Shame

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 248 of 267 · 20 per page

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  The Bible makes it clear that humility comes with benefits,11 but let me provide three specific benefits here, keeping that unfortunate situation with my coworker in mind. Humility Helps Us Let Go of Being Awesome I know something about myself that I used to spend a lot of time trying to cover up: get too close to me and I will disappoint you quickly and often. And while I hate that it is true, it is true. Pedestals make miserable homes, and the sooner my new coworker realizes that she’s working for a sinner who happens to be leading an organization (and who happens to maybe snap at her one time and then feel terrible about it later—ahem), the better. Now, I am not justifying my behavior, but the truth is, I’m going to make mistakes. I’m going to be selfish and sometimes unthoughtful and short. I’m going to let her down. I’m not going to want to do these things, but now and again they will happen. I’m absolutely going to screw up. How do I know these things? Because I’ve come to understand that I’m just not all that great. Before you rush to my defense: I think this understanding is the goal. Caring little about what you think about me. Caring little about what even I think about me. Do you know how much freedom we could experience, if we prized these two simple truths? My son Cooper is ten years old and is the walking, talking epitome of self-importance. I adore that kid, but I stand by my assessment. I think we’re all that way at ten years old: we’re big deals—at least, we think we are. (Middle school usually takes care of such things, so I’m going to let it ride.) Anyway, Cooper, who cares more about clothes and shoes than his two teenage sisters combined, came downstairs the other morning wearing the fancy Air Jordan shoes that his grandmother bought him and reminded me that he “needs” a leather jacket. He’s been asking for one for weeks. I don’t know which of his basketball heroes he saw clad in a leather jacket, but now Cooper’s life will not be complete until he has one of his own. “I just want to be awesome, ” his pleading eyes say to me. And are you and I any different? At ten years old and at forty, our eyes say the very same thing. When I (finally) chose to humble myself with that coworker and ask her to forgive me for what I had done, I was relieved. I had done the backward thing God asks of us, that thing you and I tend to hate. I’d humbled myself. I’d apologized. I’d made things right again.

• From Between Us

  42 ​“Our flight attendants’ smiles will be more human”: Cited from Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 5. 42 ​“[o]pen aggression was the official policy”: Cited from Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 146. 42 ​“understanding as one would be with a good friend”: Cited from Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 109. 42 ​“seemed too much like a cabin full of 300 demanding strangers”: Cited from Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 134. 42 ​“a sense of being phony or insincere”: Cited from Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 21. 43 ​“faces that did not show emotion at all”: Quotes from Julia L. Cassaniti, “Moralizing Emotion: A Breakdown in Thailand,” Anthropological Theory 14, no. 3 (August 6, 2014): 284. Copyright © 2014 by Sage Journals. Reprinted by Permission of SAGE Publications. 45 ​match up to others’ needs and expectations: Eunkook Suh et al., “The Shifting Basis of Life Satisfaction Judgments across Cultures: Emotion vs Norms,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 2 (1998): 483. 45 ​a large-scale international questionnaire study: David Matsumoto, Seung H. Yoo, and Sanae Nakagawa, “Culture, Emotion Regulation, and Adjustment,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94, no. 6 (2008): 925–37. Suppression was measured with the four-item suppression scale developed by Gross and John, which Matsumoto and colleagues established to be equivalent across different cultures (James J. Gross and Oliver P. John, “Individual Differences in Two Emotion Regulation Processes: Implications for Affect, Relationships, and Well-Being,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85, no. 2 [August 2003]: 348–62). 46 ​emotions to be “negotiated” with the social environment: The point was originally made by Lutz (Unnatural Emotions). 46 ​sign of personal immaturity: Hazel R. Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, “Models of Agency: Sociocultural Diversity in the Construction of Action,” in Cross-Cultural Differences in Perspectives on the Self, ed. Virginia Murphy-Berman and John J. Berman, vol. 49 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 1–58. 46 ​cultivate the emotions . . . with greater ease: Joseph A. Allen, James M. Diefendorff, and Yufeng Ma, “Differences in Emotional Labor across Cultures: A Comparison of Chinese and U.S. Service Workers,” Journal of Business and Psychology 29 (2014): 21–35; Batja Mesquita and Ellen Delvaux, “A Cultural Perspective on Emotion Labor,” in Emotional Labor in the 21st Century: Diverse Perspectives on Emotion Regulation at Work, ed. Alicia Grandey, James Diefendorff, and Deborah E. Rupp (New York: Routledge, 2013), 251–72. 46 ​Chinese service workers did not see it as faking at all: “Surface acting” items (i.e., items on changing emotional expression) loaded on the same factor as items on “faking” in the U.S., but not in China. Suppression is simply not the same as faking it in China: the faking items had a zero loading on the surface acting factor (Allen, Diefendorff, and Ma, “Differences in Emotional Labor across Cultures”).

