Unshame: Healing trauma-based shame through psychotherapy

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A truly wonderful brave and important exploration of shame. I have come away knowing I have learnt a lot. This is in part through cognitive knowledge and new perspectives and importantly through self reflection and feeling my own relationship to shame in the ways put forward.” 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.” Exploring the concept of shame resilience especially in terms of daily life mode (approach) rather than danger mode (avoid). 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.” 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.

The Body Remembers- The psycho-physiology of trauma and trauma treatment By Babette Rothschild. W.W Norton and Company LTD (2000) 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 ) 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. Applying this understanding to the therapist’s need to communicate safety to a client at both a conscious and unconscious level.

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Exploring the dual stages of a compassionate response, via an amber zone response which can result in empathic distress, or pushing through to a green zone response which results in true compassion. Exploring the concept of sharing our shame stories to defuse them, but only to people who have earned the right to hear them. 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. For survivors of child sexual abuse, shame is a kind of universal, identifying characteristic. And for survivors of other kinds of trauma, shame is never far away: if not shame at what happened, then shame at how we responded. Shame and the freeze response go hand-in-hand. And yet shame has its roots in our evolution and is not an accident. It has a protective function, so, if approached in the right way, could it actually be our friend?

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.

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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.” Introducing polyvagal theory in terms of a ‘trauma traffic light’ and shame as a ‘red zone’ instinctive physiological and neurobiological response. 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. 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.

Examining behavioural responses to shame linked to the trauma traffic light (moving away, moving towards, moving against).

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.” Introducing the concept of shame not as ‘a bad thing’ or as dysfunction but as an essential survival mechanism. I know this, because my life has been crippled by shame. Join me on this course where I combine the latest neuroscience insights with my own personal narrative of a journey towards ‘unshame’. The VIA Strengths assessment tool is available at: www.viacharacter.org Transcript: ‘Shame, unshame and who you really are’ 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.