This Too Shall Last

by K. J. Ramsey

  I want to live in the equidistant place between truth and sorrow, the place where pain dwells companionably with mystery. And sometimes that means refusing to plaster an overlay of tidy goodness on my experiences. It means letting someone hear I’m crumbling, weak, and weary. Sometimes hope comes through sight, in showing the truth our bodies are telling about our stories instead of placing pretty words of purpose over our pain. Sometimes the most faithful response to suffering is letting ourselves show our honest sadness.

  After I hung up the phone, I wondered if this is the surprising way of Jesus, the man who so fully honored our pain that he took it into his very body and carried it to the cross. I wondered if his is a story we can’t fully remember on our own, if it takes phone calls and gentle prodding to be honest and be seen to spot through the rushing storms of today that our stories are still part of his.

  I wondered if finding grace when suffering lingers requires moving from hiding to honest, from naked to clothed, from withholding and ashamed in our singular stories of suffering to being held in a shared story of God’s solidarity with our pain.

  Deep down, our greatest fear is that if we express how broken and scared we really feel, we will sink into complete darkness. We fear that expressing the depth of our discouragement will separate us from God. This is the knife edge of shame in suffering, the Enemy’s favorite weapon in defeating us, depressing us, and holding us back from the love we were created to receive.

  Shame1 is always being leveraged by the Enemy to tell a story where you end up alone. Our discomfort with expressing the honest, sad truth of our experience reveals a deeper truth about the storyline steering our lives. The shame born in the garden silently stalks us today, trying to convince us no one cares, nothing can improve, and expressing weakness will only further isolate us instead of connecting us to hope. We have to acknowledge shame’s presence to inhabit the embodied story of sight, to step toward the communion we were made for.

  Shame, as psychiatrist Curt Thompson so powerfully describes, is the primary tool evil uses to disrupt and disconnect our relationships, our stories, our communities, and our world.2 It is the felt sense that I am bad, there really is something wrong with me, and I don’t matter to anyone else.3 Shame is the stealthy, compelling energy evil is constantly using to distract us from living in the story where grace is here.

  Before we even have words to acknowledge or ascribe meaning to its disturbing presence, shame is felt in our bodies in the dynamic interplay of relationship. It arises from condescending or mean words, sure, but it also ignites in the million ways we sense another person might not care or might be judging us. Before we consciously register we’ve noticed, our bodies are responding to the nonverbal cues of others. Shame starts with the sigh of someone who is tired of listening to us, an irritated glance, or lack of eye contact in a conversation. The dam of shame has often been released before we realize it, starting from the lower regions of our brains.

  Shame quickly and powerfully disrupts the integration of the lower and upper regions of our brains, biologically isolating parts of ourselves from one another. We become overwhelmed by the current of energy in our brain stems and temporarily unable to access the regulating, rational functions of the upper region of our brains, the prefrontal cortex.4 Without thinking, we turn our gaze away from others to deal with the rush of painful emotion, but turning away only reinforces the sense that we are alone and that we have to deal with this, and everything, on our own. Shame paralyzes us and blocks us from hope, because it tells the untrue story that we are the only ones who can get ourselves out of the mess we are in. It’s the neurobiological process behind our prideful self-sufficiency, the instinct pushing us to chew our sorrows into stories of success.

  Psychiatrist and trauma expert Judith Lewis Herman describes shame as “a relatively wordless state, in which speech and thought are inhibited.”5 She elaborates, “It is also an acutely self-conscious state; the person feels small, ridiculous, and exposed. There is a wish to hide, characteristically expressed by covering the face with the hands. . . . Shame is always implicitly a relational experience.”6 Our faces flush. We look down and away. We feel worthless, confused, and scared.

  Shame hijacks us, persuading us, often without our awareness, to live according to our culture’s story of self-sufficient hiding and pretending. It is the emotional sense “that I do not have what it takes to tolerate this moment or circumstance.”7 As such, shame wordlessly tells our bodies the story that we are abandoned, unlovable, and headed for harm. It convinces us to disconnect, self-protect, and detach from where we are and who we are.

  In early 2015 I had to get all new doctors after joining my husband’s work insurance plan. I’m part of the unfortunate 20 percent or so of ankylosing spondylitis (AS) patients whose bloodwork is nearly always normal, making my body more of a puzzle than a provable artifact of disease. My previous rheumatologist was a short, red-haired woman whose spark matched her kindness. She always took time to listen during our appointments and seriously considered my exceedingly extensive family history8 in treating my enigmatic symptoms with respect. Before her, my experience with rheumatologists included both doctors who cared and listened and those who treated me like an inconvenience, or worse, a liar. Her kindness had given me hope that the days of needing to prove myself to doctors were over.

  I entered the tiny exam room of my new rheumatologist’s office ready to give a full personal and family history. And I came alone. I’m a professional patient. Strong. Capable of advocating for myself. I figured at six years into being sick, I could handle the visit on my own. Why make my husband use a personal day?

