An intimate look at the full spectrum of shame―often masked by addiction, promiscuity, perfectionism, self-loathing, or narcissism―that offers a new, positive route forward
Encounters with embarrassment, guilt, self-consciousness, remorse, etc. are an unavoidable part of everyday life, and they sometimes have lessons to teach us―about our goals and values, about the person we expect ourselves to be. In contrast to the prevailing cultural view of shame as a uniformly toxic influence, Shame is a book that approaches the subject of shame as an entire family of emotions which share a “painful awareness of self.”
Challenging widely-accepted views within the self-esteem movement, Shame argues that self-esteem does NOT thrive in the soil of non-stop praise and encouragement, but rather depends upon setting and meeting goals, living up to the expectations we hold for ourselves, and finally sharing our joy in achievement with the people who matter most to us. Along the way, listening to and learning from our encounters with shame will go further than affirmations and positive self-talk in helping us to build authentic self-esteem.
Richly illustrated with clinical stories from the author’s 35 years in private practice, Shame also describes the myriad ways that unacknowledged shame often hides behind a broad spectrum of mental disorders including social anxiety, narcissism, addiction, and masochism.
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"The daily lead-ball-and-chain existence of people like me consists of a formidable perfect-storm-like combination of adverse childhood experience trauma, autism spectrum disorder and high sensitivity, the ACE trauma in large part being due to my ASD and high sensitivity. Ergo, it would be very helpful to have books about such or similar conditions involving a coexistence of ACE trauma and/or ASD and/or high sensitivity, the latter which seems to have a couple characteristics similar to ASD traits.
While 'SHAME: Free Yourself, Find Joy, and Build True Self-Esteem' is informative and useful to me in other ways, it nevertheless fails to mention any of the three abovementioned cerebral conditions, let alone the potential obstacles they may or likely will pose to consumers like me benefiting from the book’s information/instruction.
'The Autistic Brain', for example, fails to even once mention the real potential for additional challenges created by a reader’s ASD coexisting with thus exacerbated by high sensitivity and/or ACE trauma. As it were, I also consumed a book on adverse childhood experience trauma ['Childhood Disrupted'] that totally fails to even once mention high sensitivity and/or autism spectrum disorder. That was followed by 'The Highly Sensitive Man', with no mention whatsoever of autism spectrum disorder or adverse childhood experience trauma.
I therefore don't know whether my additional, coexisting conditions will render the information and/or assigned exercises from such not-cheap books useless, or close to it, in my efforts to live much less miserably.
While many/most people in my shoes would work with the books nonetheless, I cannot; I simply need to know if I'm wasting my time and, most importantly, mental efforts.
ACE abuse thus trauma is often inflicted upon ASD and/or highly sensitive children and teens by their normal or ‘neurotypical’ peers — thus resulting in immense and even debilitating self-hatred and shame — so why not at least acknowledge it in some meaningful, constructive way?"
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Frank Sterle (4 out of 5 stars)