Shame: Healthy Shame and Toxic Shame

Adapted from a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Edited from the original recording for readability.

About the eight feelings. The eight-feelings framework discussed in this conversation originates with Dr. Chip Dodd in his book The Voice of the Heart. Sage Hill Counseling uses this framework in its work with permission and gratitude.

Healthy shame, not toxic shame

Shame has gotten such a bad rap in the last several years. Toxic shame deserves the bad rap, but the problem, Dodd says, is that so much of the focus has landed there that healthy shame has been lost. The work Brené Brown has done on the subject is really good. So was the work done before her: back in the eighties, John Bradshaw did a tremendous amount of work on toxic shame in *Healing the Shame That Binds You*, and a lot of the later work is, in many ways, a continuation and even a repetition of what he did — which is great.

Go back further still, to 1957, and you find Erik Erikson — the developmental psychologist who gave us the eight stages of human development, not Milton Erickson the psychiatrist — writing in *The Gifted Child in Society* that this thing called shame needs a lot more study. In 1957 there was not yet a real recognition of what to call this experience, this "shouldistic" kind of experience, because it had been so closely associated with guilt and had produced more conformity than it did real repentance. It is interesting to trace the line: 1957, then 1977, then 1987, and now here in 2017 the culture is dealing with toxic shame in some real rich ways.

Toxic shame defined

If Dodd were to give a two-sentence definition, it would be this: toxic shame is the contempt I have toward myself for having healthy shame. And toxic shame, to be clear, is not a feeling.

Healthy shame is something else entirely. It is an innate, inborn experience of being dependent. It is the neediness feeling. It is not conscious — not unconscious, but *not conscious* — a recognition of being who I am made to be. A child comes out of the womb reaching for connection, crying out in neediness, and then sucking life in with abandon, without measure: I want what I want, when I want it, and I bring it in. That is a human being acting exactly as he or she is made to act, and that is a healthy shame experience.

A young child is not contemptuous toward himself for tears, for reaching and needing connection, or for wanting what he wants when he wants it. There is no pretense in it. There is only contending. Pretending is predicting actions and acting a certain way; contending is going for something. Healthy shame is the identification of ourselves as being human.

From neediness to empathy

Shame begins as neediness, and neediness is what allows the child to coordinate the relationship with the parent — the child is reading the mom, reading the dad, learning how to respond, all of it out of the context of need.

Healthy shame is the recognition within us that we're all made the same. I make mistakes and so do you. And as it matures, it becomes a conscious recognition: I make mistakes and so do you. I have needs. I need you and you need me. I'm not God and you aren't either. I don't have all the answers and you don't either — but I have some. That is why healthy shame is what leads us to sharing. I bring what I've got, you bring what you've got, and let's see what we get. It develops into the recognition that together we are more than we are apart.

That makes healthy shame a huge part of empathy — the recognition that you're like me, and also that I'm not going to understand what it's like to be you. The growth that healthy shame fashions in us is empathy. We are acting in healthy shame as soon as we're born, but then something happens to us over time: we become conscious of a world we don't control and a world that's bigger than us. That consciousness reawakens us to the deeper sense of neediness. It opens us up to being conscious of dependency — wanting to live with you, wanting to be with you, needing you, feeling lonely without you, feeling sad when you're not around, being angry for something, being fearful. It is consciousness of my condition.

From consciousness to conscience

That consciousness leads me to recognize that when somebody does something to me that lends me to being afraid or to being hurt, I will hurt and I will be afraid. Well, duh. But that same consciousness also leads me to a thing called conscience, and conscience is the recognition that what happens to me that I have pain about might affect you in the same way. Sensitivity toward myself when I'm around somebody who matters to me becomes sensitivity toward another. Shame, in that sense, is hugely powerful and hugely needed.

Healthy shame translates into conscience, which is also the capacity for empathy. Without the empathy that starts in healthy shame, there is no such thing as guilt — no such thing as recognizing damage I've done. Guilt is saying: I did something that I possibly meant to do, I regret having done it, and now will I have the courage to admit my human being actions, in the hopes that another human being will grasp in their own sensitivity my sorrow, and be able to give me mercy. Guilt is the recognition that comes out of having the capacity to do something that I would not want somebody to do to me.

