Understanding our Animal Instincts and Shame

​      During the season of Lent, we, as Christians, often spend time contemplating our lives with the goal of aligning our lives so that they reflect more the character of God.   In this Lenten blog, I want to focus on an aspect of our humanity that is rarely talked about in church or within Christian spirituality, namely our animal instincts.  These primal instincts, the survival, social, and sexual instincts arise from the reptilian part of our human brain.   While animal instincts play an important part in our human experience, they are often not seen that way by our religious traditions or our culture.   Many religious systems view these animal instincts as part of the human fallen nature.  In this blog, I explore the gift of these animal instincts and how shame often unfortunately arises when these instincts get triggered. 

      I have been a participant in a Diamond Approach spiritual work school for 19 years now.   The Diamond Approach integrates the insights of psychology with the insights of the religious mystical traditions.  One of the teachings of the Diamond Approach is the animal soul, that part of the human soul that contains the animal’s three primal instincts, namely the survival, social, and sexual instincts.   Based on the Diamond Approach, the purpose of all these animal instincts is to help us, as humans, regulate our life experience.   Let us look at each instinct to see how it helps us regulate our soul, mind, and body.   
      The survival instinct is all about safety and comfort and it arises when our existence is threatened.  These survival responses are most evident when trauma happens.   Psychological research has revealed that trauma can create 5 common responses:  fight, flight, freeze, flop, and faun.  

       When the fight part within us gets triggered, we confront the aggressor that is hurting us.  When the flight part reacts, we flee from the aggressor to hopefully escape to a safe place.   The other three respones arise when neither fight or flight responses are possible.  The freeze part causes us to become paralyzed or numb, unable to move.  The flop parts causes to collapse, to become unresponsive, play dead like a possum.  Finally, when the fawn part gets activated, this part causes us to appease our aggressor, to say or do anything possible to cause our aggressor to settle and not hurt us.   It is very apparent that these five survival responses are positive; their goal is to help us regulate our experience around our aggressor so that we survive or can calm our stressful experience.    
      The social dynamic arises to help us deal with the stresses found in  difficult social situations.   Within Emotionally Focused Therapy, an effective psychological modality used in couple therapy, we see two common responses to the pressures that arise in relationships. 

       One pattern is to disengage, to withdraw from the person creating the relationship stress (the sought in the above diagram).   A second pattern is to pursue the person (the seeker in the above diagram) who is creating the social stress through their withdrawing, to try to merge with them with the hope that the relationship can be restored.  One can see how these primal dynamics of merging and distancing help us regulate the pressures within relationships and social situations.   
      Finally, the sexual instinct is not really about sex but rather about the dynamics that lead to vitality and creativity.   Based on the teachings of the Enneagram, this sexual instinct includes everything that connects with our passions, desires, convictions, emotions, our playfulness and our sense of beauty.  

      For us to realize this vitality, this is a complex dance that we much negotiate between the need to be assertive and the need to surrender.   Depending on our response to stress,  the sexual drive can move us toward assertion and control, or in the oppositive direction toward passivity and giving up.   For us to experience this sexual/spiritual vitality that leads to creativity and oneness, we must find a healthy balance between these two dynamics.    
      What is common about each of these three instincts is that they are biologically hardwired into our nervous system.   They are located in the reptilian section of our human brain.  This means that these instincts get triggered easily when needed, often before our rational cognitive mind enters the pictures.   From a Diamond Approach perspective, these animal instincts are seen as positive.  Each one of them are designed to help us regulate the emotional energies within our soul, mind, and body so that we do not only survive but thrive and grow in life.  One could say that these animal instincts are part of God’s plan in designing our human body and soul.   There is nothing fallen or sinful about these animal instincts. 
        However, when experiences happen in our life that are too much for our animal instincts to regulate like trauma or severe attachment wounds, our animal instincts become overwhelmed.  As children, our capacity to self-regulate are far less than when we are adults.  This is why attachment wounds and trauma happen so often in our childhood.  When this occurs, our psyche/soul goes into emergency mode and develops an emergency protective system made up of many psychological coping parts whose purpose is to deal with this overwhelming experience to our animal instincts.
      One set of parts, known as Exiles with Internal Family Systems (IFS), carries the painful memories of the trauma.  The other group of parts, labelled as Protectors in IFS, carry the coping mechanisms that keep us from feeling this pain.   Often these coping parts are extreme versions of our animal instincts: the fight response, the flee response, the freeze response, the fawn response, the flop response, the distancing response, the merge response, the take charge/control response (assertive), and the passive/give-up response (surrender). 

