This will not get out of hand, she told herself. I can handle this. He is only interested in my work, and I love my work. The lies became more entrenched and automatic. They became as much who she was as what she told herself. Before she knew it, working lunches turned into working dinners, which turned into intimate conversations usually reserved for spouses or the closest of girlfriends. Her boss, of course, was in a listless marriage, and he had no trouble revealing his one area of neediness to which Carla gravitated to supply the emotional solution, something she had learned well how to do in her middle-child occupancy. With each step closer to the abyss, her boss was sending a message she interpreted as, “You are beautiful. You are smart. You are funny. You are the answer to all my questions. You are what I need. You are … enough.” What she did not hear was him saying more implicitly, “I need you to meet my needs. My needs are more important than you or your marriage or your children. My needs are really all that matter to me. Your needs matter to me as long as meeting them is a way for me to ultimately meet my needs. For you, as it turns out, are not as important as you might think.” These were the words that were implied despite what she heard him say.
Sexual involvement was the predictable next stop on her train’s journey, though it initially carried with it no small amount of shame and guilt. How to keep the secret safe from Preston, from her close friends, from her parents? So much energy expended maintaining the façade, Carla unaware of the presence of the shame attendant constantly reminding her that her life was a lie and that she was not and would not be enough. And it certainly would not be enough if she stopped the affair. The only solution she had for these noxious feelings was to turn her attention to the sensations, images and feelings of how unconditionally loved she felt by her employer. At some point not long before Carla and I first met, her husband became suspicious; upon his inquiry, she flatly denied to him any extramarital relationship. No wonder she hadn’t been sleeping. Shame’s perfect loop was complete.
“What do you feel when I suggest the possibility of telling Preston about the affair?” I asked. She was aghast. “I feel like throwing up.” Indeed, in the moments that followed she complained of feeling lightheaded and nauseated. “There is no conceivable universe in which that is happening. He’s already uninterested in me. Now he will hate me—no, worse than hate. I would be repulsive to him. And I should be, given what I’ve done. What’s more, if I tell him, he will leave me and take the boys, which he would more than have the right to do.”
After several sessions, Carla eventually came to a point of realization. “I think I know why I can’t tell him, and it boils down to this. I feel too … vulnerable.” There. She said it. She uttered what many of us might easily say is one of the most uncomfortable sensations that we know. To feel vulnerable is to feel, as did Eve and Adam after their fruit fest, naked and ashamed. For in the story of the world portrayed in the biblical narrative, shame is the tacit emotional payload that vulnerability carries. In our minds, to be vulnerable is to sense the potential of danger. But this danger is not perceived as being merely that of physical annihilation, limited to the functions of the brainstem and limbic circuitry. It is the even more consciously terrifying prospect of relational disintegration, which eventually leads to the prefrontal cortex telling us we are not enough and the specter of our being left as a result. To be vulnerable is to recognize that we are at the mercy of those whose intentions we cannot guarantee, and who can leave us alone.
Into this state of vulnerability I offered to Carla another way of picturing what was taking place in her interpersonal neurobiological matrix. “It makes complete sense that you would feel so vulnerable,” I said. “This is the feeling that shame activates and that everyone feels to some degree when they are on the verge of being known in what they anticipate may be an unsafe space. To allow yourself to be known is very hard work.” In the language of the Bible, vulnerability is reframed and transformed into something completely different. Something that only the story of the Bible—only the God of the Bible—can offer. As it does, it invites us to offer the same to each other. The gift—and the terror—of being known.
Carla could see that her anticipation of feeling intensely vulnerable—and the shame that was embedded within it—stood in the way of the movement she needed to make if her life was to be redeemed. She was surprised to discover that this sense of vulnerability, which she interpreted as the sign of her greatest weakness—the greatest risk to her survival—when reframed in terms of being known by (in this case) me, and hopefully God and perhaps even her husband, was in fact the key to her healing. But how was she to realize this? How was she to swim across the river of life?
Taken from The Soul of Shame by Curt Thompson. Copyright (c) 2015 by Curt Thompson. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA. www.ivpress.com
