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What keeps us from falling down, our faces to the ground; ashamed, ashamed?
What Mary Oliver speaks of in her poem entitled “The morning paper”, in the volume, A Thousand Mornings (2012), refers to the collective shame citizens of all nations carry for the relentless disasters we read of daily that occur as a result of “unbelievable yet approved decisions” (p. 63) by governments. In a similar voice, the essays in the book, