Most of us have had some variation of this experience: a patient walks into our office and can’t exactly articulate what’s distressing them, although they are showing signs of the problem in the way that they talk and even in the posture of their body. Whatever the issue, there’s a strong chance that, in one way or another, shame is at work, disrupting healthy emotional functioning and trying to unravel the mind’s multifaceted processes into a state of total disintegration. Most scientific literature on shame treats it as a kind of random virus with unpleasant features that happens to occur in nature. 

However, psychiatrist Curt Thompson, M.D., founder of Being Known, LLC and author of The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves, shows us that shame is much more insidious than that, employing strategies to undo us. In this course on clinical approaches to shame, Dr. Thompson describes what the mind actually is, how it functions, and what it looks like when it is flourishing, before demonstrating how shame derails all the tasks that the mind has to perform each day in order for a human being to thrive. Dr. Thompson then introduces clinical tools and therapeutic techniques mental health professionals can use to assist their patients in the long and difficult battle against shame.

What You'll Learn:

• What is a human mind and what are its tasks?
• What does the mind look like when it is flourishing in a state of integration?
  
  
• What is shame, and how does it go about disrupting healthy mental processes?
  
  
• What are the signs of shame, and how can mental health professionals identify them?
  
  
• What are some practical therapeutic techniques clinicians can use to help patients overcome their shame?
  
  
• What resources can Christian faith offer in the battle against shame?