• From Between Us

  In one of the most vivid examples of different socializing emotions, anthropologist Birgitt Röttger-Rössler and developmental psychologist Manfred Holodynski described the central role of malu (shame) in the socialization of Minangkabau children. The children come from a small peasant village on West Sumatra, Indonesia (the site where Levenson and Ekman tested their MINE theory). The central goal for socialization among the Minangkabau is to pay respect to parents and anyone else—whether kin or no kin—who is older. For the Minangkabau, “showing respect” is to be modest and norm-compliant, and children learn this behavior by learning malu (closest translation: “shame”). From very early on, Minangkabau parents encourage shy behavior in their toddlers, and call it malu-malu (“baby malu”). By calling attention to the behavior, parents also expose their children to the full attention of everyone present, which itself may elicit malu. When children are slightly older, public mocking begins. Five-year-old Haifa and her same-aged (male) cousin Is were publicly mocked by their classmates after having been discovered swimming naked in the local pond. The peers laughed and whispered, and then one cried out “They have no shame!” which was met with agreement and laughing. The episode ended no sooner than Haifa and Is were fully dressed. Sanctioning by caregivers and other relatives similarly does not end until the child’s norm violations have stopped. A defiant child is completely ignored until their behavior is no longer inappropriate, and the adults involved show vicarious or “shared” shame over their child’s norm violations. When the Minangkabau child is older yet, during early adolescence, they are sometimes actively humiliated. Thirteen-year-old Andi, whose teacher cut his hair in front of the whole class (see chapter 2), was an example of this. The use of progressively serious exclusion techniques ensures that Minangkabau children experience and “know” shame. Inducing shame does not only mark norm violations to be avoided; it also leads to the reserved and modest person that is valued among the Minangkabau: a person who is always aware of the social consequences that their behavior may have. Taiwanese Didi’s mom, whom I cited at the beginning of this chapter, equally used shaming to teach her little boy propriety. She drew Didi’s attention to norm violations, and had she lived in the Chicago area, might have been called “critical.” Where the U.S. mothers were weary of shaming or criticizing their children out of fear that doing so would harm their children’s brittle self-esteem, Didi’s mom was trying intentionally to produce a child prone to shame. She was convinced that shame was the “right” thing for Didi to feel. In Taiwan, shame shows that you know your place, and are ready to be deferential. It shows you are committed to preventing the potential negative consequences of norm-violation. In such a cultural context, Didi’s mom thought of shamelessness, not shame, as the more worrisome of the two.

• From Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Cycle of Anxious Thoughts (2020)

  In Philippians 2, he wrote, “In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus.”9 [image file=Image00045.jpg] And what was that mind-set? Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.10 He emptied Himself by taking the form of a servant. He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to death. Does this sound as convicting to you as it does to me? A sacrifice requiring emptiness, ultimate meekness, devastating lowliness of heart—this wasn’t merely a kind act from Jesus for humankind. It was also intended to be an example—as in, a move that His followers would consistently make. Inviting the death of self-centeredness. Enduring the death of dreams. Allowing for the death of hyperconsumerism. Being least awesome, least liked, last. Jesus humbled Himself deeply so that we’d be compelled to live lives of deep humility too. That is, if we so choose. The Upside of Humility When we realize we’ve bought into the lie of our own greatness and we make the shift to choose humility, we then can follow the example of Jesus, who “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped…” who “emptied himself…” who took on “the form of a servant…” who “humbled himself…” who became “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” When we mimic the qualities that motivated these acts, we put God in His rightful place. We replace the lie of our greatness with the truth of who God is—and how needy we are apart from Him. Humility becomes the only logical posture of our hearts. The day after my little lashing-out episode and under undeniable conviction from God, I pulled aside my coworker and asked for her forgiveness. “I need to apologize for something I said yesterday,” I started. “I was wrong, and I’m so sorry. My reaction was really unfair.” You know how I wondered whether maybe she hadn’t even noticed the slight, whether maybe she’d looked past it and just moved on? Yeah. Not so much. “Can I cool off for a while,” she asked quietly, “and then we can sit down and talk this out?” I had hurt her—deeply. She’d been miserable for twenty-four hours.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  HILARY. And this was the carpenter’s son who subdues iron by means of fire, who tries the virtue of this world in the judgment, and forms the rude mass to every work of human need; the figure of our bodies, for example, to the divers ministrations of the limbs, and all the actions of life eternal. JEROME. And when they are mistaken in His Father, no wonder if they are also mistaken in His brethren. Whence it is added, Is not his mother Mary, and his brethren, James, and Joseph, and Simon, and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us? JEROME. (in Helvid. 14.) Those who are here called the Lord’s brethren, are the sons of a Mary, His Mother’s sister; she is the mother of this James and Joseph, that is to say, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and this is the Mary who is called the mother of James the Less. AUGUSTINE. (Quæst. in Matt. q. 17.) No wonder then that any kinsmen by the mother’s side should be called the Lord’s brethren, when even by their kindred to Joseph some are here called His brethren by those who thought Him the son of Joseph. HILARY. Thus the Lord is held in no honour by His own; and though the wisdom of His teaching, and the power of His working raised their admiration, yet do they not believe that He did these things in the name of the Lord, and they cast His father’s trade in His teeth. Amid all the wonderful works which He did, they were moved with the contemplation of His Body, and hence they ask, Whence hath this man these things? And thus they were offended in him. JEROME. This error of the Jews is our salvation, and the condemnation of the heretics, for they perceived Jesus Christ to be man so far as to think Him the son of a carpenter. CHRYSOSTOM. Observe Christ’s mercifulness; He is evil spoken of, yet He answers with mildness; Jesus said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and in his own house. REMIGIUS. He calls Himself a Prophet, as Moses also declares, when he says, A Prophet shall God raise up unto you of your brethren. (Deut. 18:18.) And it should be known, that not Christ only, who is the Head of all the Prophets, but Jeremiah, Daniel, and the other lesser Prophets, had more honour and regard among strangers than among their own citizens. JEROME. For it is almost natural for citizens to be jealous towards one another; for they do not look to the present works of the man, but remember the frailties of his childhood; as if they themselves had not passed through the very same stages of age to their maturity.

