This book can help you make shame, guilt and anger your allies instead of our enemies. They can become keys to your inner life and to your dreams. Getting to know these feelings will help you better meet your needs for respect, acceptance, belonging and freedom. What would be possible if you no longer needed to shrink yourself to avoid shame or guilt?
Chronic shame is painful, corrosive, and elusive. It resists self-help and undermines even intensive psychoanalysis. Patricia A. DeYoung’s cutting-edge book gives chronic shame the serious attention it deserves, integrating new brain science with an inclusive tradition of relational psychotherapy. She looks behind the myriad symptoms of shame to its relational essence. As DeYoung describes how chronic shame is wired into the brain and developed in personality, she clarifies complex concepts and makes them available for everyday therapy practice. Grounded in clinical experience and alive with case examples, Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame is highly readable and immediately helpful. Patricia A. DeYoung’s clear, engaging writing helps readers recognize the presence of shame in the therapy room, think through its origins and effects in their clients’ lives, and decide how best to work with those clients. Therapists will find that Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame enhances the scope of their practice and efficacy with this client group, which comprises a large part of most therapy practices. Challenging, enlightening, and nourishing, this book belongs in the library of every shame-aware therapist.
"The world today seems full of anger. In the West, particularly in the US and UK, this anger can oftentimes feel aimless, a possible product of social media. Still, anger is normally considered a useful motivational source for positive social change. Channeling that anger into movements for civil rights, alleviation of socio-economic inequality, and the end of endless wars, has long been understood as a valuable tactic. Moreover, anger is believed to be handy in everyday life in order to protect, and stick up for, oneself. On the flip side, the world today celebrates diminishing amounts of shame. Political leaders and pundits shamelessly abandon commitments to integrity, truth and decency, and in general, shame is considered to be a primitive, ugly emotion, which causes eating disorders, PTSD, teenage pregnancy, suicide, and other highly undesirable circumstances. Having shame is, thus, regularly understood as both psychologically bad and morally bad. In How to Do Things with Emotions, philosopher Owen Flanagan argues this thinking is backwards, and that we need to tune down anger and tune up shame. By examining cross-cultural resources, Flanagan demonstrates how certain kinds of anger are destructive, while a 'mature' sense of shame can be used -as it is in many cultures- as a socializing emotion, that does not need to be attached to the self, but can be called upon to protect good values (kindness, truth) rather than bad ones (racism, sexism). Drawing from Stoic, Buddhist, and other cultural traditions, Flanagan explains that payback anger (i.e., revenge) and pain-passing anger (i.e., passing hurt one is feeling to someone else) are incorrigible, and also, how the Western view of shame rooted in traditions of psychoanalysis is entirely unwarranted. Continuing his method of doing ethics by bringing in cross-cultural philosophy, research from psychology, and in this case widening that to include cultural psychology and anthropology, Flanagan shows exactly how our culture shapes our emotions-through norms and traditions-and how proper cultivation of our emotions can yield important progress in our morality"--
This volume reports on the growing body of knowledge on shame and guilt, integrating findings from the authors' original research program with other data emerging from social, clinical, personality, and developmental psychology. Evidence is presented to demonstrate that these universally experienced affective phenomena have significant implications for many aspects of human functioning, with particular relevance for interpersonal relationships. --From publisher's description.
The blush is a ubiquitous, but little understood, phenomenon. It involves an involuntary change in the face that can express feelings, reveal character and cause intense anxiety. Crozier provides a scholarly, yet accessible, synthesis of new research, locating blushing within the context of the 'social emotions' of embarrassment, shame and shyness.
The Ethics of Anger provides the resources needed to understand the prevalence of anger in relation to ethics, religion, social and political behavior, and peace studies. Providing theoretical and practical arguments, both for and against the necessity of anger, The Ethics of Anger assembles a variety of diverse perspectives in order to increase knowledge and bolster further research. Part one examines topics such as the nature and ethics of vengeful anger and the psychology of anger. Part two includes chapters on the necessity of anger as central to our moral lives, an examination of Joseph Butler’s sermons on resentment, and three chapters that explore anger within Confucianism, Buddhism, and other Eastern religions. Part three examines the practical responses to anger, offering several intriguing chapters on topics such as mind viruses, social justice, the virtues of anger, feminism, punishment, and popular culture. This book, edited by Court D. Lewis and Gregory L. Bock, challenges and provides a framework for how moral persons approach, incorporate, and/or exclude anger in their lives.
Letting Go of Shame: Understanding How Shame Affects Your Life helps to explain the emotion of shame and its impact on our self-image and relationships. As we identify shame and use recovery skills to work through it, the authors offer us a way that we can personalize a plan of action to help build our self-esteem, and they suggest exercises to help us identify our feelings of shame.
"The portrait that emerges is one in which people are much more sensually, intimately, and aesthetically bound up in the landscapes of their lives than previous scientific studies would suggest. In fact, Katz argues that emotions are most directly understood as transformations of the ongoing aesthetic foundations of the self."--BOOK JACKET.
Broken family bonds can be one of the most intense sources of conflict. This book - which provides vital insights into the dynamics of family and other forms of violence - explores the damage caused to familial and social bonds by escalating feelings of shame during marital quarrels. Theories and research from large-scale conflict, marital dispute and communication processes are reviewed and provide a background for Retzinger's new integrative theory, which focuses on social bonds. The theory is applied to four case studies of marital quarrels in order to advance understanding of the escalation and resolution of conflict. The book includes a description of an intensive case study method for analyzing discourse and provides
A Guide to Healthy Anger Expression How do you express your anger? Do you blow up? Quietly seethe? Or do you try to pretend that you're really not angry at all and just hope the feelings will go away? Most of us express anger in more than one way, but we also tend to be creatures of habit, falling back on a few predictable styles when we feel angry. Unfortunately, while some styles are appropriate in some situations, others are not—and consistently using an inappropriate style is a sure way to find yourself saddled with a huge anger problem. This book examines the eleven most common styles of anger expression and helps you learn how to communicate your anger in healthy ways. Learn which anger styles work for different situations—and which ones lead to certain disaster. Find out how to become more flexible and creative at expressing your anger. Once you understand the whole range of anger styles, you'll be able to better manage angry feelings and use your anger as a positive force for building a better life.
