Shame can be like a multi-headed hydra, attacking self-esteem and self-worth and getting in the way of making life changes. And she noticed what it was like to talk about her life without feeling judged. My presence was a safe witness that she had not experienced before. I explained that thought was actually the cognitive expression of shame. ![]() She had a lifetime of repeating the shame messages that had been placed on her by keeping herself small and believing that something was wrong with her. She had a lifetime of holding back her thoughts and feelings. She had learned to think “Something must be wrong with me” because she had a different reaction than family members. She joined my gentle curiosity as we gently unpacked the way shame had protected her. Maybe you learned to hold back your emotions so deeply and you learned to hold back your thoughts, and shame was like a cover of the deeper parts of you?” “Maybe shame bound up with your anger and sadness to protect you in childhood when your parents beat you. “Shame is a binding emotion,” I told her one day. She would be beaten by her sister for even having a thought that was different and by her mother just for looking a little different. She would be beaten by her father for not giving him a glass in the correct way. In early sessions she had talked about her confusion about her role as a younger daughter growing up in a large family and about having to follow the rules or be beaten-even when she didn’t know what was wrong. We tracked her sessions from her first realization, during the Sounds True interview, that this emotion of shame had played a major but invisible role in her life. NOTE: Transformance is a term coined by Diana Fosha, developer of AEDP, to describe “the force in the psyche that’s moving towards growth and expansion and transformation,” and the idea that healing is “not just an outcome but a process that exists within each person that emerges in conditions of safety.”Īn active meditator, she knew how to sit with herself and track thoughts and emotions. And she had not dated at all because if anyone wanted to go out with her, she would wonder what was wrong with them! As she said: “I always thought there was something wrong with me!” She had kept getting more and more training in her field because she never knew when she would feel inferior and have to back up her work. Listening to us talk about shame, she realized that she had done years of therapy but had never addressed her deepest issue. My client had come in because she had heard Bret and I discuss healing shame on the Sounds True Self-Acceptance Summit in 2017. All her emotions and her life forward direction stayed stuck and frozen in that shame/trauma bubble. ![]() And yet there was another part of her from long ago that knew that what was going on in her family was not right. ![]() She had a part of her that believed that something was wrong with her. During our many months of therapy she spoke of numerous times in her life when she felt too awkward or too shy or too depressed when she felt put down by people in her family or at work. My client was a high functioning professional. By Sheila Rubin, Co-founder of the Center For Healing Shame
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