Healthy shame and healthy authority

Healthy shame allows us to recognize our own neediness. It carries a real awareness of a power differential. I look at mom, I look at dad; a little bit older, I look at teacher, I look at coach, and I understand there is a healthy authority there for me to submit to. That recognition is healthy shame: my neediness given to you for you to help me achieve something I can't do without you. That is healthy authority — the person desires my good, and is active in getting me the good, even saying no to me at times.

That leads to a real place of tenderness, neediness, and vulnerability, and to the recognition that other people are like me also.

How it gets spoiled

Most of us, though, are more familiar with toxic shame — self-contempt, hatred toward oneself, and even other-centered contempt, contempt toward God, contempt toward anyone who would love me. Why would I want to be in a club that would invite me to participate? Toxic shame is contempt toward myself for being needy, contempt toward myself for not having all the answers.

The very thing that blesses us to be fully alive is the very thing we experience as cursing us to be wounded, because of how we're made. We are made for relationship, created to connect, created to find as much fulfillment as we can have in this life through relationship with God, ourselves, and others. So when neediness reaches out — when I reach out to you hungry to connect, hungry to be cared about, hungry to have needs met, to be touched by your care, encouraged when my courage fades — that neediness is so powerful that it has to be met, or I will fall into a thing called darkness. And we are not made to live in the dark.

Darkness is worse than death for a child, because a child has no conception of death, but a child does have a conception of being alone pretty quickly. The child reaches out, and a hand meets the hand. Sometimes the hand doesn't meet me, I cry, and then the hand finally comes. But when the tears are not enough, when the cry out is no longer heard, when the reach out is ignored or slapped back — or when I'm told that my hunger is somehow negative — my need to be joined is so powerful that if I'm not accepted as I'm created, something else takes its place.

When rejection has only one explanation

When we can't be accepted for who we are, we look for another way in. We start to conform ourselves into whatever we can do to be loved. Toxic shame is the moment that turn becomes a conclusion: the only explanation I have for my rejection is that there's something wrong with me.

Dodd tells the story on himself, and he's careful to say it's a story of life, not a story of accusation. In seventh grade he went out for football. He wasn't prepared. He'd moved from a little elementary school — where football was a junior pro thing, a neighborhood thing, first through sixth grade — to a middle school that mixed a lot of different populations together. He hadn't seen the newspaper, didn't even know practice was happening, and by the time he heard about it the team had been practicing about two weeks. He went home, announced he was going out for football, and told the coach the next day.

That first day he ran over to the practice field with the team in the clothes he'd worn to school and a pair of hard-soled shoes, because the field was half a mile or a mile from the building. He went to watch. It started raining and they all ran back about an hour later. The next day he suited up, the whole thing started moving fast, and he got exhausted. He went to the coach and said, "I can't do this." The coach looked at him and said, "Yes, you can."

Looking back, he can see two things at work in that sentence. There was still enough healthy shame in him to say honestly, I can't. And there was already enough toxic shame that he didn't know how to ask for help, didn't know to say *show me how to do it* — only *I can't do it*. Seventh grade, he notes, is a hell of its own. Even the super popular kids are fading stars by then.

Telling his father

He went home that night knowing he had failed, knowing he had quit, and he had already gotten the message very clearly that you don't quit. Somehow he was soft and his father was hard. His father was successful and he was now suddenly unsuccessful. His mother told him he had to tell his father — something he hadn't thought about when he quit. He said, "Dad, I quit." His father had the most painful look on his face, and instead of seeing that his father was in pain, he saw his father as disgusted with him. What was actually happening was that his father had been put in a position he didn't know what to do with.

So his father went around his back and talked to somebody who talked to the coach. The coach called him and said he was giving him a second chance because his father was so disappointed in him. He remembers thinking: I knew he was disappointed, and now I *know* he's disappointed. Now I know I'm a mess.

What he decided about himself that day was that he was weak — that it was confirmed, that there was something really deficient in him, that he would never be acceptable to his father. Two years later he played football at Central, a school of three thousand, where about a hundred people went out and fourteen were left. He didn't play for football. He played so that he wouldn't go home and say he quit. By then it was life and death, dark versus light.

