Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame Quotes

“There are other ways family members avoid saying what they feel. People hide behind silence or behind a lot of pleasant chatter. Maybe nobody wants to talk because nobody will listen. Maybe people are afraid to get hurt. It’s hard to speak up if you think the others will ignore you or attack you. And you can’t listen while you’re preparing your defense or counter-attack.”
― Patricia A. DeYoung, Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach

“Self psychology has always understood a client’s symptoms and defenses as efforts to maintain his self-cohesion. When a client enters therapy guardedly, a self psychologist understands this resistance as necessary; the client needs to protect his self-organization from being re-traumatized in this new relationship.”
― Patricia A. DeYoung, Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach

“Andrea’s mother was the parent who gave her no emotional response. For years, Andrea didn’t know that she was angry with her mother. She just gave up hope of experiencing love in her lifetime. She didn’t know about her own deep, core shame either. She just refused to need emotional closeness with others. Staying cool, contained, and in her head kept her safe from the relationships she “knew” would only hurt her, and it kept her safely disconnected from her own emotions, too.”
― Patricia A. DeYoung, Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach

“mutual emotional connection with us. When this connectedness is the heart of treatment, the therapy will naturally create mutually experienced selfobject transferences that lead the client toward health.7 I have noted that having selfobject experiences with us is one of the ways our chronically shamed clients get a second chance at the right-brain regulation they missed when they were younger.”
― Patricia A. DeYoung, Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach

“Right-brain self-acceptance, grounded in the relational experience of being accepted as an imperfect but lovable whole person, is what makes it possible for a child or an adult to develop the capacity for guilt and remorse. A person with chronically unresolved shame can’t be “a good person who did a bad thing.” The idea of having done harm may be unthinkable—it just couldn’t/didn’t happen.”
― Patricia A. DeYoung, Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach

“But of course, not every misattuned interpersonal interaction that isn’t repaired morphs into debilitating life-long shame. What we recognize as chronic shame has a dynamic and logic of its own that builds on many repetitions of disconnection, in one pattern or another, that are cumulatively traumatic. Shame starts as a simple right-brain to right-brain dysregulating event, but as those events, unrepaired, cluster in memory and wire up consistently with other neural events, shame becomes a chronic relational emotion shaped and colored by the relational contexts in which it came to be. In other words, although a “dysregulation/disintegration”
― Patricia A. DeYoung, Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach

“The dark emotional convictions of chronic shame will feel like truth until they are brought out into brighter spaces where compassionate acceptance is the rule.”
― Patricia A. DeYoung, Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach

“Such integration is the opposite of shame, for shame is the dis-integration that happens when a self cannot find empathic recognition from an emotionally significant other.”
― Patricia A. DeYoung, Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach