Is Shame Something to Resist—or to Reconsider? - Lecture 1

What is shame, and why does it shape us so deeply? Shame is a shared human experience, yet we struggle to describe it. In some cases, we sense that we should not feel ashamed, and yet we do. In other cases of moral wrongdoing, a lack of shame, or at least the ability to experience it, is often deemed problematic. To be shameless is viewed as a moral deficiency in such circumstances. 

Scripture only deepens the complexity. Across both the First and Second Testaments, the Bible seems to present the experience of shame as something integral to the human experience— and as something we should not resist.

In this Friday Night Lecture, Dr. S. J. Parrott will explore the dynamics of shame, what it contributes to our moral psychologies, and how Scripture can reorient our thinking about shame in order to consider how we find out who we are, and who gets a say in the process.

Friday Night Lectures feature three short and engaging talks woven together with live Q&A, brief intermissions, and time for conversation. Join us for a warm, welcoming atmosphere and meaningful reflection on compelling questions within the Christian tradition. 

ABOUT OUR SPEAKER

S. J. Parrott completed her DPhil in Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford after obtaining two master's degrees at Regent College in Vancouver. She specializes in topics of shame, ethics, human formation, rhetoric, prophetic and poetic literature, and more.

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Transcript

Tony Bolos 0:00

So, tonight's conversation is brought to you by Upper House Commons. It is an arm of the foundation that seeks to gather the university community for spiritual and intellectual formation. And tonight's topic is on shame. And as you probably know, this is an incredibly difficult subject and one that is felt on a deeply personal level by many of us here. The conversation tonight will, I think, highlight a theological understanding of shame and shed new light on this important topic. Our speaker tonight is Dr. Parrott, who is currently an assistant professor at Trinity Western University. I thought it was in Vancouver, it's just east of Vancouver in Canada. She holds a D Phil from the University of Oxford and two master's degrees from Regent College in Vancouver. She has recently published on the prophetic metaphors of clothing and unclothing, and her current project examines the moral value of shame in the Psalms. Would you please join me in welcoming our speaker tonight?

