Lessons on Shame, From a 4-Year-Old

At work this week, I met a very self-aware 4-year-old. Only minutes after he met me, he told me that he liked to bite himself. He proceeded not only to do it, but to show me the teeth marks on his arms. Heartbroken, I flipped over the worksheet we had been doing together, and gently looked him straight in the eyes. I started to ask him questions and used covert metaphors to dumb it down to “4-year-old understanding.” We came to this conclusion (spoken right out of his mouth): that he hurts himself so that when other people hurt him, he’s used to it. I tried to reason with him—telling him that a bite is going to physically hurt whether he does it or someone else does it to him. Upon further reflection however, I realized that it’s not so much the physical pain he’s worried about, but the emotional pain.

I wonder how many of us live like this. I know I did for a long period of my life. It makes sense. If you’re used to getting hurt and shamed by people, it’s so much easier to shame yourself and kick yourself down as low as you can. Therefore, when those people hurt and shame you, it seemingly has no emotional effect on you. They can’t kick you down any lower because you’ve already kicked yourself down. The problem with that lifestyle though, is that it’s soul-deadening. You start to lose all hope of being great, as everyone—even yourself—tells you that you’re worth nothing more than the concrete you’ve kicked yourself down to.

Living this way makes us wear “shame glasses.” We see everything through the lens of not being worthy or valuable or lovable. And because we’re faced down on the ground, it’s natural to focus on the evidence supporting those claims. We don’t even see the evidence above us that is screaming our value and our worth in Christ.

We have a choice however. We can decide to pick our heads up and look toward the sky. I’ve found that the greatest way to combat shame is gratitude—looking up and looking for evidence that you are indeed valuable in God’s eyes. Looking for the ways that you’ve seen His love in your life. It’s risky business. When you’re standing up tall, secure, and confident in your worth, it’s going to hurt when other people shame you. It’s going to hurt a whole lot. You might cry. You might face-plant smack into that concrete again. Yet once you get a taste of what it means to live confidently and wholeheartedly, you’ll do anything to get it back.

I’ve found that taking off those “shame glasses” is worth the occasional wounds given to me by other people. Standing secure makes me realize how incredibly grateful I am to serve a God who will never stop calling me worthy of being His daughter when He looks at me. And the more we choose to believe that, the easier it will become to negate the evidence that tells us we’re unlovable and not valuable. Because we’re walking tall, the evidence proving our worth and value in Christ seems to be everywhere.

I’m still a work in progress. We all are. We will fall. Even when we are living in light of our worthiness, given to us by Jesus Christ, we will still undoubtedly find ourselves with our faces to the concrete every once in a while. However, we have the choice to take off those shame glasses and get back up (Proverbs 24:16—for though they fall seven times, they will rise again).

As far as my 4-year-old friend goes, I pray that I would be a beacon of hope in his life, and that God would surround him with people who will persistently pursue him with love.