Janina Fisher: Shame and Self-Loathing in the Treatment of Trauma

Does shame prevent your traumatized clients’ recovery and hamper their ability to find relief and perspective despite effective treatment? 

Do your clients' feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy interfere with taking in positive experiences, leaving them to feel hopeless?

Trauma therapists regularly confront the impact of shame on their clients’ ability to find relief and perspective even with good treatment. Feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy interfere with taking in positive experiences, leaving only hopelessness. Increased ability for self-assertion gets undermined by belief systems about worth or deserving.  Progress in the treatment, increasing relief from symptoms, even greater success in life tend to evoke shame and self-judgment rather than pride. Despite the therapist's best efforts, unshakeable feelings of shame and self-hatred often undermine the treatment.

This workshop will introduce participants to understanding shame from a neurobiological perspective—as a survival strategy driving somatic responses of automatic obedience and total submission—enforced by the client’s punitive introspection.  Using lecture, videotape, and experiential exercises drawn from Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, a body-oriented talking therapy, participants will learn to help clients relate to their symptoms with mindful awareness and curiosity rather than automatic acceptance. When traditional psychodyanamic, cognitive-behavioural, and EMDR techniques are integrated with Sensorimotor interventions emphasizing posture, movement, and gesture, issues of shame can become an avenue to transformation rather than a source of stuckness.