A multi-speaker transcript from a Pure Desire Ministries YouTube video (BRAIN BUG #5) focused on the role of shame in addiction recovery and relationships. Speakers share personal recovery experiences, describe how shame re-emerges (through perfectionism, unmet expectations, body/sexual dynamics, and routine triggers), and discuss how shame both fuels acting-out and drives attempts to self-medicate. The conversation also notes practical responses: recognizing shame’s ‘bait’ and leaning on recovery tools and workbook material to respond differently.
The final brain bug is the persistent message of shame.
Yeah, so I've experienced this personally where, you know, I'm eight years into recovery, and I wouldn't call myself a seasoned veteran, but, like, that's, you know, I've been in it for a while, but, man, there are days, moments, choices that I make where I'm like, I should be so much further than this. Why am I making this stupid decision? Like, you know, Instagram reels, I know that those are problem. Why am I on them again? Just mindless. Like, this is a landmine, and I'm just mindless, wandering through it. I think about those things, and those are the times that shame pops up again. For me, at least. More. The most prevalent is when I'm not communicating clearly to my wife or I'm blowing up at my kids, or I'm making stupid decisions and not paying attention to my guardrails. And that message of, you've been in here for eight years and you still haven't figured it out. You should be better than this. That's one for sure. That message of shame always seems to creep in. And then another one that I've had to deal with throughout my journey. If you were sexually healthy and you didn't have this addiction, your wife would want to have sex with you all the time. And I don't know if you've been in marriage before or you've met regular people, but at least I'm not gonna say, okay, I'm not gonna get into that. But basically, it's not that way. You know what I mean? I remember a friend of mine once, I had lost a bunch of weight, and he was like, oh, I bet your wife can't keep her hands off you. And I was like, oh, she can. She totally can. And it wasn't. And that's, like, for me, at that moment, I remember feeling a lot of shame because it felt like a character statement toward me or like that I'm not desired or wanted. And I think that when we take, especially in the realm of our sexuality and we, like, project that onto our value or how much we're loved or how much we're cared for by our spouse, I think we get into really messy situations because, like, you know, my wife has had some significant surgeries and stuff that are impacting her body. And I would say that's a big reason why, you know, if we don't. If we're not having sex, it usually has something to do with her body and what's going on. The season of Life we're in. But it's easy for me for that voice of shame to come back up. It's like, oh, it's because you're, you know, you don't look like you used to or you should be further along. And if you were further along, then she would want to have sex with you more. And so it's like those every. And this is just the way that the enemy works. Every opening, it feels like shame can just pop in. And if we're not aware that that's going to happen and aware of the most consistent messages we tend to get in that, then I don't think we'll take any steps forward in combating the shame.
Yeah, it's to remember that shame is a double edged sword because shame can be what keeps someone locked in their addictive pattern or acting out because they feel so bad about what they're doing and they feel worthless. And if people knew I was doing this, they'd reject me. So I'm locked in shame, which actually perpetuates me continuing to do the very things I feel shameful about. But on the other hand, shame can be what drives us into those behaviors as a way to medicate what we're feeling. And it might not be shame that has anything to do with sexual sin or acting out. It may be shame, like you're saying, Trevor, because many of us are kind of perfectionists or we're performance oriented, that we find our worth and value in how well we perform or we have expectations of what we should be like as a parent, a spouse, a worker, what, you know, whatever roles we have in this world. And if we don't live up to our own standard, then that voice of shame says, well, what's wrong with you? Why don't you have it all together? And then that little, you know, blinking red light in the back of our brain starts to go off and say, you know, what makes you feel better when you feel this way? Do you know what we used to do? Because the shame messages sometimes are the same. So our brain is associated. Like, oh, when I hear this message, there's this old place that I ran to. And I think that catches some people off guard that they're like, I totally was not feeling sexual or tempted at all. And I had this day at work and this thing went on. And as I drove home, I drove by that store where I knew I used to buy magazines. And like the trigger just came on like a wave. And what was going on, I thought I was over that. It's like well, maybe it wasn't a sexual temptation. It was that little voice of shame saying, we know how to make this better, we know a little way to run away from it, and we can get caught back up in medicating shame for all the same reasons as before, even if maybe the entry point was different. So just to be aware of that double edged sword of shame that just because you've dealt with the sexual shame doesn't mean you've completely learned to respond appropriately to shame messages that can come from other areas.
Yeah, and I, as you were talking about that, I just, I mean, there's literally not a day that goes by and I've said this before in podcasts that I don't, I don't think about what I did and then what happened to me. And then the enemy uses everything that I did and constantly reminder. He's just constantly like throwing, it's like, it's like fishing, like fly fishing. He's just constantly throwing that fly out, trying to get me to bite on it. And then I realized what's happening. I'm like, okay, I see what you're doing. And this, then I turn to, well, like we talked about, like, you know, the, the, the relapse, you know, are coming out of nowhere. Well, when we see it, it's like, no, I see what you're doing. So the, I'm going to lean on these tools, so I'm not going to focus on that fly. I'm just going to let it go. It's very difficult.
I'm glad you mentioned that because I think it comes up several places in the new workbook that I really appreciated where we do maybe have those curses or things we've believed about ourselves that I will not.
