​By Sheila Rubin, Co-founder of the Center For Healing Shame

My client was a high functioning professional. During our many months of therapy she spoke of numerous times in her life when she felt too awkward or too shy or too depressed when she felt put down by people in her family or at work. She had a part of her that believed that something was wrong with her. And yet there was another part of her from long ago that knew that what was going on in her family was not right. And that part had been frozen in shame. All her emotions and her life forward direction stayed stuck and frozen in that shame/trauma bubble.

My client had come in because she had heard Bret and I discuss healing shame on the Sounds True Self-Acceptance Summit in 2017. Listening to us talk about shame, she realized that she had done years of therapy but had never addressed her deepest issue. As she said: “I always thought there was something wrong with me!” She had kept getting more and more training in her field because she never knew when she would feel inferior and have to back up her work. And she had not dated at all because if anyone wanted to go out with her, she would wonder what was wrong with them!

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NOTE: Transformance is a term coined by Diana Fosha, developer of AEDP, to describe “the force in the psyche that’s moving towards growth and expansion and transformation,” and the idea that healing is “not just an outcome but a process that exists within each person that emerges in conditions of safety.”

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An active meditator, she knew how to sit with herself and track thoughts and emotions. We tracked her sessions from her first realization, during the Sounds True interview, that this emotion of shame had played a major but invisible role in her life. In early sessions she had talked about her confusion about her role as a younger daughter growing up in a large family and about having to follow the rules or be beaten—even when she didn’t know what was wrong. She would be beaten by her father for not giving him a glass in the correct way. She would be beaten by her sister for even having a thought that was different and by her mother just for looking a little different.

“Shame is a binding emotion,” I told her one day. “Maybe shame bound up with your anger and sadness to protect you in childhood when your parents beat you. Maybe you learned to hold back your emotions so deeply and you learned to hold back your thoughts, and shame was like a cover of the deeper parts of you?”

She joined my gentle curiosity as we gently unpacked the way shame had protected her. She had learned to think “Something must be wrong with me” because she had a different reaction than family members. She had a lifetime of holding back her thoughts and feelings. She had a lifetime of repeating the shame messages that had been placed on her by keeping herself small and believing that something was wrong with her. I explained that thought was actually the cognitive expression of shame.

My presence was a safe witness that she had not experienced before. And she noticed what it was like to talk about her life without feeling judged.

Shame can be like a multi-headed hydra, attacking self-esteem and self-worth and getting in the way of making life changes. It can help to have a new mirror. I mirrored the positives in her and the changes she was making in her life. I explained to her about healthy shame. And we processed the difference between that and the toxic shame that kept her stuck in the past and kept her energy system frozen for so many years.

It was exciting to watch her transform as we encountered and processed and moved a little beyond the shame each week. Our work together led to an extraordinary session in which the curtain of shame lifted and I got to see the radiant person underneath. I would like to share a moment from that session with you. (I have changed various aspects of her story to keep her identity private.)

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It was an odd look I had not seen on her face before, and I wanted both of us to stay a little longer with that moment.

“Ooooooohhhhh. What’s that emotion?” I say, drawing out the sounds of my words. I’ve never seen this look before, I reflect back to her.

She shrugs and stops herself from rushing forward into words that may have been there, and she pauses in that moment and shrugs.

“That emotion,” I say with curiosity and wonder, “I have never seen on your face. Your eyes are getting big, and there’s a new lightness around your eyes.”

She shrugs again.

I ask again, more insistent, increasing my vitality affect and leaning in towards her a little.

“THAT emotion,” I say, raising my excitement level a little more. “Can you name it? Do you notice it?” We look at each other for a few moments and she sighs.

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know,” I repeat, as if joining her in a game of hide and seek. I ask again. “I wonder what it may be?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know… I don’t know… maybe…maybe….. Oh my……. It’s happiness!!!” she says with extreme surprise.

Happiness and joy! Two emotions that are new to her. We are at a transformance moment in our session, where a lifetime of being in the grips of the shame freeze has kept her emotions frozen and her life ordinary. I join her and name the delight of her overflowing joy and the waterfall and pleasure of this incredible moment.

It touched my heart to share that moment of joyous discovery with her. It brought tears to my eyes and we cried tears of joy together.

© 2018 Sheila Rubin

About the Author:Sheila Rubin is the Co-founder of the Center For Healing Shame. The Center For Healing Shame is based in Berkeley, California. Workshops are offered in Berkeley, at various other locations in the United States and Canada, and online. There is also a full training and certification program for therapists. The education is designed to help therapists show clients how to recognize shame, work through it and move on by:   

• Becoming more sensitive to the shaming often implicit in the therapy situation and learning how to counter shame in therapy.

• Helping clients separate feelings of shame from other emotions.

• Learning how to take clients back to early shaming situations and reverse the outcome.

• Supporting clients to move their energy powerfully outward rather than turn it against themselves.

Sheila and Bret have been at the forefront of guiding mental health professionals to recognize and move through shame with their clients.

The Center for Healing Shame is qualified to provide CE credits for MFTs, LCSWs, LPCCs and LEPs registered in California - CAMFT Approved CE Provider #134393. PhDs in California and PhDs and licensed therapists outside of California may be able to receive CE credits through the co-sponsorship of R. Cassidy Seminars. 

​By Alice Kahn Ladas, EdD, CBT, lic. Psychologist, NM-505-471-6791  [email protected]

Before I talk about early Coping Strategies and how they can sabotage connection, I would like to review, briefly, what I have observed happening in the Reichian branch of body psychotherapy over the past 65 years. Contemporary brain research confirms the mind-body relationship and has brought psychotherapy around to what Reich was discovering almost a century ago. Until his work challenged Viennese cultural norms and they threw him out, Reich was Freud’s star pupil. The reasons for Reich being attacked in he USA remains unclear. Conflicting versions of that story are reflected in two books, Mickey Sharaf’s Fury On Earth and James Martin’s Wilhelm Reich and the Cold War. Was it McCarthy, European Emigree Psychiatrists, Russia or all of them combined?

I am probably the oldest member of USABP, the living person who has been involved with Body Psychotherapy for the longest time and the only current member of USABP who met in person the physician who brought this form of body psychotherapy to the United States. To further connect our start with our present here is a quote from Reich’s Brief to the US Court of Appeals in 1951.

“Not protection of old financial or
Political privileges, but safeguarding the
Planet, Earth, and transforming its
Technological structure is the task of today.
Let us hope that the great industrial powers
Of our planet have retained their pioneering spirit.”

People often ask how come I am in relatively good shape at my august age and I have given the usual answers: luck, genes, diet, exercise. Now I add Body Psychotherapy. Most questioners have no clue as to what that means which gives me the opportunity to tell them. Encountering the work of Reich and many of those who followed him were, for me, life changing and I am forever grateful.

I attended my first Conference at Orgonon in 1948 and was personally examined by Reich in 1951 in order to be on the staff of his Infant Research Center. That same year, I brought orgone therapist, Dr. Alan Cott, to meet Mrs. Roosevelt because Reich believed, at the time, that Orgone energy might counteract the effects of nuclear radiation. Mrs. R ran the information by Robert Oppenheimer who said it is probably a hoax. That same year Reich learned he was wrong: the combination proved destructive.

Reich has the distinction of being the only person to have his books burned by both the Nazis and the United States, as well as being on Russia’s top hit list. I was around for the book burning and destruction of Reich’s scientific equipment but did not turn in my books or orgone accumulator. I still have those precious ancient possessions. But I left the field of psychotherapy for several years--the event was so appalling.

In 1955, I returned to join the study group of Lowen and Pierrakos and began introducing Lowen at his public lectures. My suggestion they form a not-for-profit organization was greeted favorably. After introducing Al to his first publisher, and writing the first brochure, I joined the original Board of five and remained there for many years. I also served on the Board of USABP from 2000 to 2007. So I have been involved in Body Psychotherapy for a VERY LONG time.