• From I'm Not a Mourning Person (2023)

  Before I knew what hit me, my hand was slapping my face. What the hell are you doing? Finally, the pain from my stinging cheeks overtook the anguish in my heart. At last, relief. Field note from grief: always carry a good tube of concealer and some powder. You’ll need it. I fixed my makeup and returned to the table. Shocked, stunned, but pulled together. I acted like nothing happened. I made light conversation. How good is this lightly floured zucchini blossom? I laughed when appropriate and drank wine (but not too much, fearing I might lose it again). Despite the disturbing interlude of self-abuse, I even enjoyed much of the remaining evening. Grandma wouldn’t have approved of my methods, but at least she’d give me points for carrying cover-up and getting on with a grand old time. A COCKTAIL OF SHAMEThe next morning I woke up with a big AR (agonizing reappraisal) hangover. Even though I was the only one who witnessed my unhinged spectacle, I was sick with shame. Why couldn’t I be the type of person who didn’t do insane things like that? Instead, I felt like Annette Bening’s character in the film American Beauty. A positive-thinking, obsessed Realtor who breaks down in a self-slapping fit when she fails to sell a house. “You big baby! Stop it!” she screams, before collecting herself and silently walking out. But like Annette’s character, this house was my everything, too. At least no one saw me, I thought. I can keep this pathetic meltdown to myself. Lock it up. Throw away the key. Smile. Yeah, right. Who was I kidding? A few weeks later, our Bucket List Tour brought us all to Newport, to celebrate my birthday. By this time, I really thought I could keep a lid on any outbursts. I’d talked about it in therapy. Did a bunch of energy work, yada yada. In my mind, I was all set. After a lovely dinner (with no interludes), I was standing outside the restaurant waiting for the valet to bring the car around. My parents were using the restroom; Brian was searching through his pockets for a tip. I’m so grateful we’re here together, I thought. And bonus points for not losing my shit. Clearly, I believed I was growing. Not so fast, Speed Racer. As the car pulled up, three drunk dudes tumbled out of the lobby. One guy put his hand on my shoulder and said/slurred, “You’re pretty, come to a bar with us.” Another crawled into the back seat of our car. I lost track of the third one. He was probably puking in the bushes. “Not gonna happen,” I replied as I removed his grabby hand from my shoulder, before turning to his friend. “Hey, buddy. This isn’t an Uber. Please get out of our car.” He stared at me defiantly, while rifling through our things.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In the early days, though, fighting was a secondary concern; the charter quoted none of the Quranic jihad verses.80 The first priority was the Greater Jihad, the struggle to become a better Muslim. Palestinians, Hamas believed, had been weakened by the inauthentic adoption of Western secularism under the PLO, when, the Charter explained, “Islam disappeared from life. Thus, rules were broken, concepts were vilified, values changed … homelands were invaded, people were subdued.”81 Hamas did not resort to violence until 1993, the year of the Oslo Accords, when seventeen Palestinians were killed on the Haram al-Sharif, and Hamas activists retaliated in a series of operations against Israeli military targets and Palestinian collaborators. After Oslo, support for the militant Islamist groups dropped to 13 percent of the Palestinian population, but it rose to a third when Palestinians found that they were subjected to harsh and exceptional regulations and that Israel would retain indefinite sovereignty over Gaza and the West Bank.82 The Hebron massacre was a watershed. After the forty-day mourning period, a Hamas suicide bomber killed seven Israeli citizens in Afula in Israel proper, and this was followed by four operations in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the most deadly of which was a bus bombing in Tel Aviv on October 19, 1994, which killed twenty-three people and injured nearly fifty. The murder of innocent civilians and the exploitation of adolescents for these actions was morally repugnant, damaged the Palestinian cause abroad, and split the movement. Some Hamas leaders argued that by losing the moral high ground, Hamas had strengthened the Israeli position.83 Others retorted that Hamas was merely responding in kind to Israel’s aggression against Palestinian civilians, which indeed had increased after the outbreak of the Second Intifada, when there were more bombings, missile attacks, and assassinations of Palestinian leaders. Ulema abroad were equally divided. Sheikh Tantawi, grand mufti of Egypt, defended suicide bombing as the only way for Palestinians to counter the military might of Israel, and Sheikh al-Qaradawi in Yemen argued that it was legitimate self-defense.84 But Sheikh al-Sheikh, grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, protested that the Quran strictly forbade suicide and that Islamic law prohibited the killing of civilians. In 2005 Hamas abandoned the suicide attack and focused instead on creating a conventional military apparatus in Gaza.