  From the moment the tall, blond doctor strode into the room, something was off. He didn’t shake my hand or look me in the eye but instead went directly to the computer to read from my chart, where his gaze remained for the next two minutes. When he finally turned around, he gave me no invitation to share my history but instead unequivocally stated he believed I was a case of misdiagnosis and malpractice.

  Without hearing my voice or touching my body, he reduced six years of treatment to a mistake. In his eyes I was a blight of the medical system, wrongly passed from one doctor to another without proof to warrant the extreme measures that had been taken to treat my pain and keep me functioning. Before five minutes had passed, my worst nightmare was becoming a reality.

  I was face to face with the person who had the power to ensure I would continue receiving the care that kept me out of bed, and he was unwilling to give it. Without hearing my story, without knowing the way my body had so dramatically responded to treatment over the years, without listening to the ways disease had split through my life like an ax, this towering, self-assured doctor had dismissed the reality that had taken all of my strength to survive.

  Though I cannot remember the full course of our conversation, probably because the experience was more painful than my mind could bear, I do remember feeling the expanse of my fate spread before me like a charcoal cloud. Desperate to push away the future I most feared, I tried using my clearest words in my most determined, respectable tone. My attempt to be heard only amplified his aggression. Six years of doctors’ appointments and a lifetime of fortifying myself against waves of harm gave me the courage to say no to being treated with contempt by a person under oath to do no harm.

  I pressed hard into the handles of the chair, toughening my resolve, and looked straight into the eyes of the man who didn’t have the respect to look into mine.

  “Who is your superior?” I asked. “Who can I see for a second opinion? I am not willing to have you be my doctor.”

  More condescension ensued, but the scales of power had subtly shifted.

  Yet even in my strength, my soul trembled at the possibility that this was it—the future I feared, the black unraveling of days in which I would only get sicker because no one would see or care enough to help. I wasn’t sure I could survive that future.

  Shame was the blade cutting apa
rt my calm and hope in that exam room, not because I felt stupid or bad but because I felt unable to tolerate the terror of the moment. I was in the presence of someone who was supposed to care and help, but met with judgment. I felt terrified and alone. Shame was forecasting the coming chapter of my life as one of sickness eliciting suspicion, pain with no relief, suffering with only myself to rely on for help. I left angry and anxious but, especially, I left with less hope.

  Shame was telling a scary story about my life, the same story it tries to tell me in times of distress now. Shame whispers the taunting story of defeat and diminishment in our moments of stress. It cuts against our hope and fuels our fear in suffering, even if we don’t think it’s the main problem we face, even if it’s not the reason you picked up this book on suffering.

  Maybe the pervading feeling you have is anxiety about your suffering. You fear how you’ll pay for therapy, doctors’ appointments, or the divorce lawyer, but really, isn’t that fear about not having enough for the situation you find yourself in? Maybe you fear having to tell your small group at church about your marriage problems or how sad you really feel about still being single, but isn’t that fear about feeling you won’t be able to tolerate how uncomfortable telling them might be? You anticipate being judged or not really being heard, and that anticipation is shame expressed in anxiety. We fear being diminished by the suffering in our lives, becoming less human, less okay, less in control of stopping our lives from becoming a dark descent into a terrible future.

  Shame wants us to believe the story that weakness is a private, avoidable problem we should overcome by ourselves. When everything around us treats weakness like a personal problem to master, when we suffer and it does not cease, shame becomes more palpable. When your disease isn’t healed, your marriage doesn’t last, or your mental health is lacking, you have to both experience weakness and cope with it in a world that tells you it is your fault.

  Evil uses shaming encounters like the one I experienced with that doctor to shrink our expectations of the grace we can receive in relationships. It reinforces the story that we will be judged, unheard, and stuck. Evil uses shame to isolate us so thoroughly that we become trapped in a cycle of expecting judgment and prejudging most people as unwilling or unable to hear, help, and love. The people who could remind us of hope are viewed as probable enemies. We fear being honest will just make us hurt worse. We silence ourselves in shame, withholding truth about suffering, because of the unspoken, preemptive verdict that grace won’t be here.

  Shame tells the story that we are alone and must make our own way through the distress we feel. It diminishes us in suffering by coaxing us to ignore the pain, minimize it, and pretend everything is more okay than it is. It’s sin, energized, silently persuading us to stay in hiding. Shame wants us to live divided, dishonest, disembodied lives, to treat our bodies and stories like failures to conceal, to let our lips say we believe God is good while our hearts stay discouraged in the dark. The most harrowing power of shame might be its stealth in convincing us that silencing our pain behind statements of God’s goodness is spiritual, when really it’s just a churchy form of self-sufficiency.

  It is only in honesty and exposure, in being seen in our sadness and despair, that we’ll most clearly see the truth that we’re still living in a story of love.

  The scariest part of being human might be the moments of exposure, when others see how deeply we need to be held. Every human bears the scar of our first relational severing, the disconnection from God we inherited from Adam and Eve’s choice to seek self-sufficiency, to be more godlike than their bodies could hold. Our bodies bear the memory of our perceived abandonment from God. At the slightest hint of rejection or the ringing impression of danger, our bodies instinctively respond with shame’s self-protection. We turn our gaze from those who could hurt us. Adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol rush without our conscious consent, readying us to fight or flee the vulnerability of exposure.

