Unshame: healing trauma-based shame through psychotherapy

Product Information

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 I cannot write from the clients or survivor’s perspective. I feel all peoples experiences will be different. One message to take home is as a survivor you have not done anything wrong. Nothing, absolutely nothing. Resources 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.

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. 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.” 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. 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.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. 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.

Great book– Read this inspiring book a few months ago and bought another copy to gift to someone else. The most helpful and insightful book on how to help someone who has experienced trauma I have ever read.” Unshame- healing trauma-based shame through psychotherapy By Carolyn Spring. Carolyn Spring Publishing (2019) 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.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. 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. 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.’ 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.