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  “The first fantasies I can recall involved having sex with men in their twenties or thirties. I had found some porn magazines of my father’s. I was around eleven. My favorite scene was of a man in his thirties approaching me from behind and pushing me up against a chain-link fence, pushing my clothes aside but always having a firm grasp on my body. Now my fiancé is in Iraq. Ninety-five percent of my fantasies involve him. We have the photos we send each other. I hear I’m kind of a small-celebrity army pinup.” “My boss; a stranger in a bar; my father’s friend. Horny and demanding and forceful. So consumed by me that he can’t help himself. . . . As an undergraduate I felt like I had to monitor my internal and external life toward consistency. In other words, if I truly believed in women’s equality with men, then I’d have to have sex and imagine sex that reflected that—no domination, no rape fantasies. One result was that I married a nice liberal man who shared my convictions on how sex should be. Seven years later we divorced.” “A really sexy girl lies back on my bed. I grind against her face with my vagina, making her eat me out kind of violently.” “Rape—which, until very recently, I had trouble admitting even to myself. It seemed to fly in the face of all my participation in Take Back the Night rallies in college, all those women’s studies courses. Men take turns holding me down.” The appeal of rape—in the mind, in the lab—haunted Meana and Chivers and took our conversations to uneasy places. Two of their sexologist colleagues, Jenny Bivona and Joseph Critelli at the University of North Texas, had gathered data from nine earlier studies and offered a sense of how commonly women turn themselves on in this way. “For the purposes of the present review,” Bivona and Critelli spelled out, “the term ‘rape fantasy’ will follow legal definitions of rape and sexual assault. This term will refer to women’s fantasies that involve the use of physical force, threat of force, or incapacitation through, for example, sleep or intoxication, to coerce a woman into sexual activity against her will.” Depending on the study, between around 30 and 60 percent of women acknowledged that they took pleasure in this kind of imagining. The true numbers, the authors argued, were probably higher. The subjects conjured the scenes while they had sex, welcomed them while they masturbated, daydreamed about them. One explanation invoked the same reasoning as the woman who said, “I didn’t have to explain myself to Jesus.” Rape fantasies removed guilt. Women embraced them to escape the shame imposed, from the beginnings of girlhood, on their sexuality, to escape the constraints imposed going back and back in time. Another theory took imagining and relishing rape as a type of taboo-breaking.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  351 In this way, the reader understands how the economic and the religious, the secular and the spiritual, were intimately connected for Defoe’s audience. Crusoe is a product of both the Neoclassical world, with its belief in rational design and universal order, and the modern sensibility that insists upon the individual’s capacity to recreate himself. Crusoe’s struggle to understand his place in God’s plan begins nine months after his shipwreck, when he is taken ill and, in his fevered sleep, has a terrible dream. Defoe’s description of Crusoe’s dream-vision recalls the language of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’ s Progress (1678). Crusoe’s reaction to his dream is to refl ect on the wickedness of his ways. He speaks of the “Stupidity of his Soul, without desire of Good, or Conscience of Evil” that overwhelmed him. When Crusoe speaks of acting like a “meer Brute,” guided only by the “principles of Nature and the Dictates of common Sense,” we should not confuse his language with that employed by the Romantics. Crusoe is describing the response of an irrational creature, one who possesses only common, that is, uncultured, sense. Overwhelmed with remorse, Crusoe recalls his father’s warning that if he rejected his place in God’s order, he would suffer God’s reproach. For the fi rst time in many years, Crusoe prays. Crusoe’s description of himself as a “meer Brute” foreshadows his discovery of a single footprint in the sand. Crusoe’s fear that the print might be the mark of Satan or indicate the presence of cannibals temporarily deprives him of his faith, but upon refl ection, he regains his confi dence in God. It is only after his faith has been tested by, ironically, the suggestion that he is not alone on the island, that Crusoe is able to pass that faith on to another. When he rescues Friday from the cannibals, he is also rescuing himself from the state of animal desires. Just as Crusoe has had to learn to honor both his earthly and heavenly father’s wisdom, so Friday learns to become the perfect child to his father, Crusoe. Crusoe’s story is a story of a man who gradually learns to master his own self, his world, and other men. As such, it is the story of the presence of England in the New World, the story of colonization. Robinson Crusoe is a narrative about the power of human reason to overcome the natural world and, thus, an embodiment of Enlightenment ideology, but not the embodiment of that

