Shame Vs Guilt

Shame lies at the heart of many of the issues that bring people to therapy. The dictionary definition of shame is “a painful feeling of humiliation or distress cau...

Shame starts early.

Each experience of shame is like hiding little pieces of stinky cheese deep in the consciousness of our true selves. The cheese of shame is always there, slowly rotting, and smelling worse and worse over time. The irony is, even though this shame smell i...

People around us, friends, family, and loved ones don’t smell the cheese anymore. In fact, we might do such a good job searching for the cheese, examining the cheese, talking about the cheese, we might emotionally clean the cheese smell out completely. But the truth is, the smell will always ling...

Times when we feel like we stink, and that other people can smell this, and that other people will know we stink and think less of us, that people in our lives that we love will think we are bad people because we smell. We explore the shameful feelings, and through that process we are able to fin...

• Shame can be so ingrained in our lives from an early age that we don’t appreciate how powerfully it affects us in the present.
• The “cheese” of shame is always there, slowly rotting, and smelling worse and worse over time.
• Even after shame is addressed, the memory of its “smel...