Therapeutic Intereventions with Shame, Experienced

• Therapeutic Interventions with Shame by Ed Schmookler, PhD., 5/6/96
  • Sophisticated question by Don Nathanson, 5/7/96
    
    

Dear Dr. Nathanson:

Thank you for your prompt reply and your encouragement. I am very excited by the potential landscape that is opening up as a result of your ways of seeing. I have purchased your book on Shame and Pride and am very impressed by the magnitude of your contribution.

I would like to share my current experience with doing as you suggested and trying some of this with "someone I like," as you said. I believe I see ways of integrating what you have uncovered with the kind of work I do, and I'd like to share with you what just happened.

My specialty is work with trauma. And the way I work happens to be phenomenological in many cases: I help people track their inner experience, grounding it especially in body experience (the latter comes from training with Peter Levine). While I have, as I mentioned in my initial post, worked with shame for years, your work has helped me to see it there where before I would not have. Moreover, it gives me courage to stay with the phenomenological experience of shame when before I would have shied off of it or relieved it in many of the ways I have learned, semi-consciously, to do.

Today, however, I asked, "And so what is it you feel, when you are telling me this?" "Shame," said the client. We then focussed in on the body sensations she was labelling as shame. This brought her back to the experience of molestation, and not just that experience but that particular aspect of it that was revealed by and hidden in shame. And by staying with it, when she would have preferred to flee the feeling of shame, we uncovered some energetic "holes" which she could then repair by pushing the molester back out of her body.

Your pointing out that shame, and affect in general, is a magnifying glass (the picture my mind has generated to present your expression, "amplification") has given me the encouragement to stay with the experience of the current affect in order to illuminate some aspect of the original experience. I believe your work is not a synthesis of different viewpoints but rather an exposure of the underlying landscape of what is actually there and therefore underlying various viewpoints (psychological, medical, biological). Because of that, it provides an accurate map of where we are going and what we might expect to find when we get there. Therefore, it kept me going cutting through thickets I would otherwise have evaded.

Furthermore, I had a feeling, when I read that shame was a way of stopping interest/excitement and enjoyment/joy, that there could be a way of utilizing the exploration of shame to get back to the original positive experience, if one endured through to the bottom of the shame. And indeed, this presented itself in the session. The client realized that the intrusion of molestation had cut off all this early child's life, all these hopes, all those feelings, and she had collapsed into shame. So at the end of the session, I suggested that she dialogue with this younger part of herself and give it a chance to pick up where it had left off, so that the molester need not continue to win. This struck a deep chord with her.

So I think there are plenty of places to go with intervention once the field is opened up to the clarity you have provided.

Sincerely,

Ed Schmookler, PhD.

• The good part of shame by Don Nathanson, 5/9/96
• Bravo, Ed Schmookler! by Steven H. Shmurak, Ph.D., 10/15/97