• From While You Were Out (2023)

  I thought he might faint. Keep moving, I told him as I grabbed his arm. But they weren’t there to interview us. The reporters hadn’t even seen us. They had come from Chicago to interview Joseph Bernardin, the archbishop of Cincinnati, the man who had just said Mass that day. As we later learned, the pope had just named Bernardin as archbishop of Chicago, the largest archdiocese in the nation. He would soon be installed as a cardinal. From the look of terror in Danny’s eyes as we exited the church, I could see then that he would never shake off the shame of his cruel hoax, not that day, not ever. 10 Arrivals and Departures [image file=Image00015.jpg] Bedtime. My mother with Molly and Danny, a.k.a. the Diapered Duo. Wilmette, Illinois, 1965. By August 1986, I was eight months pregnant with our first child and more than a little nervous about giving birth. Larry and I had moved to Milwaukee, knowing we wanted to start a family someday and live closer to his parents or mine. Milwaukee was as close as we got. I was covering the courts and writing about legal issues for The Milwaukee Journal . As my due date drew near, I began to panic. How the hell is a baby’s head supposed to get out of my body? I asked my mother. Beats me, she said. God must be a man or he would have figured out an easier way. This was a cute answer, but, like those she gave to so many of the ques tions I had asked over the years about childbirth and caring for newborns, not a very satisfying one. My mother came up to Milwaukee to help us when Charley was born, and then again, seventeen months later, when Molly, our daughter, arrived. In many ways, those were magical days. I had my mother’s undivided attention for a full week. She was here for me, stone-cold sober and eager to help fold laundry, make dinner, and coo at these wonderful, squiggly new creatures. But I had so many questions, almost none that she could answer. What do I do if he won’t latch on? My mother shrugged. Should I give him a bath before his nap or after? She shrugged again. Is this colic? Here a shrug. There a shrug. Everywhere a shrug shrug. What do you mean you don’t know? I asked her. You had eight of these things. I don’t remember, she said. At first, I thought she was just trying to be polite, deferential, not overbearing, to let me discover the joy of motherhood on my own time, at my own pace. But I wanted direction, some practical advice that I could use to help me care for my newborns. After about the tenth time she told me I would figure it out, I finally realized that she wasn’t being coy. She genuinely did not remember. All those kids. All that laundry.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  Here is where the sad part of the story enters. God made everything so good for the Man. He set him in paradise, everything was perfect except for one thing and that one thing was the man didn’t have a counterpart. So God, being the good Father He is, already had a plan in place to take care of and provide everything the man would need. We know the plan was in place before He even made Man in that He actually extracts the female from the male. They were there together, sharing one body, but they had no way to enjoy the other, unless the one became two. God is a one-times-two kind of God who loves to take two and make them one, and yet the one still remains two. He is a relational God and we humans are made in His image and purposed to be relational creatures, just like our Designer. The two had the freedom to play, explore, and discover the over three hundred erogenous zones God gave each of them. They could frolic and enjoy one another’s bodies with absolutely not one drop of shame. Scripture says, “No shame,” even, “Naked and not ashamed.” It’s all so good, man and woman living together in paradise, the way God intended it to be. And then the serpent, the evil one, enters the story and the beautiful plan God created took a nasty turn. “The serpent was clever, more clever than any wild animal God had made. He spoke to the Woman: “Do I understand that God told you not to eat from any tree in the garden?” (Gen. 3:1). He has the nerve to start with a lie, just a little white lie to create doubt, to wedge in just a sliver of unbelief, questioning God’s goodness. God hadn’t said any tree, only one tree. I imagine there were thousands to pick from, only one did God set a boundary around. The Woman said to the serpent, “Not at all. We can eat from the trees in the garden. It’s only about the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘Don’t eat from it; don’t even touch it or you’ll die’” (Gen. 3:2–3). Do you see how the serpent exaggerated? He loves to make God sound like the bad guy, the cheapskate, the withholder of fun stuff. The serpent told the Woman, “You won’t die. God knows that the moment you eat from that tree, you’ll see what’s really going on. You’ll be just like God, knowing everything ranging all the way from good to evil.” (Gen. 3:4–5) He forgot to mention God is good and wanted to provide good for His children and protect them from the burden of evil.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  Sadly, the Man is silent during the exchange, and neither the Man nor the Woman bother to consult with God. Consider if they would have looked at each other and said, “Hey, God has a stellar track record with us. He has only provided wondrous things for us, we live in paradise, we eat organic fruits and veggies, we swim whenever we want to, and we have a lot of fun together. We have never experienced Him withholding anything good from us. Let’s wait—He should be here soon—and we can talk this over with Him before we listen to this creepy snake.” But Man remained silent and Woman acted on her own. We see the same scenario today, with male and female and what harms our relationships with each other. The serpent planted doubt in Woman, and every woman has been marked by doubt since then. We ask ourselves, “Is God really good? Can I trust Him? Maybe I should take things into my own hands—maybe if I have sex with this guy he will love me and give me the love I so hunger for? Maybe he will be faithful to me, if I give him everything I have?” Or, “I don’t need a man or relationships. I can make it on my own.” Because this is a book on sexuality, I will point out how the Fall affected our sexual decision making. First, the Man was passive. Passivity paralyzes a man and leaves him feeling inadequate, feeling less than; in extremes, he begins to believe he is a loser. Some men get stuck in either one of two shame-inducing extremes. Either too fearful to even approach a female or, if he happens to find a woman, he hides himself from her, believing if she knew the real him she would run. Or he spends his life trying to prove his masculinity through sexual conquests—proving to himself and others that he is indeed adequate. The story continues, “When the Woman saw that the tree looked like good eating and realized what she would get out of it—she’d know everything!—she took and ate the fruit and then gave some to her husband, and he ate” (Gen 3:6). Yep, now we know it all. Lucky us, instead of male and female having paradise and a lot of sexual fun together in a committed, covenantal, safe relationship, now we have a lot of heartache; because when she ate, we all ate, and our eyes have been opened to evil, and sometimes it looks pretty tempting, especially before we count the cost of the consequences of shame.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  “God called to the Man: ‘Where are you?’” The God of pursuit has come looking for His beloved children. Adam replies, “‘I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked. And I hid.’ God said, ‘Who told you, you were naked?’” (Gen. 3:9–11). This is such a powerful question, a question that begs exploring. I wonder if God is saddened when a parent slaps his or her child’s hand because they are exploring their genitals and learning that they feel good. I wonder if God is saddened when a teenager’s body is flooded with either testosterone or estrogen and sexual feelings arise and someone says, “What is wrong with you? Your sexuality is dirty, and you better keep that under wraps. Don’t come home pregnant, young lady; and buddy, you better keep that in your pants.” Imagine if naked were normal and we weren’t freaked out that God made us sexual creatures on purpose? Imagine if we saw our sexuality as normal, but sacred, and the act of sex as something godlike and holy and fun and playful? We’d live in a different world where we would talk about sex and educate our children and integrate our values and our spirituality into the greater context of our sexuality. It would be normal to include God in our sexual decision making. Our choices would be less about what our hormones are saying and more about our character structure. But because of the Fall we have separated our sexuality from our spirituality, and we keep much of what we do with it hidden under the fig leaves—away from God and away from those we are meant to love. If our sexuality and spirituality were integrated, we might have frequent conversations with God such as; “God, would You teach me how to make love to my husband? I just haven’t been in the mood lately, and the kids are wearing me out. I don’t want to have someone grab my breasts, snuggle me, or tug on me. I need some space, and sex just doesn’t sound like fun.”—Or—“God, I need Your help in connecting sexually with my wife. I seem to be all thumbs, and I’m not touching her in a way that stirs much up. Would You help me, help us to have the kind of sex You want us to have?” If single, we might say, “Lord, I am dating this amazing person, and I am so hot on fire for him or her sexually. What do I do with my desires and longings? How do I handle wanting to have sex so bad—and yet You want me to wait until we are in a covenant relationship. How do I do this?”

