Emotional Disintegration Through Shame....
.... emotional reintegration through being seen.
This week, I want to share insights from a book on neuro-theology that my wife introduced to me. Neuro-theology explores how our brains and religion are connected, especially how brain functions influence our experience of God. Reading Curt Thompson's work has been enlightening, and I’d like to relate these insights to understanding emotional formation in Christian worship. I believe there is a key connection between how we worship and how Thompson describes how the brain works. The thought that has been bouncing around inside my head is that when we worship, we want to be connected to God, to ourselves, and to others but often we feel disconnected. Thompson addresses what could be at the root of that disconnectedness while leading us on a way forward.
Disintegration through Shame
One of the key concepts that Thompson is writing on is shame. Shame “disintegrates the mind and relationships and overwhelms or window of tolerance, yanking us out of our social engagement system (with which we effectively co-regulate difficult emotions) and into our sympathetic nervous system, with its fight-or-flight options at the ready, or further, into our dorsal vagal nervous system, shutting down our ability to connect completely and leaving us to wander alone in the dark.” In that long sentence, there is a lot to unpack and some verbiage that I do not fully understand but will attempt to work through in the current section.
I think the most important part of shame is where Thompson starts, that is disintegrates and disconnects us. When we find ourselves ashamed for who we are or how we feel, we withdraw because our brain ceases to function across the paths of connections that it is meant to. We forget how to properly express ourselves emotionally, because we feel the need to hide our emotions. Thompson explains that when a child expresses an emotion like anger and it is met with anger from a parent, that child learns that it is improper to express that emotion and tries to figure out a way out of their distress, which might mean suppressing their feelings. How we feel and how we reduce our distress are at odds, so we fight our feelings or flee those feelings that we were taught to no longer express.
We find ourselves disintegrated in worship when we feel that we cannot worship through how we feel. We might have been taught that one ought to be somber and subdued before the throne of God, and we feel wrong expressing both sadness and joy when we worship. Our we are told we should not be sad, so we bury our sadness, knowing that the surpassed emotion is not welcomed in church. In a podcast episode, Thompson says, “what that ultimately means is that I practice even neuro biologically I practice not paying attention to or having access to particular emotional states.” He continues that these emotional states are not completely ignored but “It just means that they're being worked out in ways that I may not be aware of, and often in ways that are not very helpful or integrating for me personally or for my relationships.” Instead of turning to God as an outlet for our joy, sadness, grief, or happiness, we try to find another way to express those emotions or have them sneak out of us at times that are not appropriate. We laugh at a funeral because we cannot express grief properly, for example.
What really draws my attention is the fact that we are blind to the mechanism that fuel the behavior and sometimes cannot see the behavior until it is called out for us by someone else. We need people surrounding us, gazing upon us in a healing manner, for sometimes a very long time. With the help of others, our minds can re-integrate into a state where we “experience greater connection between” our “right hemisphere and” our “body, enabling greater composure” while also connecting our right and left hemispheres of our brains to help us reflect on what we are experiencing and why we are reacting the way we are. Why this stands out to me is that churches, congregations, or even single congregants can be blind to how they are disintegrated. Until someone else comes along side and spends the time to understand them by being with them, the one who is disintegrated will not be aware of it. That means that a church might think that it is worshipping with their whole hearts, while ignoring swathes of their emotions. If a congregation only associates with itself or churches that are disintegrated in the same way, they will never know.
Reintegration through Being Seen
Thompson writes that “being seen, soothed, safe, and secure in the presence of our shame and trauma gives us the opportunity to literally sense, image, feel, and think and our bodies the chance to behave in a completely different way in response to the shame we have carried for so long.” Thompson does not mean that to be whole we need to be rid of our trauma. Rather, we must be seen in our trauma so that we can relate to others, ourselves, and God through it. Thompson writes that we often wish to be not seen because we think that “if they knew” they “would surely shame us for being where we are.” We are afraid “the grieving and broken parts of us, should they be revealed, would lead only to further humiliation and isolation.” Even if we know that the path to integration and connection is by exposing one selves’ vulnerability, we often are afraid that doing so will only make it worse. It is why we pretend that all is well while feeling crushed by the world around us. As Thompson puts it, “our intention is to live into something other than what we are all walking around with” but fear of judgement gets in our way. Thompson continues that “We are particularly susceptible to” hiding our feelings “for in our deep longing to create goodness and beauty in our worshipping communities, they become the very places where being exposed feels so risky.” The reason we disintegrate in worship is because we want to create an environment that is better than the one that we come from. We want to be able to leave all our cares and burdens at the doors of the church. We want everyone to feel safe and welcome, and think that to do that, we need to act like those burdens do not exist, even if it is only for an hour. The services we create, through the songs we sing, the scripture we read, the themes we preach on, all end up disconnection ourselves from our reality when we focus on only joy, goodness, and what we perceive to be beautiful.
In the same podcast I referenced above, Thompson asks, “who would sign up to be this vulnerable? Who would sign up to believe that vulnerability in a context of confidence and security without shame being in the driver's seat of that relationship? Who in their right mind would think that vulnerability is the source of the most durable beauty that we can create?” We are used to having our shame driving us away from community which would expose our issues, to the point we forget that our weakness is what lasts and makes up who we are. I might be strong for a minute, but it exhausts me. Having to always push down my insecurities, guard my tongue against spilling my sorrows, all while my brain fixates on these wears a person out.
