Month: October 2013
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How do you work with shame?
How do you work with shame? Do you try to help the patient experience it as deeply as possible? Shame has been understood from many different perspectives. Sylvan Tomkins proposed that shame is a sudden drop in positive affect. Freud and many other psychoanalysts proposed that shame results when we don’t live up to our…
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Is it anger or is it just blaming?
“When should I explore anger versus restructure externalization? Are these just two poles of a continuum (narrative truth versus historical truth)? I often find myself seeing it neither as black or white but grey. But then, how do I know I’m really exploring a feeling versus reinforcing the patient’s defense of blaming others? For example,…