The workshop on Evicting Toxic Shame introduces a process for helping clients who struggle with an unyielding sense of inner worthlessness, or even self-loathing. While standard EMDR protocol can chip away at the problem, it is often the case that these clients make very slow progress, and even appear to regress. The very deep negative sense of self, Toxic Shame, is resistant to change, due to:

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1. It’s early formation (Very early childhood trauma, abuse and/or neglect),

2. Being not just beliefs, but a deeper organizing pseudo-self,

3. An archaic or archetypical basis of the pseudo-self.

4. Powerful defenses from preverbal experiences and introjections.

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Addressing the nature of shame, some will say it is a natural and healthy part of the system, and others differentiate between guilt and shame, or chronic shame and acute shame. Some have attributed it to child ego states, or a guardian part. Most say it has value to the client.

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For this process the term “Toxic Shame” refers to an unhealthy and destructive energy that appears as an aspect or ‘costume’ taken on by various ego states representing a deeper, pre-ego state of being. It is in no way an ego state or other integral part of the client.

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A few notable writers who have addressed this in different terms include Eckhart Tolle and Donald Kalsched.

Eckhart Tolle, a contemporary spiritual teacher, calls it the “pain body” in his books, The Power of Now, and A New Earth, which helps to form an understanding of what it is we are dealing with in Toxic Shame.  He describes the pain body as a parasite, that feeds on the negativity that it provokes, and is highly invested in its own survival.

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Kalsched, a post-Jungian analyst, discusses what both Freud and Jung referred to as the Deamon, or Diamon, a representative of the self-care system that has become a self-destruct system “which turns the inner world into a nightmare of persecution and self-attack.”

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This is, in the Adaptive Information Processing model’s framework, the kind of adaptation that can happen in an infant or very young child experiencing unbearable pain or trauma. As they have yet to form an ego or defensible sense of self, and as they are yet not differentiated from the care-giver, they incorporate and digest whatever they perceive as a means for survival.

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In both concepts, the subject is clearly not a part of the client, but an introject, an absorbed perpetrator, a parasite. The parasite can be and often is transgenerational. It can also be culturally supported or induced, but that is a whole other paper.

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While the process introduced here is still very much an EMDR protocol, the target elicited is specifically and exclusively a visual representation of the felt sense of that parasite, that Toxic Shame, that self-loathing.  What may be considered a variance is that unlike most processes, the target is not meant to be assimilated or integrated. It is absolutely meant to be obliterated.

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There are many levels of toxic shame, and many presentations and representations that may appear to be worked with. This training presents the conceptualization to recognize them and methods for managing them, and the guidelines for helping clients through the process with a minimum of distress. Many clients experience some sadness, which they will either attribute to the realization of the childhood they lost, or the grief of saying goodbye to a lifelong companion, abusive and hurtful though it was.

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This clinician has used this process with more than 145 clients to date, and has assisted other clinicians with as many. The results have been hugely successful, and clients go on to process beliefs and memories quickly and easily.

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Much more can be said about Toxic Shame, as it is endemic in our culture and many others, as it perpetuates abuse and neglect, as it may even be at the heart of what most ails the human race.