The Voice of the Heart Audiobook, Shame

Transcript of a Sage Hill Live Fully Podcast conversation with Dr. Chip Dodd. Lightly edited for readability; speaker labels omitted.

You're listening to the Sage Hill podcast with Dr. Chip Dodd. Today's podcast is a sample of the newly released Voice of the Heart audiobook available for sale on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes. Humble yourselves therefore under God's mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. First Peter five, six and seven. Chapter eight, Shame. Shame tells me I am limited. I am mistake ridden. I have some answers, but I don't have all the answers. I need you to help me. I can't do this alone. We need each other. Shame is the emotional and spiritual recognition of the potential to fail and to do harm, to succeed and to love. Shame elicits the experience of conscience and consciousness, of our own limitation and giftedness. In the experience of shame, through realizing our gifts and limitations, we have empathy for others. We know and accept that we make mistakes so we can offer the same understanding to others. We know goodness and badness and help others recognize both. We also know and accept that we have gifts so we can offer others the same knowledge about themselves. The empathy that has developed through shame illuminates the truth of our human condition. We become vulnerable to considering ourselves exactly as we are, feeling, needing, desiring, longing, hoping creatures who succeed and fail, who need daily, who desire great things even though we may fall short of finding them, who long for a fulfillment we cannot completely obtain, and who have abundant hope that someday everything will be okay. In seeing ourselves as we are, we find that we are full of dreams and capabilities, keepers of great worth who are also needy and unable a lot of the time to do what we say we're going to do or wish to do. We are glorious ruins in need of others and god. Humility. However, shame does not humiliate. It helps create humility within us. Humility grows out of the profound recognition of our limitations and of the capacities we possess in our giftedness. It helps us realize how incredibly fortunate we are to be who we are, and at the same time, it shows us how deficient we are without others and God to help us live fully. You carry within yourself specific gifts that allow you to experience how wonderfully you were made. Discovering and experiencing these gifts will help you know your value in life, that you belong, and your ability to add to life, that you matter. Most of us don't fully appreciate the value of our giftedness until we have been broken by circumstances in life. In brokenness, we are offered the opportunity to see our powerlessness and neediness. These painful circumstances often break us of our pride filled defiance against needing and break us of the fear that our lack of power will result in rejection. Not until then do we acknowledge our gifts and stop using them only to prove ourselves. Only then do we start giving ourselves in service to others. In this sharing, we offer our gifts not because we ought to, but because we can't help doing so. We are made to live out of the heart's expression of our giftedness. We have all known someone like this, a teacher who has passion for her subject and her students, a pastor who loves to offer spiritual certainty and comfort to his congregation, a physician who genuinely cares for her patients, a mother who nurtures and cares beyond her own children and seems to adopt an entire neighborhood, or a father who coaches a baseball team long after his children have grown up. These individuals offer themselves because they cannot help doing so. They have found that the greatest fulfillment in life is to be of maximum service through their giftedness. These same persons are also amazed at times that they get to give so much. Living in giftedness. Living in our giftedness is a form of expressing who we are. When we actually live as who we are, three things happen. One, we delight in god's creation. Two, we are humbled that god made us like we are, gifted and limited. Three, we are unable to ignore the desire to give ourselves to something greater. In delight, we find joy. In humility, we are grateful and merciful. Being unable to ignore our desire to serve can be tremendously painful. Until we let ourselves pursue that desire, we will feel emotional and spiritual pain. Yet in the pursuit of that desire, we are willing to go through great pain in order to have our desire fulfilled. Living with healthy shame is living within your appropriate authority. It is living how God has made you, specifically using your gifts and talents in maximum service to others while also recognizing the limitations of your gifts and seeking the giftedness of others and their appropriate authority. In so doing, you are involved in the authentic pursuit of living fully, responding appropriately out of your spiritual and emotional gifts. These gifts involve physical talents and or intellectual acumen, but they are submitted to the primacy of the heart's voice. For example, a laborer produces using his hands, but is not necessarily present in mind and heart. A craftsman uses his hands and mind to build, but may not be moved by his heart. An artist is present in both body and mind, but uses these as tools to create from his heart or even from emotional and spiritual desire. We all fall into one of these three categories, whether we are a harpist, pastor, physician, or welder. Even the lowliest work is full if the artist is present. The artist starts not with the canvas, but with desire. When we live humbly from our hearts, open to our gifts, and willing to see our limitations, we cannot help but have influence in an appropriate, authentic way. The humility that occurs when we live out of our gifts and limitations leads us to the awareness of our appropriate place on a team, in a corporation, in the universe. Therefore, shame is the feeling that allows us to move into cooperation and community because it says, I have my talents. I also have my limitations, and so do you. I'll share what I have as will you, and that way you and I can create something beautiful and true. The greatest achievements happen through this kind of cooperation rather than through competition. Self centeredness versus self awareness. Self centeredness. Self