The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves

It is the emotional weapon that evil uses to (1) corrupt our relationships with God and each other, and (2) disintegrate any and all gifts of vocational vision and creativity.

Shame is a primary means to prevent us from using the gifts we have been given. And those gifts enable us to flourish as a light-bearing community of Jesus followers who work to create space for others who wish to join it to do so. Shame, therefore, is not simply an unfortunate, random, emotional event that came with us out of the primordial evolut

Healing shame requires our being vulnerable with other people in embodied actions. There is no other way, but shame will, as we will see, attempt to convince us otherwise.

Combating shame requires more work than you might imagine.

This book, therefore, is not just a book about shame. It is a book about storytelling—the stories we tell about ourselves (which of course include others and especially God), how we tell them and, more importantly, the story that shame is trying to tell about us.

To effectively enter into the healing of shame requires us to know the place it holds in our story as a human race, and that requires us to know which story, exactly, we believe we are living in.

Some may be familiar with the idea of our having a narrator that is infrequently quiet, informing us of the life we are living, and not always using only words. Each of us lives within a story we believe we occupy.

we live our lives telling stories; in fact, we don’t really know how to function and not tell them. We tell them for many reasons. We do so not just to describe what we are doing but to make sense of what we have done.