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  How attachment went with our Family of Origin (FOO) is integral to understanding how we were shaped for love relationships. In my own life, my mother could be warm and nurturing and available at times. Other times she was distant and unavailable. I later learned those were the times my father was either drinking heavily or acting out in some way. I formed a more anxious style of attaching because I was uncertain if I could count on my parents. Sometimes they were available, other times my father was stressed and highly reactive and downright frightening, and my mother was caught up in his behavior. My husband came from a family of seven children, a daycare in his home, and foster children in and out. He was in the middle and learned to be more avoidant. Together, we have worked on our attachment styles to form a more solid, secure attachment. It hasn’t happened easily or without tears, but every ounce of effort we have applied to learn how to turn toward each other instead of becoming either anxious or avoidant has been worth the secure love relationship we now share. At times, we still have some bumpy moments, but overall our attachment has grown strong and secure and is a great source of joy. Sexuality is a significant part of our story, and our parents play a role in how we feel about our sexuality and what we do with it. If our parents had a healthy view of sexuality and were comfortable talking about sex, that shaped us in a positive way. If they were unhealthy and sex was a taboo topic in the house you grew up in, sex can be a really difficult topic. If sex was treated without respect such as when porn was readily available, or off-handed sexual innuendos were tossed around, or parents were sexually unfaithful to one another, sexuality can seem dirty. If Mom and Dad modeled warmth, affection, and playful attraction, we learned our sexuality is something good. If our parents argued about sex, if one was cold and the other pouting because sex wasn’t frequent enough, we learn sex is a power struggle. Either way, our parents are wiring our brain for future sexual relationships. You may feel discouraged by this. Ron and I were at first as well. Neither set of our parents modeled healthy sexuality. There were lots of dark secrets to be sorted through. With God’s help and the help of others, we can honestly say no sexual problem, no shameful secret, nothing you are hiding from is too impossible for God to heal. THE FIRST TIME Our first sexual encounter also forms our feelings and beliefs about sexuality. For some their first sexual encounter is loving, happy, and satisfying. Sadly, for too many, their first sexual encounter may not have been a positive experience. Yet, they are lasting experiences, and sometimes we find ourselves stuck in the memories, feelings, sensations, and images of those experiences.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  “I know I’m not alone. College can seem like a time to spread your wings and get free from your high school days or maybe your parents’ rules. I get that. Nobody wanted his or her freedom more than me. My dad was a preacher and I had my bellyful of religion and rules by the time I got to college. You may be shocked I am talking so openly about sex, drugs, and religion, but these are the big issues you are going to face in the next several years. You will make choices that will impact the rest of your lives. “Kaycie and I have walked this journey out. It has been messy and at times heartbreaking. We have hurt each other, our families, and ourselves. But we have also experienced grace, compassion, forgiveness, and a new way of doing life. We have committed our lives to helping you do the same, if that’s what you want. No secrets. “Open, honest, real-life conversations and dialogues are welcome here. We don’t want to pretend we have all the answers. We don’t. We are still learning and discovering. But this we do know: God is for you, and He will not leave you even when you are at your worst. And neither will we. “Jesus wants a relationship with you. It’s a relationship with Jesus that changed my life. I’m so grateful He found me in my darkest days. I grew up in the church; I was there every time the doors were open, and I went up front every summer at youth camp to give my life to Jesus, but a week later, I took it back. I thought my dad represented God, and if God was as mean as my dad, then I didn’t want anything to do with him. “My dad would preach on Sunday and whip me for fun later the same day. The gospel became very twisted inside me. God loves me, and my dad loves God, but my dad was as mean as a snake, and I personally thought he was the devil. When I heard the way he yelled at my mom, the thuds I heard coming from their bedroom, and her quiet whimpers and bruises in the morning, it made me hate him more. When I left for college, I didn’t want anything to do with God or Jesus His son. “I came to A&M running away from it all and believing I could leave that life behind. But the nightmares and memories didn’t leave me so I started using porn and drinking. That worked for two years to numb the pain inside me. When it stopped working, I tried something stronger and when I found myself needing more and more to get the same high, I knew I needed help. Honestly, I had no clue where to find help. The church only told me what was wrong with me.