The Secure Start Podcast Episode 5: Lisa Etherson

In this podcast, my guest and I take a deep dive into shame.

Lisa is a qualified psychosexual therapist with over a decade of experience in private practice. Currently, she is also a PhD researcher. Her research focuses on developmental shame, and compulsive sexual behaviour in adult men, leading to the development of her innovative Shame Containment Theory (SCT). Her clinical work and research have cultivated a strong interest in the impact of childhood experiences on adult behaviour. Lisa is the author of Jake and his Shame Armour, a children’s book on shame.

You can find our more about Lisa's work here.

You can connect with Lisa on LinkedIn here.

Disclaimer

Information reported by guests of this podcast is assumed to be accurate as stated. Podcast owner Colby Pearce is not responsible for any error of facts presented by podcast guests. In addition, unless otherwise specified, opinions expressed by guests of this podcast may not reflect those of the podcast owner, Colby Pearce.

Transcript

Welcome to the Secure Start podcast. We can feel like we're going to be annihilated and destroyed, so it is literally the most unpleasant human experience I think that we can have. And I went into the literature to see what other people were saying about this, and again I couldn't really find anything in the literature either. 

People were just talking about shame, but what they weren't doing was describing that actually that shame is a process. But for Jamie's dad to be a parent, he would have to have looked at his own stuff, and that's a very, very difficult thing to do. He would have to have looked at his relationship with his dad, what his attachment injuries were, where his contained shame is, what does his contained shame tell him about him.

So it's so much easier to say, well actually everything was fine for me, it's this thing over here, it's this phone device, it's this app, it's what people are watching, my kids are watching. That's really the problem, when it's not, it's actually our stuff and it's what we are bringing into our dynamics with our children. But that's a very hard, it's a very big ask to ask people to do that, even though I think we should. 

So welcome to the Secure Start podcast. I'm Colby Pearce and joining me for this episode is a thinker, researcher and practitioner in the nuanced area, shame. Before I introduce my guests, I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that I'm meeting on, the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, and acknowledge the continuing connection that the living Kaurna people feel to land, waters, culture and community. 

I'd also like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. Now my guest this episode is Lisa Etherson. Lisa is a qualified psychosexual therapist with over a decade of experience in private practice. 

Currently she's also a PhD researcher. Her research focuses on developmental shame and compulsive sexual behaviour in adult men, leading to the development of her innovative theory, shame containment theory. Her clinical work and research have cultivated a strong interest in the impact of childhood experiences on adult behaviour. 

Lisa is the author of Jake and His Shame Armour, a children's book on shame. Welcome Lisa. Thank you very much Colby, thank you for having me. 

You're welcome and I just want to acknowledge that whilst I'm here in Australia and it's a nice sunny afternoon for me, it is sunny there as we can tell from the look over your shoulder, but it's it is not the same time of the day. No it's 6am, just after 6am. I'm jealous of both early risers and those who have the stamina to stay up late at night. 

I think I could get so much more work done, but I am neither an early riser nor am I energetic much past 8.30 at night time. Oh yeah, I'm the same with night time, but I'm a very early riser, so I've been up and about since 5.30 this morning and it's not because of training, you know, they say that it's that's the best thing to do, isn't it, get up early and then you'll be super productive. It just happens, my body clock says, right okay, this is the time that we're getting up, but my brain switches off by about 4pm. 

Yeah, mine switches off a little bit later than that, but it definitely, I can't work in the evening and I can't record podcasts in the evening because my brain has gone to sleep and I did once try to get up at five o'clock and work and at last, I remember it lasting about four days before I became insufferable, so during the day. So back to getting up sometime later, in fact around about 6, 6.30 is good for me. Anyway, enough of all that. 

I heard about you from Cath Nibbs and I heard about your Shane containment theory whilst actually recording a podcast with her about three weeks ago, so I'm really pleased that you agreed to come on. I've given a little bit of an opening spiel about you. Is there anything that you would add that describes the work that you do? I don't think there was necessarily anything more I would add, but I think perhaps there's something quite important when it comes to being a researcher, is being, a term that I've come across since doing my PhD is a pracademic.

Pracademic, wow. Yeah, so pracademic is a somebody who is in practice who's also in academia, so that, you know, bridging that gap and for me that's super important because often, you know, I've been doing my PhD for seven years now, it's part-time, so I've been spending a lot of time in and around academic work and reading research and I can really see the difference between people who are pure academics and people who actually do do the work that the research is supposed to be applied on and that for me is a real key. I think it's so important and I would love to have more practitioners in whatever fields you are in to do the research because it just has such more depth because you know whatever it is that you're doing has to apply to the work that you're trying to achieve with whoever it is that you're working with.

Yeah, I'm quite envious of practitioners who do get to do research. I started my career doing primarily research but as I was working through the process of getting my qualifications in clinical psychology, I love doing research. It was, you know, some of the best work years of my life but yeah, I often turn my mind to practice expertise and titled expertise and often titled expertise goes with academic appointment and I think you're right. 

I think that practitioners have a different kind, bring a different kind of knowledge to the problems that we're seeking to address in our work. I'm also mindful of the so-called 10,000 hour theory. Have you heard of the 10,000, yeah, it takes 10,000 years, 10,000 years, 10,000 hours to develop expertise in something and I think, yeah, and I think, you know, in practice, I've been practicing for 30 years so and once with a colleague, Patrick Tomlinson, we kind of turn my mind to how many hours that of direct client contact that might encapsulate and it was a lot more than 10,000. 