Reich relied on patients words at the start of therapy but very little after that. He did it to the patient and was highly evaluative. If you want to know exactly how one person’s therapy went, A.E. Hamilton kept a diary of his sessions, although Reich told his patients not to. I rescued that diary from a snowdrift and you can read it in three J.s of Orgonomy, 31(1) (2)1997 and 32 (1).

Following Freud’s dictum that only medical doctors could practice psychoanalysis, Orgonomy was also initially restricted to physicians. So Lowen got his medical degree before inventing his own version of Body Psychotherapy. Stanley Keleman was part of that original group. So were many others with whose names you are familiar.

I had therapy sessions with both Lowen and Pierrakos and can testify they followed Reich’s pattern of evaluating and doing it to the patient until a highly qualified psychiatrist-patient screwed up his courage to ask “Would you like to know what is happening to me?” After much internal struggle, Bioenergetic Analysis gradually moved towards doing the work together, a collaborative adventure based on connection. But it involved a huge struggle and a lot of hurt feelings.

For many years, there was such a strong emphasis on feelings that thinking was virtually cast aside…understandable since feelings had been neglected for eons. My article, "Using Goals in Bioenergetic Analysis," was rejected by the Bioenergetic Journal and published instead by The American Assoc. of Psychotherapists. But I believe and suspect you do too, that both feelings AND thoughts matter. My friend, colleague and founder of Radix™, Charles Kelley, discovered, to his dismay, that his seminars on feeling were well attended but those on purpose were not.

A related pattern concerns research. Yale Professor, Dr. John Bellis, was forced to resign in 1961 as Director of Training partly because he wanted to include a research project as one of the requirements for becoming a Certified Bioenergetic Analyst. The research project of my husband Harold and myself, "Women and Bioenergetic Analysis," was disowned by IIBA until the CT Society published it. At my insistence, it was included as an appendix in our NY Times bestseller The G Spot and Other Discoveries About Human Sexuality. The study, presented as "From Freud Through Hite, All Partly Wrong and Partly Right," at a meeting of SSSS, was what led to meeting our coauthors, the researchers Whipple and Perry. As a result, readers from 18 countries and almost as many languages have the opportunity to learn about Body Psychotherapy.

After 40 years of failing to persuade IIBA to establish awards for research, I joined the Board of USABP in 2000. They established two --one for practitioners and one for students--and, in 2008, named those awards after me. Unless we publish research in peer-reviewed journals other than our own, Body Psychotherapy is unlikely to get the recognition it deserves. Said Murray Bowen, in a 1980 speech entitled Psychotherapy: Past Present and Future, “A theory is just a theory until it is validated by research.” This September 2018, the new director of APA sent me an email confirming Bowen’s statement. He wrote to me saying he is not familiar with Body Psychotherapy.

Recent brain research not only confirms that working with the body is vital but that we need to engage all parts of our brain in order to recover and grow. Since my involvement with Reich and Bioenergetics, many other very helpful methods of body psychotherapy have evolved. Now that we include the brain, as an organ to address consciously, along with other parts of our bodies, we have the opportunity to include both the thinking and feeling parts of that organ, along with the primitive section that tells us to continue doing what we once did to accommodate and stay safe in our family and culture of origin.

It took me more than 60 years to come up with the idea I want to share now. Many of you work with similar concepts; it is the manner and timing of working with it that differs. I have found it exponentially increases the effectiveness of what I was already doing. Had any of my therapists, verbal or body-centered, said to me at the start of therapy “What did you do to adapt to your family and culture of origin?” we might have discovered precisely what to work on and saved lots of money and time. One of my present goals is to teach this work to other clinicians before I get too old. If you think what I write today has merit, invite me to do a workshop.

Following the medical model, we give diagnoses. Theoretically, these lead to the best methods of treatment; and get paid by insurances. My diagnosis made me feel less than worthy. Wouldn’t you rather be told there is something right about you than something wrong? By focusing early on a client’s coping strategy in the family and culture into which she/he was born and viewing it as lifesaving, you make clients right. That helps promote the positive client/therapist relationship so crucial to all successful therapy.

When clients become aware of what they had to do to cope in their family and culture of origin, it is often what they are still doing which prevents them from experiencing the kind of life they long for today. Were they freezing, running away? hiding? fighting, afraid to reach, stealing? If it helped them survive they were doing something right.

