Guilt, Shame, and Anxiety

Author: Peter Roger Breggin
Publisher:
ISBN: 1616141492
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
With the first unified theory of guilt, shame, and anxiety, this pioneering psychiatrist and critic of psychiatric diagnoses and drugs examines the causes and effects of psychological and emotional suffering from the perspective of biological evolution, child development, and mature adult decision-making. Drawing on evolution, neuroscience, and decades of clinical experience, Dr. Breggin analyzes what he calls our negative legacy emotions-the painful emotional heritage that encumbers all human beings. The author marshals evidence that we evolved as the most violent and yet most empathic creatures on Earth. Evolution dealt with this species-threatening conflict between our violence and our close-knit social life by building guilt, shame, and anxiety into our genes. These inhibiting emotions were needed prehistorically to control our self-assertiveness and aggression within intimate family and clan relationships. Dr. Breggin shows how guilt, shame, and anxiety eventually became self-defeating and demoralizing legacies from our primitive past, which no longer play any useful or positive role in mature adult life. He then guides the reader through the Three Steps to Emotional Freedom, starting with how to identify negative legacy emotions and then how to reject their control over us. Finally, he describes how to triumph over and transcend guilt, shame, and anxiety on the way to greater emotional freedom and a more rational, loving, and productive life.

Guilt, Shame, and Anxiety

Author: Peter R. Breggin, MD
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1616147210
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
With the first unified theory of guilt, shame, and anxiety, this pioneering psychiatrist and critic of psychiatric diagnoses and drugs examines the causes and effects of psychological and emotional suffering from the perspective of biological evolution, child development, and mature adult decision-making. Drawing on evolution, neuroscience, and decades of clinical experience, Dr. Breggin analyzes what he calls our negative legacy emotions—the painful emotional heritage that encumbers all human beings. The author marshals evidence that we evolved as the most violent and yet most empathic creatures on Earth. Evolution dealt with this species-threatening conflict between our violence and our close-knit social life by building guilt, shame, and anxiety into our genes. These inhibiting emotions were needed prehistorically to control our self-assertiveness and aggression within intimate family and clan relationships. Dr. Breggin shows how guilt, shame, and anxiety eventually became self-defeating and demoralizing legacies from our primitive past that no longer play any useful or positive role in mature adult life. He then guides the reader through the Three Steps to Emotional Freedom, starting with how to identify negative legacy emotions and then how to reject their control over us. Finally, he describes how to triumph over and transcend guilt, shame, and anxiety on the way to greater emotional freedom and a more rational, loving, and productive life.

Shame and Guilt

Author: June Price Tangney
Publisher: Guilford Press
ISBN: 9781572309876
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
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.

Escaping Toxic Guilt

Author: Susan Carrell
Publisher: McGraw Hill Professional
ISBN: 0071595880
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
Highly qualified author: Carrell is a registered psychiatric nurse, relationship coach, therapist, and former university campus chaplain Includes a prescriptive five-step plan for freeing readers from all types of guilt, whether it’s familyrelated, religious, or self-imposed

Shame & Guilt

Author: Jane Middelton-Moz
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0757324045
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 143

Book Description
"It is my feeling that debilitating shame and guilt are at the root of all dysfunctions in families,” says Jane Middelton-Moz. A few common characteristics of adults shamed in childhood: You may suffer extreme shyness, embarrassment and feelings of being inferior to others. You don’t believe you make mistakes, you believe you are a mistake. You feel controlled from the outside and from within. You feel that normal spontaneous expression is blocked. You may suffer from debilitating guilt; you apologize constantly. You have little sense of emotional boundaries; you feel constantly violated by others; you frequently build false boundaries. If you see yourself in any of these characteristics, you can learn how shame keeps you from being the person you were born to be and how to change that. Shame And Guilt describes how debilitating shame is created and fostered in childhood and how it manifests itself in adulthood and in intimate relationships. Through the use of myths and fairytales to portray different shaming environments, Dr. Middelton-Moz allows you to reach the shamed child within you and to add clarity to what could be difficult concepts. Read Shame and Guilt — you’re worth it.

I Thought It Was Just Me (but it Isn't)

Author: Brené Brown
Publisher: Avery
ISBN: 1592403352
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
First published in 2007 with the title: I thought it was just me: women reclaiming power and courage in a culture of shame.