      Another aspect of this emergency protective system is that the coping parts within it are often hypervigilant, always on the lookout for situations of future potential trauma.   When it fears traumatic pain coming, certain parts are triggered, and jump into action hoping to protect us from experiencing that trauma again.    
Sometimes, if the overwhelm feeling is too much for our soul to regulate, something similar happens to what occurs when electric current exceeds the capacity of an appliance in our house.   We blow a fuse.   Our soul may dissociate or a psychotic break may transpire where our soul splits in two, and we find ourselves no longer connected to our experience.  These dissociations and psychotic breaks lead to other more structured parts in our emergency protective system. ​

      Seeing how this emergency protective system works, I have come to the conclusion that this system is God’s way of helping humans regulate themselves after they have experience trauma or intense pain in their lives.  The intention of this emergency protective system is good.  It is all about managing the pain found within our soul from our past, and keeping it from being triggered again.  However, many of the coping parts within our emergency protective system get in the way of our enjoyment of life and allowing ourselves to grow and develop as a human being.  Let me give you a few examples. 
      Anger is a great protector but if we get angry too easily, our anger gets in the way of us having significant relationships with others.  The anxiety and fear that causes us to flee is another powerful protector; it keeps us from entering potentially dangerous situations.  But if fear/anxiety is a dominant emotion in our life, we will find our world getting smaller and smaller for we are unable to enter any situation that may lead to personal growth or enjoyment from entering new relationships or settings; its too scary.    The same can be said for the protector parts that cause us to freeze or flop and numb our painful experiences like addiction, dissociation, denial, etc.   This is true for many of the coping parts within our emergency protective system that are tied to our animal instincts.  While they are protective, and good from that perspective, they can also be very limiting or life-denying and are often judged by as bad.    
      This is why Christianity and other religions often view the coping parts within our emergency protective systems as sinful.  Consider the seven deadly sins within Christianity:   lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride.   

​      Within my Christian tradition, these behaviors are seen as bad, something that should be avoided at all costs and managed.   But I also know from my psychospiritual counselling ministry that each of these behaviors are pain coping strategies that are found within many emergency protective systems in people’s souls.   Lust protects us from feeling deeply our intimacy struggles and desire for connection.  Gluttony covers up our feelings of emptiness or fears of being seen.  Greed hides our fears of scarcity and not enough.  Sloth protects us from the fear of failure.  Wrath and anger are wonderful protector emotions for they keep us from any feelings of vulnerability.  Envy emerges to get us to look outside ourselves rather than feel our insecurity.   Pride arises to replace our lack of self-love and self-appreciation.  Many more protective impulses could be shared that explain how these deadly sins seek to help us cope with our internal pain.  
       What is important to our discussion here is that these deadly sins are also trying to protect people from feeling very painful experiences within their soul.   That should cause us to pause and be hesitant to judged such coping mechanism as just "deadly sins".   However, this view I have described above is not how my Christian tradition understands this paradox found within our emergency protective system between good intentions and unhelpful outcomes.  Instead, these protective parts are often seen as sin and evil.
      There is one more key emotional aspect that is tied to these times when our emergency protective system gets triggered, namely the experience of shame. ​

        When our animal instincts are burdened with past trauma and pain, they often react before our cognitive mind can step in and manage them.   This is often what happens when our emergency protective system is triggered by a situation or person it judges as potential dangerous.  
      This is the situation that Apostle Paul is describing in Romans 7 in the Bible when he says,  “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… In fact, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me.  .... For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me" (Rom 7: 15, 16-20).
      Such Biblical teachings like this one drive home the point that all the coping parts within our emergency protective system are sinful.  Furthermore, every time our animal instincts function in ways beyond our mental control that our egoic mind judges as wrong, we experience a deep shame.   This shame is often profound after we find ourselves triggered and doing things we find that we are not able to control.
      At my last Diamond Approach retreat in February, 2025, my Diamond Approach teacher, Dr. Thomas Weinberg, described shame as a human experience that does not have an essential root.  This caught my attention for up to now, I had been taught that every human emotion, from a Diamond Approach perspective, has an essential source.    
      This is the basis of the Theory of Holes within the Diamond Approach.   Sadness has at its root Divine Compassion.  Anger has at its source Divine Strength before it becomes distorted into anger, rage, or weakness.  Hatred has at its core Divine Power before it become corrupted into hatred or powerlessness.   Below is a chart I share with my counselling students about the theory of holes.    It shows how the common emotions have at their origin an expression of the Divine.    

