Shame, like trauma, is a state of freeze. When in shame, or even talking about a shaming feeling or experience, the client loses contact with his resources. When we work with a client, we need to make sure she is able to be “with” the shame, not in it. We need to establish and keep an optimal distance by helping the client find and hold a resourced state. The most important strategy at the beginning of a session is to resource the client. In fact, resourcing the client and making sure the client stays resourced is the most important strategy throughout the session.
In real estate, brokers say there are three important aspects to pricing and selling a house: location, location, location. In the same way, there are three important aspects of working with a client about shame or trauma: resource, resource, resource. We need to start each session with resourcing—and continue helping the client find resources and stay in a resourced state throughout the session. In the movie “The World’s Greatest Lover,” Gene Wilder has given his girlfriend a number of activities to do during sex. We never find out what the activities are, but he tells her to “never stop doing number eight.” In the same way, we never stop resourcing. If we can resource a client in working with shame or trauma—even if we never get anything else done—the session is successful.
This can get confusing for therapists or coaches who think their job is to fix the problem. Basically, fixing the problem is not our job. Which is a good thing, because we can’t fix someone else’s problem. Our job is to help the client acquire the resources to fix the problem— or live with the problem—or find a way to see the problem differently. Once we understand this, we become far more useful to the client. And we can gain far more joy and satisfaction from our work.
If we can’t fix the problem, and we are not supposed to, what is our job? One of my mentors, Bruce Ecker, always talked of therapeutic powerlessness. We can lose our joy, hope, and effectiveness if we think we are supposed to do things we can’t do. So what are we supposed to do? I pondered this problem and I came up with the concept of guiding the client’s attention. That is the power we do have. Clients may not always realize it, but what they really need help with is finding resources and knowing where to look for them.
As Sheila Rubin and I thought about how to guide a client’s attention, we realized that we could separate the way we experienced the world into four realms of experience: cognitive, somatic-emotional (these could be separated, but we liked the symmetry of four), interpersonal, and imaginal-spiritual. And we realized that the reason to employ these four realms was to create an optimal distance from any emotion—so we could experience the emotion and still continue with our life. In Diana Fosha’s terms, we could "feel and deal." In Peter Levine’s, we could establish and expand a "window of tolerance.”
We can resource the client—or help him find resources—in all the realms. In creating optimal distance, we work with all four realms of experience: the cognitive, the somatic-emotional, the imaginal—which includes the spiritual—and the interpersonal. Usually, if the client is under-resourced in one realm, we move him to another realm and stay there for a while.
Clients often plunge into their material and stay there. Shame, like trauma, has a pull and can draw the client—and the therapist—right down the rabbit hole. We don’t need to resource the client where they are under-resourced. And we don’t need to let them stay in the pain of the memory of shame or trauma. In fact, most of the time, we cannot. The pull of the shame will be too great. Instead, we need to take charge of our main resource—and our job—which is to guide the client’s attention. We need to lead them somewhere else. If the client is drowning in feelings of shame, we can try to use the somatic resources of breathing and grounding. If the pull of shame is too strong, we may need to take them into a non-somatic realm.
There are resources for a client in every realm. We need to help her find them—or co-create them if they are not available. In the somatic realm, there is breathing and grounding and slowing things down. In the interpersonal realm, there is the awareness that I am not alone—you are there with me. This is the most basic resource and the most important. The simplest and most direct way to resource the client is to be there with them, fully present, and to listen to and react to what they say. We can also self-reveal appropriately, sharing commonalities and acknowledging differences. “I know what that feels like.” “I grew up very differently.” “It really shocks me that you were treated like that."
Just listening, with facial expression that shows that we are listening, may be enough in dealing with feelings of grief and anger. However, with shame and trauma, just listening isn’t enough. Both shame and trauma are states of freeze that take away resources. Both lower ability to function, physically and mentally. A person in trauma or shame is badly under-resourced. Shame and trauma focus us on ourselves and cut off our connection to others. If we are simply listening, the client may still feel alone and stay under-resourced. And grief and anger are often bound with shame, isolating the client. In order for us to get through to the client and allow her to fully feel our presence, we need to give feedback, both verbal and non-verbal. We need to talk as well as listen. And we need to respond with our faces and our bodies. We need to “dance” with the client, and we need to establish pendulation.
One of the most painful tasks of a student of psychology is to watch the still-face experiment of Ed Tronick, now available on YouTube. Here we see a mother happily interacting with her baby. The baby smiles, giggles, reaches out; the mother is equally animated, mirroring the baby’s actions with her face and body. At a certain point, the mother stops responding, her face become expressionless, her body stops moving. The baby tries and tries to involve the mother. She giggles more, squirms with more energy. She reaches out desperately and you can see the pain on her face. Finally, she just gives up and becomes very still, almost frozen. We can see the physical expression of shame and despair. The mother then starts moving and responding again and, in a little while, the baby comes back to life and starts responding and playing again. All is well. You can sense the mother’s relief that the experiment is over and she can come back to her baby. Like the baby, she has endured a lot for the sake of science.
The “dance" I am talking about is interacting with your clients, physically as well as emotionally, both mirroring and reacting. It is not enough to sit silently. The client may feel some of your presence, but there are still elements of the still-face experiment. It is vital to react facially. It is even better when you can respond and mirror the client with subtle (and occasionally not so subtle) movements of your whole upper body.
In addition, we need to establish pendulation with and within the client. Pendulation is our natural state. We move smoothly from one feeling to another, one activity to another. We’re happy, then we’re sad, then we’re happy again. We exercise, then we rest. “I wasn’t hungry an hour ago, but now I am.” Or “I had the most terrible day. I feel so bad. I don’t think I’ll ever recover… I wonder what’s for dinner…” Shame and trauma disrupt the natural ability to pendulate, and we want to help the client restore that ability.
The first pendulation is external, between client and therapist. You talk, then I talk. If the therapist simply stays silent, the client may not become fully aware that he is with someone else. I learned this when I first worked with several narcissistic young men. After a very short time, it became clear to me that they didn’t even really know that I was in the room with them. If we are to undo aloneness, we have to make our presence felt. And by establishing a pendulation, we help the client come out of stuckness.
Once we have restored the external pendulation between helper and client, we need to restore internal pendulation. We need to help the client move out of the painful feeling that comes up whenever they are trying to recall or talk about a painful experience. If we hear a problem or sense pain and jump in to fix it, we are doing the opposite of pendulating. We are reinforcing the under-resourced state. We want the client to be resourced before they focus on pain and difficulty. That is why we need to help the client find resources and expand those resources right at the beginning of every session involving shame. And why we actively help the client pendulate out of bad feelings and direct her to resources before the bad feelings take over and the client goes down the rabbit hole. We are trying to restore pendulation. We want the client to be able to pendulate out of the painful place to the resource whenever they need to. By doing this, we can help the client go deeper and deeper into the shame experiences from the past and still come out again. We expand the “window of tolerance” for going into the darkness, because the client knows they can come out again into the light.
This brings us back to guiding the client’s attention. We can find resources in every realm. I have mentioned the somatic and interpersonal so far. In the cognitive realm, we can educate the client and normalize their situation. We can help them see the big picture, what happened before and after, who else was involved. In the imaginal realm, there are people who inspired them, helped them or loved them, times when life was good, and places where they felt the most relaxed and safe. We can work with parts and roles and we can help them go back to past situations and give them different endings. There are also spiritual beliefs. Our first job is to look for those resources, help the client see them and focus on and build them so that the client can come back to them whenever they need to. Only then can we go fully into the material the client needs to explore.
© 2021 Bret Lyon
Photo by Bret Lyon