What is Toxic Shame and How Can We Heal From ItIn life, all of us have done some things wrong. And made many mistakes. Too many to count. Some may have happened in moments of recklessness and impulsivity. Others may have happened even after careful planning. No matter how your mistakes happened, you probably ended up feeling many different emotions, including emotions like guilt and shame.
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Many clients say to me: “I need to stop feeling guilty” or “I just want this guilt to go away”. For me these are very interesting statements that require more exploration, and I hope by reading this you will get more of an understanding why. Through my study and practice of Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT), I feel that I have developed my understanding of the nature of guilt and how it can be confused with shame. We may say that we are feeling guilt for something, when really what we are experiencing is shame. This is an important distinction to make, so, this blog starts with firstly understanding what shame is. The seven most difficult feelings for emotional eatersAll theories of emotional eating share the assumption that before emotional eating occurs, we tend to experience a negative affect that we cannot properly regulate. This affect may prompt us to employ strategies that we have available but that are not necessarily adaptive in the long term. This is an important finding, since it suggests that the problem is not necessarily associated with negative emotions per se, but rather with the lack of adaptive coping strategies available to regulate our negative affect. |
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