Monique Blom
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Welcome to this presentation on Dealing with Shame.
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I am Monique Blom, the Senior Director of Communication and Engagement at the Board of Inquiry,
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The Board of Inquiry into historical child sexual abuse in Beaumaris Primary School and certain other government schools proudly acknowledges Aboriginal people as the First Peoples and traditional owners and custodians of the lands, seas and waters of Australia.
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We pay our respect to Elders, past and present.
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We acknowledge the profound history of healing approaches within Aboriginal communities that seek to address the impacts of trauma by embracing social, emotional, physical, cultural and spiritual dimensions of health and wellbeing.
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We recognise the remarkable strength, resilience and courage of all victim-survivors, secondary victims and communities affected by historical child sexual abuse.
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I would like to introduce your host for Dealing with Shame, Michael.
Michael
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Welcome everyone, and today we're going to talk about dealing with shame and how we can work through shame.
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What we're going to cover today is: What is shame?
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The difference between shame and guilt.
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Recognising shame, how it presents and its triggers.
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And then tools to work through shame, because we know that shame can really present itself and it can disconnect us from ourselves and from others.
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So what is shame? So, let's look at shame and how it works.
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So the purpose of shame here is that we have shared values and rules as a collective and as a society. If we live outside of those shared values and rules, then we will feel shame and disconnect.
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Disconnection also can make us feel threatened and go into a life-threatening response where we look to try and attach to others, so we will come back to the collective that they have shared values and rules. So what that means is if we're doing something that we shouldn't by the shared values and rules, and we don't live up to those shared values and rules,
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and we feel shame when we feel the disconnect and then we will try and do something to reconnect back. Because as humans we attach and we connect to others to keep our survival
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that has been born out of living as a tribe or tribal team. And if we think about that growing developing as our species that shared values and rules kept us safe. For example, when maybe a tiger came, then we had shared values and rules how we were going to keep each other safe and what we're going to do. So it's often about keeping us safe and helping us survive as a species that has led this, this has led has let this happen.
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Shame can lead us to feel the disconnect and then if we feel the disconnect it stops us in our tracks and it leads us to do another behaviour to reconnect to the group and values and rules.
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An example of shame and where it has occurred has been during COVID-19 when we haven't been wearing a mask.
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We might have turned up to a shopping centre and we might have wanted to get in the shopping centre where we needed to wear masks to keep each other safe, shared values and rules of keeping each other safe,
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and we don't have ours to keep other people safe. Then we might feel shame and then we might lead us to not enter into that shopping centre. Or it might lead us to go and get a mask, for example from a shop to then connect into the shared values on rules, stopping that disconnection from ourselves and from the collective as a society.
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Another example where this has happened has been when we break rules and being caught, for example when we get a speeding fine. So we might speed. And the shared values and rules is that we don't speed because it will cause someone harm. And then when we get caught, we feel shame within ourselves. We feel that yucky, icky feeling. And then we also feel like disconnect from society. So we might stop us feeling shame. We might actually get quite angry and aggressive to reduce the shame that we're feeling.
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Another one might be not meeting our own standards, because our own standards will be born out of a collective society of who we are. Those values and rules have impacted on us. So if we are not living by our own standards then we might feel shame within ourselves and we might feel really low and yuck, which actually might lead to us to stop doing certain behaviours for. For example, if our own standards is that we want to go to the gym every morning before work, then we might then
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go to the gym and try and connect and have those values and rules.
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But if we don't and we don't meet that, then we feel we can feel down and depressed and low within ourselves. For example, if we went a week without going to the gym and that's a shared value and rule, that we have links into the shared values and rules of society,
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then we might lead us to feel shame.
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That's the basis of shame. But as I've talked about what is the purpose of shame? Well, it's to stop behaviour. It's to stop behaviour and so that we reconnect to the tribe. As I said, it started as a tribe and it's agreeing in our society of what is harmful and what is wrong. Because if someone went around and harmed people, we do want them to feel shame. We want them to feel that it's not OK that it's happened.
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Another issue is about attachment. How does this work with shame? When I'm talking about attachment, what I'm meaning is when babies are born, they attach to human caregivers and throughout our life that template is then replicated into other relationships that we develop.
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So what that means is that if we feel shame and we feel disconnected from ourselves and disconnection from others, then how do we connect and feel good in ourselves when we're experiencing such a yucky feeling?
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And feeling shame isn't the problem. We, as I've mentioned, we do want people to feel shame who have who've hurt others. But it's more of a problem when we talk about our next concept, which I'm just about to move on to, which is mistaken shame.
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So again, this is the shame, the shared values and rules of what we live up to as a society. And under that might be mistaken shame. So mistaken shame is often
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something that's like, toxic, and it can be often stated as toxic shame. So we'll look at some of the examples of where mistaken shame has happened.
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Being bullied, for example. So if we think of that infographic, the shared values and rules might be as a person that you stand up for yourself. Certainly for males it might be that you're not to be viewed as weak. So then when we're being bullied, we might have a mistaken shame because we might feel weak because someone else is doing wrong to us. And if they're doing wrong to us, then that's on them, not on us. But we can certainly feel that that shame. Being groomed, for example,
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grooming. The grooming process occurs very often over very small incremental steps and can lead us to feel
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that we are special. So if we think about shared values and rules, you are special within this relationship. This is a shared value and rule within this relationship, and now you've broken it because you've done something wrong. So there's a complexity within this shame process, and it's mistaken shame because it wasn't, you haven't done any harm or wrongdoing in that shame process. Someone else has
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and it can really feel like you are responsible for that behaviour.
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And abuse. Because abuse works on power and control and on ways to manipulate people to believing that they have done something wrong against the values and rules, either within the relationship or within the context of society.
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When we think about shame, shame also comes up within
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our developmental stages. So from from 18 months to three years old, often the psychological task is autonomy versus shame and doubt.
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And in this stage, what children want or need to do is develop a sense of self control.
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And that there are safe adults to be there, to allow the child to explore the world safely and that they have a sense of development. So it's OK for me to be me in the world. And the tasks that they need to do is toilet training and getting dressed.
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When we think about how that might happen
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within sexual abuse,
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then
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children at this age won't have a self control because they're being controlled by someone else. But also when we're older we can revisit these stages even in childhood or even as adults. So if someone's taken away our self control, then we don't have autonomy, shame and doubt is the task or the crisis that comes up and there might be reduced will or reduced hope. In that sense
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we've all been there with 18 months to three year olds where they are really in self-control. They can do it, they want to do it. So it's that that's really important to harness in children and young people. But if we haven't had it harnessed in ourselves, or if it's been squashed because of the sexual abuse, then shame and doubt might be more prevalent.
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Then when we look at, um ages 3 to 5,
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what we can see is that it's initiative vs guilt,
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so children are able to make judgement. Is it OK for me to behave in the way that I do or act and move. And their ability to take on tasks and have purpose, e.g. learning a new skill for example like learning how to ride a bike.
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Now when we think about shame, you know shame is focused on self which we'll get onto and guilt is on the action. We can see that in these developmental tasks that's exactly what they're talking about and if they're not having a positive outcome in those developmental tasks then they will feel these these crisis points.
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So again, when we think about sexual abuse and how that interacts with initiative versus guilt, is the child can't make a judgement or may have made a judgement on somebody thinking that they are safe because they have been groomed and then
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they have been told that it's not OK to be there. So then guilt can be the task point that comes out.
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So now we're going to look at the difference between shame and guilt, as I just talked about.
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So shame is “I am a bad person”. And if we think about those developmental stages, Yep, that was more focused on the person. And “am I OK to be me in the world?”
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And guilt is “I did a bad thing”. As we talked about the next stage was “Am I doing good? Am I able to do these tasks that I need to do?”
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There's controversy between looking at shame and guilt this way. The controversy is, is that if someone's caused harm, then looking at guilt in this sense can lead them to bypass the shame. So they someone who's harmed someone can say “yeah, I did a bad thing” it’ll lead them not to feel shame. Which can lead the victim-survivor to feel outraged that they are having to hold the pain. So the person who's had the pain done to them is left with the pain.
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So what does shame look like when harm has been caused?
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So it can look like this: denial, blame, minimising behaviours, justifying behaviours, withdrawal, aggression and violence, self harm, destraction of thinking or talking about the harm. Now this isn't only just for the person who's been harmed, it also can be the person who has caused harm, as well as family members may feel this too. So they may feel responsible for the harm being caused and they may deny that it's happened or blame other people or minimise the behaviours. And that can be really distressing for the person who
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has been harmed, because no one’s holding their experience and no one's holding the pain that they're feeling. And so then it can lead to a second whammy of shame that comes through.
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So now we're going to look at recognising shame and its triggers.
