Black Dog Shame

 As a lover of all things certain, I wanted faith to work like an epidural; to numb the pain of vulnerability. As it turned out, my faith ended up being more like a midwife - a nurturing partner who leans into the discomfort with me and whispers "push" and "breathe."  Faith didn't make my life less vulnerable or comfortable, it simply offered to travel with me through the uncertainty.  Brene Brown, Ordinary Courage

For much of my Xtian life I have chased after the magic prayer that would make my broken soul right as rain. There was inside of me an insistence that if I just believed the right things in the right way and with just the right amount of passion and fervor there would come a breakthrough from the pain of Being Me.



I'm not sure why self-loathing and it's cousin self-contempt have chosen to be my companions since  I was a child. But there they've been, year after year, prowling around my life like a couple of black dogs looking for a fight. Trouble is, I thought the only way to get rid of them was to overpower them with self-help formulas and religious rituals. I've done prayed it up and down and inside out and had demons cast out of me and the Holy Spirit cast into me...yet there they stay, those two black dogs staring me down with the cocky air of undefeat.

But now here I am, pushing past the fourth decade of my life. I don't feed those dogs as much as I used to. (no wonder they've hung around so long. I fed 'em real good!) I've been learning there's a whole 'nother way to confront them, these beasts of shame and uncertainty, for that is what they are, their true nature. The self-loathing and contempt is the game face; the subtext for why these black dogs ever showed up in the first place has to do with the universal human condition known as Shame. That's a strong emotion that will drive a woman insane with psychic pain or a grown man to drink and use so as to numb it out. Shame has a power  few can match. My best day in my best dress with my hair behaving and me feeling all pretty and gussied up can be undone in a moment by a surprise visit from Shame. That is one black dog that won't be ignored.

I thought these black dogs could  be cast out like evil spirits. Their black energy could  be exorcised with candles and spells, Christian, pagan or otherwise.  For many years I have practiced my craft of faith attempting to put those dogs on the run. Instead, they've had me on the run. On the run from Being Me.

A new voice has managed to serendipitously come into my life. Meet Brene Brown, Dr. Brene Brown. Dr Brown, or Brene as I'm already calling her (pronounced Bruh-nay) is a sociology professor in Texas. She has a PhD and studied shame and vulnerability for ten years. She is a leading expert on what shame is, how it affects people, and how to tango with it. According to Brene, shame cannot be exorcised like a demon. She has learned from all her research that shame is a universal feeling deeply embedded in the human condition. We can't undo it. But...and this is a very important but... we can learn to develop what she calls shame resilience. 

The primary way for a woman like me, she writes, to develop a resilience to having those black dogs prowl me into a corner of shame and self-contempt, is to expose it. Speak it outloud. Be Vulnerable. Spoken to the right person, a moment of shame shrivels up under the light of empathy. Human empathy, that miraculous transaction when one human being truly enters the story of another and does so without judgment or fixes, is the powerful antidote to keeping the  black dogs of shame on a shorter leash.

Like last week. I said something stupid to a total stranger. Only later did  I realize how inappropriate my words were. The heat of the shame, that black dog's breath, crept inside my chest and gripped me  in it's jaws. I could hardly breathe. How could I be so thoughtless, so uncouth, so....retarded! The beautiful day I had been enjoying up to that point became overshadowed with dark storm clouds conjured up by shame.

But then I thought I would try it. I would tell somebody about it, even though it was embarrassing. I saw a friend, a trustworthy woman with a kind way. I told her my sad tale and she busted out laughing. "Oh Pam, you know how many times I've said something like that?" Suddenly my world was made right. The black dog crept away and the sun came out to shine on me again. A small example, but a great feeling of not having to be commanded by shame anymore. I can be free to Be Me and it doesn't need to involve a massive 40-days of fasting and praying.  The miracle of God's love dissipating shame is in the telling of it to another human being. I think the Good Book describes it as Love One Another.

 Brene says it best in her blog. I'll leave you with that and hope you find people around you to Be You with all your dogs and mess-ups. That's the kind of magic prayer I'm looking for these days.

My faith is most alive when I'm willing to be vulnerable and open to connection - with myself, my family, my friends, and even with strangers. As Martin Buber wrote: “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them."