Yeah, so I think practitioner expertise is very important and, yeah, and if you're lucky enough or fortunate enough to be able to go back into academia and research, then I think that that's, you know, doubly important, yeah, and beneficial. I think practitioners are doing their own research anyway. It's almost like ethnographic research, isn't it? You are in it, you are involved and all this PhD is doing, really, for me at least, is making it slightly more official so I can say, well, actually, I have done the research, I have systematically researched this thing that I've been talking about that I've known for a long time and I think that's also was, if people have listened to Kath's podcast, I think that was Kath's motivation as well. 

She knew all this stuff way before her PhD ever came along but you just kind of need to get that rubber stamp to say, we have researched this properly. And you've obviously listened to the podcast and my response to her was that I think of research as the scientific inquiry into things that we already believe to be true and not always but a lot of the time it is that and you're right, particularly practice over a long career is a fertile ground to develop a lot of knowledge and wisdom in your area of endeavour, at least, you know, I believe so and I think that we need to hear more from experienced and expert practitioners and that's really part of the reason why I started doing this podcast. A large part of the reason is because I wanted to provide a forum for expert practitioners, people who've worked in the field of endeavour for years and years, if not decades and decades, to be able to come on and share what they've learned through their work. 

You'll have to tell me off if I talk too much, actually just give me a look, but you can't kick me under the table of course, you're on the other side of the world. So you've come on to talk about shame and I guess my first question is what drew you to the work, to looking into shame? I think this is, I don't think my experience is particularly unique to me as to why I became interested because it was my own experience, which is often the way, isn't it, something happens to us and I think, oh goodness, okay, yeah, I really need to take notice of this, which is basically what happened. So about maybe 10, 11, 12 years ago, I can't quite remember now, might be slightly more, I had been qualified as a psychosexual therapist for about a year and the thing that's really quite interesting about shame is it's generally missed in our training as any sort of counsellor, psychotherapist, I believe social workers too, I'm busy training social workers in shame containment theory at the moment in the UK. 

It's been notoriously missed from the conversation, loads of things about anxiety, the conversations around trauma are fantastic, but there's just very, very little on shame and I had an event that happened to me, what I now call uncontained shame and uncontained shame event, which is where all of my shame that I'd managed to successfully keep inside me and contain and not let necessary people see, came out in one moment and that moment was when I received a letter to say I was being investigated for something from a professional capacity for work. Uncontained shame is a very acute experience, it's what a lot of people define as shame. If you look at the literature, when people are talking about shame, they're talking about this and it's a horrendous experience and it's the thing that we want to avoid, but it can make us feel suicidal, it can feel, we've gone to various different places with our nervous system, either panic, shut down, freeze, all of these different things can happen quite simultaneously, sort of kind of bouncing up and around our nervous system.

We can feel like we're going to be annihilated and destroyed, so it is literally the pleasant human experience I think that we can have and this is the thing that happened to me. So you have a very acute experience of that, well I did, had a very acute experience of that for about maybe 24 to 48 hours and then a more chronic experience of it all in all for about two weeks until I received another letter to say the investigation had been completed, everything was fine, it was a mistake, all was good and it was that moment that I felt like I was sort of let off the hook, I couldn't let myself off the hook because I was waiting to find out what my fate was going to be in the hands of these unknown people. It was just a horrendous experience but it completely changed my life because what I was able to do from that experience is name shame for the first time and I was 40 at this point and I've never been able to name shame and another couple of things happened beyond that which was the feeling that I had of uncontained shame was familiar to me, I'd had it before, not to the extent that I had it then and touch wood I've never had it to that extent since, that was a very unique experience but I could remember feeling very similar to that in childhood, as far back as my memory would, my explicit memory was enabling me to go but the thing that was more interesting for me was I recognised that I had set up my whole life with what I now call shame containment strategies, so shame containment strategies are the things that we do, think, feel, believe, behaviours, all sorts of things mixed up in there that prevent us from having these moments of uncontained shame, so that was the relationships that I was having, how I was in relationships, the work that I was doing and how I applied myself to work, so having work as a shame containment strategy and then suddenly something with that happened was utterly devastating and what I wanted to do was work on the shame containment strategies because I recognised I didn't have the language, I didn't use that language at that particular point in time that's come from the theory, but they were the things that I wanted to work on because they were starting to get in the way, I recognised that I wouldn't really take risks, I wouldn't put myself out there, I would keep myself very closed in because of the vulnerability of if I was to be attacked, if I was to be seen, that uncontained shame may present itself and so I tried a few therapists over here in the UK, couldn't find anybody to help, couldn't find anyone who really fully understood what it was that I was talking about, so then as part of all of this I was starting to recognise the same thing in my clients, the people that I was working with in psychosexual therapy, they were describing these moments of uncontained shame, I work with, the majority of people that I work with are men, and they were describing moments when maybe they'd been caught because their porn history had been discovered by a partner or something along those lines, and they would describe exactly the same feelings as what I had when I was also uncontained, even though the circumstances were completely different, and also recognising that they also had their own shame containment strategies but like I said I still didn't necessarily have the full language of that at the time, and I went into the literature to see what other people were saying about this, and again I couldn't really find anything in the literature either, people were just talking about shame but what they weren't doing was describing that actually that shame is a process and we have different parts and elements of shame, they were just talking about, they were just, you know, name shame but they were talking about different things which was very, very confusing, so I couldn't find anything there. 