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  “I know many addicts did not receive sufficient bonding from their parents or most significant caregiver. God wanted every child to receive secure attachment, which means the child knew his or her parents would be available, warm, and nurturing, not perfect, but would work to build trust with the child. Dr. Daniel Siegel says it like this, ‘Being a we often begins in our infancy. Yet, over one third of us have had a history of insecure attachment and did not have a reliable experience of joining in where we were respected as individuals who were worthy of being a part of a linked and vibrant whole.’3 “For children who did not get that type of attachment, they typically develop one of two styles of attachment: anxious or avoidant. The anxious attacher feels insecure and afraid when attachment isn’t going well and typically ramps up emotionally to try to reconnect. The avoidant tamps down emotionally and moves away from attachment, believing he or she cannot trust attachment. “The brain develops from the bottom to the top (our primal brain resides at the bottom and our pre-frontal cortex, our smart brain, resides at the top), and from right to left. The right side is the relational side of your brain, the left is the logical; and the left side was intended to help make sense of the right side. If the child, whose main task is to experience joyful, trusting connections with mother and father during its first eighteen months of life, did not receive these positive feelings to minimize and regulate stressful feelings, the child becomes the adult who has poor affect regulation. In other words, these adults have a hard time or an inability to calm and soothe themselves when stressed or to reach out to another human being for containment. “You can understand how this person reaches for some sort of substance to calm the brain. God’s ideal was we would reach for mommy or daddy to comfort, smile, reassure, and soothe our discomforts; but when that doesn’t happen the child learns people cannot be trusted, and they must find ways on their own to soothe the distress. “Because caregivers didn’t provide what was needed for this child, shame gets deeply wired into the limbic system, where memories are stored. Shame is generally programmed by the time we are two years old. This is why we oftentimes don’t have the language to describe our shame; we just have feelings of shame.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  The two-story house wasn’t impressive—it smelt like leftover pizza, stale beer, and looked like nobody’s mother had been to visit in the last three decades. Someone picked up the kitchen, but it wasn’t clean. A&M chairs filled in for furniture in the living room and what was once the kitchen table was filled with week-old newspapers, coupon fliers, accounting books, and an old pizza box with one piece of dried up pepperoni left. Jeff looked hungrily at the box but decided to pass, wondering how long it had been there. Trevor and Jeff stood in the living room, their belongings lumped at their feet looking a little lost, when Kevin came rumbling down the stairs. “Hey guys!” He stuck out his hand and shook each of theirs. Jeff looked him square in the eyes and gave him a firm handshake. Trevor’s was less convincing and he didn’t completely make eye contact. Kevin, raised in LA, knew that evasive look way too well. He sensed Trevor had a few secrets much like he did. “Let me show you the palace,” Kevin said as he rolled his eyes. Later, a stillness settled over the house as the lights went out one by one. Kevin tossed in his bed as the familiar dream haunted his sleep. He was chasing after his mother, screaming for her in the dark, he was small, vulnerable, and alone. Aching penetrated each throb of his panicked heart. The cold sweat awakened him with a sudden realization he was not alone. He shared this room with Jason. Hot shame replaced his cold sweat. The next morning Kevin rolled over relieved to see Jason’s bed a crumpled, empty mess. Kevin wondered how someone that large slept comfortably in a twin bed. About that time, Jason showed up dripping from his morning run in the Texas heat. “Hey,” he said, “do you want to go to this thing with me today? It’s a campus ministry that’s a really big deal here, almost everyone goes, and you could meet most of the guys I hang out with.” “Um—sure—yeah, I guess.” Later, Kevin convinced Jeff and Trevor to go with them. Blaring from the coliseum was Tim McGraw’s song, “Humble and Kind.” Kevin thought that was interesting. The only time he attended anything religious was his grandmother’s church, where they opened a musty hymnbook and sang songs from prehistoric times. He always pictured people wearing old western clothes, bonnets, and buns, with long skirts, and shirts buttoned to the neck. He loved the warmth of his grandmother and how she smelt like cookies, but her church made him fidget and pray to the God up there this would soon be over.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  We ask you—urge is more like it—that you keep on doing what we told you to do to please God, not in a dogged religious plod, but in a living, spirited dance. You know the guidelines we laid out for you from the Master Jesus. God wants you to live a pure life. Keep yourselves from sexual promiscuity. Learn to appreciate and give dignity to your body, not abusing it, as is so common among those who know nothing of God (1 Thess. 4:1–5). “Man, I wish I’d known something about this kind of a life. You may think Kaycie and I have it all together. The truth is the first time we met was in a dark basement at a frat party. We sat across from a coffee table splattered with beer bottles, pot, and cocaine. We shared a line of cocaine, got high, and slept together for the first time without hardly sharing a word or knowing each other’s last names. We were so lost we didn’t know up from down, and we sure didn’t give dignity to our bodies. Instead, we abused our bodies and took from each other what we thought would remove the empty, lonely pit we found ourselves in. “If that wasn’t enough, I was also addicted to porn and Kaycie—well, she will tell you her own story. A month before graduation, Kaycie discovered she was pregnant. That little redhaired guy, yeah, he was the result of our college days. Don’t get me wrong; I love Sam. He’s a gift and a big part of why we both got sober. We have needed a lot of help. The hardest part and the one with the strongest grip on my mind was the porn. My older brother introduced me to it, and before I knew it, I started planning my days around losing myself in what I once thought was the best drug I ever discovered. It was my dirty little secret. I thought it hurt no one until two months after Sam was born, Kaycie found me late one night indulging in my private life. “It was humiliating, so I tried to put it off on her and the new baby. After all, I justified, we weren’t exactly having a ton of sex since she got pregnant and had the baby. It wasn’t until I got help that I realized how completely selfish I was and how my secret was hurting the people I loved.

