Book Review: Shame Interrupted

Tiitle: Shame Interrupted

Author: Edward T. Welch

Publisher: New Growth Press

Date: 2012

ISBN: 978-1-935273-98-1

Length: 337 pages including reference material

Quote: “Women can usually identify shame in their lives without much effort.”

Can they? Generally, outside of therapy groups that tend to attract people who have emotional issues in common?

If so, what are we as a society doing wrong? Are women usually emotionally abused? Or are counsellors actively, if not consciously, trying to make people aware of feeling shame, because when what you have is a hammer you’re apt to want everything to be a nail?

There are some peculiarities about Edward T. Welch’s understanding of shame. He describes shame as a feeling of revulsion directed at oneself, but he fails to make clear why he imagines that people’s first experiences of revulsion, with things alien to the self that seem yucky, squishy, prickly, sticky, stinky, etc., seem to him to be connected to shame. That sort of illogical association sometimes identifies the last straggling survivors from an old psychotherapy cult that used to take as a point of doctrine that everything people thought and felt was really “about themselves.” You might observe that it was raining outside, and if these people were in an evangelical mood they’d reply, “And what does rain symbolize for you, and why are you feeling that about yourself?” This kind of conversation is so rarely preserved in nostalgic fiction today that I conclude that there were indeed some things about the 1960s that nobody misses at all, and Psychologically Insightful Conversation was one of them. Especially with that group.

For most of us, I suspect, revulsion is the primal instinct and shame is the learned reaction: we, or some of us, let people tell us that we are like rotten eggs and nastier things. For survivors from 1960s’ and 1970s’ therapy cults, however, boosting people’s self-esteem is the hammer, and searching for evidence that people suffer from low self-esteem—if not positively from shame—is their way of looking for nails.

Welch is one of those Christian counsellors whose strategy is to present conversion as therapy. For some people this approach to emotional problems does in fact work; Welch’s hammer hits their nails on the head. That’s what’s to like about this book.

What’s not to like is that, for other people, the emotional problems they have originate in medical conditions and/or social experience. These people may already be Christians. Just praying or singing with them may get them through emotional hard times, but that’s all it’s likely ever to do. Finding fault with the religious experience they have can do only harm.

Because all groups of people are polluted by human selfishness, though some of the less toxic schools of self-esteem psychology have infiltrated some churches, self-esteem psychology has not served churches particularly well. Welch urges people who have genuinely survived toxic shame that saying “I was wrong” is “part of Kingdom life.” So it undoubtedly will be but church groups in this life are like any other group. If you want to practice humility and believe that anyone else in the group is likely to have something to teach you, you can count the minutes before the social bullies in the group identify you as a public garbage disposal chute and dump all their unpleasantness on you. Welch might have done better to warn people who have survived toxic relationships of emotional abuse, especially if they are less wealthy than some of the congregation, “Don’t feed social bullies.”

Far from being foretastes of God’s Kingdom, many churches are scenes of emotional abuse. For anyone who has been bullied or otherwise abused, any abusive encounter in a church should be taken as an indication that they have not perfected the art of discouraging bullies. They should anticipate more bullying in that church and should practice self-respect by not going back to it. If you are saying “I was wrong” more often than you are hearing it, even if you are a new Christian and don’t completely understand the doctrines the church teaches, you are being bullied and have a moral responsibility before God to withhold your money and support from the group where that bullying occurs. If physical contact occurs, whether you just step away, loudly say “Stand back! Maintain a healthy social distance!”, or go into a full PTSD reaction with screaming, tears, and vomiting, all shame should be directed to the toucher; you should expect to be thanked if you left the offender’s hand attached to per arm, and shown more respect by members of any group you support.

Because of the philosophical background Welch reveals in this book, and the focus on emotions at the expense of the physical and social situations in which emotions may be felt, I’d hesitate to recommend this book to any church or school group.

That does not mean it can’t be useful to some individuals. I think it can. For individuals coming out of abusive homes, schools, or cults Welch’s focus on biblical Christianity seems likely to help; it certainly includes plenty of Bible study, and it’s well written, in plain English, without the clunky jargon that typified psychological self-help books in the 1970s.

It’s just my usual warning. Not all Christian books are likely, or even intended, to help every Christian. Most of us can relate to the emotions of Welch’s audience, in some way, but shame is not really a big part of even our emotional lives. If you start reading Shame Interrupted and then start curling up your nose and saying “So Christianity is supposed to be therapy now? What about all the abusers who attend churches?” or “Eww ick, that tone of a huckster peddling ‘Jesus’ as a bottle of Swamp Root & Snake Oil Elixir, good for what ails you…” this probably indicates that it’s not the book for you.