17 Apr [April 17, 2011] Shame: The Wretched Suffering of Not Being Met
During the second day of the Becoming Safely Attached workshop in Chicago I taught an introduction to shame and shame resilience.
I’ve been on a first name basis with shame for as long as I can remember; perhaps it’s a legacy of being brought up Irish Catholic.
Whatever it’s genesis I’ve searched everywhere for direction and help. Every training I’ve taken over the years I’ve always asked how to deal with shame in theory and practice.
It’s only since studying attachment theorists and working from an attachment perspective that I’ve been able to put enough pieces together to have an intellectual frame and a practice for working with my own shame and with the shame my clients suffer from.
Intellectually I have that frame now.
I understand how shame can drive us into withdrawing from life, avoiding circumstances and people, and how we will attack ourselves in all kinds of ways to protect ourselves.
I have even come to understand that when shamed many people will attack others in an effort to redirect away from the horrid sense of not being enough.
Understanding is one thing, learning to work with and be with and repair the shame patterns can be harder.
This was the situation I’ve been in with a client who I truly enjoy but nevertheless got stuck in a re-enactment with. This person’s patterns of shame activated my feeling of being attacked.
For weeks now we have been in this hurtful tango. As is good psychological practice I got consultation about what was happening in the therapy. I wanted to understand – but more importantly, I wanted to repair the hurts I was inadvertently creating by not fully understanding or connecting with this person.
Many people who get in these kinds of situations with a therapist leave the therapy, disappear, or aren’t able to tolerate the incredible wounding that comes with feeling the deep layers of shame underneath not being “gotten.”
Over and over I marvel with so many people about their determination to get help, resolve to work through this pattern even as it seemed the other person is just not getting it.
When I’m the person on the other end I shake my head in complete dismay, What am I not getting? What was this person trying to communicate that I kept missing?”
Miss it I seemed to do session after session.
It’s one thing to get it outside the immediacy of the relationship, another thing to be right there with the feelings and defenses right in the room. It broke my heart that couldn’t pierce whatever pattern that we were entangled in.
[Even as I write this I watch how I am cautioning myself, worried about not presenting myself as a perfect therapist, the kind of therapist who gets every mismatch and deftly alters the course so that the therapy moves along without anything disagreeable happening.
I worry that I will feel the effects of shame for exposing myself as not having it all together all of the time.
Yet, I know that the true healing of attachment not comes from having a perfect therapist/spouse/parent/friend but rather from a relationship that will tolerate upset and look for ways to repair the disruption.]
[As a result of writing this I thought a lot about being “careful.” Making sure I don’t make mistakes or hurt anyone’s feelings. Since this article is getting a tad long I decided to write that up as a blog post: click here to read]
Somewhere in the middle of this confusing morass I heard/felt the tuning fork of my history: that of being attacked.
Unfortunately, for many of us born into shame prone families (in my case, Irish Catholic) we know this alternating pattern of having people withdraw from us or attack us.
My family, despite the good care, well intentioned care, and the underlying love that wa there was also prone to shaming, prone to sarcasm, hidden humiliation bombs, discreet contempt. As a result I have a pattern that can pull me right in when I feel “attacked.”
At any rate, when the tiny metaphorical tuning fork pinged I “got it.”
Peter Fonagy and his team at Tavistock in London says that we all “have a biological need to be understood.”
Getting how much this person wanted to be understood, needed to be understood and heard helped shift the tango. It wasn’t about understanding the words that were being said but understanding the deep heart of pain that created the crucible in which we both moved out of the patterns in which we were caught.
There’s more repair that needs to be done, to go over and over and over once again the blunders and missteps that happened when I didn’t understand and didn’t “get” what this person was trying so hard to communicate.
I am grateful for the second chance to repair the relationship, as I am with everyone who offers me that opportunity. It’s the sacred gift of being allowed to join in what Jeffrey Moussaieff Mason and Susan McCarthy’s describe as “Searching the Heart of the Other.”