Unshame: Healing Trauma-Based Shame Through Psychotherapy

by Carolyn Spring

I didn’t journey from shame to unshame by being talked out of it. Instead, again and again and again and again, I experienced the activation of my green zone: the ventral vagal circuit of my social engagement system. Every time I wanted to run and hide and dissociate because of shame, there was the therapist, drawing me back into green, regulating me with her deep, steady compassion, her empathy, her unwavering acceptance, despite all my shameful emotionality and trauma. This book captures a tiny glimpse of that. My regret is that I couldn’t capture more, but how do you capture with words what is ineffable and wordless?

Like everything I face in therapy, it starts with a start.

What I always forget, with this therapist, is that everything—literally everything—is grist for the mill. She feeds on scraps. And she never fails to uncover the reactions, the overreactions, the underrreactions, the non-reactions, that trauma evokes in me.

The feeling of shame is one of being ineffably defective. It is not that I have done wrong. It is that I am wrong. And there is nothing I can do about it. It is a searingly powerless place to be. If I was born wrong, if I was born to be wrong, then what is the point to me being alive? How can I expect to belong, when I don’t have the right credentials? How can I ever expect anyone to accept me, when I am intrinsically unacceptable? I deserve to be on the outside. I deserve never to fit in. I deserve only for bad things to happen. And how can I shift those beliefs when they appear so inarguably true?

Because the memories don’t ‘feel’ real. They are different from other types of memory. (It will take me several years more to discover that traumatic memories are indeed a different kind of memory, being mediated principally by the amygdala rather than the hippocampus). Sometimes they are ‘there’ and at other times they aren’t. They seem to dance in the shadows in my brain. Surely this isn’t right, or normal, or sane?

I trail off as sadness wraps itself around my throat. There are moments in therapy, and this is one of them, when the pain is unbearable. If it were not for the empathic presence of another human being, supporting me, holding this space open for me, giving me hope, I genuinely believe I would die. She doesn’t even have to say anything. This is the fruit of a multitude of sessions: the ‘with-ness’ of another human being, which makes the unbearable bearable.

‘I don’t want to be the source of pain in anyone’s life, no matter how much they might deserve it. I don’t want to be that kind of a person. Actually’—I look up, as what I do want occurs to me, ‘actually, I just want to get better. I want to heal the damage. And then I want to help other people get better. That’s what I want to do with my anger.’