Broken Image

So what is shame? Well, Brené Brown is probably one of the most popular, um, secular writers on shame in the last 10 years, and she says, "I define shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.

Something we've experienced, something we've done or failed to do makes us unworthy of connection." I'm gonna be talking mostly about shame today.

Um, in the title, there is s- low self-esteem too.

Um, but I'm seeing shame as like the umbrella and low self-esteem sitting underneath that.

But it is a little bit different.

Um, so Brandon in '94, who wrote a paper called "The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem," he says, "Self-esteem is a person's belief in their worthiness to be rejoicing and able to cope with and handle everyday life issues." So I guess one simple distinction, it's not always as simple as these things, but, uh, a simple distinction we could say is that self-esteem is one sort of cognitive evaluation of our abilities and our worth, whereas shame is a painful emotional experience.

The two can obviously be quite interrelated, but they could also not be.

So I could, um, cognitively appraise how well I do this seminar and walk out of the room still thinking I'm okay and I'm still worthy of connection.

But I could also appraise that I've done a terrible job and then allow that to attach to my identity and become a shaming thing and think, "Well, they're never gonna ask me back again," and, "What do all those people think of me in the room?" And so do you see the difference, the tonal difference of that? That you can assess how well you've done in something, but it doesn't have to then attach to your...

who you are, and that's what shame does.

Shame attaches to our identity.

I think we've talked a bit more about the difference of between guilt and shame in sort of Christian circles more recently.

Certainly, I've heard it talked about more.

Um, after yesterday's seminar, um, had a, a really good discussion thinking about kind of the more the nuances of this.

Uh, so I guess this is a sort of simplistic, um, distinction, but guilt is often associated to what we've done.

A bit like self-esteem, but much more to do with, um, we've failed to do or we've done something that doesn't match up to our value system, and so then we feel this psychological discomfort, uh, which is guilt.

Now, we understand a lot that the Bible tells us about our guilt.

Uh, it says we are guilty before the Lord, that in Christ, he takes on our guilt for him- uh, to himself, and if we confess it, then we are forgiven, and our guilt can be dealt with.

Um, but we talk less about shame.

We understand that Christ did also take our shame onto himself, but we don't often drill down so much into the details of that.

But shame and guilt just are bedfellows, so they often go together.

So although we can distinguish them kind of theoretically in the whole person, they're often a, a mixture and a sort of, um...

We can't quite tease them apart all the time, and often they feel the same.

So you might hear that people say, "I feel really guilty about this," or, "That was really my fault," and, and it sounds like they're talking about responsibility.

But sometimes if you listen harder, you'll start to hear they're talking about who they are, not something they did, but what it's -- means about who they are.