Unshame: healing trauma-based shame through psychotherapy

£8.495
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Unshame: healing trauma-based shame through psychotherapy

Unshame: healing trauma-based shame through psychotherapy

RRP: £16.99
Price: £8.495
£8.495 FREE Shipping

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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.

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. 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. 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.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.

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. 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. 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.”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 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.’ The VIA Strengths assessment tool is available at: www.viacharacter.org Transcript: ‘Shame, unshame and who you really are’

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.’ 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. 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 ) 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.”

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. 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. 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. 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.



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