So then I decided that actually what I needed to do then was to really understand this thing because clearly there was a gap, and not only was I experiencing it but other people around me were also experiencing it, I was starting to see it, and just my family and friends, it's almost one of those things that once you see it, once you know it, you can't unsee it, you just see it everywhere, so then I embarked on a PhD in the rest of history, I suppose, and having to figure out my own stuff without really the aid of therapy, not because I'm reluctant to be in therapy, quite the opposite, I just hadn't been able to find anyone who could actually really understand what it was that I was trying to explain and what it was that I needed to work through, so I've had to sort of do that my own self by reading the literature and applying, being very reflective, okay, I understand that actually that these are the things that were happening to me and shifting that, so what I've been able to do in amongst all of that has completely changed my relationship with shame, and that's one of my biggest aims is to help people to change their relationship with shame, it's not about curing shame or letting go of shame, which is often what we see that the narratives that we have around shame. Shame is a bad thing. Shame is a bad thing, and it's not, shame is a very good thing, we absolutely need shame, it's a very, very good feeling, it's a very bad experience, and they are two completely different things.

Yeah, so listening to you, I was thinking that you've developed shame containment theory, and I'll ask you a little bit more about the various components of the theory in a moment, but you develop from your own experience and observations of others, and again, I'd like to ask you what you have found, what you have found has been the reception for a theory that has been generated in that way. I mean, I've done something quite similar in my own work, and just getting back to our earlier comments about research, I think that there's probably a lot of theories that are developed through the developer having, you know, their own personal experience, their observations of others, and their exploration of the relevant literature, and their own exploration more generally, yeah? And then the research comes, if people are fortunate enough to do the PhDs and so on and so forth, the research then comes that those theories that hang around are supported by that. But just before I get you to describe shame containment theory, and while I remember to ask, what have you found to be the way in which shame containment theory has been received? It's been overwhelmingly positive, and the thing that's really quite interesting, because I've trained a lot of therapists and different practitioners in shame containment theory now, and it's very new still.

A paper was published, which was fantastic, peer-reviewed journal, it went into attachment, which was, you know, a really decent publication, which I'm very, very pleased about, in December 2023, and that was almost like, that was the seal of approval that I needed to say, okay, this is an actual thing, this is a thing now, this is an entity in its own right, so it was a very big moment for me to get that paper published, that article. And yeah, I've since trained a lot of people since then in shame containment theory, and the thing that's really interesting is that, because the feedback has been fantastic, but the feedback from more experienced practitioners is generally a lot more enthusiastic, and I don't know how enthusiastic, it's just been amazing, and I think one of the reasons is, it's quite rare, well, it's not often that you get a theory, where you think, oh my goodness, that makes sense, and I can use it, you can actually apply it directly to the people that I am working with, and I think because that doesn't happen very often, that's why the more seasoned practitioners, if you like, are taking it on board so readily, whereas the people who are maybe newly qualified are the people who are still in training, like, oh god, yeah, that's great, that makes a lot of sense, but they don't know any difference, they just think that this is something that you do, yeah, it's just another tool, whereas the older practitioners, but I mean more experienced practitioners are like, oh wow, yeah, that's really something. And I recall reading in some of your material that when you looked at the literature, you did find that people talked about particular aspects of shame, you referred to Freud, and Freud kind of dispensing with shame in favour of guilt, and talked about Brene Brown and how she has managed shame, but it struck me that the literature talked about shame as a discrete construct, and I think that's the difference, isn't it, and you've already mentioned it, that your shame containment theory is about shame as a process, and that there are different, you know, it has different sides and aspects to it.

I wonder if you can give us a bit of a synopsis of shame containment theory. Yeah, a very brief synopsis, I had to take up the whole podcast. So from my perspective of shame containment theory, there's five components, and the first component is attachment injuries, and there was just something I was wanting to mention, really, obviously, your podcast is Secure Start, and you know, you think about attachment, and you think about child experiences, so why is an adult practitioner on your podcast? And it's because for me, everything comes from that place, it comes from attachment, it comes from childhood experiences.

So, you know, you're talking to Cath, and I just think, well, I'm the person who, well, hopefully Cath presents people from getting to me, but if there isn't people like Cath around, then the other people who I do get to see, we can't separate those two moments in time, can we, childhood and adulthood, they're so entwined, they're still us, it's still us that's actually had these experiences. And that's one of the reasons why I spend so much time thinking about childhood when I'm with my clients is, these are the reasons, you know, if you're looking for answers, those answers are in your experiences in those moments of being a child. So the first part of... I refer to them, sorry, I was just going to say, I refer to them as enduring sensitivities.

Enduring sensitivities? Enduring. Enduring, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a nice way to put it. So we have these childhood experiences where we feel a disconnect in our attachment to our significant others, whether that be parents, caregivers, whoever it is, whoever those attachment figures are. 

And these attachment injuries can be very, very subtle. I think a lot of times when we're talking about childhood experiences, we're talking about the capital T traumas, the big events. And when I'm talking about attachment injuries and a sense of disconnect, I'm talking about unavailability, uninterest, parents being distracted. 

Again, Cath was talking about parents on their phone. It gave me chills when she talked about the three-part family, the mother, the parent, the child, and the divorce. And it's so easy to create. 

This isn't about blame. It's just so easy to create these attachment injuries without us even realising that this is what it is that we're doing with the children that we are in care of. So we have attachment injuries and shame is a response to those attachment injuries. 

So we see shame as part of our attachment system, which is why it's vital. So the idea of letting go and healing shame is like, no, no, no, because this is such an important part of us being able to survive. But what shame will do as a response to these attachment injuries is it will get the child to modify their behaviour so that the parent or the caregiver will want to reconnect back up with that child so that the child looks attractive and valuable again. 

Because we have a sense of, as you'll know, children are narcissistic, and I don't mean it as in personality disorder, narcissistic, but the world has to revolve around them. So if there's a disconnect, the child will assume that it's something that they have done. So therefore, they can modify their behaviour to undo what it is. 

So there's a theorist called Helen Block Lewis. She calls it writing behaviour. So shame really propels us into a position to write our behaviour.