S.J. Parrott 0:59

Good evening, everyone. I am so grateful that you've given up your Friday night to be here with me and to talk about a very difficult subject. And I trust that Christ is going to do something in all of us tonight. That's my hope. What is at stake tonight in these talks? I assume you are all here because you have, at a minimum, some interest in tonight's topic, shame. Depending on your level of interest or experiences of shame, perhaps very little or very much is at stake for you personally. And I take that very seriously, the effect that shame has on us and on our lives and on our communities. My research in this area finds its origin many years ago in the struggle that I had with shame and self-hatred. At the time I didn't realize I was going to end up researching it, but this was a very real issue in my life too. So know that it comes from that place. I trust that some here tonight have had or are currently going through debilitating experiences of shame that you struggle to talk about or you know somebody who does. For me to come up and simply present to you my research on shame in the Psalms as an intellectual endeavor, I think will be disappointing, if not a little bit rude, because of the nature of this topic. This topic matters, and therefore my research matters, but what matters more to me tonight, and maybe possibly hopefully for you, is to better understand the phenomenon of shame in your life too, how faith fits into that picture and how to how to manage and mitigate it in your life. I hope I'm not totally off base in thinking this, uh, because it's how I've kind of framed my lectures tonight. But there's also more at stake. For the topic of shame is one which affects our understanding of ourselves, the role that others play in shaping who we are, and the role that faith plays in determining who we are. This is not a simply intellectual thing about understanding shame, neither is it simply a me and Jesus thing in isolation from others. Understanding shame helps us understand how our identities are constructed as humans in relation. A deeper understanding of shame can help us mitigate our experiences of shame and more importantly, work through them with dignity and confidence in who we are in the context of a relationship with God. What is also at stake in a deeper understanding of shame is thus a capacity to experience shame reveals that who we are is not totally up to us. We are not the final authority on the person we are, contra all that society and culture would suggest. And this is crucial to our constitution as humans in relation with ourselves, with one another, and most importantly, with the trying God. God has created us such that the perspectives of others might be able to influence how we see ourselves, see one another, and how we see the world. This is a good thing, as we can all get it wrong about ourselves. This is a bad thing as others can get it wrong about us too. But there is a best thing in all of this, and that is the perspective of God, which sees all aright, and thus is the plumb line for the navigation of identity. Indeed, God's perspective of us is how we will move forward from shame toward transformation. All this will become clear in due course, I hope. Here's our agenda for tonight. In our first lecture together, I will present a basic understanding of what shame is, and my understanding is drawn from my research in the field of moral philosophy. Why am I using moral philosophy to understand shame? In all the reading that I have done, philosophy has provided the most robust account of shame that is able to account for the varied experiences of shame. Our second lecture is going to go deeper into the construction of our identities as humans in relation and some of the broader concepts shame is related to, with the second half locating the discussion in the Psalms or of one particular psalm. And our final lecture, it'll be the most, so to speak, practical, uh, and it will focus on how to move forward from shame toward transformation and will spell out how these two concepts are related. Another way to think about the agenda. As a good academic, I know to end an introduction by stating what I am not doing tonight. What I'm not talking about today is shaming, acts of shaming, the attempt to make others feel shame through some action or discourse against them. This is distinguishable from the experience or the emotion of shame. I'm not dealing with acts of shaming today. What concerns me is the emotion of shame, which is both self-conscious and social. How we experience shame and how we move forward from it is what interests me, irrespective of how that comes about. Shaming is an important topic. And if you know somebody who's experienced shaming, then I do offer truly, these aren't just nice words, my deep sympathy for you, because such an experience is rarely justifiable and can be extremely damaging. Acts of shaming are prevalent online and hurting our used as well as parents and ourselves. And as important as that topic is, acts of shaming are not the topic of our discussion today. I also won't be discussing guilt or honor today, which often come to mind when you talk about shame. Shame is different than guilt, indeed, though when guilt occurs, shame often can but not always occur and makes the two a little bit hard to distinguish at times. In contrast, when shame occurs, this may have nothing to do with guilt. And often is such the case. With respect to honor, honor and shame are often presented as a dichotomy, but one that is in more recent research found to be a false one. And indeed, in the Hebrew Bible, there is no dichotomy between honor and shame. We could talk about that if we want. I will suggest instead that the counterpart to shame in the Hebrew Bible is not honor, but rather acknowledgement or recognition. And in the Psalms in particular, this has to do a lot with trust. Words of trust are presented as the antonym. More graspable might be the word respect. We'll be talking about this a lot. So having said all the things that we are not going to do, let's get to what we are going to be doing. Moral philosopher Krista Thomason describes shame as a Jekyll and hide emotion. On the one hand, it can help regulate moral life and thus can be positive. It's felt when someone is not the kind of person that they want to be. On the other hand, there is a darker side to shame, one which we experience when we feel when we have a different sort of self-perception. It is felt about being ugly, low class, uneducated, having sex, nakedness, bodily functions. Victims of violence can experience this sort of shame too. This other side of shame is not typically to do with morality, but centers around how someone is perceived by themselves and others. A wide variety of experiences can therefore precipitate shame, which means shame stirs up a lot of varied emotions, memories, and experiences. This also means that the average person lacks the ability to state