Back in February I posted some thoughts on anger riffing off of a podcast from Andy Stanley. Stanley proposes that at the root of our anger is an open account: "you owe me."
Your friend owed it to you to not stab you in the back. They did, so you get angry.
Working off of this, guilt is also about an open account: "I owe you." I've done something to wrong you and now I'm in debt to you, I need to make it up to you somehow.
The problem is that usually the debt can never be paid back. Your friend said what they said, it can't be taken back. You can't take back what you said or how you harmed the other person.
So what we need to do is close the ledger, forgive the accounts. We need to extend forgiveness where we're angry. Otherwise that anger will destroy all our relationships. We need to accept God's forgiveness where we feel guilty (even if the person involved isn't willing to extend forgiveness to us), because guilt is a ball and chain, hampering our ability to take risks and love in relationships.
I've been thinking about this the past couple of days in relation to shame. I'm wondering if we might be able to uproot shame if we can understand some of how it is woven into our lives.
Leaving anger behind for a moment and framing guilt and shame a slightly different way, guilt is feeling bad about something that we've done, shame is feeling bad about who we are.
And so I wonder if we might use Stanley's ledger analogy and frame-up shame in this way: shame equals "I owe me."
If I bounce a check, I feel guilty as a husband for costing our family the bounced check fee. But at a deeper level, I feel ashamed because I have not lived up to my own sense of being the kind of guy that doesn't bounce checks.
I have a self-image as a responsible, reasonably intelligent human being who can balance a check book. And my sense of shame is the result of my inability to live up to the internal voices and standards that I have created or set for myself.
Shame, then, is a self-inflicted disease.
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