And how it's going to do that is by telling us that we are bad. So you know, that position of bad childhood parents, it's shame as a mechanism that puts us in that position so that we can then rescue ourselves from that position. From there we have, so from the shame response, we have shame scripts. 

So this is part of the thing that I call contained shame. So contained shame is, we can sometimes call this trait shame as well. So this is starting to become our identity, who we think we are. 

So we have enough attachment injuries. And if you think about how innocent an attachment injury can be, from being distracted or not available, a child can have 10, 15 attachment injuries in a day, and they're having shame responses to each of those attachment injuries. That's a lot of shame response. 

So contained shame is, that can be confused with what people are talking about with self-esteem or self-worth. So these shame scripts, I'm bad, I'm not good enough, I'm useless, whatever it is that actually that shame response is telling us that we have to change. Because we generally don't have conversations around shame, we don't necessarily have adults around to help us with understanding what it is that's actually happening and why we have these feelings of this internalised shame, if you like.

That it stays stuck, it's got nowhere to go, can't really be expressed. Because if anyone was to see it, we're already in a place of vulnerability. If anyone was to see that we are bad, that we're no good, that we're unlovable, worthless, whatever it is, then we're definitely going to be abandoned.

So shame is all about preventing us from being abandoned. That's why it's part of our attachment system. So we can't allow anyone to see this contained shame. 

So what we do is we create shame containment strategies, and they are the things that help us to prevent the contained shame from becoming uncontained and being seen. So our shame containment strategies are, as I was saying before, behaviours, it can be thoughts, it can be attitudes, beliefs, it can be all sorts of different things. And we absolutely need shame containment strategies, we all need them as humans, because shame is about helping us to be pro-social, it's how we function in society.

So the example that I often use is a really good, helpful shame containment strategy is politeness. And as a British person, we're very open about politeness. It's basically just a shame containment strategy, because it helps us, it allows us to function and not be ousted from the group and be seen in a positive way, and not be rejected. 

So we all need shame containment strategies. The difficulty, as I was saying at the beginning of my experience is when our shame containment strategies become life limiting rather than life enhancing. So being polite is a life enhancing shame containment strategy.

But the uncontained shame, that is that very acute, extremely unpleasant, very, very painful experience of shame. And every time we have an attachment injury, we tend to move in a state of uncontained shame as a trauma response, basically. And that's the thing that we're really trying to avoid. 

So I envision contained shame and uncontained shame as a jack in the box. So we have our contained shame is held down by this lid, the lid of the shame containment strategies. Something happens with that lid, either the shame containment strategy fails, or we just didn't put one in place because we didn't expect this thing to happen. 

Uncontained shame tends to erupt as a surprise, as a shock, a thing that we were not expecting at all. So the lid comes up, uncontained shame will literally explode out if it's a big enough uncontained shame experience. And then we need something to put the lid back on. 

And they are what I call re-containment strategies, which are very similar to shame containment strategies, but we employ them depending on whether we're trying to keep the lid on or whether the lid needs to be put back on, if that makes sense. Keep it on and put it back on. Yeah. 

So with re-containment strategies, they can either become very life-limiting or they can be life-enhancing. So my therapeutic work, what I do with clients now is to address all of these different aspects of shame and see it as a process, a linear process. So someone arrives for me, to me in therapy, it might be that they're recognising, well, again, they wouldn't have this language at this point, that there might be something going on for them, a shame containment strategy, which is starting to become life limiting. 

They've been avoiding relationships, they've been using a lot of porn to avoid the vulnerability of intimacy because that's much safer, but that strategy is starting to get in the way and they want to do something different, for example. Or it could be, as I was saying before, someone's been caught, their partner isn't very happy with their porn history or something along those lines, they're in a state of uncontained shame at that point. And the therapy is used then to re-contain that shame. 

So people present it all different parts of within that process and it's really not linear, but there was always a starting point and that starting point is always attachment injuries from childhood. So that, yeah, in a nutshell, that's a very, very quick... Thank you. And it sounds insight-oriented because I think I've either read somewhere or you've said that, I think you are both, you said it's, I wonder if therapy is about changing your relationship with shame. 

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And the thought that I was having as well was, as you were describing it was, we all have shame. 

Shame is a process. We all have shame containment strategies and they're functional, you were saying, until they're not. And I was trying to imagine circumstances in which a person might seek a psychotherapeutic support in relation to their experiences. 

And you were saying they don't necessarily see it as shame and use that language. But what I'm hearing you say is that it often, from your point of view, has its basis in uncontained shame, which stems from early attachment injuries and shame containment strategies going awry, I guess, so to speak. Yeah. 

And therapy is part of the re-containment process. But left to their own devices, what happens for people as part of trying to re-contain their shame? What sort of things occur? Well, it's interesting because I know that you mentioned adolescence with the conversation that you were having with Kath now. I believe that was maybe something that you and I were going to talk about today, because that's a brilliant example of that.

Yeah, I was leading there. You know what I say, when I say to kids, I say to kids, you're supposed to say to me, get out of my head, Colby, it's rude to be in there. You know, I don't like, and I'm feeling like saying, what are you doing? Read in my mind.

We're supposed to be doing a podcast. So I go on. Yes, yes, I was leading that way towards, you know, I wanted to ask you about adolescence and what we saw happen in that show.

And I am going to put the caveat in that, you know, it is an outlier with how all of that experience was sort of played out. But one of the things that was amazing for me was I literally got to, I was just watching Shame Containment Theory throughout the whole series, particularly in episode three, which is when Jamie was talking to the psychologist. And you get to really understand what it was that was actually happening and why things happened. 

