Moving From Shame to Embrace

Step 5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

When we love and allow ourselves to be loved, we begin more and more to inhabit the kingdom of the eternal. Fear changes into courage, emptiness becomes plenitude, and distance becomes intimacy.

~ John O’Donohue, Anam Cara

Entering the shame spiral is all too familiar for me, as I shared about in From Burned Out to Beloved’s chapter ‘Moving From Shame to Self-Empathy’. Yet I really could have named that chapter, moving from shame to embrace. It is the primary movement. The antidote to shame, is intimacy.

Although we can extend self-empathy, receiving embrace and knowing we are loved helps us to digest and extend that empathy. We need the embrace of God and we need the embrace of others.

Inviting God to meet us in our emotional spirals helps us to extend self-empathy and compassion.

In this newsletter, I am going to invite you to consider a movement from Shame to Embrace. I will share a bit about what this means and then you’ll have the opportunity to engage in an imaginative prayer reflection. This exercise will invite you to recall the feeling of shame in your body, so if you are not in a safe place or season to do that, consider waiting until you are ready.

I invite you pause now.

Inhale / Exhale.

Consider a recent small mistake you made.

How did you feel about yourself?

If you felt shame, where did you feel shame in your body?

How did you respond to shame?

What narrative did you tell yourself about your worth?

In spiraling moments of shame, my limbic response shuts down my capacity to think clearly. When my husband brings up something I did or said that was hurtful, my tendency is to get flooded and go to shame. Regrettably it becomes about me instead of truly hearing his pain and facing up to the way I hurt him.

Shame turns us inward. Jesuit Soul Formation teacher Bill Zuelke calls this out as narcissistic. Ouch. My shame not only blinds me to truth about my belovedness, it hurts those I love.

In the midst my spiral, when I hear my husband affirm his love for me, even after surfacing some issue of conflict, I am brought back to center. My heart stops racing, my head clears, shame loosens its grip. Knowing I am loved pulls me back out of the shame mud.

Ignatian Spiritual Exercises Guide, Dale Gish writes "when we enter the shame spiral, we are invited to choose a different movement, one that turns us towards God, that quenches our shame in love. This movement moves us towards freedom, out of bondage, and into a deeper relationship with God. This is not an easy movement. The shame spiral is likely a well-worn path in your psyche. But with God there is freedom.”^[ii]

Gish invites us to see the prodigal son as a guide in this movement. Instead of wallowing in the mud of shame, he gets up, returns to his father and is received with a loving embrace.

In the moment of shame, we can turn and allow ourselves to be embraced. Instead of flitting around like a hummingbird from branch to branch, from self-judgment to judgment, we need to pause, to settle ourselves. To be still and receive.

Photo by Chris Charles on Unsplash

Repentance is a turning away from everything that denies the light and the eternity in which life is rooted. It is a returning to a reverence for the glory that is in each one of us and in all that has been born of the mystery of God.

~ J. Philip Newell