Unshame: healing trauma-based shame through psychotherapy

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I think shame is principally shifted via right-brain mechanisms – compassionate presence, empathy, attunement. But we’re not just right-brain people. We have both hemispheres for a reason, and they support each other. So when we use psychoeducation, which is principally focused on the left side of our brain, when we learn about shame, about the three zones of the trauma traffic light and how shame resides principally in the red zone … when we learn the strategies of abusers, who are acting ‘shamelessly’ to transfer the shame and responsibility of their abuse to their victims … when we understand these concepts, it can really support us to be open to right-brain experiences. So from one survivor to another, THANK YOU, Carolyn for being brave enough to bare your soul like this - and in print, no less! - I am so sorry, thankful and proud of you. I tore through it in twenty four hours, sobbed several times, nodded in agreement, squared up defensively, and heartily applauded her all at the same time. One of the things I’m particularly interested in is, who are we when we strip away the trauma? Quite understandably, the trauma can be so overwhelming – as it was for me – that we live our lives looking through its lens. It’s like the air around us – we can’t see it, we just breathe it in and everything we see and hear and perceive is carried through it as a medium. And so we have a trauma-centric view of ourselves. I think this is what drives the need for many people with DID to reify their parts – to make them more real than they are, to elaborate them and live their lives through their parts. I think it makes perfect sense. Captivating– I was captivated by this book. I’m amazed by how Carolyn so clearly explains such difficult subject matter and ultimately this is a story of hope that I believe will help many people.”

And that’s what this book is all about for me. Lots of survivors have commented that I’ve put words to their experience. And lots of therapists have too. It always strikes me what a lonely place providing therapy is. There’s only you and the client. There’s no-one else there to say whether you’re getting it right or saying or doing the right thing. It’s a vulnerable place to be, especially with your own shame gremlins on your shoulders telling you that you’re getting it wrong. And so I was really pleased to have therapists say, having read certain chapters in particular, that they’re relieved to know that it’s not just them either. To really have that glimpse into someone else’s therapy room.

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And so, when we have the courage to be vulnerable, although there is always the risk of being hurt, there is also the reward of connecting with others and realising that we’re not alone. But I think that’s shame speaking, and that one of the ways out of shame is to really fall in love with who you are. To really know who you are. Because shame says, ‘You’re not enough. You’re not good enough. You’re bad. You’re unacceptable. You won’t be liked as you are.’ And unshame says, ‘I’m okay just as I am. I AM good enough. I AM acceptable. I am me, and it’s okay to be me.’ Deeply therapeutic– Carolyn Spring uncovers shame and its workings very gently, holding the shamed heart tenderly and with respect. A deeply therapeutic and healing experience to read this book and being taken on a journey to uncover shame and discovering hope, self worth and a way out from under. Thank you so much for this fantastic book.” But neither is DID who I am, because that is defining myself by the trauma I have experienced, and that’s not right either. The abuse is something that happened to me, but it does not define who I am. DID is how my brain automatically and naturally responded to that abuse, but it does not define who I am. I am – I always have been – more than my trauma, and more than my response to that trauma. I’m a human being.

So the two very much go together in my opinion, and they go together in my book as well. The words that are said, so to speak, in the therapy setting in the book, are highly psychoeducational at one level. So I’m using the book to explain some of these concepts, by narrating how I came to understand them in the first place. But then I’m also framing that within the context of the supportive therapeutic relationship, and the repeated moments of attunement – and misattunement – that went on between us as two human beings. I am a survivor of Sexual Assault, both in my childhood and as an adult. I have trouble calling it r*pe because that word is too cold and clinical to describe the emotional, mental and physical devastation of the act(s) that changed my life not once, but twice. I cannot write from the clients or survivor’s perspective. I feel all peoples experiences will be different. One message to take home is as a survivor you have not done anything wrong. Nothing, absolutely nothing. Resources The Body Remembers- The psycho-physiology of trauma and trauma treatment By Babette Rothschild. W.W Norton and Company LTD (2000)

