquently describes the vulnerable subjective world of a female toddler, Ursula, who is enthralled with her father. And on a particular day this enthrallment came to an excruciating end as he brutally crushed her delicate little world by abruptly introducing his own. (I quote an extensive excerpt from ch. 8; but you might appreciate the set-up even more and you can readily obtain it free on the internet.)

And she played on, because of her disappointment persisting even the more in her play. She dreaded work, because she could not do it as he did it. She was conscious of the great breach between them. She knew she had no power. The grown-up power to work deliberately was a mystery to her.

He would smash into her sensitive child’s world destructively. Her mother was lenient, careless The children played about as they would all day. Ursula was thoughtless-why should she remember things? If across the garden she saw the hedge had budded, and if she wanted these greeny-pink, tiny buds for bread-and-cheese, to play at teaparty with, over she went for them.

Then suddenly, perhaps the next day, her soul would almost start out of her body as her father turned on her, shouting:

“Who’s been tramplin’ an’ dancin’ across where I’ve just sowed seed? I know it’s you, nuisance! Can you find nowhere else to walk, but just over my seed beds? But it’s like you, that is-no heed but to follow your own greedy nose.”

It had shocked him in his intent world to see the zigzagging lines of deep little footprints across his work. The child was infinitely more shocked. Her vulnerable little soul was flayed and trampled. Why were the footprints there? She had not wanted to make them. She stood dazzled with pain and shame and unreality.

Her soul, her consciousness seemed to die away. She became shut off and senseless, a little fixed creature whose soul had gone hard and unresponsive. The sense of her own unreality hardened her like a frost. She cared no longer.

And the sight of her face, shut and superior with self-asserting indifference, made a flame of rage go over him. He wanted to break her.

“I’ll break your obstinate little face,” he said, through shut teeth, lifting his hand.

The child did not alter in the least. The look of indifference, complete glancing indifference, as if nothing but herself existed to her, remained fixed.

Yet far away in her, the sobs were tearing her soul. And when he had gone, she would go and creep under the parlour sofa, and lie clinched in the silent, hidden misery of childhood.

When she crawled out, after an hour or so, she went rather stiffly to play. She willed to forget. She cut off her childish soul from memory, so that the pain, and the insult should not be real. She asserted herself only. There was not nothing in the world but her own self. So very soon, she came to believe in the outward malevolence that was against her. And very early, she learned that even her adored father was part of this malevolence. And very early she learned to harden her soul in resistance and denial of all that was outside her, harden herself upon her own being.

She never felt sorry for what she had done, she never forgave those who had made her guilty. If he had said to her, “Why, Ursula, did you trample my carefully-made bed?” that would have hurt her to the quick, and she would have done anything for him. But she was always tormented by the unreality of outside things. The earth was to walk on. Why must she avoid a certain patch, just because it was called a seed-bed? It was the earth to walk on. This was her instinctive assumption. And when he bullied her, she became hard, cut herself off from all connection, lived in the little separate world of her own violent will.

I don’t think this father had any idea what he was doing when he insisted on his values and rules. He was just very angry and lashed out, oblivious to how devastating the fury appeared to his beloved, vulnerable little girl. The resulting shame caused her to retreat into a shell, into “the little separate world of her own violent will.”

Shame is one of the most basic human emotions, possibly the most primary experience we have as our ego begins to formulate. There is some sense in which we all get “shamed” into reality, into the “common-sense” world of everyday reality. But though it is “common-sense” to the world, to the little child who has yet to accept its proffered terms, it is a strange and bewildering world.

The “Shame-hole” of Self Awareness

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Last week Rachel Maddow used a line that grabbed me, referring to the “shame-hole of critical self assessment.” She was discoursing about the difficulty that people have in “self” assessing, in employing meta-cognition and becoming “self” aware. This ability to become self aware is the gift of our forebrain, a gift which we all have but one which is often not utilized. I have heard political commentators note in the recent election that most people do not use this forebrain and vote on the basis of reason but on the basis of emotion which means that astute politicians will always appeal first to emotion.

But I want to focus on that “shame-hole.” Wow! What a notion that is. And from my own personal experience it is so powerful to suddenly be made “self” aware, to be confronted with reality, and forced to realize that how one perceived the world was not how the world actually is. In other words, in involves accepting the notion, “I was wrong or in error. I screwed up.” This is the famous Rick Perry “Oops” moment. (And by the way, I admire him for having the temerity to offer that honest assessment, which will inevitably end up on his tombstone!)

Shame is such a powerful experience and our fear of it keeps us from dealing with reality. We prefer to keep our head buried in the sand, to remain in the comfort of those “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken). As T.S. Eliot noted, “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.”

One other thought, shame “hole” brings to my mind “black hole” and I think the two notions are related. The black hole evokes terror with all of us but no more that raw, unmitigated experience of shame. I think that is what Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” was about.

 

C. S. Lewis and Shame

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In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis said re shame:

Don’t you remember on earth there were things too hot to touch with you finger but you could drink them alright? Shame is like that. If you will attempt it—if you will drink the cup to the bottom—you will find it very nourishing; but try to do anything else with it and it scalds.

This made me think of the Richard Rohr observation which I recently shared, “I look daily for some little humiliation in my life.” He explained that he did this as it reflected an opportunity to address an occasion of his ego rearing its ugly head.

I think that Lewis and Rohr realize/realized the role that shame plays in spirituality. Its presence, when not addressed and acknowledged, leads to profound ugliness and even brutality in the spiritual world. But, addressed and acknowledged, embraced if you will, provides an opportunity to draw a little closer to one’s Source. For, I intuitively know that shame lies at the core of our identity and we have to tippy-toe into it as we approach that core. And, I might add it behooves us to have someone holding our hand as we begin to tippy-toe into it—perhaps a pastor, a therapist, a friend, or a spouse.

But we must avoid the easy way out which is to cling to dogma, those “well worn words and ready phrases” (Conrad Aiken) which insulate us from any real, human/spiritual experience. We must go beyond the shell of the words, the “letter of the law”, and get into the Spirit.

One last thought on this note. Twenty years ago John Bradshaw was in the self-help vanguard with a series of books on the family. In one of them he noted that in his clinical work he felt that shame was the core issue with a lot of deep seated issues, that often there were high-falutin diagnoses which could merely be explained in terms of “shame-based” behavior and emotions. My own clinical work confirms this. We are often dealing only with deep-seated shame which binds the individual and will continue to do so until it is gradually, gently, and graciously brought to the fore and experienced and then processed.