If we only sing songs about how we are perfected in Christ, that our tears have been taken away, that Christ is all we need, or that joy and gladness are the only acceptable feelings, the congregation will not feel seen. They may not feel, maybe only subconsciously, ignored because they do not fit in. They may not feel soothed because they must pretend that there is nothing to be soothed. They may not feel save because they feel like an outsider due to not fitting in with the rest of the congregation. Instead, the church needs to a confessional community where the congregation can come, lay themselves emotionally bare, and feel with each other. It needs to a place “where we make mistakes, where we take risks in which we don't succeed, we know that there will be a place to return where we are seen soothed and safe.” It needs to be a place we have a secure attachment to, that we can be “launched out into a place of taking risks in a secure fashion” because we know that we have been seen, soothed, and are save. And when we do not feel that way, we know that we can return and be reassured that we are loved as a whole self.
It's hard to take a dense book full of meaning and reduce it down while capturing all the nuances. It's destined to fail, but I think that helps generate conversation around the topic. I was being reductionistic and will try to engage your questions as best as I can!
1. Thompson does address cultural and learned shame, deeming some positive and some negative. Thompson's point is that we need to co-regulate our feelings appropriately. When someone is shamed for everything that they do, they develop unhealthy levels of shame as they will feel shame about everything. There are actions that are worthy of feeling shame over. The problem is that we often over-shame ourselves and others. Shame can be corrective and restorative, but it often is not used that way. The point is not to get rid of shame, but to use shame correctly.
2. Unbridled emotion or vulnerability is a problem. One should not trauma dump to a stranger on the bus that they just met. We need to sublimate our emotions at times, yet we are too good at sublimation. Any extreme is a problem. In a trusted relationship where we are safe and seen, we need to be willing to be vulnerable and not let our desire to hid our feelings win out all the time. Bringing that to the church, we often hold back feelings in worship and fellowship so that we do not produce shame in us or our interlocuters. We need to worry about social stability at times, but often maintaining that stability is the issue and the stability needs to be subverted. We need to discern when maintaining and subverting is correct. And honestly, we need to make the social stability a place where vulnerability is expected.
3. Thompson talks about non-verbal queues and how our body language and actions convey feelings. He discusses how when we swoop into to rescue a child from a situation we find distressing that they do not they start to associate that action with distress. Think about how a child starts\stops looking over at the parent before they cry after falling. He also discusses how a knowing look can be enough to sooth someone or convey that they are there for them if they need them. But the non-verbal only works when a relationship is already established.
Thompson, of course, is Western and thinks through that lens. The different parts of the brain should operate the same universally but the way those centers are activated might differ across cultures (not that type of Doctor). So the way that the church creates confessional communities can be different in other cultures, but I think they still need to exist. Emotional healing and communal integration are (probably) universal needs that play out differently. I think our American culture is bad at expressing grief and lament but other cultures might repress other feelings. Thompson does not say that talk-therapy is what is needed, even in our American context. What is needed is people to have relationships that allow for complete expressions of our selves to each other. Those communities need to be able to support and challenge us, all in a safe and soothing atmosphere where we feel seen.
I'm torn about this. Not about your general point, which I agree with, but with Thompsons way of talking about it. Granted, you are summarizing, so I say this cautiously, but it seems reductionistic. I have some scattered thoughts and questions and I'm not sure how to be concise, so I'll just throw them out and see if they make sense.
1) I'm curious to know if he sees a positive role for shame in the life of a community. A while back I was reading Te-Li Lau's book Defending Shame which points to the positive use of shame in the Bible. He argues that shame is in part something we impose on ourselves when we adopt the values of the community (unavoidably; this is how humans relate in society with each other) but fail to live up to them. *We* know we haven't done what we should and so we feel shame, even if no one says anything. The positive social function is then a kind of guardrail. If I am sinning, the experience of shame should be a motivation for me to return to the community and correct my actions. The bad use of shame is when it is non-restorative.
2) Similarly, I'm curious if his proposal for what this looks like is something like unbridled vulnerability and emotional expression or if he sees any space for restraint of any kind. In other words, is sublimation always bad or is it sometimes appropriate? If we had to compare social stability (via sublimation) and emotional vulnerability, would he say that emotional vulnerability should win every time?
3) Finally, does Thompson have any space for non-verbal or non-direct forms of emotional healing and communal integration? What I mean is that long before therapy talk was a thing, societies had traditions and practices that facilitated the type of emotional healing and communal integration that Thompson seems to be describing. Someone might go on a pilgrimage and come back an emotionally healed and communally integrated person, but they won't use that language or even have that concept. Does he have space for that or does he imagine it is only possible via a specifically 21st-century American way of emotional healing and communal integration?
That last question is perhaps my concern. This all sounds very American with some science behind it, therefore, it's universal. I'm suspicious of that not because I don't think there are universal human traits, but because I think humans are extremely adaptable and societies throughout history have found ways, good and bad, to find a kind of homeostasis (without knowledge of neuro-biology) and I don't want to pigeonhole everyone into becoming 21st century Americans! As in our previous discussion about culture, I'm trying to find a point of contact between different conceptual frameworks to possibly identify where the church--even if the culture prioritized emotional restraint--found ways to bring about emotional healing and communal integration.