Shame Kept Me Silent—How I Broke Free

I was ashamed every time I opened my mouth. Words never came out. Talking felt like walking through thick mud and was exhausting. It still is. I am a person who stutters.

My stuttering has been a source of shame, angst, and insecurity for me for as long as I can remember. I’ve cried out to the Lord innumerable times—"Why me, Lord? Why do I talk like this?” It’s confounding that I can bench press 200 lbs., but sometimes a whisper won't budge.

My personal Goliath is syllables.

Shame from my speech kept me hidden for years. But I learned that God's light can shine in even the darkest places. He doesn’t want me to hide, and He doesn’t want you to do that, either.

Are you struggling with something you’d rather not talk about? Is shame keeping your heart locked away from experiencing freedom in the Lord?

Whatever you’re going through, you're not alone in your battle.

Football Failure

As a kid, shame was a regular part of my life. From saying my name and my address to giving presentations at school, I was embarrassed by stuttering every time I opened my mouth.

In my 7th-grade English class, I was mortified by the idea of reading lines aloud in a play, so I lied to my teacher and said I needed to use the bathroom. I twiddled my thumbs there for several minutes—just enough time to return and see that my teacher had given away my lines to another student. But no one knew why I absconded except me.

Another time, in junior high school, I was on the tackle football team, and one of my roles as a halfback was to relay the play from the sidelines to the quarterback. It was a simple task for most 12-year-old boys: Listen to directions, run to the middle of the field, and deliver the message in the huddle.

This time, the coach told me the play, and I ran to my team, but the words were superglued to the back of my throat. They weren’t budging. I panicked. The quarterback’s eyes anxiously darted from player to player, then asked, “Who’s got the play?” With great force, only a few faint sounds trickled out of my mouth.

The quarterback blurted out a random play, and my coach went berserk, wondering why we hadn’t followed his instructions.

I have no idea why the coach gave me this responsibility. It was as if he entrusted an important package to a delivery driver who frequently swerved off the road and crashed. But he didn’t know the extent of my stuttering.

I didn’t dare tell him. And I didn’t dare tell anyone.

Looking back, I can laugh at my time on the football team. Humor is God’s gift to terrible circumstances and a sign of healing. But it’s taken me years to lighten up about how I talk. Praise God that I don't have to take myself seriously anymore.

That’s the Lord's plan for you, as well—He wants to lift the shame off of you in whatever burden you’re facing. I pray someday you can even snicker about it.

Shame Pushes Hiddenness

What’s your version of wanting to run, hide, and medicate? Shame is pernicious. It doesn’t just say “You did something wrong”; it says, “You are wrong—you are a bad person.” It’s a symptom of something deeper we need to deal with—it's the canary warning us in the coal mine.

Some shame has been brought on by our own sin. Other times, as in my speech, I didn’t do anything wrong, but both have to be dealt with in our lives.

After the Fall, Adam tried to hide from God. The Lord called out, “Where are you?” He replied, “I heard you walking in the garden, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked.”

After they disobeyed, Adam and Eve knew good and evil, just like Satan had promised. And now they knew shame as a result.

When shame pushes you to act like a stowaway in life, no one gets to see the real you. They see an outline, like a children's coloring book yet to be filled in. Your precious and beautiful heart gets hidden from the world—even from your loved ones. This happens for as long as you live in the dark.

I lived a big chunk of my years on earth trying to rationalize why I don’t have to deal with my speech and other issues. Oh! I’ll deal with it someday, I thought. I’d have a Ph.D. in Avoidance if colleges awarded that degree.

Practically, I learned to hide by substituting difficult words or by completely avoiding certain speaking situations altogether. I felt temporary relief for a moment by making superficial changes, but what I was doing was like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and expecting a different result.

We need to look in the mirror and admit we need help. People knew the truth about how I spoke, but could I admit it to myself? How long would I keep up the façade?

It’s hard to admit your struggles, whatever they are—an addiction to gambling, shopping, eating, or pornography. It doesn’t have to be sin at all, and your struggle very well could have been caused by no fault of your own, like an abuse that shattered your heart at an early age. Some of you might be fighting an addiction because you were attacked with a barrage of horrible words, and you can't free yourself from those lies.

Whatever the case might be, unaddressed shame and trauma eat at your soul every day. It’s death by a thousand cuts. It’s a toxic waste that kills you drop by drop, lie by lie, eventually sucking you dry of passion, and keeping you from being the man or woman of God He has called you to be. Indeed, shame is a terrible little yeast that works through the whole batch of dough, affecting every area of your life—your family, your friends, and your relationship with the Lord.

Shame carved the lie in my mind, “Something is deeply wrong with me.” It said, “I’m different—but not in a good way; in a bad way.” At the core, shame screams that I was unlovable. My speech was a deal-breaker to know and to be fully known.

The fear is that if we come to terms with it, we’ll be rejected. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Squaring Up Against Shame

The only way to break the power of shame is to be honest with yourself and be vulnerable with others. To get free, I learned I couldn’t hide from the truth. I couldn’t hide in the bathrooms of life as I did in school. There was no way to make my shame less daunting. The only solution was to face it head-on.

Sooner or later, I had to square up against my shame, look it in the eye, and say, “No more. You won’t rule me.” And I did.

It started with signing up for speech therapy in college. I discovered that my university offered a top-level graduate speech therapy program on campus and that I could receive sessions at a very low cost, since the master’s degree students were still learning.

One of the first challenges my therapist gave me was to self-disclose to others about my stuttering. Fear didn’t want me to. Pride told me to save face. Shame whispered in my ear that people would laugh and make fun of me. I knew that if I began telling people the obvious, it would confirm I was weird.

Baring my soul to my friends and family was scary, but I did it anyway. Then, when I shared, something amazing happened—I felt free. The weight of shame was lighter, and each time the power of shame broke a little more.

When I self-disclosed, another profound thing happened: Others began sharing their own hidden struggles — whether it was a speech issue, like not being able to say “s’s” as a child, or something random like a medical crisis they overcame.

Vulnerability bred vulnerability. Courage begot courage. Authenticity brought more authenticity. Isn’t it cool how God works? Acts of humility multiplied it.

What I’ve learned through my speech is that everyone has areas of shame they don’t want to address. I get it. It’s easier in one sense to bury it than dig it up deal with it. The problem is that just because you don’t acknowledge it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist or doesn’t affect you.

Shame thrives in the dark, when it’s left alone and undisturbed. But vulnerability plus humility are secret weapons against it, bringing freedom with each self-disclosure. The light of truth always overpowers the darkness of shame. You break it by becoming honest.

I kept going to therapy and sharing my stuttering with others, experiencing God’s love and grace each time while having the privilege of listening to others’ struggles. But the therapist wasn’t done yet. Next came my biggest challenge.

If shame is controlling you, it’s because it’s still hidden. And the only way to break it is to bring it into the light.

What my therapist asked me to do next pushed me further than I ever thought possible.

Part two coming.