Food, Sex, and Shame, Part 2

by on March 28, 2025

In part two of this conversation, Dan and Rachael continue their exploration by addressing the profound link between shame, food, and sex. 

Shame is often leveraged by evil around our core needs for nourishment and intimacy to isolate and create deeper wounds, making it difficult to engage these areas with openness. 

Dan emphasizes, “Knowing your story’s vulnerability to how you have been harmed, but also how you’ve used food and sex,” is crucial.

Rather than allowing shame to silence or control us, Dan and Rachael encourage listeners to confront it with boldness. While shame may never fully disappear, we can engage it—not with harshness or self-destruction, but with a fierce kindness and courageous defiance.

Rachael shares: “The Spirit is often inviting me in the disruption of shame, not to power up and go toward fight, flight or freeze as a way to disrupt shame, but to move toward tenderness, to move toward grief, to move toward a kind of righteous anger that leads to a ‘hell no.’”

Ultimately, the work of dismantling shame happens within a community of care. Dan reminds us that true healing takes place in a “playground of kindness”—a space where we are seen, known, and deeply loved.

Please note that this episode contains discussions of sexual development, sex, body image, and disordered eating, and may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

Related Resources:

Episode Transcript:

Dan: We’ve named some difficult things as we enter into this conversation about sexuality and eating and the interplay with shame and contempt. So just to let people know we’re coming back into that. Is it a trigger warning? Probably a little, but I have another warning and that is my head is full of something I will not name other than it rhymes with the word not. And most of us have labored when we don’t feel well. But I think having the opportunity to disrupt shame and contempt, it’s like I would really want to have a little bit more of a less congested voice, let alone head. But yet let’s muddle into this conversation. And you were saying that you could feel somewhat better as well.

Rachael: Yeah. Just levels of fragmentation that you just don’t quite want to have. But also I feel fiercely committed to disrupting shame, and it feels like if there was something worth fighting for today in the midst of unwellness and fragmentation, disrupting shame is certainly one of those things.

Dan: Well, and I hadn’t planned on starting with this, but there is something really important about that notion of ferocity, and maybe even more so the word defiance. We’ll talk about how we think we can dismantle something of the nuclear power of shame and therefore contempt. But just to begin with that, and that is this lovely framework in Isaiah chapter 50 where the suffering servant talks about the reality of having his face spit upon, his beard plucked. And there is this image of, I defiantly look the shame in the eye, and it parallels very much what we find in Hebrews Chapter 12 “for the joy set before him, he endured the cross scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God”, and then Paul’s invitation or the writer of Hebrews invitation, “consider him who endured such opposition from sinners so that you’ll not grow weary and lose heart.” So as we begin this process, I kind of want to begin with that and perhaps we’ll come to a completion and end with it. There has to be a kind of, even if you don’t feel well, even if you’ve known you’ve struggled with shame, with regard to your sexuality or food or both, there has to be something inside that says, hell no. This is the work of evil. Evil uses shame and contempt, I think more deeply than any other affect, any other experience of the human condition to create that sense of scattering, because we’ve talked about before that the experience of shame is a form of trauma, and that what you experience when you feel shame is trauma and its effect of fragmentation, numbing and the desire to isolate.

Rachael: So in some ways, in order to disrupt shame and to bring our defiance into play, we have to know something of our enemy, not a fixing our eyes on the enemy, not a becoming hypervigilant, but certainly to grow in wisdom.

Dan: Oh, absolutely. And what I think you’re putting words to is again, what Ephesians 6:12 invites us to us “for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against rulers and against authorities and against powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” So we’re not just talking about in some sense, systems, which are seeable but profound, but we’re also talking about system structures and I don’t know the best word to use entities. I hate using the word being or persons, but intentional entities that wish to create profound harm, particularly as we talked last time regarding our sexuality and/or with regard to food. So the defiance that you hold, I just want to say. Yeah, yeah. So when you come to name that your enemy isn’t just systems selling food that actually is intended at some level to be addictive or systems that demand that you take in sexual desire and therefore to stir desire for even more beyond sex itself to the product or the person selling, how does it help you to know that our war is not primarily with flesh and blood?

