Last
day of vacation so I decided to run out and pick up lunch. I was
driving home when I saw a car with a gaping hole in the trunk
exposing lots of personal property once hidden inside. And it was
full of stuff, an ugly mess. I think I may have gasped at the sight
of it; it was a bit shocking. Seeing inside the trunk of someone's
car in this way made me consider what kinds of things I store in my
trunk. Sometimes my trunk is filled for weeks on end with things I
mean to donate to the thrift store. Other times my trunk holds the
basics: back pack for work, car emergency kit, spare tire and a pop
up bag for groceries, which rarely gets used because I forget it is
there. I often have something in my trunk to return to someone.
Putting something in the trunk seems to have a way of wiping it from
my memory temporarily. If I have something of yours, you might check
the trunk of my car.
While
I was thinking about what people might see if my trunk was bashed
open, it occurred to me most of us have an emotional trunk where we
stuff feelings and memories we want to forget or don't know what to
do with, things we don't want others to see. OK so I am a counselor
and yes I have to tie the exposed trunk to our psychological mess.
Please bear with me. I do believe a lot of what we try to ignore in
our emotional trunks keeps us trapped and unable to live in freedom.
Without
making a full disclosure of all we hide in our trunks, let's consider
the bottom line: shame. Maybe shame isn't all, but shame seems to be
the big white elephant we all stuff into the trunk and lock it in
tight; we for sure don't want others to know how much shame we feel.
Here is the interesting thing I have discovered in my work, most of
what we are ashamed of aren't things we did wrong (though there is
some of that). People are most often ashamed of things out of their
control. The big snow ball of shame begins as a child by the things
others did or said to us and it keeps on building from there. Shame
is based on the lies we believe and shame paralyzes us. I love this
reminder in Psalm 34:5 (NIV).
Those
who look to him are radiant;
their
faces are never covered with shame.
Brené
Brown, an expert on shame, wrote, “Shame is that warm feeling that
washes over us, making us feel small, flawed, and never good enough.
If we want to develop shame resilience – ability to recognize shame
and move through it while maintaining our worthiness and authenticity
– then we have to talk about why shame happens.”
Oh
no! We have to pull shame out of the trunk and into the open. Brown
goes on to write, “Shame is basically the fear of being unlovable .
. . There is a real fear that we can be buried or defined by an
experience that, in reality, is only a sliver of who we are. . . .
Shame needs three things to grow out of control in our lives:
secrecy, silence, and judgment. When something shaming happens and we
keep it locked up, it festers and grows. It consumes us. We need to
share our experience. Shame happens between people, and it heals
between people. . . . Shame loses power when it is spoken.”
Like
me, many of you may be wondering: “Aren't we supposed to feel
ashamed of some things?” Brown simply explains the difference
between shame and guilt in this way:
Guilt
= I did something bad.
Shame
= I am bad.
We
all have stories that have shaped us for better or worse. Shame can
keep us from seeing any good, anything of worth in our stories. Shame
can make us hide and pretend until someone rear ends our emotional
trunk and our pain gets exposed. Ultimately we each have a choice in
whether or not we allow our stories to be used for good or buried
inside to decay and shame us. I am learning it is better to embrace
the story I've lived, sift it for all the good God has brought from
it, be a humble encourager of others from a truer place, than have my
protective bumper ripped away and all my stuff instantly and
violently exposed.
Peter
Scazzero writes in Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, “Our
fear of bringing secrets and sin into the light, however, drives many
people to prefer the illusion that if they don't think about it, it
somehow goes away. It doesn't. Unhealed wounds open us up to habitual
sin against God and others. . . . You see, even the worst and most
painful family experiences are part of our total identity. God had a
plan in placing us in our particular families and cultures. And the
more we know about our families, the more we know about ourselves –
and the more freedom we have to make decisions how we want to live.
We can say: 'This is what I want to keep. This is what I do not want
to bring with me to the next generation.'”
All
this to say opening our emotional trunks is not the same thing as
exposing hurt and hurtful people on social media. We have dulled our
senses from overexposure and do not realize this has the same effect
as ripping open a trunk and exposing everything at once. This is not
healing, not useful and is not without shame. Our stories aren't
meant to be weapons. It is through the grace of God we are able to
expose our wounds in a healthy way, bringing all the ingredients of
our lives, and allowing our stories to be woven into His beautiful
message of love and redemption to the world.
I
find hope in the words of Henri J. M. Nouwen, “There are two ways
of telling your story. One is to tell it compulsively and urgently,
to keep returning to it because you see your present suffering as the
result of your past experiences. But there is another way. You can
tell your story from the place where it no longer dominates you. You
can speak about it with a certain distance and see it as the way to
your present freedom. The compulsion to tell your story is gone. From
the perspective of the life you now live and the distance you now
have, your past does not loom over you. It has lost its weight and
can be remembered as God's way of making you more compassionate and
understanding toward others.”
Maybe
it's time to inventory your trunk. How are you doing as you sort out
what is usable and what is not? Are you willing to give shame the
boot so you are free to offer up the mess for God to use? If the idea
is overwhelming, don't do it alone. We are to encourage one another
and bear one another's burdens. Find a trustworthy person to buoy you
up in the process.
