This book has been more than a decade in the making, and so I have had time to test its ideas in countless clinical discussions. I owe thanks to all those colleagues, supervisees, and students who through the years have listened to my thoughts on the presence and power of chronic shame in clients’ lives and who have offered their ideas in response. It has been my privilege to theorize in a community full of lively talk about the connections between many kinds of clinical theory and the relational practice of psychotherapy.
A few of my colleagues have been closely involved in constructing this particular book. Rozanne Grimard, Jason Winkler, Karen Essex, and Judy Gould, who teach with me at the Toronto Institute for Relational Psychotherapy, read an early version of the text carefully. Their comments were especially useful because of the theory/praxis understanding of relational therapy we share, honed in our joint endeavor to teach an essentially right-brain model of clinical work.
Four other colleagues—Bonnie Simpson, David Schatzky, Susan Marcus, and Pat Archer—brought clinical wisdom and writerly sensitivity to their reading of the text. In the responses of all my Toronto readers, I felt understood in my passion to write about the shame we encounter so often in our work and also in ourselves. No one could offer more depth of support than a group of relational psychotherapists! They took my project seriously, and I welcomed their honest challenge to give it the best articulation possible, to peel back my own verbiage until I could find with clarity “what must be said.”
Over the years, I started the book in at least four different ways, looking for a key concept that would bring meaningful coherence to a welter of material on shame. As I explain in the text, the theoretical key fell into my hand just over a year ago at an Allan Schore conference on the practice of right brain therapy. I wrote some new chapters quickly and gave them to my daughter, Adriel Weaver, to read. Though not a therapist, she is an accomplished legal and academic writer, and I am grateful for her help in thinking through opening issues of audience, voice, and tone. I’m also pleased that she made time to edit a final version of the text after all the substantive changes had been made.
Help came from far as well as near: I would like to thank Anna Moore, my editor at Routledge, for her encouragement to write this book ahead of the project she had first requested and for her reliable, reassuring presence just an email click away. I trust her intention to give the book the best life possible out in the world. Routledge review readers were helpful; I would especially like to mention Patricia Papernow, a therapist/writer I have never met but who gifted me with detailed attention to the first half of the text and valuable help in peeling away verbiage.
Clearly, many eyes and hands have been on this book to shape it into something useful. In its pages I also refer to dozens of theorists, past and present, who have influenced the shape and direction of my thought. But although I have benefitted from so much collegial conversation, both actual and virtual, I also need to say that this particular take on understanding and treating chronic shame is mine, and I take responsibility for how it now goes out into the world.
Though I cannot mention them by name, the book could not have been written without the many clients who have allowed me to come close to their emotional experience, the heart and soul of where they live, suffer, and hope. I have been moved by their pain, their courage, and their trust. Most of the client examples in the text are fictionalized and composite stories; only the emotional realities are true. Where a story is thinly disguised, I have asked for permission to use it as it appears in the text, and I deeply appreciate the consents given.
As each chapter of the book came off my printer, I gave it immediately to one person, Mary Greey, my partner for more than twenty years, knowing that my thoughts and words, like all the rest of me, would find a safe home with her. It may be true that “there ain’t no cure for shame,” but the consistent experience of safe home—knowing that one’s being is welcomed with compassion and delight—makes a world of difference. In a sentence, and not so strangely (for we are often drawn to theorize what we know without words), that’s also the take-home message of this book.
Patricia A. DeYoung
Toronto
May, 2014