Week 9 | Cftgroup

SUMMARY

Thank you for your continued efforts and courage with our work together.

In our module today we have explored how shame can be focused on what we think other people feel about us, and we call that externally focused shame. We can be self-critical and put ourselves down and thereby shame ourselves. If we feel other people are putting us down unfairly then we can have an experience of anger-humiliation and desire for retaliation, getting our own back in some way. Importantly we saw that guilt is quite different to these feelings because this is when we ourselves have been the source of harm and we are not focusing on ourselves but on our behaviour. Now our feelings are ones of sadness remorse and regret as opposed to anger or disgust with the self.

They are all threat emotions related to the experience of the self as a social agent. We realised that shame can take many forms (internal and external) and it can make us react in different ways. Most importantly then, is that it is different from guilt, which stems from our motivation to be helpful and not harmful.

Just a few notes for this week -

Personal Practice

Please see on the page a recording of one of the exercises we did, which was on developing our compassionate self.
Remember doing these exercises can bring us into touch with our own personal struggles, which can be tricky at times, and that is not your fault. Try to see if you can bring your compassionate self to your struggles during these times.
Finally, see if you can notice times during the week where you have thought of our modules or tried to do some of the strategies suggested in our modules. it is so helpful to notice and explore what happened. You can use your workbook to write anything down.

Wishing you well