Unshame: Healing Trauma-Based Shame Through Psychotherapy

by Carolyn Spring

In shame, we hide because we feel fundamentally unacceptable: what greater hiddenness is there than hiding even from yourself,

It was like hydrogen: all around me, part of my very being, and yet invisible and odourless. I had never paid it any attention whatsoever.

Not for one moment did I think I was a captive of shame: I lived in an invisible prison.

Now this woman sits here looking at me and I don’t know how to be. I know that all of me, here, now and always, is wrong. I am filth. I am broken. I am a dirty, damaged, defective, sub-human. That is who I am. And I don’t think it: it just is. It just always has been. This is me. I am shame.

I feel like I ought to warn her: that in working with me she will be contaminated. And she will hate me. She will find me out as the fraud that I am. She will peer into the darkness of my soul and glimpse the horror of the badness that is me. She will smell my rankness.

I was puerile and pathetic and needy and wrong. I hated myself with unadulterated loathing. When I self-harmed, I was acting out the violence upon myself of sheer hatred: I seethed out my anger in scars.

In that first session, I didn’t say, ‘I need help with shame’ because I didn’t know that shame was the problem. Shame told me that I was the problem.

How could anyone be ashamed of this? the therapist thinks. It wasn’t her fault. She didn’t cause it. She’s a victim. That’s all. It’s not her shame. She knows this, but every time it surprises her, because of the gap between how she sees the woman, and how the woman sees herself.

I ache with the bleakness of being me.

I sigh. Go for it. ‘Because I hate being so negative,’ I admit, finally. ‘I hate it. I hate how it makes me feel—morose and powerless. I hate how it makes me look. I hate how it narrows everything down into misery and helplessness. That’s not who I want to be any more.’

She looks at me intently, like she’s trying to read my thoughts, and deliberately I mask them and try to be good.

Your trauma is part of what happened to you, and it affects how you react to things in the here and now. But your trauma isn’t you.’

I’m not sure why I feel so resistant on the inside. Perhaps I’m just scared, because it’s new, and new things are scary, and so by default I avoid them.

I come back several weeks later. This one insight poked alive my curiosity. I still couldn’t engage, but at least I was edging up to it. I started to read about it. As always, with me, intellect first: I’ll engage once I understand.

But it’s a generalisation: my mother mocked me for having feelings; my mother was a woman; you’re a woman; you will mock me for having feelings.

‘Why do they want me to hurt them?’ It is said with sadness, not incredulity. Six voices, all at once. I close my eyes, frowning to concentrate. Time passes. ‘So they can be close to you. Because being hurt is the only way to be loved.’