Therapy and Theology: Good Guilt vs. Destructive Shame
hi i’m lisa turkis and welcome to therapy and theology this is some of the most favorite time that i have recording these sessions with therapy and theology with two men that are very very dear friends of mine joel mutamale and we get to work together at proverbs 31 ministries tell us a little bit about what you do there yeah i get to serve as director of theology and research and bring oversight to our theological development formation and i really think that i have the best job in the entire world that’s good because if you left
i’m i’m leaving with you so just going to go ahead and get that out of the way and then also my personal counselor jim crest jim tell us a little bit about you and what your passion is in counseling yeah i like to tell people that we have more help than they have problems and to just get into the narrative and the story of people’s lives as you’ve heard said before and now you have in a book that we simply collect dots connect dots and hopefully correct the dots and just walk people through their pain through some of the things like is in
hebrews 12 that are hindering them from running the race and seeing some some people set free i love doing it every day that’s awesome and i’m so grateful for you not only does jim help me out but many people i love come to see gym too and so just so grateful today we’re talking about a very important topic shame and guilt and you know i was thinking about this before we stepped on camera today i have carried the weight of feeling just rejected and betrayed i’ve carried the weight of having breast cancer i have carried the
weight of disappointment but i’m telling you the hardest most heavy weight i’ve ever carried is the weight of shame and for me mine really played out in my early 20s when before i was married i got pregnant and was just very uneducated about options and choices and i was just very desperate i felt alone i was not really walking with the lord at that point and was too afraid to ask for wise counsel so i went to an abortion clinic and i had an abortion and the weight of shame that came upon me was the heaviest weight
i’ve ever known so when we talk about this today none of us are far removed from this uh shame and guilt topic it’s something that we’ve all experienced so i just wanted to normalize the reality that this is a common human dynamic and i think one trick that either our minds can play on us or that the enemy can play on us is to make us feel like we’re the only one and i think that’s part of the setup for shame the isolation the intimidation and just feeling like no one else in the world could possibly uh be okay with me because i’m not even
okay with me so let’s start off first let’s define shame and then let’s talk about how does it play out how do we recognize some of those thoughts or some of the reactions that we’re having in life where okay this is shame because we’re also talking about guilt and shame and guilt are not one and the same yeah yeah so what do you think jim well i say and you’ve heard me say this that shame i say stands for s-h-a-m-e self-hatred at my expense it’s always about condemnation literally condemning myself and there’s a message which we’re going
