I have long considered, in my therapeutic work with both couples and individuals, there is a certain something more needed to make the deepest impact possible with clients. The common truism in psychotherapy… that the therapeutic process will ultimately supply that which is missing, I have finally concluded is only half true. It is now my understanding that there are certain crucial moments where a portion of our clients benefit hugely and crucially from an additional stepping forward on the therapists part… moments when the clients internalization of the therapy goes from half baked to fully baked. These are moments that require more of us therapists.

Many of us, me included, can fear and avoid these moments. After all, they weren’t in the training manual! These are moments when we are vulnerable and exposed. When we step forward out of our common humanity with our clients, and less from our sense of the rules of how therapy is done. Commonly there is a fear of misstepping, poor reaction in the client, censure from colleagues, and ultimately, shame and rejection. Our only hope here is to surround ourselves with portions our therapeutic community that our safe for us… stay close, and share. Only by getting this deep level of support can we then bring the courage necessary to provide our clients the fullest therapy possible. 

In our shame we make ourselves other. My sense is that this has to do with the cast-out feeling that typically accompanies shame. From an evolutionary perspective shame is closely associated with the feeling of being unacceptable to the social group/tribe one belongs to. In shame we we identify with our imaginings of the group’s attitude towards us and turn against ourselves as unacceptable. Shame is the inbuilt human response to the threat of being cast-out, the sense of being pariah… the sense of being bad, whether it be the actual eyes of others, or more commonly… our internal representation of others looking at us… our expectation of how others will see us. 

There is a common pattern of misalignment, common in young first marriages, but also found to a lesser degree in older marriages. The pattern is this… One or both in the marriage are in great fear/anxiety and agitation over anticipating failure if they reach for the partner of “their hearts desire.” So they avoid and don’t reach. Over time they identify another woman or man to approach that feels much safer to them, and with this other person they find a way to engage. However, they cannot help but think… “i am settling for someone who is less than I wanted.” Hence, they both feel badly about themselves in their partner choice, and often devalue their new partner as “less than.” Hence the joy of finally having found someone wonderful and safe to love is now complicated by their own feelings that the new relationship is evidence of their own failed worth. (to be cont.) 

It has taken me many years to get past the individualistic bias of Western psychology and classical psychoanalysis to be able to see this simple fact; we are dancing in human connection, all the time, whether we know it or not. From the cradle to the grave. It is the exengencies of western culture, which require so much emphasis upon making our own individual way, a particular adaptation to the world, that makes it so hard to discern the underlying drama of how we are in an attachment story always, from one moment to the next. 

For years as a therapist, I had no idea. I was highly sensitive to the dynamics of individual inner life, and to the pain of existential delimmas in modern isolated life, but I accepted the individual backdrop of life as simply reality… sometimes joyful, sometimes tragic. It was only after I embarked on studying modern attachment research, followed by extensive training in attachment-based couples therapy, followed by many hundreds of hours of actually doing attachment-based therapy, that I finally began to tune-in to the drama of “people needing people” all the time. And that when it is not obvious on the outside, it is happening internally through inner dialogue or fantasy… all the time! And when it is denied, it is still happening. 

One of the most common shame situations is how we shame ourselves for not accomplishing goals we have set for ourselves. This is where we blame ourselves, and relentlessly undermine our self-esteem, over our failures to accomplish… and do not stop to truly consider the real psychological causes for why we cannot complete our goals. That there are reasons for why things turn out the way they do, that true patterns of causality live within our psychologies that are every bit as “objectively real” as occur in the world of physics. 

Actually we fight facing into “the real” about ourselves in terms of goals not reached. It can feel like a kind of giving up. This resistance can be hugely powerful because of the ways that the goals we set for ourselves our tied to our ideal sense of ourselves. The problem here is that our ideal goals are often compensatory of imagined inadequacies that we harbor towards ourselves deeply inside; they do not do justice to the “whole picture” of who we really are inside, or even outside!