And there's been some amazing research done by a guy called James Gilligan over in the US. And he was a psychiatrist and he was asked a lot of years ago now, I believe, he was asked to go into a prison that had the highest mortality rate of inmates. So basically, inmates were murdering each other.

And they couldn't figure out why there was so much violence in this particular prison. So James was sent in to find out what was going on. And he did some amazing research from there.

And what he discovered was that actually what was happening was people's shame was being triggered. I don't actually like the word triggered, but I've said it. So people were becoming uncontained. 

And how they were becoming uncontained, and again, this wasn't James' language, this is my interpreting his research in the language that I use. But the language that he did use was about being dissed, it was about being disrespected. So if you think about what being disrespected means is that you have no respect, therefore you have no value. 

So when people are perceived by their peers to have no value, they move into a state of uncontained shame. And what was happening was, so someone was being dissed. And the person who was being dissed had to assert their respect back, which is a recontainment strategy, they were trying to recontain that sense of uncontained shame that they were feeling. 

And how they were doing that was through extreme violence, through murder. And this is kind of what we were seeing with Jamie in the television programme, very, very fictional, doesn't happen very often. Strangely enough, I'm saying it doesn't happen very often. 

It did actually happen somewhere very local to me, about 25 miles away from where I live. About two years ago, a young 15-year-old girl was murdered by her partner, who was 17. And there's so many similarities with what was displayed in the TV programme. 

So again, it's about the rejections, about the disrespect, it's about all of that shame coming out, that I am not okay, I need to do something with this feeling, because that feeling is intolerable. And there's something similar happens, as we understand it, in gang violence, for example. It's a thing of disrespect. 

So really, it's about uncontained shame. And this is one of the reasons why, for me, uncontained shame needs to be looked at, because those recontainment strategies that we have, they are very, very life-limiting for everyone, for the victim, for the person who actually doesn't have any other ways of recontaining that shame. I also have another friend and colleague at the moment who's doing her PhD on shame and violence in men, and aggression. 

And she's finding something very, very similar within her research as well. So it's a really important thing. And yeah, it was a fictional programme, and it doesn't happen all that often in the way that it was described. 

But equally, you were seeing it playing out. Yeah. What did you notice? What did you notice? So I noticed that, for me, the big thing wasn't necessarily the social media and the insult. 

That isn't necessarily how insults operate. You know, as Cass said, of course, he was celibate. He was a 13-year-old kid. 

You know, he's not voluntary celibate. He's not deciding that, you know, that this is the lifestyle for him, or this is the gang that he's going to be part of. That really wasn't the thing. 

It was more about his relationship with his dad. And it was about his dad's relationship with his dad. And you just got these little snippets of this stuff coming through about his dad's idea of masculinity, and how for him in his childhood, if he deviated from that idea, then he was severely punished. 

He was beaten, and he didn't want to do the same thing to his child. But that's his shame. His shame was still presenting itself. 

So when Jamie wasn't very good at football, it was his dad's shame that was coming up. It wasn't Jamie's. It was his dad's. 

And his dad's responding to Jamie in that particular way. I hope there's no spoilers yet. People haven't watched the programme.

I did feel like saying, yeah, spoiler alert before. But anyway, go ahead. Yeah, so it was that relationship. 

And there was these real key statements. So it was about when Jamie was describing to the psychologist how his dad had turned away when he was playing football. You turn your face away. 

You can't stand. It's a sign of disgust and contempt to turn the face away. And that's very uncontaining for a child to have that happen. 

And in episode four, Jamie's dad actually confirms that that actually was the case. It wasn't Jamie just imagining that his dad was ashamed of him. His dad actually was ashamed of him. 

And so it was more along those lines. That was the thing that really piqued my interest, was that dynamic. And on social media, everyone was focusing on the social media stuff. 

And I'm like, no, there was so much to this. And dad was ashamed of himself. Yeah, as well. 

Yeah. For producing a son in this way. Yeah, because of his history, because of the attachment injuries that he had experienced from his dad. 

So really, what we're seeing is that intergenerational trauma. But that also looks very ordinary. So it's part of this idea that intergenerational trauma or trauma isn't these big events. 

It's these moments of disconnect on the thing that, for me, is key. Yeah, the issue in the show was of recontainment strategies was partly depicted in the way in which dad in the show behaved and how he was described by his son in terms of the shed. Yeah, exactly. 

Yeah. So if you think about that, so dad, there was just this underlying aggression from dad. So the destroying of the shed or you saw him, you know, being very angry when he was provoked by the kids when he was outside of the DIY store. 

There was lots of aggression there. You know, so we and there was a another key moment when he was talking to his wife, when his wife said to him, but Jamie's always had a temper, but so have you. So there's just all of these little hints of their recontainment strategy as men, as males within that family was violence or aggression, at least, but certainly aggression. 

So when Jamie's being dissed by his dad, I still see that as disrespect, not being allowed to be who you are, not allowed to be your authentic self. The idea of having to be something else is quite disrespectful to to you. But also the the shame of being of him being ashamed of his son and that uncontained shame that you would feel from from that, as well as that being an attachment injury. 

But then that being reinforced by the bullying and the things that were actually happening online. And one of the things that I'm very concerned about is when we focus on things like porn is a big thing at the moment, obviously, with young people, as it should be, and social media, if we just focus on those things, we're missing all of the stuff that's going on underneath, which are things like how are we parenting? How are we creating good attachments? How are we repairing attachments when that sense of disconnect is broken? It's not necessarily the social media stuff that's going on that might reinforce things, but that's not necessarily the genesis of where these things are happening. And I just it really concerns me that we're really missing a trick if we just focus on these things external to us. 

They're easy targets. And we can reassure ourselves that we think we know what's going on without really turning our mind to what is really going on for a young person who reacts in this way to the provocation. Yeah, and it's really difficult, isn't it? I think you're absolutely right. 

So if we just go back to adolescence, and just because it's a story that everybody got to witness, all the people who've watched it have witnessed this. And by the way, I was having a thought about spoilers. And I was thinking, maybe we should get Netflix to sponsor this.

Well, I don't know. I think it's a really good idea. It's so rare that we've had something that's generated so much conversation. 

And I think that's the brilliant thing that it did. There's lots of things about it that were problematic. But the fact that it has created conversations is amazing.

But for Jamie's dad to be a better parent, he would have looked at his own stuff. And that's a very, very difficult thing to do. We would have to have looked at his relationship with his dad, what his attachment injuries were, where his contained shame is, what does his contained shame tell him about him.

So it's so much easier to say, well, actually, everything was fine for me. It's this thing over here. It's this phone device. 

It's this app. It's what people are watching. My kids are watching.

That's really the problem when it's not. It's actually our stuff. And it's what we are bringing into our dynamics with our children. 

But that's a very hard, it's a very big ask to ask people to do that, even though I think we should. I think you're right. I was only talking about this issue this morning about when parents bring along a child to see a therapist, and the quickest way to scare them off is to ask them, well, about their own childhood and how it was for them when their parents were not happy with some aspect of their behaviour. 

Yeah, very difficult. Yeah, yeah. You've just given me a brilliant idea for one of the books in the bookseed.

I can't. I mean, it is the cornerstone of a certain theoretical approach, the name of which escapes me just at the moment. But it was quite prevalent here in some of our services within the last 20 years.

Yeah, yeah. It's changed as a sex therapist, like a sexual therapist. I actually have more friends and people around me who are child psychotherapists, which is brilliant for me because I get to hear all of this stuff. 

And what I know from them is, yeah, it is really difficult to get parents to look at their own stuff and what is it that they are bringing. But there's a lot of similarities with my own work. So what happens in my own work is a partner, if you have a couple, one of the people in the couple is deemed to be the one with the problem. 

The other one who doesn't consider themselves to have any problem at all, literally drags the one with the problem to therapy and says to me, OK, you need to fix them because once you fix them, I'm going to feel OK. But what they're not recognising is actually what that person is doing is bringing up all of their stuff. Yeah. 

And part of my job is to help them to understand that actually it's your stuff that's coming up here and it's your stuff from childhood and it's your attachment injuries. And I don't say it like that. Obviously, that's a bit of a bit of work, but it's a very similar dynamics, a very similar process.

Fascinating. I did have a thought and I was hoping it would come back. I really recognise that look.

Yeah, that's an age related thing. But yeah, usually, usually it'll come back. Yeah. 

Anyway, moving on. So I think, you know, from from. I think people will take home, you know, certain messages from from the TV show Adolescence. 

But I wonder what you think is would be the better take home messages for for parents in particular who watch. This is going to be a bit of an unfair question, double barrelled, unfair take home messages, I guess, from from what was portrayed from a shame perspective in the show Adolescence. And what what you think professionals should take away from from our conversation and from your from from shame containment theory in their work? I think if I start with the with professionals first, that's probably the easiest one to answer, really. 

I think there's something about recognising that shame is there for all all humans. And there's a there's a quite an interesting idea, which makes sense to me, that even people who are presented as shameless are so full of shame that the other people who have to disavow or bypass or avoid. These are various different terms that are used within the shame literature to not feel their shame.

And so, yeah, you know, there's something quite important about people who present as being shameless and what it is that's going on for them. So even within those dynamics, we will still be seeing shame. So just to go back very briefly to what you were saying about about Freud, I believe that he is single handedly been responsible for us ignoring shame or not looking at shame or not recognising that shame is there. 

We suspect it may be because he was so full of shame that he had to do exactly that. He had just avoided shame entirely. So guilt was a much easier thing for him to to to to spend time with. 

And that's been the legacy of psycho analysis, which has then been the legacy of most other things that we do within regards mental mental health. So it's about recognising that because shame is a human emotion, which is quite different from trauma, not everyone has had trauma experiences, but everyone will experience shame because we're supposed to. That shame will be there for their clients in some way, shape or form.

And one of the things that shame containment theory does is it brings a language that we've never really had before. To the extent of being able to recognise these different components of shame, these different parts of shame, rather than people just talking about shame and me when I'm looking at the literature thinking, well, but but which part of shame are you actually thinking about then? Because contained shame is very, very different from uncontained shame. Then you have all the strategies to try and manage all of these these things. 

So I think for professionals, it's it's about if you've got people who are stuck, or if you've got people who don't feel like they are there, I don't really like the word resistance, but just to use it to make it make sense in this context. If you're perhaps given a suggestion about something and they're just really reluctant to take that suggestion on board, it's because that's a shame containment strategy. And they can't allow themselves to let go of that shame containment strategy just yet. 

So things when there's an impasse, it's often shame that that's there. Shame will get people into the room. Shame will get people out of the room. 

Yes, it's just presence the whole time. And we're really missing a trick if we're not looking at shame. Yeah. 

And, you know, even things like with anxiety, and there was a guy called Wormser, Leon Wormser, who coined the phrase shame anxiety. So shame anxiety is the anxiety that we are going to feel sorry, the anxiety that we feel is the impending shame. Yeah, it's going to come when we do certain things. 

So speaking on stage, we might feel a lot of anxiety. But really, what we're worried about is the shame that's going to come when we trip over, or when someone tells us that our presentation was terrible, real bad and inadequate. But what we're doing, yeah, so evening anxiety, generally, what's going on is shame. 

