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Unshame: healing trauma-based shame through psychotherapy

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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.” 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 )

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.’ And so in ‘ Unshame’ I basically tell a story. There are twenty chapters, relating to twenty therapy sessions. We talk about lots of different things in those sessions or chapters, but all along there’s this narrative description of how shame feels. What it’s like to experience compassion. What is experienced as shaming. So I’m trying, just a little bit, to bring it alive with words that are evocative and at times hopefully beautiful, rather than a dry academic textbook type approach. My journey out of shame therefore has mirrored my journey out of trauma, and actually I’d say that largely they are the same thing. Trauma sends us out of the green zone into amber or red. Shame likewise sends out of the green zone, usually into red. They are both ways in which our nervous system is dysregulated. The answer to both is regulation – someone who’s in the green zone and able to stay in the green zone, coming alongside us and using their ‘regulated-ness’ to help to regulate our nervous system – so that we can integrate what’s happened to us; so that we can have an integrated sense of self. 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.Beautiful book– I’ve never read anything like this that lays open the experience of the person in the client’s chair so vividly, plainly, bravely and I’d dare say unashamedly. With particular attention paid to dissociation and what did and really didn’t work for Carolyn in supporting her. It is quite incredible.” And shame is triggered just by being in therapy. You’re sat three feet away from another human being, who might reject you, who might abandon you, who might hate you or hurt you … and this person is in a position of power over you … and so it activates our primal defences. We’re prone to experiencing shame in that kind of environment. So we come to therapy maybe to work through our shame issues, even if we don’t call them that, but then the therapy itself activates our shame. So it’s a bit of a catch-22. But what I know, having been on the receiving end of it, is that therapy can be highly effective in resolving trauma, in disarming shame. My life is completely different as a result of it – as a result of being on the receiving end of compassion and empathy week in, week out. 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.

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.And for me it was fascinating too because again it was so spot on. So my top strengths are creativity, love of learning, humour and curiosity. I read a lot, I write a lot, I learn a lot, and I laugh a lot – that’s pretty accurate! And it has nothing to do with trauma. So I’m a person separate from my trauma – that was absolutely fundamental for me to understand, and for me to be able to start building on those strengths and appreciating myself for them, rather than always looking at what’s wrong with me, how defective I am, how messed up, how broken. 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.

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 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. It feels intrinsically wrong to rate or review something like this, but I'm going to try and articulate how important this book is to me. The VIA Strengths assessment tool is available at: www.viacharacter.org Transcript: ‘Shame, unshame and who you really are’ 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.Now that I've finished, feel... emotionally flayed, but also grateful, seen, vindicated. I admire very much how she's able to be so intensely vulnerable in the hope of helping others. I mean, this woman gets me, down to the marrow without exception. Incredible– What an incredible book. I feel it should be mandatory reading for every therapist seeking to support people dealing with trauma. My understanding has been massively broadened. It gives practical insight into how to be with someone traumatised. Thank you to the writer. So inspirational and brave.”

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.” And not every chapter is explicitly about shame, because that’s exactly what therapy is like. Shame was our constant companion, as it were – the third person in the room, every single session. But I didn’t always identify it as shame, and we didn’t actually talk about shame directly all that often, because to do so just tended to trigger me into more shame. Instead, shame is in the dynamic between the client and the therapist. It’s the need to not be seen, not be heard, not be noticed. To not cause a fuss. To not get into trouble. And at the same time there’s this unquantifiable need to be seen and heard and noticed and connected with. 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. 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. 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.

In this podcast, I talk about the crippling isolation of shame, and how to move beyond it. I talk about how shame is a survival strategy which tries to keep us from being hurt. But in moving towards ‘Unshame’ – the title of my new book – we need to find out who we really are and live from that place of deep self-compassion. Raw and Real– My therapist introduced me to Carolyn Spring, and I’m so glad she did. In ‘Unshame’, Carolyn shares her experiences; highlighting the pain of trauma and the complexity of recovery. Her vulnerability and openness invites you to relate to her thought processes and apply the recovery practices to yourself. She also offers honest hope for recovery from trauma.” And so in writing about shame, which is a relational emotion, I wanted to write about it in the context of relationship. And I wanted to evoke characters and setting and narrative and the things that we’d normally associate with creative writing, with fiction. I wanted to paint a picture of shame rather than just cite ten research studies. It’s a very vulnerable book and that in itself is part of the journey to ‘unshame’. Shame tries to keep us safe, but a large part of the antidote to shame is courage. Courage to be who we are, and to be seen. Courage to be despised or criticised or rejected, if that’s what happens. But although we risk that, the reward, when it goes right, is connection – connection with the right people. The reward for me, writing this book, is all the people who have commented and said that it’s like I’m inside their head, that it could be a transcript of their therapy session, that they thought it was just them, and that as a result of reading it they feel less alone and actually less ashamed.

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