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There's going to be 4 categories that we're going to go through. And the first is safety. So often when sexual abuse has happened and we're not feeling safe or we've had a trigger situation where we're not feeling safe, it can take us back to that time where we didn't feel safe when the sexual abuse occurred
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and what we believe about ourselves in those moments is: :”I'm not safe, I'm in danger and I can't protect myself.”
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So if you think about that just in an everyday example, where we were at work and we're meeting with our manager and our manager is talking about our performance, our emotional safety and also our financial safety might be at play here. And these kinds of self-beliefs can come up about ourselves and then can link into that shame that we felt when the sexual abuse occurred.
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And so what we would like to believe about ourselves is “I can learn to be safe or I am safe.”
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“It's over, that instance. It's over. It's in the past. And I'm safe now. And I can protect myself or I can learn to protect myself”. obviously safe safely. We don't want people, you know, doing unsafe things, but “I can learn to protect myself safely”. And so to get us out of that shame, this is the type of thing that we might want to believe about ourselves or things that we can start to think.
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Another kind of theme that might come up is control and choice.
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And what we believe about ourselves during this time is I don't have control, I must be in control and I'm powerless. So again, if we use the same example of meeting with our manager and I'm talking about our performance,
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they might be talking through you know what we haven't done and that we, you know, we might feel really out of control in the conversation.
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So when we want to bring that back and reduce the shame that we might feel and what we might want to believe about ourselves is “I do have control. I don't have to be perfect, I am safe or I can learn to trust safe people” and again “I have control”. So think about what we actually have control. And sometimes we don't have control in certain situations, but what do we have control of? And often we only have control of ourselves
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and then self esteem. This is our third overview of what triggers shame.
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So what we believe about ourselves is “I'm not good enough, I'm bad, I don't belong, I'm not lovable.” So then if again, if we take the example of our manager talking about our performance, “I'm not good enough because I'm not meeting the standard. I don't belong here because I'm being pushed out of the shared values and rules. I'm not lovable or I'm not good enough.”
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And so these can all be all the kind of what we believe about ourselves throughout each
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overview
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can be really unconscious. We might not be aware or fully aware of what's happening.
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And things that we can believe about ourselves is “I'm good enough/worthy. I do belong. I am lovable.”
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And our final overview is responsibility. And often in sexual abuse, people can feel really responsible for the abuse that they suffered.
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For example, what people believe about themselves is “It's my fault I made a mistake, I'm not good enough, I'm overwhelmed and I'm going to explode.” And often that can be retriggered again. If we take the example of a meeting with our manager,
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“It's not my fault. I made a mistake and I'm not good enough.” And then “I'm overwhelmed and my emotions are getting me just too much. It's becoming too much.
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And what we would like to believe about ourselves is “It's not my fault. I did all that I could. I can learn from my mistakes. I'm worthy. I can get through, could manage.” And so what we can do in these situations is we can start to think about the things that we
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want to believe about ourselves. And we can think of instances where we felt those things or had those things happen to us. And we can use bilateral stimulation to encode that within our brain to make it stronger for us. And so that when we go into that kind of negative or the yucky stuff that comes up that we start to believe about ourselves when shame occurs then we can help ourselves move out of that by starting to look at what we want to believe about ourselves.
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We're gonna talk about tools to work through shame.
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Before we start to talk about tools to work through shame, we just want to look at
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polyvagal theory. Once you look at polyvagal theory and look at the Fight/Flight/Freeze response and notice that shame sits in the frozen response, in the dorsal vagal nerve.
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We want to get people or we want to be in the social engagement phase when we're talking about shame. So that's kind of down past fight/flight.
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And so there's ways that we can do that so that we're not frozen. And when we're frozen, we're disconnected from people. We're disconnected from ourselves, and we're disconnected from others.
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So we want to connect with others and the phases of shame because we want to be in that social engagement phase. So how do we do that? And what does that look like? So we want to think about when, before we even go into shame, maybe talking with our loved ones about when I have that yucky feeling. You don't have to say when I feel shame, when I have that yucky feeling. And what this is what I'd like for you. I'd like you to be able to just talk with me. Just sit with me. Just listen to me. I'd like you to think about, you know, can you touch my shoulder,
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can you give me a hug? Sometimes with touch, it can be overwhelming for people. It can be too much for people and it can just lead them to feel, um, not good about themselves, which is the shame coming up and that they don't deserve that touch. So really considering what people would like in that moment as well as you can do certain things like having a connection, like just holding a rope or each holding something that's going to be helpful for you both. When talking through the shame that somebody's feeling
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you might want to reduce eye contact and might help to reduce eye contact so you're not feeling so yucky inside.