So we need to just take so much more notice of where the shame is, and what is actually playing out. So I think for parents, the key messages, I think, for me would be about thinking about what is it that we are doing, that might cause an attachment injury in a child, considering that my research is indicating that the biggest sources of attachment injuries are uninteresting unavailability. And again, this isn't about blaming parents, because there's a lot of parents who have to be unavailable, because they're having to work. 

We're in a very, very different position. These days, moms are working and right, so they have that career. But how are they managing that so that the child does still feel connected? Somehow, or if there is a disconnect, or there is a rupture, how are people repairing that rupture? This is a relatively new thing to be talking about, I think, certainly people of my generation, and I should suspect yours as well, Coby, our parents weren't taught anything about repairs and ruptures, we were just told off. 

And that was it. That child is us as children, where they're just left in the state of uncontained shame, because we don't know why we've just been told off. Yeah, without that explanation, without that ability to reconnect.

And about how a lot of the stuff that's going on is our own stuff. You know, if you just think about back to the programme, you know, really, we could, we can look at all of that family and see that actually, it was the granddad that kind of set things off, and no doubt, it was stuff from his dad. And, you know, you can go back and back and back.

But there has to be something where at some point, that cycle needs to be broken. Yeah. And I suppose this is an opportunity for us to be the ones that are actually going to do something a little bit different.

I don't know if you listened closely to, well, I presume you did, you listened to the podcast. But at the end of the podcast, I do the question without notice. For me, I ask a lot of questions, here's your chance to ask me a question before I give you that opportunity. 

With the last podcast, I did talk about, with Kath asked me about boys, and what we're doing with boys. And having spoken to you now, I think that, and thinking about what, at least what I said in that conversation, as well as what Kath said, through the lens of shame, it strikes me that one of the things that we need to be concerned about, I basically, to simplify the issue, where are we going wrong with our boys? I simplified it down to, we're not showing that we're proud of them. We're not showing enough pride in boys and in their competencies and their achievements. 

And, you know, we're very concerned about our boys. And in talking to you, I wonder whether a lot of that is, you know, manifests as attachment injuries for our boys. And because we are, you know, there is significant concern, and perhaps misdirected, but significant concern about boys. 

And yeah, if people want to hear more about my thoughts about that, they should listen to the podcast with Kath. But this was what left my mind earlier, and has come back, I was thinking about masculinity, masculinity amongst men, or boys and men, as a shame containment strategy. And how, in our society, there is a, there is such a reaction to people like Andrew Tate, and others who are, I mean, Andrew Tate, irritates me as well, I have to say, just in the way he communicates, but there's been, it's not just him, there is this whole, the, what do they call it, the man, manverse, or something like that. 

But anyway, there's a whole, man, manosphere. And but there's a whole reaction in society against masculinity. And as Kath referred to it, her dislike of the term toxic masculinity, but, you know, and the demonization of masculinity in a way. 

I just wonder about, about that, about attacking, almost attacking, yeah, attacking shame containment strategies, and re-containment strategies, and what's the impact of that? Well, the impact of those things are huge, aren't they? As I said, yes, violence, or it certainly can be. And I think it's, I think the reason why it's violence for men and boys is because of that conditioning, well, it's okay to be aggressive if you're a boy, it's not okay to be aggressive if you're a girl. There was a, I was doing some training quite recently, and it was really, really interesting. 

This woman asked me, she said she had read a book, I don't know what the book was, I really should have asked her what the book was. And in that book, what it was saying is that women feel shame and men don't. And I was like, wow, that's some statement, actually, because what we're seeing is an awful lot of shame for men, and we're seeing an awful lot of consequences of that shame for men. 

It's just that men see it, if you are presented with violence, that might not look like shame. Yeah, and I guess where we landed in that part of the conversation is that, is my strong view that the way we're going, the way certain social forces and agendas are going in relation to masculinity, and your kind of attacks on masculinity, they're not going to make this scenario, they're not necessarily violence reducing. They're actually, by shaming boys and men for being boys and men, they, I'm concerned that they just opt out of the conversation, and then social forces exert less influence over their approach to life and relationships. 

But thinking of it from the point of view of what we've talked about, nothing good comes of shaming masculinity. Nothing good comes from it. No, because if you are feeling shame because of who you are, so being male, masc, you know, I'm wary that that's very binary in the way that I'm talking here, but for the sake of the conversation, that is the thing that is bringing that shame, because we're telling men and boys that that is not okay. 

There always has to be a response. There will always be a response. And the thing that's really interesting is I work with adults, but I work with predominantly men from the ages of 18 plus. 

I see a lot of young men, and these young men are terrified of being male. So what's happening for them is they are completely avoiding relationships. They're avoiding sex. 

They are the people who are going to porn, because that is a safer place to be, because then they don't actually have to worry about what anybody thinks about them. So they're not in relationships and they're watching porn. These are the people who would be classed as being porn addicted or have compulsive sexual behavior. 

And they're in a state of fear of being who they are because they're worried about the consequences, because they're reading all this stuff online and they're being told categorically that them being men, male, mask is not okay. And then you have the likes of Andrew Tate at the very, very opposite end of the spectrum, very extreme. To me, he's just one big walking shame containment strategy or recontainment strategy, depending on where his uncontained shame is, because he also has to have a response. 

So the reason why for me that Andrew Tate was so attractive is because young boys need a response. They need to move away from their shame, because that's the most intolerable place that we can be. So this is what I mean, they have to be responsive. 

They're either going to withdraw or they're going to attack. It's absolutely fascinating. Thank you for that. 

It's your turn now, if you'd like that. And I'll try and be quicker. I'm not sure what else you got on today, but it was quite a long conversation when Cath asked me last week. 