      However,  my Diamond teacher taught that the experience of shame was different from all these common human emotions.    Rather then from our Divine or Essential nature,  shame has it root in how our egoic personality functions.   
       This Diamond Approach insight echoes of the core story found in the Bible that describes in mythical language the story of the fall of humanity (Gen 3: 1- 11). From a depth psychology point of view, the snake in the Tree of Good and Knowledge represents the emergence of the human egoic self that happens early in the development of a human person.   In the Biblical story, as soon as the two humans listened to the snake (ego) and ate the forbidden fruit, the story teaches that the experience of shame entered into the lives of Adam and Eve.  We read in the Bible that upon eating the fruit, “their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.”   Due to the experience of shame, they could no longer live with their nakedness and vulnerability.   This egoic shame caused them to hide themselves. 
      But the impact of shame goes deeper in this Bible story.   We read that upon hearing God walking in the Garden, Adam and Eve now felt unworthy to be in the presence of God.  Due to shame, they had to hide from God.     Due to shame, they had to keep themselves from entering the vulnerable place of Being, that place of being with our experience of the Present Moment where we can notice fully our own experience, and in doing so, notice the Spirit of God emerging in our lives in response to what we are experiencing.    It is in our experience of the Present Moment where we notice God's spirit of compassion emerging in response to our pain, where we notice God's spirit of anger-like strength arising when our boundaries are crossed or our truth is dismissed by others, etc.   When our egoic self causes us to experience shame due to our primal emerrgency protective system being triggered, this shame causes us to hide from others and God, and it makes it very hard for us to enter the Present Moment where God's spirit can minister to us directly or through others.   ​

      The Diamond Approach teaches that vulnerability cannot co-exist with shame.  The reason for this is that “ shame is a specific painful feeling of deficiency, exposure and judgment, all related to a sense of inadequacy in being oneself. What makes this specifically a narcissistic manifestation is that one feels inadequate in being oneself, or judges oneself as such. We judge ourselves as unable to be real. We feel also the emotions associated with the 'great betrayal': We are a traitor to ourseles, we have sold out; we have been too weak and dependent to stand our ground. Narcissistic shame is an intense pain related to social failure, failure to be a true human being. It is a sense of being an inferior human being, exposed to social judgment in the midst of severe disintegration of the self. When experienced fully, the affect is very painful. The affect itself has a disintegrating effect on the self” (The Point of Existence, pg. 334).  
        When we understand shame in this way, you realize that it is unhelpful to contemplate on the experience of shame.  It just leads to us experiencing more shame toward self.   During my 19 years of doing spiritual work within my Diamond Approach school, not once have I been asked to explore my experience of shame.  I have inquired into my anger, sadness, anxiety, worthlessness, despair, judgementalism, wilfulness, lack of inner support, need for control, hatred, etc.  but not once into my experience of shame.    Furthermore,  these Diamond Approach teachings help us realize that shame has nothing to do with the Sacred.   Shame is totally a creation of our egoic self to keep us from becoming vulnerable and drawing near to God or the experience of the Present Moment where the Sacred is encountered.   
       Seeing how the experience of shame has nothing do with God, this should cause us to wonder why the church and our culture often use shame as a way to get people to follow the teachings of the church or the cultural rules of being an upright citizen.  The church often uses shame tactics with people who struggle with the deadly sins.    Our culture often use similar shame tactics with those who are homeless, struggle with addictions or mental health conditions, have issues with the law or finances, etc.   
       When the church or our culture touches our internal shame buttons like this, they are really triggering parts within our emergency protection system which cause us to  feel even more shameful.   In the end, such religous and cultural practices that trigger shame within us push us even further from the presence of God or from the sources of love and grace that people need to discover healing, just like in the Garden of Eden story.     People hide instead and struggle alone due to this shame.  
       Through this blog, I am hoping to help people see the gifts of our animal instincts, and how God uses these animal instincts to help us regulate our emotions, body, and soul.     However, due to trauma and painful attachment wounds, an emergency protective system develops in our soul building on these animal instincts to help us regulate our life and emotions so that we can function in the world.     While the parts within our protective emotional system have a protective role, some of these coping patterns are many times unhelpful and are judged by churches and culture as bad or sinful.     The other powerful experience that arises when our primal emergency protective system is triggered is that shame.   We have explored how shame is an experience created by our egoic self and has no connection to how God's spirit works within our world.    And yet, shame is often used as a motivating factor by the church and our culture to  get people to change, when in reality the nature of shame causes the opposite to happen, to become more stuck in their issues.   
       Rather than shame, may we explore how love is the secret to healing our emergency protective systems and the animal instinct coping parts within them. 

Gord Alton MDiv RP Supervisor-Educator