Early coping strategies show up in bodies just as clearly as they do in words. These early questions are not a replacement for bodywork. They facilitate it. “If we decide to work together and are successful, what will that look like?” is on my written form for new clients. Some can answer that question and others can’t. Since intention plays an important role in the success of therapy, I have been seeking a written answer to that question for years. Today I ask a second more difficult question early on: “In your family and culture of origin, what did you do to get along?” Since early coping strategies are often partly, if not wholly, unconscious, this can take time. Once we identify it, we know what to work on. What they did then was useful but today it gets in the way of what they long for. I view their adaptation as "right" instead of "wrong." After identifying a client’s early coping strategy (and I say client instead of patient deliberately), I warn that changing a way of responding that was once lifesaving but no longer works, is as difficult as changing any other kind of compulsive behavior. The amygdala warns us not to change any behavior that once kept us safe. It does not understand you are no longer trapped in a situation you did not choose. Pay attention to what triggers that initial coping strategy. Take small steps to modify your response to the trigger. Instead of reacting, take a breath and act in order to get what you need today. Be patient, and expect you will have to deal with anxiety, possibly severe anxiety, as you make the changes needed to create the life you seek today.

We discuss and practice many ways of handling anxiety. You know all of them.…keeping knees soft, opening stuck breathing, noticing your present surroundings, exercising, hitting, meditating, or going over the Bioenergetic stool if that was part of your training. We also do whatever is needed to free up energy blocks or increase energy. This can involve diet, exercise, stopping or adding meds, sleep patterns, new forms of brain stimulation, medical cannabis, etc.. Below is a list of possible questions to use in discovering your clients or your early coping mechanism. You might try them on a willing colleague or friend or on your clients. I hope you will find this approach as helpful as I have.

Questions and suggestions from the therapist

If we decide to work together and are successful, what would that look like? How might your life be different?

Tell me how you coped with or kept yourself safe during your early years in your family and culture of origin?

Where and how, in your behavior and your body, does this way of keeping safe manifest today?

Would you like to modify or change your early way of staying safe because it no longer helps you be or get what you want?

If you modified your early response, would that make you feel anxious?

(The primitive part of your brain will tell you not to alter any behavior that kept you safe before so you may feel very anxious.)

How will you deal with the anxiety?

(Please be patient with yourself if you are not able to change as fast as you would like)

For homework, please write a detailed description of what you did to stay safe in your family and culture of origin. Then write about how that behavior may be keeping you from creating what you would like to in your life today.

If you are working with a couple, it is very useful to have each person write about their own early way of coping and also their partners way of coping. They can then compare their understanding of themselves and each other to see if they fully understand both their own coping strategies and those of their partner. That helps them recognize when their partners are triggered and to act rather than react.

A warning is in order: Often the coping mechanisms are not fully conscious or even unconscious, so it may take time to unearth them correctly.

​From the NARM Training Institute.

In June 2018, nearly 40 years after the APA controversially yet officially recognized Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)as a mental disorder that required clinical treatment, the World Health Organization released the ICD-11 including a new diagnosis: Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD).

This diagnosis has the potential to completely revolutionize the world of mental health.

Understanding the long-term impact of unresolved early trauma is indeed a world health issue.  Attachment, relational and developmental trauma – which crosses all cultures, religions and communities – impacts the neurobiological development of children and creates life-long patterns of disorganization within the body, mind and relationships.  Perhaps a greater understanding of Complex Trauma can help us understand the underlying causes of the disorders our clients are struggling with, in addition to the increasing social challenges like substance abuse, systemic injustice and violence.  A trauma-responsive perspective brings great hope.

While PTSD evolved the field of psychology in a major way nearly 40 years ago, those of us that have worked in this field know that there are limitations to the diagnosis and the treatments addressing it.  C-PTSD helps us evolve our understanding of trauma.  Now that C-PSTD has been officially recognized, the next step is to finding treatments that are specifically geared to addressing Complex Trauma. 