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Another way that we can connect is using the Exploring Shame resources, which is thirty cards which have themes of shame throughout them. And on the back of the card there's questions that can be asked or it can just be that somebody can point to the card. So an example of that
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can be this one: Pain. So someone might be in pain when they're feeling shame often. Often people are,
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and on the back of the card it asks “is the suffering being acknowledged
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and what are some healthy ways to express the pain?”
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Now, you don't have to use these questions, of course, but they can just help unpack and bring us back into that ventral vagus nerve.
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Which keeps us grounded.
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Another such card is Freedom. So we might want to think about what does that mean, and what does that look like in the context of shame?
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Has shame been used to control others?
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Often it would have been. And what does freedom look like? So really thinking about those two things And then when we think about control and shame, you know, we go back to that shared values and rules and how people might work, warp those shared values and rules to be able to reduce people's freedom.
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Another way that we can look and work through shame is consider reframing shame. So whose shame is it really? And when we're thinking about that, we're not trying to blame other people for the shame. We're not trying to say it's your shame, it's not mine. It's more about looking at the ethics of shame and where it sits. Well, who really caused the harm? Was it me that caused the harm? Or was it somebody older than me, somebody wiser than me, that groomed me and was able to get me to do certain things. And this can help. Just reframe the shame and let us
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get space from the shame because it's really important to get space so that we can work through what was actually happening.
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And it can put back the responsibility to who really caused the harm.
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Another way that we can work with shame and work through shame is the somatic profile and the value base that we want to consider. Where do I feel the shame in my body? Often people might feel numb, or they might have butterflies in their stomach, or they might be different parts of the body that might let us know that we're feeling shame.
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What is this feeling need to do or say? Does it need to move? Does it need to stay still? Does it need need to do something? Does it need, for example, a cold shower? Does it need to say something to someone? Does it need to shout something, does it need to scream? Is it caught?
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And how can I do this safely? Of course we want people, if the anger is there, we want the anger to be expressed safely. But how do we do that? Is it shouting into a pillow or is it writing down some words. How does that look?
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But what is shame’s function here? Shame will often have a function and what is it trying to do? Is it trying to get us to reconnect? Is it trying to protect me from something?
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And is there something this feeling wants me to know? So a really important question, what does it want me to know? What's it trying to tell me? What's it trying to say?
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What does it say about me that I feel this way?
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And often that'll be I care,
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and that I can feel,
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and that I'm able to look at this in a responsible way.
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What would it say if I didn't feel shame? Well, I mean the opposite. It might mean that you don't that you that you don't care. So if you didn't feel the shame, meaning you don't care and you can feel empathy. Whereas when you feel shame, you can feel empathy.
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This is our final technique. It's the Emotional Freedom Technique.
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So before we start, well, when we think about this technique and we're in shame, we want to rate the intensity of the shame or the feeling that you're having now. This can just take the edge off the feeling that you're having, and you can do
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three or four rounds of this to help just reduce it. So if we rate it
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while tapping them the emotion that you're feeling,
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and this is the sentence that will say: “Although I have this fear, I can deeply and completely accept myself.”
So it can be “Although I have this fear, although I have this shame, although I feel this anger, I can deeply and completely accept myself.” So you just insert the feeling that you have and then you rate the intensity of the feeling again after the sequence.
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So we're gonna try that together.
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So the tapping points are on the top of the head,
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over the eyebrows, on the side of the eyebrows, under the eyes,
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under the nose, on the chin, on the collarbone and on the karate chop. Here.
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So,
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let's do this together.
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Although I have this fear, I can deeply and completely accept myself. Although I have this fear, I can deeply and completely accept myself.
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Although I have this fear, I can deeply and completely accept myself. Although I have this fear, I can deeply and completely accept myself.
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Although I have this fear, I can deeply and completely accept myself. Although I have this fear, I can deeply and completely accept myself. Although I have this fear, I can deeply and completely accept myself. Although I have this fear, I can deeply and completely accept myself.
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And then just on the back of the top of the head: Although I have this fear, I can deeply and completely accept myself.
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And then we'll just go through the tapping sequence again. So it's the top of the head with the eyebrows, side of the eyes, under the eyes, under the nose, under the mouth, collarbone.
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You can go under your arm, and the side of the hand: the karate chop.
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That brings us to the end of working through shame and how we can do that. It's been a pleasure to speak to you today and thank you for joining us.
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