Shame Therapy

Until then, psychology had paid more attention to guilt. Freud wrote at length about guilt and much less about shame.

In the 1990s, psychologist June Tangney built on Lewis’s work. She found that guilt tends to move people toward repair, while shame tends to move them toward hiding or lashing out.

At the same time, British psychologist Paul Gilbert noticed something in people with deep shame. They could find kinder thoughts about themselves, but they couldn’t feel them. He began developing compassion-focused therapy to help people feel warmth, not just think it.

In 1992, psychiatrist Donald Nathanson described four ways people often respond to shame. Some withdraw. Some avoid it through distraction or numbing. Some turn it inward and attack themselves. Some turn it outward and attack others.

Lewis’s daughter, psychiatrist Judith Herman, had already changed how the world understands trauma. In 2007, she said that survivors often carry shame for harm that was done to them. She described shame as a normal response to broken bonds.

In 2010, researcher Brené Brown gave a talk about vulnerability and shame. Tens of millions of people watched it, and shame became something more people could talk about.

But shame has been used more than it has been studied.

Families, schools, religions, governments and systems have used shame to control people.

For more than a century, over 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children in Canada were sent to residential schools. Many were taken from their families and given numbers or new names. Their hair was cut, and they were punished for speaking their languages or practicing their traditions. They were taught that their families, cultures and spirituality were shameful. The last federally run school only closed in 1996. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission shared what it heard from more than 6,000 witnesses. It described the schools as cultural genocide.

From the end of the Second World War into the 1970s, an estimated 300,000 unmarried women and girls in Canada were pressured or forced to give up their babies for adoption. Many were sent to maternity homes, often run by churches or agencies. There, they were told they were unfit to be mothers and that keeping their child would ruin the child’s life. Some never held or saw their babies. Hospitals, social workers and governments were involved. In 2018, a Senate committee heard their testimony. It called on the federal government to apologize and titled its report The Shame Is Ours.

For decades, tens of thousands of 2SLGBTQ+ Canadians were subjected to conversion therapy, meant to change their sexual orientation or gender identity. It was offered by counsellors, religious groups and programs across Canada. Many people were taught that who they loved or who they were was sinful or broken. Survivors describe years of shame and hiding that followed them long after. In 2021, Parliament voted unanimously to ban conversion therapy, and it became a crime across Canada in January 2022.

Many survivors carried that shame for decades, as if it were their own.

When shame is treated only as a personal problem, the people and systems who caused it can disappear from view.

And shame can show up in therapy itself, in a label, a look or a silence that feels like judgment.

Trauma-sensitive shame therapy works inside those gaps. It helps you set down shame that was never about who you are. It works with the body, where shame lives, not only with thoughts. It treats hiding as protection, not a flaw. And when therapy raises shame, it makes room to name it and repair it.

Trauma-sensitive therapy starts from the belief that you are good.