What shame says in the mirror

Shame says you're not acceptable like this. And instead of asking *what do I need to do to change or grow*, it becomes *I've got to do this thing to be okay* — because you're rejected, or you will be rejected if you don't. Even after ninth-grade football, it still wasn't enough; there was always something else.

When toxic shame looks at us in the mirror — the literal mirror, or the mirror of other people's eyes — we see ourselves as inadequate, incompetent, sickening, pathetic, disgusting, unlovable, rejectable, grotesque, fat, ugly, and dumb. That's a clear motivation. You're dumb, you're inadequate, you should do something about that, and here's the course to follow. Shame condemns us, and then shame hands us a program to work on. If you only lose this weight, you'll be okay. If you only get that grade, you'll be all right. It sets up a ladder-climbing, performance-driven experience — a hamster wheel you can run very hard on.

Toxic shame robs us of how God made us, because it robs us of how we're compelled to create. We're born compelled to create, and toxic shame reaches in, grabs that gift of being compelled, and turns it into drivenness. People who say "I'm driven" are actually saying they're in a cattle herd with cowboys whipping them to market, to slaughter. The idea that I'm a driven person is a self-insult. What's driving you? Your shame — healthy shame translated into toxic shame.

It gets handed down

We're born with healthy shame. Then we run into authority that will not love us for who we are — and that authority is acting out of its own sense of self-rejection. Dodd's father looked at him and thought, *I know what that's like, and I know failure awaits you, so you can't be somebody who quits or disaster is going to occur for you.* His father was reliving his own childhood of impoverishment and how he'd had to climb out of the pit. He was looking at his son out of his own toxic shame, ashamed of his own neediness and certain that his son's neediness would land him somewhere terrible. Surely at some point in his life he'd wanted to quit something and never had the courage to. Drive was the only way to succeed; conquering was the only way to make it. And so it passes on.

Why shame makes sense

We condemn ourselves at early ages. We take on vows — and rightfully, in a way, because we want to be loved and accepted, to belong and to matter, more than anything, and we'll become whoever we need to become in order to belong and matter.

So in a way that seems bizarre but makes total sense, toxic shame is actually a way to make sense of life. Say you're my mother, my father, my teacher, my peers, and you shame me — you look at me with disgust, you say mean things, you ask why I can't be like so-and-so, what's wrong with me. I really need you. You're an authority. You have the food on the table of acceptance and care. If I look at you, the one I need, and conclude that you're mean and bad and inadequate and incompetent as a person, as a parent, as a leader — if you're bad and I'm actually not — then I'm in worse trouble than if I'm bad and you're good.

"I'll call me bad to keep you good"

Run the logic again, because at first it seems bizarre. A child is left with two awful choices. The first, and the worst, is that the person who is supposed to protect and care and provide is incompetent — which means the child is alone in the world. The second choice is only slightly better: I'm the problem. And if I could just change, then this person will be okay.

But that second choice has one enormous advantage. If I'm the problem, I've got control. If you're the problem, I'm helpless. So we will choose self-hatred over helplessness, and it is a smart decision. It's rational. I'll call me bad to keep you good — and there's the hope dynamic right there. Every person does that.

From then on, I start working for you, watching your face to see how good I'm doing, because I know you're good and if I won't be bad anymore, then I'll be good, and then you'll be good with me, and then we're all going to be okay. That sets up the gerbil wheel, the ladder of performance. Most people's lives are lived in toxic shame, running from the sensitivity of being alive with other people.

Great things done out of toxic shame

People do a great deal of good out of toxic shame. Winston Churchill was an alcoholic, perhaps a narcissist, and he participated in saving the world. Sigmund Freud was, by report, zealous for fame and for fitting in. Even the people who are hell-bent on doing good so that they'll be loved and accepted can look very humble. Jimmy Swaggart is one figure who comes to mind.

Much of that drive to be kind, to be good, comes out of a self-concept of needing to be the right kind of person. That is should-driven living, and should-driven is very different from desire-driven. We are created to do what we need to do and what we want to do — believe it or not — not what we should do, and that throws a lot of people out of whack. The fear is that if people start doing what they need and want, society will come apart. But what I am born needing to do is to be sensitive to who you are, out of the recognition that you and I are just alike. That's what we need to be like. We need healthy shame and humility.