• From Love & Sex: A Christian Guide to Healthy Intimacy (2018)

  Kaycie was grateful for the interruption when the waiting-room door swung open. The familiar smile of her therapist shook her brain out of the negative rehearsal. She dumped her overloaded purse filled with baby wipes, crackers, and gummy bears at her feet and settled into the familiar sofa. Olivia’s smile always calmed her and reassured Kaycie she wasn’t some hopeless freak. “Kaycie, where would you like to start today?” Kaycie took a deep breath and heard herself exhale before she said, “It’s not all James. The healthier he gets, the more I can see my own issues. I want to work on me. I have faced and grieved the one-night stand and the porn issues, but I think I need to take the focus off of James—it keeps me stuck in the past and avoiding my own issues. I need your help to move forward.” “Kaycie,” Olivia looked at her with a twinkle in her eye, “I have been hoping you would come to this place. You have done the hard work of facing the marital issues, and I am celebrating that you are ready to face your own. Besides, a healthy marriage consists of two individuals who are doing the hard work of healing their own souls. So let me ask, where would you like to start working on you?” Kaycie nervously clutched her hands in her lap, “Well, James and I have a theme with the students, “No secrets,” but to be honest, I have never shared with anyone my biggest secret. And I’m not sure I have told myself . . .” Kaycie stiffened as a red rash crept up her chest and onto her neck. “My senior year of high school, I had two youth pastors. One was incredible; he was round-faced with a warm, dimpled smile. He adored his wife and four little boys. He was completely dedicated to the youth group. He loved God and really wanted the best for all of us. I trusted him.” Olivia nodded and leaned in knowing there was more.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  What is noticeable about the prophetic literature even in its earliest surviving phase is the emphatic connection it makes between sexual misconduct, more often than not on the part of women, and infidelity to the God of Israel. It is not surprising that this eventually led to the ejection of God’s wife from her place of honour (though, of course, the causality might be the other way round). Hosea was a prophet of the eighth century whose diatribe is one of the earliest to survive in written form. He shaped his bitter denunciation of the people’s betrayal of God around what he at least claimed was his own personal tragedy: a direct divine command to marry a woman he already knew to be promiscuous, and soon to be the mother of illegitimate sons and daughters – ‘children of harlotry’. This extreme form of enacted prophecy was a mirror to the religious unfaithfulness of Israel, the dark reversal of God’s promise of fatherhood to Abraham; Hosea interrupts even the promises of national restoration in his text’s latter half with more sexual denunciation.[25] This theme of personal sexual humiliation mirroring a cosmic tragedy is extremely powerful: it has resonated with the fears and miseries of countless individuals through three millennia, as well as providing a dark but plausible explanation of communal misfortune. Equally extravagant on the theme of promiscuous unfaithfulness was the later prophet Ezekiel, both prophet and sometime priest in the last years of the Jerusalem Temple at the beginning of the sixth century BCE. The sexual theme in the collection is not as all-consuming as in Hosea, but when the denunciation of sexual and religious faithlessness does emerge, it is startlingly and brutally uninhibited. At what is now Chapter 23, verse 20, for instance, a harlot is portrayed in nostalgic mood for her time back in Egypt, and ‘her paramours there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose emission was like that of stallions’. That is the attempt of the New Revised Standard English translation to be relatively decorous while still faithful to the text; James Davidson’s more full-throated recent rendering of it gives the male lovers ‘cocks as big as donkeys’ ’, and their sperm ‘as copious as that of horses’. That passage ends (23.45–48) with God smacking his divine lips at the thought of the violent execution by stoning of such promiscuous women in Israel.[26] Small wonder that the text of Ezekiel that we now have is so damaged (see above, Chapter 1). *