SHAME AND COUNSELING
Mainstream culture is locked and loaded, ready to hunt shame into extinction. This partially explains the stigma surrounding counseling. What is counseling but a festival of shame? Exposure, surrendering trust and control, confronting shortcomings: counseling it has it all. At every second issues of power, vulnerability, and acceptance loom over the client-counselor relationship, so you might expect every counselor to have a thorough understanding about the nature of shame. In reality, psychology by and large averts its eyes. This raises the question: Would those who are hostile towards shame even recognize it if they saw it?
The answer, of course, is no. Acting from a mixture of a narrow, one-dimensional view of shame and good intentions, we boldly wave the banners that it’s a flaw to feel flawed, wrong to feel wrong, and bad to feel bad. In doing so we create the only truly dangerous form of shame: shame about shame.
Shame about shame prevents people from tending to their mental health. Taking steps to seek counseling is terrifying since it outwardly admits some failing or defect. Then there’s the panic of losing control in sessions with emotional outbursts or accidental disclosures. If people go to counseling at all, it may be with the expectation of a shame-demon exorcism. Counseling should not reinforce shame-shaming but rather assure that these feelings and concerns are natural and understandable. Counseling should provide a safe environment to practice healthy expressions of shame.
Contrary to popular opinion, the lack of shame is the opposite of mental health; its true absence is only found in psychopaths and some narcissists. When we sense we have violated our values or there is a risk of broken bonds, we feel shame. It keeps our antisocial egotistical impulses in check. By nature we are fallible, bound to occasionally feel, think or behave unfairly, inconsiderately, or with poor judgment and the consequences affect us profoundly. We don’t just want to do good, we want to be good. We don’t just want to act in acceptable ways, we want to be accepted.
Permissiveness of shamelessness does not encourage people to grow or get along, and it certainly doesn’t endow any deep, lasting happiness. Shame is the foundation for skills of social compromise; without shame, people feel entitled to reap all the benefits of society without paying any of the costs. If too many people were to take this position, society would deteriorate and no one would benefit. Shame about shame wears antisocial tendencies as a costume. By acting against one's intrinsic conscience, there is a disassociation which weakens one’s sense of self, in turn strengthening the very feelings of isolation, impurity, emptiness and anxiety it was attempting to shield against.
In order to know how to deal with shame in counseling, it’s important to learn cultural attitudes surrounding shame, that there is such a thing as healthy shame, how healthy and unhealthy shame manifest differently in people, and how it affects the client-counselor relationship.
The psychologically healthy person is whole, spontaneous, and natural, expressing shame as freely and openly as anything else. When they feel they are bad, they grow personally to repair their broken self-image. When they feel unacceptable, they express remorse to repair broken bonds. In short, when healthy people experience shame, they know how to use it productively. Since they can forgive their own mistakes and shortcomings, they respond much more positively to the expression of shame of others.
The person who does not know how to use shame to their advantage experiences shame as a catastrophic event. They fracture themselves into acceptable and unacceptable parts, using personas to hide unacceptable parts and emphasize acceptable ones. A fake self serves as protection; if it is hurt it does not have much impact because the real self remains safely tucked away. Bonds are often made with the fake self and as such are unfulfilling, superficial, and shallow. Some choose to befriend people they dislike; the less you like someone, the less they can hurt you. The imposter personality may dominate the authentic personality and a person can lose touch with their true self. To deter the temptation to form real bonds, situations are designed to bring about degradation, abandonment, betrayal, or rejection; these confirm that one is right to not form real, deep connections. They may live in fantasies of having genuine bonds as a way to compensate for the lack of the real ones. Those with unresolved shame also possess a defensiveness which healthy people do not have. They believe everyone who looks at them somehow knows their deepest indignity, coupled with a hypervigilance which looks for any sign of scorn and disapproval. The shame of others makes them uncomfortable and they are prone to react negatively.
The best way to use shame in a healthy, functional way is to couple it with reason. Being shamed can call attention to moral or interpersonal blind spots. Sometimes shame will be valid, other times it won’t. Unreasonable or unconditional shame traps people; if there is no basis for shame or no way to resolve it, one cannot make use of it. If shame is denied altogether, it bars the opportunity to assess how valid it is. If it is valid, then reason can be used to come up with a plan of action to fix the damage.