  But down to the fiber of our muscles and the double-helix cascade that carries the stories and traumas and hopes of our every ancestor, our bodies also bear the memory of unsevered love.

  Not that long ago, there was a season when I couldn’t even feel sadness for myself anymore. A lifetime of hurt and a recent string of horrible circumstances had left me depressed and disconnected. I can usually keep at least one finger on grace, but I’d entirely lost my grip. I couldn’t see a way out of my colossal, consuming pain. Out of the financial burden of surviving illness. Out of the defeat of being harmed by the body of Christ caring more about image than people. Out of the agony of living in a body mired by abuse and disease.

  My hands couldn’t touch grace. They only held the sharp edges of a shattered life, fingers wrapped in a bloodied fist shaking at the God who kept letting shards of brokenness fall from the sky.

  The only grace I saw was the alluring idea of forcing handfuls of pills down my throat to end the terror of what God had allowed my life to become. I’m a therapist who knows all the right responses to suicidal ideation, and my heart throbbed with the quick pulse of shamefully considering what I counsel so many others to reject.

  My husband found me staring blankly at the bedroom wall, pills on my bedside table, contemplating despair. He sat at my feet, placing his hands on my legs, meeting my stony face with a look of concern, care, and fear.

  “What’s wrong?”

  I fidgeted, focusing on a paper clip on my lap, twisting it into the uselessness I felt faith was. I stared at my hands, at the table, at the wall, anywhere but the two eyes, glassy with tears, staring back at the emptiness I wanted to maintain.

  “I’m . . . I don’t think I want to be alive anymore.”

  My eyes came to Ryan’s for a moment, a flicker of hope followed by a flash of fear. I had revealed myself to him, sharing the terrible truth of the darkness underneath my hollow expression.

  I was exposed.

  My body trembled with the terror of speaking my faithlessness out loud. In the silence, I grabbed the pillow next to me, burying my face and its shame.

  Ryan touched my shoulder, turned my chin from the pillow, and held my face in his two warm hands, breaking my attention from the furious flood of shame that had swamped me in the elapsed silence of four seconds.

  “I love you.”

  I met his eyes for a moment, his words and hands startling me out of my silent wake.

  “I’m so sorry you are hurting so much. I hate this for you.”

  I looked up, disbelief disarmed. Ryan wasn’t ashamed of my shame. He wasn’t afraid of my faithlessness. I glanced at my hands, at my chest, searching my body for proof that I was worthy of acceptance. I found it in his face.

  In that moment, I didn’t need someone to tell me God was still good. I needed someone to show me I was still loved—even when drowning in the violent storm of shame. Exposing my need was a grace that allowed another’s empathy to surprise me with hope.

  When we allow someone who is empathetic and safe to see our pain, shame, and need, we place our bodies in a position to remember original love. Written into our brains’ basic way of responding to each other is an exchange that can form hope where we feel only despair. While I sank in my shame, Ryan’s presence of love and acceptance began to change the story I was believing about my present and future. My brain’s mirror neuron system responded to Ryan’s display of love.9 Our bodies throb with the longing for love and intuitively absorb its presence. A lifetime of grief, dismissal, and suffering had diminished my brain’s capacity to feel loved, valuable, and safe in my present suffering, but seeing someone extend empathy reignited the neural pathways that could generate my hope and healing.

  Suffering can wring the will to live right out of us, until all that is left is a desperate drop. If you have felt hopeless, if despair has darkened your ability to see light, please know you are not alone. Losing the will to live can be a natural consequence of being human in a life battered by suffering. To feel this way is more co
mmon than you might think. And you are more valuable than shame wants you to believe. Let your hopelessness be heard. Be honest and specific—with yourself and others—about just how dark your thoughts have become.10 If you feel anywhere near how I felt in this story, please honor the gravity of what you’ve endured by seeking professional help from a licensed counselor or therapist. We won’t judge you.

  Whether you have felt suicidal or not, hear the truth I’ve learned again and again. Most of us fear the exposure of our wounds and deepest faithlessness will separate us from love, but exposure is the substance of our healing. The nakedness of suffering leads us to the embodied experience of receiving God’s clothing of love.

  Finding grace in suffering is less about cognitively assenting to the truth of God’s goodness than about letting our shame be seen. If you are a sufferer, be seen. If you encounter someone’s suffering, tuck your words of God’s goodness away until you’ve first listened with the eyes of your heart determined to not look away from pain.

  It’s the shared sight and sound of what we usually keep hidden that carries our bodies into stories larger than shame.

  Shame is constantly trying to shape the story we tell about our suffering. It is always countering the narrative of God’s nearness with the story that we are unloved, abandoned, and will forever be stuck in a place of pain.

  Like Adam and Eve, we sew together fig leaves for ourselves to cover the pain and shame of suffering. We hide, blame, rationalize, and overspiritualize, trying to think our way into comfort to make sense of the evil we experience. But God provides himself.