According to Stephen Porges, PhD, some of our traditional psychotherapeutic approaches to working with shame may inadvertently amplify it.
So in the video below, Stephen outlines a Polyvagal approach that can help us avoid reinforcing shame, and instead, resource clients to regulate themselves as they process that shame.
Have a look.
And those would become those neural exercises that would enable that person not to be, I would say, fearful of touching that shame. The shame is not deadly. The shame is just a disrupted feeling. It doesn’t feel good, but it loses its power, because the shame becomes really powerful in people’s lives and the protection of shame can be so aggressive that it can be very hurtful to loved ones around them.
So what you’re doing is developing a toolkit for the client to regulate their state so if touching shame puts them into a defensive state, they can get out of it. Now when they get out of it, you as a therapist are there giving them the cues of co-regulation. But if you try to give a person cues of co-regulation and their body is in a sense too intensely defending itself, those cues are going to be misinterpreted by the nervous system as violations of trust.
And shame is often associated also with violations of trust, and what is needed is that the person has to have some resource and then has to have the ability to go to the therapist as a resource but they’re not saying the therapist… The therapist is present and compassionate and a good witness, but the client is the one that has to be doing the state regulation. If the therapist becomes too intrusive and the client is destabilized, that intrusiveness will result in greater destabilization and reactivity. So the issue is the therapist has to be present, has to have cues that are non-evaluative, and has to allow the client to regulate the states to experience them, and part of the therapeutic model is to allow the client to talk about their visceral, their bodily experiences as they visit these states.
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Now we’d like to hear from you. How do you work with clients with deep feelings of shame? Let us know in the comments below.
shame was to be a safety skill for the self…pain related a life lesson is the safety guide be it physical or psychological. The key of healing shame is unconditional acceptace of the suffering person as a divine being and walk w. that person to the other enlightened side of the therapeutic journey.
I regard shame as relational trauma and an emotion that clients are reluctant to touch upon. I talk to my clients about how it emerges in early development ie from the outside/another person/system to shift perspective. From there an empathic presence and tracking so that a gentle move towards these feelings is possible, always at their pace with a relational approach to their visceral experience – how do they feel towards this part/experiencing, what might they need right now? I also reflect my noticing of their body language, breathing, eye contact, body position to deepen the empathy, for them to know I am really seeing how this shame is within them and showing itself, that I can see their discomfort, fear.
I see it as a reparative process within the ANS, from a dorsal collapse through anger to a safer more central ventral state. Shame as an energy. A slow gentle process with trust being built in as a vital component of this process.
Shame stays in shadow, implicitly held unless we bring it up through the system into explicit awareness and in my experience clients don’t like these feelings, they are deeply disturbing, they have often been locked away for a long time . I believe we need to talk about shame more and more to help with this process, thereby offering a more collective support to therapists too. Shame is ubiquitous and universal, we all know what it feels like. It is the primary social emotion!
The difficulty for me with “shame regulation” is keeping in mind, as NICABM presented in their shame video, that originally shame is established by a legitimate authority and not just an abusive “authority” figure which invalidates their right to authority recognition and response. I see this in my family where I passed down this dynamic to my now adult daughter. She experienced so much legitimate and illegitimate shame at my being her mother personally from our relationship and socially reinforced by critical significant others that she cannot ever see me as a legitimate authority for her or anyone else for that matter. Me reclaiming legitimate authority status as is appropriate to our adult relationship is a daunting process which is partially my work to do for myself and partly mine to do for her and me.
The injustice of blaming shame instead of protecting shame has to be reworked by me each time someone claimed authority over me or attempts to do so. I’m not sure this will ever end in my lifetime so much damage has and is being done on a day to day basis.