Breaking The Shame Cycle With The Woman At The Well

Mess To Majesty: Let God Love You In Your Mess book on Amazon

Breaking the Shame Cycle: Jesus, the Woman at the Well, and Living Free (Christian Women 35–55)

This episode explains how shame pushes people away and keeps us stuck in a repeating “shame cycle,” and clarifies the difference between shame (believing we are bad or not enough) and guilt (recognizing we did something bad and can make it right). Using the woman at the well, it shows how Jesus brings hidden pain into the light without shaming her, separating her value from her choices and offering living water, hope, and truth that transforms. The lesson encourages silencing shame by bringing its messages into the light through vulnerability with safe people and first with Father God, using James 5:15–16 to show confession and prayer lead to forgiveness and healing. It also addresses shame culture, urges self-compassion, and teaches noticing emotions without filtering them, separating feelings and choices from identity.

00:00 Shame Pushes People Away
00:41 What Shame Really Is
01:49 The Shame Cycle Explained
02:39 Woman at the Well
04:01 Jesus Breaks Shame
05:57 Bring Shame to Light
06:31 Confession and Healing
07:36 Safe People and God
10:06 Don’t Filter Emotions
11:44 Shame Culture and Identity
13:16 Personal Week Examples
14:14 Uprooting Hidden Messages