The less shame one has about shame, the more productive and less threatening it will be. The more shame one has about shame, the more dangerous it is. Instead of focusing on how bad it feels, we can focus to how useful these feelings can be. In order to effectively help clients, counselors must have the courage to look shame in the eyes and know it inside and out. Counselors should above all keep the mental health of their clients at the highest priority, which means confronting the things which make everyone uncomfortable and not conforming to injurious cultural attitudes because they sound appealing on the surface.
The answer, of course, is no. Acting from a mixture of a narrow, one-dimensional view of shame and good intentions, we boldly wave the banners that it’s a flaw to feel flawed, wrong to feel wrong, and bad to feel bad. In doing so we create the only truly dangerous form of shame: shame about shame.
Shame about shame prevents people from tending to their mental health. Taking steps to seek counseling is terrifying since it outwardly admits some failing or defect. Then there’s the panic of losing control in sessions with emotional outbursts or accidental disclosures. If people go to counseling at all, it may be with the expectation of a shame-demon exorcism. Counseling should not reinforce shame-shaming but rather assure that these feelings and concerns are natural and understandable. Counseling should provide a safe environment to practice healthy expressions of shame.
Contrary to popular opinion, the lack of shame is the opposite of mental health; its true absence is only found in psychopaths and some narcissists. When we sense we have violated our values or there is a risk of broken bonds, we feel shame. It keeps our antisocial egotistical impulses in check. By nature we are fallible, bound to occasionally feel, think or behave unfairly, inconsiderately, or with poor judgment and the consequences affect us profoundly. We don’t just want to do good, we want to be good. We don’t just want to act in acceptable ways, we want to be accepted.
Permissiveness of shamelessness does not encourage people to grow or get along, and it certainly doesn’t endow any deep, lasting happiness. Shame is the foundation for skills of social compromise; without shame, people feel entitled to reap all the benefits of society without paying any of the costs. If too many people were to take this position, society would deteriorate and no one would benefit. Shame about shame wears antisocial tendencies as a costume. By acting against one's intrinsic conscience, there is a disassociation which weakens one’s sense of self, in turn strengthening the very feelings of isolation, impurity, emptiness and anxiety it was attempting to shield against.
In order to know how to deal with shame in counseling, it’s important to learn cultural attitudes surrounding shame, that there is such a thing as healthy shame, how healthy and unhealthy shame manifest differently in people, and how it affects the client-counselor relationship.
The psychologically healthy person is whole, spontaneous, and natural, expressing shame as freely and openly as anything else. When they feel they are bad, they grow personally to repair their broken self-image. When they feel unacceptable, they express remorse to repair broken bonds. In short, when healthy people experience shame, they know how to use it productively. Since they can forgive their own mistakes and shortcomings, they respond much more positively to the expression of shame of others.
The person who does not know how to use shame to their advantage experiences shame as a catastrophic event. They fracture themselves into acceptable and unacceptable parts, using personas to hide unacceptable parts and emphasize acceptable ones. A fake self serves as protection; if it is hurt it does not have much impact because the real self remains safely tucked away. Bonds are often made with the fake self and as such are unfulfilling, superficial, and shallow. Some choose to befriend people they dislike; the less you like someone, the less they can hurt you. The imposter personality may dominate the authentic personality and a person can lose touch with their true self. To deter the temptation to form real bonds, situations are designed to bring about degradation, abandonment, betrayal, or rejection; these confirm that one is right to not form real, deep connections. They may live in fantasies of having genuine bonds as a way to compensate for the lack of the real ones. Those with unresolved shame also possess a defensiveness which healthy people do not have. They believe everyone who looks at them somehow knows their deepest indignity, coupled with a hypervigilance which looks for any sign of scorn and disapproval. The shame of others makes them uncomfortable and they are prone to react negatively.
The best way to use shame in a healthy, functional way is to couple it with reason. Being shamed can call attention to moral or interpersonal blind spots. Sometimes shame will be valid, other times it won’t. Unreasonable or unconditional shame traps people; if there is no basis for shame or no way to resolve it, one cannot make use of it. If shame is denied altogether, it bars the opportunity to assess how valid it is. If it is valid, then reason can be used to come up with a plan of action to fix the damage.
The less shame one has about shame, the more productive and less threatening it will be. The more shame one has about shame, the more dangerous it is. Instead of focusing on how bad it feels, we can focus to how useful these feelings can be. In order to effectively help clients, counselors must have the courage to look shame in the eyes and know it inside and out. Counselors should above all keep the mental health of their clients at the highest priority, which means confronting the things which make everyone uncomfortable and not conforming to injurious cultural attitudes because they sound appealing on the surface.