centeredness is a form of egocentrism. It is a focused concern on our appearance, achievements, good works, and self will while disregarding the true well-being of others. The ego centered person's focus is how am I doing? He or she looks for answers through comparison and competition. Our society's over concern with self esteem promotes a culture of egocentrism. Self awareness. Self awareness is a struggle to identify, expose, and express who we are, even when that discovery hurts or points to a need for change. By looking within and listening to others, the self aware person has answers to the questions, who am I? What do I believe? Why am I doing this? Because self awareness is usually preceded by brokenness, self awareness creates a sense of deep gratitude. A consciousness of incompleteness. Shame is the feeling that first brings us into relationship with ourselves because it makes us conscious of our incompleteness. Even in our confidence and ability, shame helps us see that we need others. It points out our shortcomings, our humanity, so that we better understand ourselves for who we uniquely are, so that we can value ourselves for how we were uniquely created. Despite all our shortcomings, we are quite capable and competent, sometimes even extraordinary. In this consciousness of gifts and shortcomings, we recognize our capacity to fall short of our desire and dreams, but we don't stop dreaming. Another gift of shame is that it keeps us from worshiping ourselves and our giftedness. We recognize our gifts and are grateful for them. We remember that we are more than our gifts and that we will never escape our natural inferiority. I'm not a king or queen. I'm royal, but fulfilled only as a servant. Shame tells us that we will always be people who are capable of harming others and failing. No matter how much we wish to be loving, good, kind, and talented, we will continue to fall short of pure desire. We will always need help. While shame tells me about myself, this self recognition also tells me about others. This sensitivity to empathy is called conscience. It lets me know that I don't have all the answers and neither do you. It says I'm not god, but neither are you. Let's help each other. In knowing that I have pain, I can recognize and accept your pain. I can say I feel hurt inside to see you in such pain. Therefore, through shame, I can be in true relationship with you because ours is not a relationship based solely upon our individual abilities or what we can offer each other, but it is a relationship grounded in our commonality as part of humanity. Toxic shame. Whereas shame leads to self acceptance in relationship with ourselves, others, and God, impaired shame creates self rejection. In impaired shame, we have learned to equate humility with humiliation, failure with uselessness, and inability with worthlessness. This experience makes healthy shame toxic. Our shame has become so distorted that it is unrecognizable as a helpful relationship. Rather than lead us to acknowledge our neediness, toxic shame entangles our hearts, tightly binding them up, leaving us unable to experience full life because we can't experience our natural place. We believe we should hide who we are, and we center our lives on doing it. This toxic shame is really rejection of the image of god we all carry in our hearts. Toxic shame denies our humanity as feeling, needing, desiring, longing, and hoping creatures. We reject our hearts through the belief that the way we are made is defective. Impaired shame comes from our past. We have learned for survival's sake to hide, reject, or minimize our hearts. If significant people whom we love insist or need for us to deny our heart's content, they poison us with toxic shame. Those who are capable of teaching us self rejection are almost always people we love. Everyone who I have ever met who has this impaired state of shame received it from those who had power over his or her heart. Toxic shame helps us so deny our natural condition that we are left with anxiety, dread of what will happen, and a demand to control, struggle to keep others away from our hearts. In healthy shame, we say I am limited, which leads us to ask for help. In toxic shame, I am limited becomes I am a mistake. This poisons the truth of our hearts and forces us to go it alone. In toxic shame, we reject our natural call to seek help, reach for others, and expose our true giftedness and creativity. In fact, we use our gifts not to express ourselves, but to become persons of value based upon performance. Toxic shame tells us that if we show our true selves, we will be rejected. Those who feel toxic shame are very hard on themselves. They are always trying to earn everything from love to grace. They live with a millstone around their necks. To hide this pain, many shame bound people spend their lives achieving and obtaining great things, but never experience the wholeness for which they were working. Shamelessness. Even farther removed from healthy shame is its impaired expression in shamelessness. Denying their natural creativeness and rejecting all humility, shameless people act as if they are incapable of being at fault, narcissist, or as if only they are allowed responsibility for problems, martyrs. Shameless people behave in grandiose ways. Shameless people instill toxic shame in those who love them and are vulnerable to them. Parents, coaches, teachers, pastors, physicians, and others have great responsibility to live lives of healthy shame, seeking forgiveness for shameless behavior. These same people have great responsibility also for breaking the bondage of toxic shame, which demeans the marvelous beauty of how god made us. The gain of shame. Healthy shame is an admission of the truth, awakening vulnerability in your limitations and competency in your giftedness. The gain of healthy shame is that it helps you live in intimacy with yourself, others, and God through the development of humility. Feeling shame allows you to recognize the commonality among all people, accept differences, and accept your own limitations. In this humility, you recognize that life is a journey of progress, not perfection. Healthy shame helps you recognize that in your humility, you can offer mercy and forgiveness, because you are as capable as anyone of being wronged and causing pain. And healthy shame prepares you to accept love as a gift and become loving as a result.