Shame and the Origins of Self-Esteem

Author: Mario Jacoby
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317311191
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Book Description
Shame is one of our most central feelings and a universal human characteristic. Why do we experience it? For what purpose? How can we cope with excessive feelings of shame? In this elegant exposition informed by many years of helping people to understand feelings of shame, leading Jungian analyst Mario Jacoby provided a comprehensive exploration of the many aspects of shame and showed how it occupies a central place in our emotional experience. Jacoby demonstrated that a lack of self-esteem is often at the root of excessive shame, and as well as providing practical examples of how therapy can help, he drew upon a wealth of historical and cultural scholarship to show how important shame is for us in both its individual and social aspects. This Classic Edition includes a new foreword by Marco Della Chiesa.

Environmental Guilt and Shame

Author: Sarah E. Fredericks
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192580353
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Bloggers confessing that they waste food, non-governmental organizations naming corporations selling unsustainably harvested seafood, and veterans apologizing to Native Americans at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation for environmental and social devastation caused by the United States government all signal the existence of action-oriented guilt and identity-oriented shame about participation in environmental degradation. Environmental Guilt and Shame demonstrates that these moral emotions are common among environmentally friendly segments of the United States but have received little attention from environmental ethicists though they can catalyze or hinder environmental action. Concern about environmental guilt and shame among “everyday environmentalists” reveals the practical, emotional, ethical, and existential issues raised by environmental guilt and shame and ethical insights about guilt, shame, responsibility, agency, and identity. A typology of guilt and shame enables the development and evaluation of these ethical insights. Environmental Guilt and Shame makes three major claims: first, individuals and collectives, including the diffuse collectives that cause climate change, can have identity, agency, and responsibility and thus guilt and shame. Second, some agents, including collectives, should feel guilt and/or shame for environmental degradation if they hold environmental values and think that their actions shape and reveal their identity. Third, a number of conditions are required to conceptually, existentially, and practically deal with guilt and shame's effects on agents. These conditions can be developed and maintained through rituals. Existing rituals need more development to fully deal with individual and collective guilt and shame as well as the anthropogenic environmental degradation that may spark them.

From Guilt to Shame

Author: Ruth Leys
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400827981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
Why has shame recently displaced guilt as a dominant emotional reference in the West? After the Holocaust, survivors often reported feeling guilty for living when so many others had died, and in the 1960s psychoanalysts and psychiatrists in the United States helped make survivor guilt a defining feature of the "survivor syndrome." Yet the idea of survivor guilt has always caused trouble, largely because it appears to imply that, by unconsciously identifying with the perpetrator, victims psychically collude with power. In From Guilt to Shame, Ruth Leys has written the first genealogical-critical study of the vicissitudes of the concept of survivor guilt and the momentous but largely unrecognized significance of guilt's replacement by shame. Ultimately, Leys challenges the theoretical and empirical validity of the shame theory proposed by figures such as Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Giorgio Agamben, demonstrating that while the notion of survivor guilt has depended on an intentionalist framework, shame theorists share a problematic commitment to interpreting the emotions, including shame, in antiintentionalist and materialist terms.

A Therapist’s Handbook to Dissolve Shame and Defense

Author: Susan Warren Warshow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429680139
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
The effort to surmount shame and formidable defenses in psychotherapy can trigger shame and self-doubt in therapists. Susan Warren Warshow offers a user-friendly-guide to help therapists move past common treatment barriers. This unique book avoids jargon and breaks down complex concepts into digestible elements for practical application. The core principles of Dynamic Emotional Focused Therapy (DEFT), a comprehensive treatment approach for demonstrable change, are illustrated with rich and abundant clinical vignettes. This engaging, often lyrical handbook emphasizes "shame-sensitivity" to create the safety necessary to achieve profound interpersonal connection. Often overlooked in treatment, shame can undermine the entire process. The author explains the "therapeutic transfer of compassion for self," a relational phenomenon that purposefully generates affective expression. She introduces a three-step, robust framework, The Healing Triad, to orient therapists to intervene effectively when the winds of resistance arise. Chapters clarify: Why we focus on feelings How to identify and move beyond shame and anxiety How to transform toxic guilt into reparative actions How to disarm defenses while avoiding ruptures This book is essential reading for both advanced and newly practicing mental health practitioners striving to access the profound emotions in their clients for transformative change.