Chronic Shame in Clinical Practice: An Embodied Relational Perspective – Online Workshop

Chronic/maladaptive shame is woven into the lives, histories and presentations for many of the people we sit with in our clinical practices. At the heart of insecure attachment, chronic shame disrupts healthy relational development and has far-reaching implications for one’s capacity to regulate affect, engage in healthy relationships, and on one’s internal working model- how one sees themselves, others and the world. This early template of self becomes intertwined with shaming experiences across the lifespan, creating cycles of multi-layered suffering. Because chronic shame is a relational injury, with its roots in early life, and woven into the fabric of the self, it is often confusing for both client and therapist, and can be a forceful inhibitor of the therapeutic process. Due to its non-verbal early origins, utilizing cognitive interventions and left hemispheric approaches are refractory, thus requiring clinicians to work from an embodied, affect regulation, relational orientation.

5 Wednesdays – October 26 through November 23, 2022

6:30 pm to 9:00 pm PT

Early bird 395.00 including gst until October 16th, 425.00 thereafter

This online workshop will:

• Define and examine chronic and maladaptive shame
• Explore the formation of chronic shame through the attachment relationship(s) and intergenerational transmission
• Introduce the different presentations of chronic shame correlated with differing attachment states
• Present the Polyvagal Theory and application to clinical practice regarding chronic shame
• Present the neurophysiological landscape of chronic shame, and resulting overwhelm and dissociation
• Examine how chronic shame is being kept alive and active in present day relationships and behaviours
• Present clinical indicators of chronic shame including: addiction, secrecy, self-sabotage, relational instability, affairs, lapses in integrity, etc.
• Explore questions to reveal chronic shame dynamics within families and caregiving relationships
• Present how to elicit historical information to piece together the specific relational details of harm such as ridicule, indifference, aggression, competition, etc.
• Introduce clinician countertransference to chronic shame in clinical practice
• Explore working with chronic shame with individual’s living with it, partners, and couple’s work
• Explore the nuanced dynamics of working relationally through an affect regulation model to work with chronic shame

This workshop is open to those with a graduate degree in a mental health discipline.

To register, email Stacy at stacy@stacyadamjensen.com or call 250.216.1356