Shamelessness: the other face of toxic shame

Toxic shame does not only show up as self-contempt. It also masquerades as shamelessness.

Healthy shame is humility, and humility is the recognition that we're made out of dirt — hummus, humility, dirt people. We may be stardust, but the conviction here is that we are divinely created, and still created. In other words, I didn't make myself. I was made. I'm powerless over how I'm made. That's humility. Then comes another humble discovery: that I am made like a relationship, made like others, to be like others — and that I cannot fulfill myself. I am made to be fulfilled, but I am powerless to fulfill myself.

That is a big idea. I can climb Mount Everest and it will not fulfill me. It will be a moment, a success, a victory, an accomplishment. But without deep relationship with other people, without deep intimacy with God, fulfillment is not possible; gratification is not possible. And because of where we live, even the way we are made cannot be completely fulfilled. So the healthiest life is living with others together in powerlessness, while still having desire to live and still risking taking control of our lives — making choices out of how we're created. The notion of the self-created, self-made person is a joke. There's no such thing.

When a person becomes contemptuous toward healthy shame, they become a-shamed — the letter *a* meaning "without." Toxic shame means being without healthy shame. And when a person gets sick and tired of hating themselves, sick and tired of kowtowing to others, sick and tired of having to prove themselves and achieve, they still can't go home to how they're made, because facing that they are human and that they feel is like death. Healthy shame is sensitivity to being lonely, hurt, sad, fearful — and if I have no home to go to, that sensitivity is unbearable. So the escape from toxic shame becomes shamelessness: no admission of having any shame at all, no contempt of self, the world is the problem. Shamelessness is a complete rejection of any kind of shame whatsoever. Such people are actually embarrassing themselves while pointing their fingers at everyone else and saying, you're the problem.

And because shameless people carry no shame, the people around them have to feel it for them. Shameless parents leave their children with tremendous toxic shame.

The giant four-year-old

Michael, the boss on *The Office*, is a picture of this. He desperately wanted to be loved, and said outright that work was just a place where we come to have friends — I'm the boss, and I want everyone to like me. In almost every episode you have to turn your head, curl into a ball a little, and hold yourself, because you feel embarrassed for him. He's shameless: no recognition of what he's doing to other people, shameless even with goodness and kindness and gifts. He's like a giant four-year-old. That shamelessness is a lack of consciousness, a lack of awareness of self and of others, and it makes for uncomfortably funny comedy.

It's worth naming what's underneath: people struggling through adult life while presenting extremely immature pictures of love and wisdom and care and passion. Healthy shame and humility, by contrast, are the doorway into greatness. They are how you become who you're made to be so you can do what you're made to do.

The way back

The doorway back to how we're made is usually that first beatitude: blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who fall off the ladder of success. Blessed are those who come to the place of saying, I climbed Mount Everest and all I found was a lack of air, a flag, and the fact that I had to come back down. I had everything I was ever made to have, and it wasn't enough.

Remember the king in the gospel who held a banquet. He invited the successful people, the ones who had it going on, the ones who had the stuff — and none of them came, because none of them needed to come. When the king realized no one had come to eat from his banquet, he sent his servant into the streets to bring in the blind, the lame, the crippled, and the beggars. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they will be invited to come to the king's feast, and in so doing, they will see.

The toxic shame agenda

The pursuit of achievement does nothing to relieve toxic shame — in fact, defeat only deepens it. When we set up what Dodd calls a toxic shame agenda — *if I do these things, then I will finally be successful* — we are guaranteed to fail, either because we do all those things and it still isn't enough, or because we can't reach the pinnacle at all. He points to the athlete's podium: the silver medal is said to feel worse than the bronze, because with silver you almost got the gold, while with bronze you almost didn't medal at all. But under toxic shame, it is never enough just to make it to the Olympics.

The pattern starts early. We come into life as pure-hearted, needy people who become aware of ourselves and, in doing so, become aware of other people. Ideally there is someone, or several someones, who say yes — you're made right. They affirm and confirm who we are, who God made, in what Dodd calls our nicheiness. That is encouragement, and encouragement means helping a person to full-hearted participation.

But none of those people are perfect, and all of them carry shame of their own makeup. So we can't help but run into people — parents, teachers, coaches, friends' parents, youth pastors, bosses — who need us to be a certain way in order for them to be okay. And we make a choice: in order to belong and matter to somebody, we agree to be less than ourselves and strive to be who they want us to be, or who the system wants us to be, in order to be loved, accepted, and valued. That becomes a driven compulsion — to achieve, to perform, to should, to caretake, to people-please, to approval-seek, whatever can be done to make ourselves acceptable. That is toxic shame.

Exposure, and being loved anyway

And then it doesn't work. We fall flat on our faces, or we get exposed, because the striving is exhausting. Most of us turn to some other thing to manage it — that is addiction. As Dodd puts it, as soon as you have toxic shame, you are addicted. We play performance, we get exposed, and then we find out we are still loved. He contends that the cure to toxic shame is precisely this: once we are exposed, we discover that somebody still loves us. It is a return to God and a discovery of others. We are in a position of need, and there it is.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven — blessed are those who have to go back to where they got started and ran away from themselves. When they reach out and cry out and are hungry to take in, God says yes, absolutely. Welcome to the kingdom of heaven. Here is the life you were trained to run away from, or the life you decided to run away from. I'm right here. I love you. Let's start getting this. God does for us what we were never meant to do for ourselves in our own aloneness.

Why some won't take the love

Dodd works in the field of accepting love or rejecting love, and some people, even when love and forgiveness are offered, will not take them. They would rather hold on to their toxic shame, because toxic shame promises control: if I do better, become more, then I'll be in charge. That person has not admitted that they are powerless over life. So they hang on to shame and continue to demand that the world fit into their schema.

Which means they must become greater and greater and greater, or drunker and drunker and drunker, or smaller and smaller and smaller. The men and women at the top end up living with the secret that if you really knew me, I wouldn't have this place, I wouldn't be esteemed, loved, valued, appreciated. The people at the bottom hide themselves in holes so deep that they can't be known — in order to survive. When it comes to the interior life, there's no difference between the rich and the poor except that the rich have it worse: they have enough money to know the money won't fix it, while the poor can hang on to the fantasy that if this and that happened, then it would be okay. Nobody escapes neediness.

So the hope for a new year is to find people who love us as we are — to simply become our wonderfully God-created, failed selves.

The beauty of healthy shame

The solution begins with healthy shame, which makes us sensitive to how we're made. The lost son came to his senses. He came into neediness, into need — *what am I doing?* That awakening was not yet a complete confession of his true heart. It was more like: I've got to find a way out of here, I want this pig slop, I need to get back to daddy, and here's what I'm going to tell him, here's what I'm going to do. He was still acting in toxic shame and shamelessness — I'll figure out how to act right now. And his father told him he didn't have to do that. Don't act right. The grace is sufficient; I'm just glad you're home. Then the other brother goes haywire in his own shamelessness and toxic shame. Both are given the opportunity to return to being loved as they are, to having somebody want good for them as they are.

The hope is that both sons would wake up to the healthy shame that leads a person to recognize: I am capable of making decisions and doing things — actions I take or thought processes I have — that actually harm other people, that carry harm in them or intent to harm. Healthy shame leaves us with a sensitivity to that capacity. I'm capable of making mistakes. I'm not God. I don't have all the answers. I need you, and you need me.

So I can really harm you, say mean things to you, and then wake up and think: if that were me, it would have really hurt to hear those words. That is sensitivity to being human, and also recognizing that you are human too, because you're like me. That is empathy, conscience. And so I go and admit it: I meant to do what I did, I meant to say those words, I did it because I hated you for whatever I thought you were doing, so I made you pay — and for that, I'm really sorry. It is doing unto others as I would have them do unto me, once I've come to my senses, come to my feelings, come to my heart, come to my neediness.

