How to Ease the Pain of Trauma-Induced Shame
 | with Bessel van der Kolk, MD; |  |
with Bessel van der Kolk, MD; Ruth Lanius, MD, PhD; Peter Levine, PhD; Thema Bryant-Davis, PhD; Richard Schwartz, PhD; Pat Ogden, PhD; Janina Fisher, PhD; Kathy Steele, MN, CS; Stephen Porges, PhD; Martha Sweezy, PhD, LICSW; Deb Dana, LCSW; Ruth Buczynski, PhD
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Ruth Buczynsky is leading the flow of explanations and clinical examples with a profound clinical understanding and a very good capacity to summarize and make everything understandable.
The lens “check with your patient’s nervous system” is becoming clearer and clearer to me.
A sincere thank you for the opportunity to listen directly to therapists who are also serious researchers in various approaches and fields.
Moral injury, somatic addiction to self harm and intolerance to positive feelings are all useful concept and ” frames” for understanding and act therapeutically
Thank you for this rich & powerful session. I work as an art therapist, combining art-making with somatic awareness & authentic movement & this session filled in some subtle but crucial gaps in my learning/experience. I appreciate the tone of humility, sharing expertise & ongoing co-learning all your presenters embody. I feel there is more for me to explore in the statement that some nervous systems ‘have developed to be more in a state of protection than connection’ – this gives dignity to this situation & honours its slow, adaptive nature. I was grateful to hear more therapists speak about how they work with shame & clarify some of my questions about self-harm. In art therapy workshops people are often initially terrified of ‘art’, fending off inner critics, recalling school humiliations for lack of talent etc. I sometimes suggest we all paint or draw cariacatures of our inner critics, imagining them in an appropriate outfit & pose, & send them out for a coffee while we make art. This is a trick really as people get really creative depicting characters from thier past – harsh critical teachers, bullies of all kinds, often with some humour. At the end we invite them back & imagine them seeing what’s been made. They are often surprised, impressed. Some creative power has been demonstrated by a presumed ‘weak’ part. It can be the beginning of working at a deeper level with this issue.
Fantastic as always. So much application to real life clients and situations. I follow, watch, read all the experts theories and try to apply to clients. I find these sessions bring the theory alive, simplify the complex. You cover so much and yet give so many useful interventions. I consistently gain new practical skills. I am a trauma psychotherapist and a 10 ACE trauma survivor, so I practise most things on myself first. Over the years I have become more confident using sensorimotor and somatic therapy. I have in the last year really began to increase my use of polyvagal applications. I think from this session (shame) I am going to take away shame as a protective survival response, Peter Levine’s shame posture and Janine Fisher’s “How long does the relief last?” Thank-you as always
Excellent session and very applicable to myself and my clients. Very true how many learn to hold experiences as inner unacknowledged shame in order to remain part of the family. Session also showed me how much more I need to learn and/or not do!
Thanks so much for this series!
This has been a great series; I appreciate the focused, precise presentation of the teaching. Each week I learn something practical I can apply immediately. This week it’s the understanding that the core experience of moral injury is the loss of ability to trust others and/or the self.
I found this webinar extremely useful and relevant to my clients and had the opportunity to use what I had learned when counselling clients today. I used the concept of the self critic and its’ role as well as the discomfort a person will experience feeling positive feelings. Thank you for a very informative webinar.
This is an excellent program that has been and continues to resonate with me on many levels. in situations that are familiar to me from many years of working with clients, disentangling many skeins and levels of action and reaction, of feelings and thoughts, but above all working with the nervous system of the client, respecting where they are (the protective, survival aspect of the traumatic symptom) and following the micro impulses and movements of body and nervous system (which with my Jungian training I would see as the unconscious). Approaches in dealing with difficult emotional states, that are so respectful, collaborative, positive and hopeful, avoiding so often diagnoses that are so imprisoning and unhelpful for the client. I will certainly be making use of these suggested ways with my clients. Terence McBride, Sydney, Australia.
This presentation was EXACTLY what I’ve been looking for. I had no idea how to work with shame. Especially moral shame. Thank you so much for your excellent presentation!
The session today on Trauma-Induced shame was extremely helpful especially the discussion on how to respond to a client’s self-blame belief that they did something wrong. Especially helping the client to understand that what they did/ did not do was a way to survive and self-preserve so they can think and understand their beliefs differently and less negatively.
Thank you for organizing and making it possible to learn from so many skillful and dedicated professionals. This is a wonderful opportunity to hear about different techniques and to apply them to benefit treatment with clients. Thank you NICABM for enabling this learning to happen.
This session has been invaluable to me, not only for my clients but is has triggered awareness about parts of myself that are stuck in shame and need to be freed. I am getting so much more out of this course than I could have imagined. I offer deep appreciation to all for your time, expertise and compassion in producing this excellent program.
Thank you. That was brilliant in how it was orchestrated and seamlessly delivered. I have a new sense of confidence in holding what has been a difficult process for some many of the people I work with.
Thank you very much. This session was very powerful. Working with shame is so difficult and you provided explanations and guidelines in a clear concise manner. I am looking forward to applying these techniques.