Rachael: Well, I’m going to get super Christian here. So I’ll just say it gives me profound hope because I believe that Jesus has already dismantled all the power of evil. I don’t understand yet why it does seem to still have some power on this earth that we are at the mercy of. So there’s a both and a not yet an already not yet reality to me of the kingdom of God. But I find great hope because I look around right now and the world feels pretty despairing, and in many ways it feels like evil is winning. And so it helps me to trust then that the power of the Spirit is also at work in ways seen and unseen because there is no power of evil that is greater than the power of God through Christ Jesus. So in some ways it helps me to kind of correct my posture, so to speak, to take courage, but also to know that the way it’s not by might, it’s not by power, but it’s by the Spirit. And the Spirit is often inviting me in the disruption of shame, not to power up and go toward fight, flight or freeze as a way to disrupt shame, but to move toward tenderness, to move toward grief, to move toward a kind of righteous anger that leads to a hell no, and to move toward embodiment. So honoring my body, blessing my body to move toward understanding the stories that shape me and to move toward relationship because ultimately I know I’m not able to give myself what I need in isolation. So in some ways it actually intensifies my defiance.

Dan: I love that. And I think it’s such an important beginning point. The most recent conversation regarding food was the fact that Becky had gone shopping soon after our first podcast and then purchased a bag of Fritos that I had asked her to purchase. And not just Fritos, but the scoop kind, and that has a lot of history for us. Some of our earliest dating experiences were at her kitchen table with Fritos and these particular Fritos in a dip that her mother would make. So it holds not just the cortisol rise and dopamine intensification, but it actually has power of oxytocin, of being something. So she bought them and after, I think less than a day, she said, did you share the Fritos with anyone? Was anyone over recently? And went, what do you mean? She’s like, well, they’re almost half gone. I just got them. I’m like… you know no one’s been in this house, but you and me. Why did you frame it in that way? So instead of dealing with fact that I had taken them as a source of solace, I’m angry at her for being playful and naming that I must have shared them with at least five other people given that so much, so much was actually gone. So do you see she’s, I think asking a very legitimate question, did you eat all those? And the answer is yes, and I’m defending against her playful assessment. And then we got beyond that down to this simple point, what’s unnerving you? And it was a particular, I’ll just say a piece of news about our national politics that had so innervated, fear, anger, confusion, and I went to the pantry and created solace. So in that I’m actually fighting as if the war is flesh and blood. But the reality is no, everything happening not just in our day, but everything happening has both the seen and the unseen world at play in a form of questioning, of doubting, of struggling. And in that, so important for me to be able to go, I was scattered. It’s just a season in which I have a hard time reading, reading the New York Times, reading the Wall Street Journal, watching the news, and then I get scattered. When I do, I get numb, and then I turn to what has been something of the means by which I can find peace, but it is not peace. So what is that echo for you?

Rachael: I want to be careful. We’re talking about how our enemy is not flesh and blood, but that doesn’t mean that evil doesn’t work through flesh and blood. So I know we’re both holding that. We’re not saying like, oh, just everyone is okay. And it’s just as if the world is split like that. We understand that truth, but in some ways, evil works in ways to expand the impact of trauma. It feeds on trauma. And so yeah, it makes me think about how all, you already put words to this, all the things we naturally experience in a trauma response, the enemy is going to work with to keep us more bound, to keep us more afraid, to keep us more ashamed and more contemptuous. So when we’re talking about sexuality and food and the complexity of those realities, especially when so many of us, our actual trauma stories have to do with sexuality and food, it’s not just like these are realities that are separate. They’re so deeply integrated to understand then that when we’re having trauma responses, the war is going to intensify.

Dan: Well, to know its schemes requires us to know our own story because if food, sex, or any means by which you can increase your level of dopamine to lower something of the experience of stress and the fragmentation that trauma brings, again, I knew only too well that my body was not doing well with what I was seeing on the screen yet the actual movement to be able to go, the actual physical movement to the pantry, the opening of the bag, it requires not a great deal of, shall we say, physical strength, but opening the bag, taking a few, then taking a few more, and then taking a few more, and then going over and getting a bowl and pouring a rather sizable portion in all that’s happening. And again, if somebody were to say, are you aware in this moment that you’re taking what you’re seeing in a way in which you’re fragmenting, it would’ve been actually helpful, but I didn’t know that. And again, we talk about it. It’s sort of what we built so much of our conversations on. But in that moment, I’m already numb. I’m already moving toward how indulgence, a kind of consumption. And what we talk about is lust. You can lust in a way that you consumed something that resolves, it’s then going to increase as it did when it got named by Becky. Even in the kindness and playfulness, she brought an immediate sense of shame, like, yes, I’m just not mature. And worse than that, many internal words, much worse than that. So knowing your story’s vulnerability to how you have been harmed, but also how you’ve used food and sex becomes this interplay of it’s just easier… just shut down.

Rachael: I think that’s what I would hope people would be hearing. I would imagine some people are hearing, wait, you had this much wait, it was an issue to eat some Fritos. Some of us aren’t as mature as you because I’m like, well, listen, I’m still going for the half bowl of Fritos, but I at least have the awareness I’m traumatized. So it’s more of a choice whether it’s a wise choice, it’s a choice. And part of what I hear you putting words to is in that moment, it wasn’t necessarily like, yes, it’s a choice, but it wasn’t an informed choice that what I’m actually looking for and what I’m actually needing is a kind of comfort, is a kind of containment. And there might be other ways to pursue that. But in this moment, there’s almost like an addictive process playing out that you don’t get to see is connected to trauma. And therefore, when it’s invited to think about, that shame instinct kicks in, which also seeks to kind of keep us bound. We don’t get to have curiosity or kindness or a sense of what’s actually at play here. What might I need? We just have either self contempt or others-centered contempt or some form of both, and we still don’t get what we need.

Dan: And at least I want to underline that one of the things you’re saying is eating really a pile of Fritos isn’t the issue. The issue is you were fragmenting, you were going numb, and you in some sense were drawn to what would both feel like a resolve. But frankly, somewhere deep within me knew it would only trigger more. So in some sense, I’m literally being seduced not to the darn Frito, but to the susceptibility to judgment. So much of our eating has judgment. I ate too much. I ate the wrong thing. I shouldn’t have eaten this much. Versus saying, wait a minute, you’re able to bless your body’s ability to take in half a bag, not quite, but near, of Fritos, and can you honor that and bless that and enjoy it rather than come to judgment? So the seduction wasn’t just the misuse of the Fritos because that’s not the point. It’s how come you weren’t aware that at this moment I need soothing, and food is a lovely gift of soothing sexuality is a lovely gift of soothing. At that moment. Becky wasn’t home. I don’t think she or I would’ve been particularly interested in sexual play, but that’s why the rapidity of food is so much easier to engage for most of us than what’s involved in initiating sexual contact. And so in that, can we hold the scheme of evil? It doesn’t want just “overuse.” What it wants is for you to judge what you perceive to be overuse in a way that leads you back to even more fragmentation because of the shame. So it’s brilliant. It’s wickedly brilliant in utilization of what has appropriate solace, comfort, goodness as a means of attending to our bodies’ dysregulation. But what it wants is for us to end up in this quiet and ferocious judgment of something is ugly and wrong with us. So that was part of the sweetness of Becky being able to go, look, if you eat the whole bag, we’ll get another, but what’s going on for you? That’s the invitation. So as we’re beginning to talk about the vulnerability of our bodies, historically, you know your story, my story of abuse makes the reality that sexuality, touch will always have something of a history of: I got to move through something. Those scars just never get fully erased. But in that, as we talk about food, as we talk about sexuality, I would love to hear how you think about the engagement with shame when it comes.

