Feb '22 - Shame to Self love

Shame - the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are
flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. I am bad, I am a mess.
-Brene Brown

February is National “Boost Your Self-Esteem” Month. As healers, there's nothing more important than helping our clients shift from excruciating shame and selfloathing to grace and love for themselves. Realistically, we can't graduate a client from therapy unless they are free from the toxic shame that binds them. It's up to us as therapists to slay the faulty programming our clients have received from neglectful and abusive caregivers who taught them that there's something inherently wrong with them.

 

 

 

In Brainspotting, I have found nothing more effective in helping myself and my clients move from self-disgust to self-love than a combination of Activated and Expansion Brainspotting designed to expose the lies inherent in our abusive developmental programming, along with a deep and expansive experience of what is right and lovable about us.

 

 

 

As someone who has been healed of chronic shame through Brainspotting, I offer each of you this wonderful tool I call the “Truth and Lie Doublespotting Set-Up” to overcome the programmed lie that you’re inherently defective or shameful and to deeply experience and know the truth: you are, and always have been, worthy of being loved for exactly who you are (and who you are not). My hope is that this will help set you and your clients free.

 

TRUTH AND LIE DOUBLESPOTTING SET-UP TO MOVE FROM SHAME TO SELFLOVE

 

Frontload: Discuss with your client who programmed them to believe they were defective, disgraceful, shameful, or unlovable? Introduce the idea that we often believe programming that is untrue about us from wounded caregivers who couldn't fully love.

 

1. Determine the aspect of self-hate or shame that is most disturbing

2. Check on activation

3. Assess SUDS (0 to10)

4. Find the location of body activation

5. Find the Inside Window activation spot (bookmark it to remember for later)

6. Guide the client to go inside to find the best POSSIBILITY inside of them to experience their goodness as a human being. Who treated you like you were worth loving? (Benevolent ancestors, spiritual figures, mentors, etc.)

7. Find where this expansion possibility for self-love is held in their body (0 to Infinity)

8. Find the Expansion Brainspot and bookmark it

9. Have the client pendulate between activated and expansion spots using their own instincts

10. If an expansion spot does not present itself initially, process on the Activated Brainspot. An expansion spot may emerge later.