I did have a question, but I think you may have answered it. My question is a very, very broad question. And it may be similar to maybe what Cath did ask you, actually. 

What do you think is the biggest issue that we're missing? With boys? No, not necessarily for boys, young people. Young people. As I said, when I was on with Cath, we should do a three-way podcast, because we talked a lot about it. 

I always pride myself with being able to answer questions without notice. What's the biggest thing? Look, I would have said before reading and speaking to you, I'll still say it because my thoughts are my thoughts. I would say the role of worthiness, self-worth, beliefs around self-worth, self-worth, adequacy and competency, the role of attachment beliefs and how they are the rudder. 

I'm not very binary about them. I see attachment as a continuum. I've seen some of the most attachment-disordered kids you could see, most disordered kids with grotesque attachment histories that you could see.

And I've seen times when those young people approach life and relationships in a positive and pro-social way, but their enduring sensitivities are such that they're often, I'm going to use the word now, triggered to head back down to that very... So I think I would have said we need to be very careful with people's felt sense of self-worth. And there's a long conversation that we could have about that. But I should imagine that the conclusion of that conversation is we're actually saying the same thing. 

Yes, I think so. It's interesting. I'll just say this very, very briefly, but my husband is 62 now. 

And if you see it, watch any of the videos that I have available online, it's a conversation between Rob and I. And he had a very, very difficult childhood, lots of trauma, and lots and lots of therapy and various different things. And it wasn't until he started to look at his shame that things started to really shift and change for him. But the most difficult process, part of that process was understanding and acknowledging and feeling his lack of self-worth.

Yeah, yeah. I think they're the same and different. What's going through my head is that shame is the insult, self-worth is the outcome, or worthlessness is the outcome. 

That's how I'm kind of processing it in my head at the moment. Yeah, yeah. So how I would say that is... So I don't see shame as a wound, I see shame as a response. 

The attachment injury is the wound. Shame is a response to that. And part of that response is that sense of low self-esteem, low self-worth, just not being valuable at all.

And for me, there's something about value, being valuable enough that someone was going to take care of them. Just being enough. Just being enough. 

Yeah, yeah. And going back to adolescence, that's the thing for Jamie, it was never felt as enough. No, no, no. 

And these early attachment injuries, as I referred... I think we, in my area of work, in child safeguarding and out-of-home care and therapeutic intervention with deeply hurt and troubled children, we imagine that somehow, not me, but there is a thought that we can fix what's happened. I think we need to understand what's happened and we need to understand that there'll be enduring sensitivities and we need to... Yeah, and the focus of my work is strengthening worth, self-worth, believed in worth, to compensate for the ongoing impacts of shame. Because we don't... I would... This conversation could go on and on, but I would dare say that improvements in felt sense of self-worth probably positively... I wonder if they positively impact one's capacity to not go into an uncontained shame space.

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that... So what you're describing is the work I would do on the contained shame. 

Let's look at the contained shame and change those scripts and change that idea and bring the reality in, because all shame scripts have to be believed, but they're not based on any truth. They're responses that we needed to keep us as safe as possible. So my work with work with adults, when they've had these experiences, let's change this contained shame and help you to express that. 

And then what you find is that some shame containment strategies just naturally drift away because they're not needed anymore. But also there's less contained shame to be uncontained. So we experience uncontained shame a lot less often. 

The big events that I experience, people generally experience those maybe once, twice, three times in a lifetime. We don't experience those very often because we have such good shame containment strategies. So that is part of the process, that's the part of the therapeutic process, is to start changing your relationships with all of those different components of shame. 

And that's our change in our relationship with shame. We need uncontained shame because that's the stuff that keeps us prosocial. So if you were to leave this podcast, go outside and smack someone in the face, you're going to feel uncontained shame. 

Knowing that you worked prevents you from doing that. So we need uncontained shame. When we understand it properly and when we work with it, that's the stuff that's our conscience, that's the stuff that tells us it's not okay to do nothing.

I've often, and I think I may have even put it written in my attachment book that way. The example that I used to give from very early trainings was disapproval. The reason why you don't and the feeling associated with disapproval, particularly from people whose opinion of us is really important to us, like our parents, our life partners, our children. 

We don't that because we fear the consequences for our relationship. I don't know that I've ever really named it a shame. But that's exactly what we're talking about. 

Lisa, we could talk all day, but I'm sure you've got things to do. You've got the whole day ahead of you. I'm near the end of it. 

Yeah, you're ending down. Yeah. So, listen, thank you for coming on. 

And how can people find out more about your work? So I do have, if you're interested in the academic side of things, I do have an open access article, as I said, an attachment. So if you just Google shame containment theory, it will come up. That's the first thing that does come up. 

I use LinkedIn quite a lot. So various different articles, you can access different videos and things like that on there. So that's just Lisa Epperson. 

If you just go to LinkedIn, you can find me there. I do have some online training. I'm putting that on hold because as happens, my training and my thinking has developed and I feel like it's slightly outdated right now. 

So maybe revisit that in about six months when I do that again. But they are out. Anybody who has any questions can email me at info at Lisa Epperson dot com as well. 

I'm always open to conversations and questions. Yeah. And there is a book that will be coming out in the summer, as I said, called Jake and his Shame Armor. 

And that's for adults to read with children to help adults understand and also help children obviously understand what it is that's actually going on with with shame when we see behaviours and we don't understand them. It's about looking at the underlying shame. So there'll be a guidebook that goes along with the children's books so the adults can actually understand the more complicated aspects of what we're saying.

Obviously, the book's very simplified because it's for children. So that's that's very exciting. Terrific. 

Excellent. Well, thank you again. And we'll bring it to a close there.

My pleasure. Thank you very much.