Many of us have experienced frustration with clients dealing with complex trauma due to their lack of progress in therapy, as well as those clients who make good progress only to regress back to old, stuck patterns of self-sabotage, hopelessness and despair.  These are usually the clients that therapists bring to consultation. 

The question we as NARM consultants get asked repeatedly – how can I most effectively help my client?

To answer this, let’s revisit The ACEs Study (Adverse Childhood Experiences).  The ACEs Study has a fascinating origin.  Originally, it was designed as a weight-loss program until the head of the program, Dr. Vincent Felitti, observed that despite making successful gains toward their weight-loss goals, nearly 50% of the participants were dropping out.  This did not make sense to Dr. Felitti at the time: why participants would leave the program as they were losing weight and coming close to meeting their weight-loss goals.  He created a questionnaire to understand this phenomenon and discovered that a majority of those that dropped-out had experienced childhood trauma.  Thus began the monumental research project we now refer to as the ACEs Study.

One fascinating aspect here is the underlying mechanism of self-sabotage.  One would think that the closer a participant got to their goals the more motivated they would be to complete their program.  But whether it’s weight loss, or a student dropping out their senior year of college just a few credits shy of graduating, or someone who has been sober and returns to their substance use, we see so many examples of people getting closer to health, wellness and success turn to behaviors that are self-sabotaging and self-destructive.

We are now unwinding this puzzle through recognizing the “survival” function of shame and self-hatred.  As young children, everything revolves around staying connected to our caregivers via attachment – this is essential for our basic survival and well-being.  When there has been failure, whether from our caregivers or from the environment, our basic survival is threatened.  A child is unable to experience themselves as being a good person in a bad situation.  Therefore, unconsciously, psychobiological mechanisms turn on to assure our basic survival.  A main survival strategy is what we might refer to as shame and self-hatred; that children experience themselves as bad as a way to protect themselves from their failures of their caregivers and/or environment.

One of the things we have observed in consulting many somatic-oriented therapists internationally is that despite very effective and powerful somatic work, therapeutic process still gets thwarted without recognizing and working directly with the survival-based developmental strategies.  Clients begin to get better and then repeatedly have set-backs or sabotage it in a number of ways.  Going back to the original weight-loss program, something is threatening about moving forward in life toward greater health and well-being.  That something is the way we learned to protect our early caregivers and environment through foreclosing fundamental aspects of ourselves, even if those fundamental aspects are positive like growth, healing and aliveness.

So what does this have to do with somatic therapy?  What happens when a client is moving toward greater embodiment, self-regulation and empowerment (“bottom-up”), but we fail to recognize the underlying shame-based wounds that have led to the dysfunctional strategies, behaviors and symptoms?  Or for traditional, talk-based therapists, what happens when we work with the psychodynamics of shame, self-hatred and self-sabotage (“top-down”) without shifting the physiological and emotional patterns that are fueling the self-limiting beliefs and behaviors?  And, what happens when we are working with early attachment wounds and don’t recognize our own countertransference (our own unresolved trauma patterns and triggers) and how this impacts the therapeutic process?  

The NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) is a therapeutic approach designed to work with the unresolved wounds and patterns leftover from early trauma.  This integrated “top-down” (psychodynamic-based) and “bottom-up” (somatic-based) approach works with the psychobiological patterns of shame and self-hatred within a deeply mindful, relational context.  With a framework that identifies the developmental wounds from early trauma, our clients have a possibility of moving forward unencumbered by these unconscious survival strategies that have come to dominate their lives.  Freedom from childhood trauma is possible 

While research on this is still in its infancy, we at the NARM Training Institute are buoyed by clinical reports and early research demonstrating how effective the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) is in resolving attachment, relational and developmental trauma.  We have trained thousands of mental health clinicians throughout North America and Europe, and are rapidly expanding our NARM training programs throughout the world and online.

If you have clients that are struggling from unresolved early trauma and would like more information on how to provide more effective therapeutic support for your clients, we invite you to learn more about the NeuroAffective Relational Model in our online or live training formats.  

To learn more about this revolutionary method to treat this paradigm-shifting diagnosis: