Unshame: Healing Trauma-Based Shame Through Psychotherapy

by Carolyn Spring

Shame tells you it’s just you. That you’re all alone. That you, uniquely in the universe, are irrevocably defective.

When did it become acceptable for us as a society to become so snarky and cynical, shaming everyone who dares to be vulnerable? There’s nothing I can do to stop people shaming me. All I can do is not let them stop me doing what I do. That’s what I’ve discovered is the power of unshame: I’m not perfect or sorted; I’m not in such a state of numb imperviousness to rejection and hurt that people’s shaming doesn’t affect me. But I carry on regardless; I keep doing what I value; and I keep on being compassionate to myself, especially when I need it most.

To shift shame, we have to change our state before we change our story. Shame affects us deeply, at a neurobiological level. It puts us into the red zone, the freeze response of trauma. And we get stuck there, because the purpose of shame is to be a brake on behaviours that would otherwise threaten our survival in the group. It’s hard to live life moving forwards when you’ve got the handbrake on.

Shame is endemic to DID. In shame, we hide because we feel fundamentally unacceptable: what greater hiddenness is there than hiding even from yourself, and experiencing the world as altered states of consciousness, alter personalities, dissociated parts? The shame-based strategy of not being ‘me’, because I believe I am too shameful and unacceptable as ‘me’, underpins the nature of DID.

‘No, I don’t know that you were abused,’ she says eventually. ‘And it’s neither my place nor my role to decide that. I’m not an investigator. I’m a therapist. I’m here to sit with you while you discover your truth.’

‘We do know that people don’t develop dissociative identity disorder for no reason. We do know that certain experiences in early childhood lead to disorganised attachment. And we do know that trauma is behind both of them. What they don’t tell us is exactly what that trauma was, on what day, how it happened, who perpetrated it. But we can be fairly confident that your responses today, your emotions and your behaviours, your symptoms, the way your brain processes information, your shame and self-loathing, your hyperarousal and dissociation, your lack of affect regulation... it’s not random. It’s trauma.’

Denial and dissociation are two sides of the same coin.

‘Denial and dissociation are based on coping with what is by saying it isn’t

‘The thing about feelings is that they don’t persist. You can spend forever avoiding them. But if you actually face them and feel them, then they change. They move on. Remember: emotions have motion. They never stay the same. They only stay the same, painful and overwhelming, while you’re not feeling them.’