We all know the story of Cinderella—the princess who was neglected, overlooked and taken advantage of by her family, but when she went to the ball dressed elaborate and beautiful, she was easily the most illustrious and noticeable person in the room, and as the story goes she captured the heart of the prince.
Allegorically speaking, what sort of mental agony is comparable to this story?
You may say depression, bipolar disorder, or even anxiety—but those haven’t been neglected and overlooked areas of focus. What I propose is the true Cinderella of mental agony is something which has extreme effects that creep into every area of our lives and causes pain and despair in just living, and that is shame.
Shame is a phenomenon of these times and has received considerably less attention than the other forms of mental agony that haunt our society. Shame plagues the self, and its aftermath is an inability to feel secure and comfortable in just being. In other words, shame causes you to feel like an outcast or plague-ridden for being, simply, you.
In his book, Shame: The Power of Caring, author Gershen Kaufman puts it this way: “Shame itself is an entrance to the self. It is the affect of indignity, of defeat, or transgression, of inferiority, and of alienation. No other affect is closer to the experienced self. None is more central to the sense of identity. Shame is felt as an inner torment, a sickness of the soul. It is the most poignant experience of the self by the self, whether felt in the humiliation of cowardice, or in the sense of failure to cope successfully with a challenge. Shame is a wound felt from the inside, dividing us both from ourselves and from one another.”
Not only is shame a huge problem, but most if not all of us are infected with it. Do you have an image or belief about yourself that causes you to feel unacceptable, unworthy or inadequate? Shame strips a person of all their dignity and tells them that all they are worthy of is rejection, humiliation and alienation. It is an attack on our identity, leaving us feeling wrong for just being you.
Shame cuts us off from our intimacy with God. Despite our knowledge of His love and grace, shame tells us that God could never love a person like you—that we cannot be forgiven, or that we don’t belong to the body of Christ.
How, though, do we address the problem of shame and work towards curing it?
Dennis Humphrey and John D. Erickson, in a lecture at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, draw attention to Jesus’ encounter with the woman at the well in John 4. They point out that Jesus was so effective in his ministry because he was able to separate identity from behavior, just as we should too. Throughout His ministry, He exposed the truth of people's identities and held them accountable for their behavior. They conclude that in order for us to have freedom from our shame we need to expose it by calling it out in community with one another, in a loving and nurturing way.
We have to be careful how we expose this truth, though, as what we attempt to do out of love may come off as shame-causing. So how do we help a friend who is struggling with shame? Well, the root of the problem, as Humphrey and Erickson explain, is that we “cannot grow, develop, and mature when we believe there is something fundamentally wrong with who we are.” Thus, through sharing the love of Christ, we expose and become freed from the shame that tells us it is our identity that is flawed.
Only when we start recognizing this Cinderella of mental agony for what it is will we start working towards redeeming this ‘sickness of the soul’, then becoming freed from its grasp on our lives and identity.