exactly what shame is. To be able to point at something and say, that, that's it, that shame, or to be able to define it. So we could begin with a little survey and no shame to raise your hand. Who here has experienced shame? Yeah, everybody's hand should be up. Who here can confidently define it for me? And would your definition encompass all experiences of shame, or only your experiences of shame, or only one of your experiences of shame? Shame is very difficult to define because such a wide variety of experiences can cause it. And one situation that causes shame in one person will not necessarily in another. What precipitates shame does come down to the individual, their personal histories, their personality traits, their characteristics. And yet, despite this, I believe we can talk about shame in an intelligent way. And philosophy is the best way, best avenue I have found to do so. This is because many philosophers study, or at least some, study shame phenomenologically. Fancy way of saying that they approach shame by focusing on subjective, conscious experience, how it manifests itself in our lived world and experience. And so here I follow Krista Thomason's definition of shame, which I will flesh out afterwards. When we feel shame, we feel a tension between our self-conception and our identity. More specifically, we feel that some feature of our identity eclipses, overshadows, or defines our self-conception. Now, by self-conception, Thomason means my own sense of who I am. A self-conception is what we can conceive of, construct, and build as an identity for ourselves. Self-conceptions can be global and static across time and space, and they can also be local and dynamic for a particular moment and place. For example, a local and dynamic self-conception might be the case for a police officer. On duty, they might have a self-conception that could consist of things like authoritative, strong, certain, which is also embodied in the uniform that they wear, drawing a little bit of my research on clothing in. Off-duty, off-duty, the police officer might have a self-conception that's more like, or that might include they are not authoritative, but they're submissive to their partner or friends. They're uncertain or find it hard to make decisions in their personal life. They're very gentle. I have personally known a few police officers or the equivalent of SWAT team members, and I've always been surprised by their gentleness off duty in contrast to the stories they shared with me and what they must do at work. An example of something that would carry across time and space might be honesty, loyalty, punctuality. The point is that a self-conception is our own sense of who we are, whether it is global and static or local and dynamic. To make the definition even more simple, we could say that shame occurs when we feel defined or overshadowed by some aspect of our identities. Now, crucial in this definition is the word feel. In the experience of shame, we feel that our self-conceptions are undermined in some way. And the manner in which they are undermined is the manner in which we feel defined. The word feel is important because that because what we feel shame about may or may not be true about ourselves. Such is often the case when we experience shame through acts of shaming or at the hands of our enemies. Thomason's definition will make more sense as we explore her understanding of identity more broadly conceived. And important to note now, identity is a huge topic studied in many fields, and thus what I present in a mere 20 minutes or so is by no means comprehensive in general or even of Thomason's view on the topic, but identity and identity formation is a topic that I have worked on or worked in, pardon me, for some years now, and was related to my doctoral work and my monograph. One's identity is comprised of various aspects that can be categorized. These are categories we make up, but it helps us understand identity. Not every single aspect of identity will be discussed here, simply the more general categories that we can place these aspects already mentioned. One as is one aspect and an aspect and a very important one, which is how one sees oneself, what Thomason and myself call self-conception. To repeat what I just stated, a self-conception is my own sense of who I am. This is what we conceive of, construct, and build as an identity for ourselves, and can be across time and space or in a particular moment and place. You all came here tonight with a self-conception, and you have one everywhere you go. Another category we can discuss with respect to identity are the features of ourselves that are unchosen or contingent upon one's history. We could call these features non-voluntary, which means we don't pick these aspects, they simply are. These and more are features that are unchangeable. They're facts. Facts which we may or may not choose to acknowledge, may deny, may try to change in a certain sense. For example, I may distance myself from my family because I had a bad childhood. I may never talk to my parents or family again, and maybe I don't even view them or understand them to be my family anymore. This means that my family has no place in my self-conception either. But the fact that these are my parents, to use the old-fashioned phrase, the fact that I'm the fruit of their loins, that is categorically unchangeable. And the shame that one can feel about one's family is often deeper or can be deeper than the shame one can feel about oneself. The next category is how one comes across to others of identity, identity broadly conceived, which is derivative from our actions and behaviors and how these are interpreted from by others. While we often do not perceive our actions and behaviors as saying something about ourselves, they are some of the key means for others to interpret who we are. While we often do not realize it, our actions and behaviors can say something about us that contradicts or contrasts how we think of ourselves. Now, this is not a matter of simply being a hypocrite. And it's important to make the point, we cannot control how we come across to others because everyone is in charge of their own interpretation. For example, whether I do so consciously or unconsciously, being unthoughtful in my communication can cause me to come across to others as rude, who will interpret me accordingly, which may not correspond to my own self-conception that I am polite. If I learn of the fact that others think of me as rude, this may undermine my self-conception of myself as polite and cause me shame. Or perhaps I and my friends think that I am patient and polite in my communication, and I am. But one day my friend overhears me talking to a customer service agent on the phone, and I am angry, rude, and unfair in my conversation with the agent. The presence of my friend seeing me talk this way wrenches me out of my fury and prompts me to see uh to see me from her perspective. I feel defined by my anger