Overcoming Trauma-Related Shame and Self-Loathing with Janina Fisher, Ph.D. – Janina Fisher

Shame has an impact on our clients ability to find relief even with good treatment. Feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy interfere with taking in positive experiences. The 60-minute recording was live from the office of Dr. Janina Fisher and was about shame as a survival strategy.

Help clients relate to their symptoms with curiosity rather than automatic acceptance, discriminate the cognitive, emotional, and physiological components of shame, and integrate traditional psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral techniques to transform shame-related stuckness.

1. Discriminate the clinical implications of physiological and cognitive contributors to shame.
2. Describe cognitive-behavioral, ego state, and psychoeducational interventions to address shame in clinical practice.

Get Overcoming Trauma-Related Shame and Self-Loathing with Janina Fisher, Ph.D. of author Janina Fisher

The mechanisms of shame.

• The role of shame in traumatic experience
• Shame as an animal defense survival response
• Effects of shame on autonomic arousal

Shame is the Evolutionary Purpose.

• Shame and the attachment system
• Rupture and repair in attachment formation

Making meaning of shame.

• Feelings of disgust, degradation, and humiliation are interpreted as “who I am”
• Cognition and the body
• Internal working models predict the future and determine our actions

Working from the bottom up.

• The role of procedural learning and memory
• Physiological effects of mindful dual awareness
• Using mindfulness-based techniques to inhibit self-judgment

There is a new relationship to the shame.

• Re-contextualizing shame as a younger self or part
• Bringing our adult capacity to our childhood vulnerability
• Healing shame through compassionate acceptance

The healing of shame is part of the social engagement system.

• Social engagement and the ventral vagal system (Porges)
• The incompatibility of shame and social engagement
• The therapist’s own social engagement system as a healing agent

Get Overcoming Trauma-Related Shame and Self-Loathing with Janina Fisher, Ph.D. of author Janina Fisher