Ep 62 - EMDR for Shame and Guilt
Hello everyone. Welcome back to the EMDR Doctor podcast.
One of the real heroes of our time, in the therapy world, has to be Brene Brown. Most people have heard of her, she is very famous for her research on Shame. Which makes her a bit of a star in the therapy field. She is also a prolific writer and wonderful communicator, so her ideas have had the opportunity to spread far and wide. And what’s more interesting, is the lack of research and discussion about shame in the therapy field prior to hers.
And I think that this very concept is central to shame. We all hate it. It is one of the most uncomfortable feelings we can experience. When we feel shame, we wither up inside. We want to shrink, to hide, to isolate. It is a powerful emotion, and one that has been pretty tricky to treat. How do we treat shame? All the previous therapies seem to gloss over it and push it aside, or maybe not even recognise it at all. There is plenty of research about anxiety, about depression, anger, even psychosis, eating disorders, but shame is kind of hidden away, just like what we want to do when we feel it. Hide, cover up, slip out the back door away from everyone.
So what is Shame, and what is guilt. Brene’s beautiful descriptions is that guilt is the feeling that goes with ‘I’ve done something bad’ and shame is the feeling ‘I am bad’. Which is a very apt description.
So I will give you some examples - guilt comes with a situation of maybe yelling at the kids after a long day. We know it was a hurtful thing to do, we know we ruptured that relationship, we are (hopefully) sorry, and the we did the wrong thing, and the guilt that we feel helps us progress to something more helpful, an action that repairs - maybe going to give the kids a hug, or speaking gently to them, using words to apologise, soothe the hurt, repair the relationship.
If I forget to call someone back ( a not too uncommon event in my practice), the guilt I feel will spur me on to rectify - I will call them, offer an apology, attend to the client in whatever way they need from then on. If I didn’t have guilt, I may not make the effort to call them, I might just ignore the request, or I might call and ignore my own error, and that might leave that person high and dry or feeling mistreated.
Or if I have stolen something, I may feel guilt and decide that from there on I will earn my belongings, not steal them! So appropriate guilt is helpful.
And so is appropriate shame. Shame is an emotion that is, believe it or not, an adaptive emotion. Even though it feels awful, it helps us to not act in ways to hurt others, helps us be part of the clan, belong, do our bit for our community, act in accordance to our laws.
Shame is the feeling that goes with the belief ‘I am bad’. Shame being so uncomfortable, makes us act in a way that is not ‘bad’ helps society and communities function. So for example, so for example if as a doctor I don't listen to my patient and I make a wrong diagnosis so I miss something. I might later find out about that and feel shame because of the belief. I'm a bad doctor now this might be quite adaptive if thinking I'm a bad doctor then makes me go and learn something more about that diagnosis or perhaps attend to my patient with a little bit m attention than that's actually helpful for me for my patient For society in general for healthcare. So in this situation it is adaptive. Shame is a good thing that thought ‘I am a bad doctor’ actually spurs me on to become better.
So what is bad about? Shame if Shane is maladaptive then it's persistent out from that one incident to our whole lives we generalise that thought I am bad so it's not just I was a bad doctor in that one patient interaction but I'm a bad doctor overall and I'm a bad person because of it then that could get really heavy really difficult for me to just function festival in the workplace. I might not be able to function as a doctor because of this shame this this belief that I'm a bad doctor bringing so much sh and that might make it if I if it's that might make it overwhelming and make me just an unable to function then if I take the knowledge about myself, I'm a bad doctor and generalise that to my whole life I'm a bad person. I'm worthless. I'm useless. I'm nothing then that gets very very difficult now. If we have learned something like this about ourselves when we were very young we may carry that shame we may carry that through our whole lives so if I was parented in a way that made me believe I am bad if I was frequently punished for reasons that I couldn't understand if I was ignored if my needs were not met if I was told you're very naughty you're very bad. You're a bad child. Go to your room. You must be alone because you are so bad. All of those things are very hard for a small person to integrate without carrying that shame into the rest of their lives. So what happens with shame if we then carry it? We might either accept it and carry that shame, punish ourselves with eating disorders, self harm, substance abuse or we might build defences against that very, very distressing feeling. What do I mean by defences? We might build like a frail personality around that belief of I am bad. We may reject it emphatically.We might then think I'm the best. I'm perfect. I never do anything wrong, if you tell me I have done something wrong the you re bad, you are wrong, you are despicable. and this might be the framework upon which a narcissistic personality traits or personality disorder is built. Alternately, We might just try and distract ourselves away from shame - that shame feeling is so intolerable, we might decide that we cannot bear to feel it and so we distract ourselves away from it by using drugs, using alcohol, overworking any of the other avoidance strategies that we see a lot of the time in therapy. Brene Brown calls these shame shields - Moving Away (withdrawal) Moving Towards (People pleasing) or Moving against (Aggression). Schema Therapy also has a lovely conceptualisation about how we cope with difficult emotions: overcompensation, avoidance or surrender. Over compensation might look like people pleasing, or more floridly narcissistic traits, Avoidance is the running away, hiding behind alcohol, drugs, other addictions, or surrender- we accept and succumb to them, this may look like severe depression. It’s just another way to conceptualise how we cope with shame.
So it can present in different ways.
Now more importantly, how do we treat Shame? Depending on its severity, it may be easy or it may be protracted. Brene Brown talks about compassion being the antidote to shame. ‘Love conquers all’ and self compassion is the long term key to dissolving and modifying shame. But this can be harder than it appears to be. Like most therapy, feeling it is the difficult bit. We can say it as much as we want - “I’m a good person, I deserve kindness, I can be kind to myself, I love myself” but mostly this just feels like lies. In EDMR, we approach the cause of the shame, we go to the difficult memories and dismantle them, take the heat out of them, dissolve the shame/sadness/hurt whatever there is there, and then, and only then, can we truly learn something better about ourselves. It is possible to learn that I am a good person, I am worthy, I am loveable. It is possible to come out of drowning in the sea of shame, on to the golden beaches of self compassion. And it may just be EMDR that helps you to float, to swim, and to get to shore.
If this has resonated with you, please feel free to take this ideas to your therapist and talk them over or
If this is something you would like to work on, feel free to reach out to me via my website EMDRdoctor.com.au or, if you have previously done EMDR and would like to continue your progress, you may be interested in joining my monthly EMDR group, so if you would like more information on this, shoot me an email at [email protected]
If you are a therapist and you're interested in up skilling to learn how to deal with shame in a little bit more of an effective manner I will be holding a webinar in June so more details about that to come shortly.
I hope this has been helpful to you, I will talk to you again next week, in the meantime take good care, bye for now.