and venomous words to the exclusion of my usual self-conception that I am polite and I wonder if my friend will ever look at me the same. When shame is related to our actions and behaviors, we might say to ourselves about ourselves, I can't believe I said that. I can't believe I did that. What kind of a person am I? Who was that person today? That's not me. I'm not like that, am I? Why did I do or say that? What was I thinking? Will my partner, my friend, my whoever it might be, be able to look at me the same way ever again? A final category to consider is that of religion, and tonight that is specifically Christianity. Now the next lectures will deal more directly with faith with respect to shame, so my comments right now are going to be brief. For some, faith is simply another category of identity, religious identity, one that stands alongside these other categories that I mentioned. For others, faith is so central that it encompasses all the other categories into itself, and that will be our understanding tonight. And I will suggest to you now and tonight that scripture presents this latter option as the optimal one. As Paul writes, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, as well as my life, and therefore my identity are hidden in Christ. This sort of understanding of faith and its outworkings in one's life influences one's self-conception and one's understanding of these other categories of identity that I mentioned. Every other aspect of identity is under this umbrella of identity in Christ, and as I said, we'll spend our whole final lecture on this very topic, so stay tuned. To recap, under the concept of identity broadly conceived are the aspects just discussed: self-conception, unchosen or contingent parts of our identity, the way we come across to others, and adherence to faith or religion. What's crucial to grasp in order to understand the experience of shame is that unchosen or contingent parts of our identity, the way we come across to others, and our adherence to faith or religion may or may not be part of our self-conception. Moreover, and importantly, the key thing to remember is that, and here I quote Thomason, attitudes towards one's non-voluntary identities do not determine once and for all, um do not determine once, pardon me, I need to quote it again, non-voluntary identities do not determine once and for all whether they are part of who one is, by which Thomason means part of one's self-conception. My attitude or feelings towards my faith, my family, my appearance, my social class, my race, my body, how others perceive and categorize me, these may or may not be part of my self-conception, my own sense of who I am. My own sense of who I am is determined by me. You have one. You just have a self-conception, how you understand yourself in a moment. And it may include aspects from these other categories and it may not. And this may change depending on context and people. Importantly, our self-conception of ourselves may not always be accurate. This is the most obvious in the case of the arrogant person, but also in the person who has a negative self-conception of worthlessness or similar. Let's return. Oh, sorry, always a slide behind in my classes. Um let's return to Krista Thomas's definition. When we feel shame, we feel a tension between our self-conception and our identity. More specifically, we feel that some feature of our identity eclipses, overshadows, undermines, or defines our self-conception. Usually what we feel defined by comes through the perspective of an other. Now, that being said, it is possible for an uh that another person to experience shame without another person being present. We can be our own audience. We can have a fantasy audience. Additionally, it can at times be that a place or an object or an imaginary conversation can all be enough to trigger shame, but usually in those cases, there has to be a history enough in the experience of shame for those things to trigger the experience of it. Key to note here, however, is that the perspective of another of us or whomever they are perceiving may also not be accurate. You can see how this all gets very tricky. Now, I've already given some examples. The best way to talk about shame is through examples. Um, and and so I've already given some, but now I want to bring this understanding a little bit more to life by giving you three examples that the two are fictitious, the first two are fictitious, I've just made them up, and the last one will be from my own life. So, example one. I am born with a big nose. I do not believe my nose to be ugly, nor do I believe it to be a hindrance in my life. And in fact, as an adult, I have come to appreciate my big nose. It gives me a certain look of European culture, as my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother all have similar noses, and it reflects my European heritage. By and large, I don't think about my nose because it's not a problem to me. I am with friends one night at a bar having drinks. We're talking about relationships, and one of my closest male friends is there, a friend who I've known for many years and we know each other well, and he's talking about his dating woes, and he says, I'm not looking for the perfect woman in any way, physically, intellectually, or anything. She could be rounder or plain or not the top of her class or not terribly funny or whatever. I just can't handle big noses. It's the one deal breaker I have. I just couldn't kiss a face with a big old thing in the way. My face turns red, and I'm hit with a wave of shame about my big nose. He looks at me a second or two later when he He realizes what he has said, and his face reveals that he feels bad about his misplaced comment, which wasn't about me, but he sees it has affected me. He also turns red, he also looks away. I feel many things in that moment. Betrayed, shocked, paralyzed, exposed, confused, but mainly I feel like I am my nose and that my nose is me, and that's it. I want to hide so everyone stops staring at my nose. I excuse myself and leave the table not knowing if I'll actually go back. I feel shame at the idea of going back and being my nose at the table and having everyone stare at it and feel pity for me. I feel shame at the idea of not going back and what my friends will say about me and my nose if I don't. I want to disappear. I leave the bar and start to think frantically about how many men have thought this way about my nose and never called me back. I feel shame for feeling shame about my nose because I actually like it. Example number two. I'm in a grocery store shopping and I'm using my own tote bag, carrier bag, I don't know what you call them here, to gather items before going to the self-checkout. And I suddenly have the idea that when I use the self-checkout, I won't scan all the items. I'll leave some at the bottom of the tote bag I'm carrying and I won't pay for them. That way it looks like I've paid because I'm scanning things, but in reality, I