And so shame steps in to keep us safe from it. Shame says, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know enough to write this book or deliver this course or record this podcast. You’re not interesting enough or original enough or clever enough or qualified enough. Who do you think you are? Brené Brown? Better not get too big for your boots. Better not get out of your box. You’re not good enough.’ In Unshame Carolyn neatly condenses years of therapy into discrete learning experiences, ranging from managing her dissociation to learning to trust present day experience. Review My new book ‘ Unshame’ really looks at shame in the context of the therapy room. Because I really wanted to write a book about shame, but it’s difficult to write one head-on, so to speak. The danger is that if we talk directly about shame, then even at an unconscious level, we think, ‘I don’t want to know about this. It’s too uncomfortable.’ And shame just doesn’t operate in a left-brain, words-based, concepts-based way. Shame is a relational thing. It’s a right-brain, body-based, neurobiological feeling type thing. So the challenge is how to write a book about shame whilst tapping into the right brain. Because, as I explore at length on my course, shame doesn’t respond well to words. We don’t tend to resolve shame by just changing our mind about it. Very rarely do we just realise that we have nothing to be ashamed of, and then hey presto the shame is gone. Because shame is far more rooted in our bodies than it is in our brains.

Awesome– People you need to read this book! A fantastic insight into trauma shame and the therapy room. The honesty of this book hits you straight in the heart.” Probably my main insight, at least for myself, is that shame isn’t all bad. It’s something that we think of as debilitating and ugly and just destructive, and it is those things, but it’s those things for a reason. Really, shame is just trying to protect us and keep us safe. It’s beating us up for a reason. It lies to us to try to keep us from being hurt. Unshame- healing trauma-based shame through psychotherapy By Carolyn Spring. Carolyn Spring Publishing (2019) Carolyn’s clarity of thought comes through in her writing. As a therapist I have often struggled to fully understand how to help overcome shame. Having read Unshame I see that the functions of shame; to avoid connecting with others, avoid feeling worthy of help and keeping emotionally isolated are all quite disabling for any survivor, making recovery from shame very difficult to even contemplate let alone begin.

Nowadays I no longer experience the world in quite such a fragmented way, because of the healing journey I’ve been on, which I summarise elsewhere as ‘regulation and integration’, but the fact that I no longer satisfy diagnostic criteria doesn’t make me different as a human being. I am someone who has experienced chronic, extreme abuse in childhood, and I’ve had to work really hard to regulate the impact of that on me, to integrate that trauma to form a coherent sense of self and my own history. But that doesn’t make me more than or less than. If we reduce the baseline down to our humanness, we lose that sense of hierarchy and superiority or inferiority which is based in shame. Carolyn briefly refers to grounding techniques and the different zones of arousal, green (no arousal, able to be logical), amber (the nervous system getting aroused, emotional and less clarity of thought) to red (aroused, likely to dissociate, or freeze). These ideas are described in greater detail in her teaching videos and seminars.( Positive Outcomes for Dissociative Survivors/PODS ) The author, Carolyn Spring, writes about her 9 years experience of psychotherapy. She focuses on her insights into her shame. Carolyn experienced extreme traumatic abuse during her childhood and has used her recovery and the knowledge she has acquired during and since this to support others. She tours with her training seminars supporting therapists, like myself and has researched, created and designed ‘psycho-educational tools’, books and on-line resources which help survivors of abuse. In my course ‘ Working with Shame’ I talk about how empathy and compassion are the antidote to shame, and that’s what I really try to evoke in the book. There’s a chapter called ‘ I see suffering’ all about the power of compassionate presence. And it was really difficult to write, because how do you put into words this invisible, silent power – of compassion? How do you explain what it’s like to be on the receiving end of empathy, especially when you’ve grown up on the receiving end of abuse? It’s beyond words. But that’s the nature, really, of therapy – I think, when we dig down into it, we want to parcel therapy up and file it and label it and know what’s going on. But a lot of the time we can’t. Therapy theory tries to put into words what is wordless, what is ineffable. Because it’s two human beings sitting together in a place of pain and suffering, and where the compassion, empathy and attunement of the therapist shifts something in the nervous system and the neural networks of the client. But we can’t see what it is. We can’t see how it is. You just know if you’ve been on the receiving end of it that something has changed. But you don’t even know what.