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Transcript

Defining Shame Versus Guilt

The Woman At The Well

Shame Brought To Light And Healed

Confession, Prayer, And Safe People

Listening To Emotions Without Filtering

Naming Feelings Without Identity

Daily Examples And Cultural Roots

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Shame pushes other people away, either because we're pushing them away because we don't want them to get too close and find out what we're hiding, or they push us away because they don't want to know what we're hiding. When I was reading back through the first chapter of Mess to Majesty, the story of the woman at the well, the shame cycle kept coming up, that phrase shame cycle. And so wanted to look, what is shame? Why does it keep us stuck? How do we get out of it? Like what is the shame cycle and how does it show up in her story so we can see how it shows up in our story and learn to break out of that cycle. So just before we look at her story, what is shame? Um, shame is not guilt. Um, shame is simply the feeling that we are not enough, that somehow we ourselves are bad. Um guilt is that we did something bad and that we so there's something to fix. Where if it's shame telling us that we are bad, there's not really anything we can fix there because we're we're us, you know, and that's what we're trying. Um so shame tells us to hide. We can't let anybody know what we're struggling with or how things are. Um shame pushes other people away, either because we're pushing them away because we don't want them to get too close and find out what we're hiding, or they push us away because they don't want to know what we're hiding. And I think if we look at there's some things we try to hide that, like if we think about other people, like we know they're hiding stuff, but somehow we think we can hide stuff and not have it be seen. But anyway, so just the shame cycle is that feeling that we're not enough. That is shame. And then the cycle is when we're feeling we're not enough. Is maybe we did something legitimately that we're not proud of. But if we take the shame road and start the shame cycle, then we tell ourselves unhelpful things. We beat ourselves up, in which case we're just reinforcing that that's who we are, and therefore we will make similar choices again, which we feel shame for, and then we beat ourselves up, and then we make those choices. So that's the cycle, just goes round and round and round. Where if we silence the voice of shame, then we can step out of that cycle. Let's look at the woman in the well. Um, we don't know, like we find her in a place of shame. She was shamed by her community, she was shamed by past husbands, um, she was shamed by the Jews. And that's where you find her. Like, we don't know how she ended up there, but we know that she had definitely come to a point of accepting shame as her identity because now she didn't even care if she had a husband. She was okay to just live with the guy. Like she didn't even value herself enough to say, like, I need to be, I need to be a wife, I need commitment from you. Um, so we had no idea how she got there. We just know that's where she's at, and that's where Jesus finds her. And so she's a little bit blown away to begin with, just that he speaks to her, because in that culture, you were shamed just for being a woman. That was all that it that it took. Shame, you're a lesser human in that culture. And yet Jesus, not just a man, but a rabbi, spoke to her. And so that was kind of mind-blowing and maybe helped to break that shame of like, wait a minute, you're acknowledging me when my own people won't acknowledge me. Um so she, you know, engages in the conversation, she's curious. But then when he says, you know, bring your husband back so he can tell you more about this, shame pops up and tries to take control and tries to hide, like, oh no, don't have a husband. Let's not go there, let's not talk about that. And of course, Jesus already knows. And he's fully willing to show her that he knows and that he's not judging her for it. Like he's still engaging, he is still offering her living water, eternal life, hope, even though he knows the shame that she's living in. And that breaks it because the shame was brought to the light, or the you know, the events, the circumstances that the enemy was using to shame her was brought to the light, and see that Jesus didn't care. Jesus wasn't shaming her for those things. She was valuable to him and she was separate from her choices. And shame doesn't let us do that. Shame tells us we are our choices. So if you've made a bad choice, you've made a mistake, just had something legitimately out of your control go wrong, somehow, you're still wrong, is what shame wants to tell you. And of course, that's not not true. So we stay stuck in that shame when we listen to it, when we accept its message that we are not enough and that we are our behavior, rather than we are an eternally valuable being that sometimes does things that need to be repented of and make messes that need to be cleaned up. And we we do sin. Jesus did have to die for us, but it's because we're eternally valuable to him in spite of all the choices that we make. So bringing those feelings and messages that shame is telling us to the light, and by that mean sharing it with someone, share it with someone safe. It takes vulnerability, it takes courage, it takes self-compassion. We have to stop judging ourselves, stop beating ourselves up if we're going to shift from the shame messages. And, you know, a lot of us probably grew up in a shame culture. Um, but before I talk about that, I had a verse, um, James 5, 15 and 16, that I think illustrates why bringing to light what we feel and the messages that we're telling ourselves, why that breaks us out of the shame cycle. Um James 5, 15 and 16. And the prayer offered in faith will restore the one who is sick. The Lord will raise him up. If he has sinned, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man has great power to prevail. So there's emotional wounds with shame. That's where shame lives. But if we confess them to one another, we can be forgiven for what we need to be forgiven for, and we can be healed. Um bring it to the light. And bringing it out can be really scary, especially if you've tried before and that hasn't gone so well. Like maybe it's gone really awful. Um, so part of that is finding safe people. And there might be different people that are safe with different vulnerabilities. Um, like you might have a pretty good relationship with your mom, and you can be vulnerable with her about a lot of things, but she's not really safe to be vulnerable about maybe some childhood wounds. And that's okay. Find someone else that's safe for those things. Um, and same, you know, like it wouldn't have to be woman, it could be a particular friend or whatever. Um, but the best thing is that Father God is safe for all of those vulnerabilities and really encourage you to go there first. Um, because that's not only did Jesus bring the woman's circumstances to light and say, they don't they don't matter to me, he gave her the truth that she was important to him, that she was important enough for the gift that he had to give. And that truth transformed her and actually transformed her whole village because she grabbed onto that truth. So when we take our shame messages and circumstances to the Lord, then he can speak that truth into us. And he's gonna counter the voice of shame, he's gonna silence the voice of shame. And so once we have that, we still need people to heal and we need healing relationships. But getting that truth from the Lord to hang on to in case you share with somebody and it turns out to not go so well, you've got that truth to go back to of I am valuable to him. And you know, the truth for whatever those shame messages were, primarily that you are enough, you were enough that he died for you without you doing anything. So you're enough. Um and if we look at David in the Psalms, he often started in just a messy, messy place, sharing those things with the Lord. But as he shared, I don't think there's a psalm that doesn't end with him coming back to praising the Lord and bless the Lord and God, you're so good. But stuffing that down, which is what shame tells us to do, keeps us stuck because it just keeps stirring around on there. Where we release it, then we can get something different inside. When you're hearing these shame messages and you're paying attention to what emotions are coming up around things, don't filter them. Don't try to make it logical. Um, we are logical in one part of our brain and emotional in another part of our brain. So switching to logic and going, well, that emotion doesn't make any sense is shutting down the process and it's keeping you from getting the information that you need to get from your emotions. The things that create a really big shame storm or just are really overwhelming emotionally probably are tied to things that happened in the past, probably even in childhood. Children don't even have logical thinking, muslat's logical emotional experiences. But they don't need to be logical to give us the information that we need to heal. So don't filter, just pay attention and gather as much information as you can about what you're thinking and what you're feeling in those situations. Like see it as a shame storm, like these messages just swirling all around. But instead of being intimidated and overwhelmed by them, just stop and look and pay attention to what they are. And then we'll learn what do we do with that now? But to learn to sit in it and again, it's separate from you. It's not you, even though that's what Shane's trying to tell you. So if you can step back and watch it, that's like that first step of separating you from what you're feeling, like growing up in a shame culture. Totally normal to hear when you make a choice or and it might even just be kind of injust sometimes, but you do something that you shouldn't have done or whatever, and shame on you. Doing something and being told you're I don't know if I was ever told I was bad, but something I've noticed with my youngest daughter is she'll say, I'm sad, or I'm mad. She's taking on emotion as her identity. And so working with her design, I'm feeling sad. I'm feeling mad, I'm feeling frustrated, um, because it's separate from us. It's not our identity. Our choices aren't, our emotions are not our identity. Um, but so just kind of that shame culture of like you need to perform, you need to um hide your flaws, you need to hide your weaknesses. Um we have a shame culture and it's not healthy. So I guess just kind of sharing that to like be aware and also give yourself the grace that like it's normal, but it's not healthy. Don't condemn yourself for struggling with shame because it's a cultural epidemic. I think it's a human epidemic, really. But so it's normal, but we're gonna break out of it. Looking at my stories from the week in light of the shame cycle to see shame was showing up in day two, telling me that I was too emotional or too needy, kind of the flip side of I'm not enough or I'm too much. Like I'm too much for people to deal with. Shame showing up in day three of just what I have to give isn't good enough. You know, just another version of that, you're not enough. And day four, stay hidden because you're not good enough. Um, and day five was kind of an example of the shame cycle in action, like all these messages that I was telling myself because of my choices and like taking that on as my identity instead of it's just how the day went. Or there's some new school skills I need to learn. Like I do actually need to grow and learn some things. The unintentional messages can be invisible, like something that is part of who you are. They're absorbed from the attitudes and repeated patterns of behavior. So I think that's like part of why shame seems so natural and so normal. It's just absorbed because it's in the culture around us. And those messages that we absorbed can be harder to uproot because they're harder to see, because we've never seen life without them. But Holy Spirit knows and he knows what healthy is, and he will reveal those things to us as we um go along.