won't have paid for all the items I'll walk out of the store with. It's a casual thought to start, but then I get to the self-checkout and I start to scan my items. I leave two or three small items at the bottom of my tote bag, and I feel confident their shape can't be seen from the outside, but I am nervous inside that someone can see through the bag to what's in there. My heart is pounding as I press the pay button and tap my card on the card machine. I can't believe what I'm doing, what am I doing? I'm stealing, I can't believe I'm doing this, I say to myself in my head. The payment goes through, I take the receipt, I walk quickly but not frantically out of the store. I get outside and I practically run home. When I get there I experience shame. The products that remain in the bottom of my topic seem to stare at me and scream, You're a thief. Now if my shame is great enough in that moment, I may never do it again. I may experience shame so strongly I never shop at that store again, for the store will make me experience shame possibly if I go there. I'll feel defined by the fact that I'm a thief. Now if I do go back to the store again, I might experience some shame. The place reflects back to me that I'm a thief. But going back going back may do something surprising, and I'll be tempted to do it again. I got away with it the first time, perhaps I can again. So I steal again. And then the next time I go and again and again and again and again. I feel nothing now when I steal. I pay for most of the items, just a few of them that I don't. Then one time I am caught. I had just exited the store with my bake of half paid items when a manager or undercover shopper runs after me and asks me to come back into the store with my unpaid items. I experience a tremendous wave of shame. I am a thief, now a caught one, and the only way I can see myself is how the man at the store sees me, a caught thief. I will have some sort of record showing that I am a thief, I think. I am repentant, I apologize for the wrong I've done, I give the items back, I sign a piece of paper saying I won't shop at the stop at the store for six months, and I go home and I cry. Now those examples were ones that I came up myself. Um and now I want to tell you a personal experience that I had. Um met a good friend of mine named Blake in Vancouver in 2014. We did our master's there together, also an American from Detroit. And uh so we met in 2014 at in Vancouver at Regent College, and then when I went to Oxford in 2018, he was already there doing his PhD. So we had known each other for two or three years, then we reunited there. Very good friend of mine. I respect him in every way I could possibly respect a person. His thoughts, his care, he's very humble, he's very intellectual, very um gentle, everything. And I trust his thoughts and I trust his opinion. We're going to a wedding one day, a friend of ours is getting married, and we're walking down the streets of Oxford, and there's churches everywhere. So there's a wedding we're going to, and there's a wedding on the other side of the street that's also happening. He looks at the crowd and he says to me, Shannon, what do you think of the fascinators that the women are wearing? Now, if you don't know what a fascinator is, it's this funny sort of hat that women wear in England. They're, I think, traditionally kind of small, but they get very elaborate. If you watch any of the royal weddings, you'll have seen these elaborate hats that some of them wear, and they they fasten it, they fasten to your head. I guess that's why they're called a fascinator. They're very distinct. They're very distinct, and we don't do this in North America. So he said, Shannon, you see the fascinators. What do you think of the fascinators on these women? And I said, Well, I don't know. Like I know that's a tradition in England, but I don't like them. I just think that they look funny and I wouldn't wear one. And he looked at me and he said, Of course you have an opinion about that. And I said, What do you mean? Of course I have an opinion about that. And he said, Well, you have an opinion about everything. And I said, What do you mean I have an opinion about everything? And he said, Well, you're just sharing your opinions all the time. And at that point, we had gotten to the church and we went into the church, church that to for the wedding we were going to, and I couldn't tell you what happened in that ceremony because the whole time I was sitting there, I was thinking about the fact that Blake said that I was opinionated. And I had this was not part of my self-conception, and this is not part of how I saw myself, but I um felt defined in a sense by his words. Now, in that moment, I actually didn't experience shame. I'm sharing the story anyways. I didn't experience shame because at that point I had healed so much from my own experiences of shame, and I had actually done so much research. I understood what was happening in me phenomenologically, and I was kind of able to stop it in the moment and hold it at arm's length. Okay, Blake said that I'm opinionated and I'm not gonna be defined by this. I'm gonna hold it here and and and think about this. And that's what I did. For a few days after that, I I contended. This word we'll use a lot tonight. I contended with Blake's perspective of me. And I thought, okay, I trust Blake. I like Blake. I know he wouldn't say something lightly, and I know he wasn't saying something to hurt me. Is this accurate? Is this a part of myself that I don't see and I don't understand? And I talked to friends who knew me well and I prayed about it a lot. And at the end of those few days, I determined that he was right. Now, if I had experienced shame, the things I might have been feeling was, I'm opinionated, this is awful. How many times have I said it in opinion carelessly? How many times have I been wrong? How many times have I made a fool of myself? How many times have I shut other people down? These sorts of these sorts of thoughts might have occurred. And in the days following, I might think I should never share an opinion again. Um you can see the line of thinking that it might go down, had I experienced shame. But I held his opinion out here, and I determined that he was correct. And it actually led to um kind of a re-evaluation, not of myself full stop, but just okay, I'm opinionated, and that could be a good thing, especially in my line of work. We're kind of paid to have opinions about stuff. Um, but I should steward this well. I should be wise, I should be thoughtful, I should know the time and place to share my opinions and when I should perhaps withhold them for whatever reason it might be. I'm gonna leave it there because that's where I was gonna end, anyways, with these three examples. But I hope it's clear that in each of them you can see how a self conception gets defined by some aspect of who you are that's not currently part of your self-conception. So I'll leave it there.