Rachael: Yeah, I think it’s back to, well, I will speak to it with regard to friendship or marriage. In the places where I’ve experienced disruption of shame, it’s exactly what Becky is doing for you. It’s an invitation to bring the fullness of my face, not just the one I want to present. And I have a particular, maybe you’re this way too, but I tend to only be able to ask for help if I know how to give myself what I need first. Okay? If I could figure out what I actually need and then therefore how to give it to myself, even if I don’t need to give it to myself, someone else will offer, at least I know I could if they fail miserably because it feels so deeply threatening to have needs that I can’t provide for myself. So shame is a tricky one for me because ultimately I do need some sense of connection, whether it’s with God, a friend, my spouse, sometimes even my children, to initially disrupt what’s happening, to be invited, so to speak, back to the table, to come out of exile, back into communion. And it’s not like we get to do that because we just, I love this moment. For you, it would’ve probably been nice to go away, figure out what’s going on, do some therapy with yourself without having to talk to anyone, and then come back and be like, oh, yes, this is what’s happening without any exposure of the more fragmented, isolated parts that are suffering where there’s vulnerability. So I certainly think that there’s a reality of being invited to turn our face back to connection.

Dan: Yeah. Well, and that’s one of the reasons I want to read this section out of Isaiah 50, starting with verse six, the suffering servant speaking. And obviously for those of us who are followers of Jesus, we see this as Jesus speaking in a way that Hebrews 12 picks up something of his theme where he says, “I’ve offered my back to those who beat me my cheeks, to those who pulled out my beard. I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting because the sovereign Lord helps me. I will not be disgraced, therefore have set my face like flint, and I know I will not be put to shame.” There is something in that, oh, defiance that I go, well, that’s not me. Oops. Thank you, Jesus, that you will stand on my behalf against my accusers. I remember a conversation which John Eldredge many, many years ago, where we were talking about an experience of shame that I had, and his simple phrase was, do you know Jesus takes that personally? And I’m like, huh? He goes, the accuser can’t come against you without it coming first through Jesus. And just that simple idea of, huh, well, it doesn’t resolve my shame. It doesn’t take it away, but it does create this interesting stance that is at least profoundly counterintuitive, and that is most of my experiences with shame over my sexuality, past, present, future, and my body with regard to past, present, future food has been to a degree turning my face away. And that just image of, well, what would it mean in one sense to bring my face to the shame that evil ultimately wants my face to be erased through, to actually touch my face, to actually feel my face, my body, and to stare at the one, because I’m usually the one who’s making the accusation. But as you would put it so wisely that it isn’t that evil doesn’t use the human condition and humans including ourselves to be the actual respondent to our own shame. So I’m having to deal with, there’s a part of me accusing, judging and shaming in the shame. Can there be another part of me that looks at that part with a ferocity, not to destroy that part, but actually to undermine its power of being able to use eyes to decimate and to erase. Thoughts?

Rachael: Yeah. Well, where I was going is I was thinking about Evie, my daughter, who’s two and a half, and how she’s just really in the thick of those first really core experiences of shame. And to watch a toddler wrestle with that where they, it’s just so visceral. It’s either like, I’m going to cover my face with my hand, or I’m going to bury my head in your chest or down by my knees, or I just won’t look at you, object permanence. If I just don’t look at you, maybe you’re not really there. And I just like how so much? And whether I’m the one that’s brought the shame, maybe it provoked the shame or she’s done something that has to be invited, a different kind of just how much my impulse. And I just constantly connect with Jesus on this. If this is your impulse to your child, do you know what my impulse toward you is? How much greater? Because my impulse with her is just to very patiently, but tenderly invite, can you look at mama? Because I want her to see my eyes that even in the places where she’s maybe making choices, whether it’s, what’s the word like on autopilot or with intentionality, I want her to see how much love and connection is for her even in these moments. So I was just thinking about how powerful it is even with ourselves and parts of ourselves to imagine a face of kindness and hands that are honoring that welcome, that invite back, but also how painful that is to receive. Oh, I watch her wrestle. It’s like I watch her little wrestling. I want that so much. And also sometimes I see in her eyes a real question of like, are you sure? Yes.