Shame is about being; guilt is about doing

Guilt is the feeling we have whenever we do something that causes another person harm — healthy shame means I'm capable of feeling and being conscious of what I do. Shame is about my being; guilt is about my doing, my actions. We seek forgiveness for things we do. We never, ever need to seek forgiveness for how we are made. Toxic shame is always saying, *forgive me for how I'm made*. Healthy shame says, because I'm made like this, there's a high chance I'm going to harm you — and when I do, let me know, and when I can see it and come to my senses, I'll tell you I'm sorry. Guilt, then, is a feeling that sets us free — and there isn't much room for genuine guilt in our society.

In a culture where there is no higher authority than how you make me feel — and where I get to decide what you make me feel — the church often struggles to translate the difference. Because we talk about toxic shame and never learn to speak of healthy shame, healthy shame ends up sounding hopelessly uncool, and so does guilt. Dodd notes he has sat through plenty of church services where people claimed to be talking about healthy shame and were simply shaming people, calling it humility when it was nothing of the kind.

False humility

What passes for humility is frequently its counterfeit. It is the person who catches on that people want him to act a certain way, that people will accept him more if he performs, that if he does this, people are really going to dig it. It shows up in something as small as a person who cannot receive a compliment and say thank you. That kind of false humility is maddening, and it is not the real thing.

The humility of facing my greatness

Healthy shame is also the humility of being able to face my greatness — my giftedness. Ask most people to name something about themselves that is absolutely, freakishly gifted, and the immediate response is embarrassment. Underneath that embarrassment is fear: fear of being judged, fear of what happens if people find out. That is a clear picture of how healthy shame slides into toxic shame. If I let people know what I'm really good at doing, I'm going to get kicked in the face. And the fear is not only of others knowing — it extends to letting myself know. To acknowledge that I am great at something is to set myself up for disappointment when other people won't see it, and from there the move is straight from shame into perfectionism and into the right to be alone. Whatever I'm great at isn't going to fix much in your life anyway; it isn't going to make your life better. So it breaks the rules to be needy, and it breaks the rules to be great.

For many people there is also the story that the spotlight can only shine on one person. To step into the spotlight is to enter competition — for provision, for love, for the ability to get needs met. It is not an ensemble cast; it's a one-person show. That deep story says there is not enough room.

Usain Bolt and the enjoyment of a gift

Dodd offers a different image. Visiting Usain Bolt's hometown in Jamaica, he heard people talk about how Bolt didn't get a pair of running shoes until he was thirteen — he was fleet afoot early, he could run, and he simply kept running. When Bolt won his first Olympics and struck his arrow pose, Dodd sees healthy shame: the enjoyment of a gift of greatness and the celebration of something incredible. In that same race Bolt was on world-record pace and slowed up to enjoy the moment and look around. If he were really only after being the best, he wouldn't have slowed down. He is after doing it. He knows he is gifted, he knows he is needy, he is grateful, and he enjoys being in his giftedness. He also recognizes some limitations and is willing to lose. Dodd is careful to say he isn't claiming Bolt has it perfect — only that he embodies what healthy shame is about.

Healthy shame, then, is not the humility of pretending I'm no good. It is not phony toxic shame or sickening false humility. It is being fully human, enjoying being fully human, and being okay in neediness.

Repentance

There is a word for the return, though it has been badly tainted. Along the way of trying to make myself a god, of protecting myself, of rejecting love and care from others — which is exactly what toxic shame does — I have harmed people. To turn away from toxic shame and turn toward how I'm created, to go home again, is repentance. That grotesque, abused word names something essential: healthy shame is the inborn capacity to live fully human, and guilt is the capacity to return to being fully human again. Repentance is a gift we have been given to live daily. Alcoholics Anonymous practices it in the tenth step — the daily personal inventory, the short list of my actions: where I need to say I'm sorry, where I need to say I'm hurt, and where I need to say, man, I really did well there.

That daily practice runs against the common instinct to look to some system outside ourselves — an institution, government, religion, some other structure — to fix the problem. The alternative is one person to one person: what are the things I need to address in my life for me, who are the people I need to address for me and for them, and how do I need to live differently? If we really repented and turned away from our need for something else to be responsible for us, and became responsible for our interior world and our actions related to it, there would be a great deal of change. The world may never change. But I can be changed in it, and do what I can to affect it.

Watch the short teaching. This feeling is also covered in the Navigating Feelings video series — watch the shame module. Or explore all eight feelings.