Dan: Oh, such a sweet image. Well, again, if we can just say it this way, defiance without kindness will eventually transform itself into shamelessness. And there are a lot of people that I think are in all sorts of realms of power who have no sense of shame. And in one sense, their “effectiveness” in their organization or in their world comes because they’re not human or said in a different way. Their humanity has the shield of shamelessness. So they’re able to do things to others individually or systemically, that would bring incredible grief and question, but they can operate with impunity and confidence, and in many ways, mockery of others who bear a sense of humanity. So nothing of what we’re wanting for people to hear is a defiance that does not bear kindness and that kindness…we have talked about this, and I don’t think we could ever talk about it enough, but to engage in your own inner world that there is something that is really crudely angry and at times well shaming in my own experience of me. And it has to meet something that’s equally ferocious, but in its core, not fighting with the same weapons, but actually utilizing the weapon of kindness. And that’s where we go back. It’s the kindness of God that leads to repentance. But Paul’s brilliant statement of, and why do you treat the kindness of God with contempt? So in that framing, so much of the work I’ve done with people who wrestle with food, wrestle with sex, wrestle with both is what does it mean for you to enter into that struggle and bless the parts of you that indeed have done harm but have longed for solace and have found because of your own story, ways to find solace that actually has created more trauma, more disruption, and therefore more judgment. If we don’t have that framework of kindness, which is never excuse making, never a way of avoiding true responsibility, but nevertheless with a heart that’s able to hold our own core struggle with something of the eyes of the kindness of God. That’s where I think many people either fail on the side of too much ferocity, not enough kindness or not enough a kindness that actually is niceness and excuse making without that ferocity to engage those parts that are full of cruelty. And this is where even this intriguing conversation, it’s hard to know how to move forward because I think all of this has to be done in community. And part of the conversation is whose face is ferocious for you and whose face bears not only ferocity, but a greater ferocity, which is the ferocity of kindness. And I’m so grateful to have friends who won’t try to take away my shame, but also won’t let it settle as something that is either inevitable or easily dissolved. And that’s where the question of how much freedom comes from our own work. Yes. But so much freedom comes as we’re in the playground of a community of kindness.

Rachael: Absolutely. And I know sometimes that community can be a hodgepodge of different people. It can be a care provider or a pastor or an incredible mentor is a part of that community. It can be a repentant parent who’s doing their work to return back to you. It can be close friends, it can be spouses and partners. And so I know for many people, sometimes when you start to do healing work or you listen to like this and you say, I want that, but then maybe what you feel like is you’re not surrounded by people who bear a kind of ferocious kindness on their own behalf as well as your behalf…

Dan: Because it’s so easy to hear everything that we’ve said and to have people who hear, you need to help people take away shame, and you need to help people stand against it. And the answer is yes, absolutely stand against it. But by entering it, they’re suffering and not universalizing, not, oh, we all feel that way. We all struggle with food and sex, blah, blah, blah. Or in many ways worse than mere universalizing is spiritualizing. Well, Jesus intends to take away your shame. So now if your shame’s not taken away,

Rachael: It’s just on you and your faithlessness.

Dan: You are such a shameful person to not let Jesus take your shame. So even in the interaction with John, it was just so helpful to be able to know that’s not going to take away my shame, but it does give me a little bit more courage to look at shame and be able to go you little… I have all sorts of words that probably aren’t profitable to say right now, but you want my destruction and I have to do the work of dismantling this atomic bomb. And it’s not going to be just snipping one wire. It’s going to be stepping into what’s my history with food, sex? Where has there been harm? Where have I done harm? Where is evil making its current accusation? And what do I do to tend to the fact I’m fragmenting and I’m numb, but how do I do that and not isolate? So that image of where we are inviting you all to at least initially is don’t isolate. Yeah. The impulse is profound. And Evie’s picture, it’s sort of an innocent way. We’re more sophisticated as to how we hide our faces.

Rachael: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Dan: And use language. Or busyness or another bag of Fritos to escape the shame and then increase more shame. So in part, I think what we’re ultimately inviting people to is something of that ending in Hebrews chapter 12. Consider him and consider him not only in what he endured, but what he joins you in enduring and how he has been willing to bear the shame is an invitation for us not to resolve the shame, but to enter the shame and to let something of the kindness of God and one another begin that to dissolving. Any last thoughts?

Rachael: No, I actually really like that image as a closing image to hold on in the midst of this day. Deeply grateful for you as well.

Dan: Well, thank you. And as we end well, I’ll say for both of our, what I’ll call broader health issues, may again, we see the kindness of God, so that we know something of what it means to live with hope in the midst of a day and in some ways, a world of despair.

Rachael: May it be so.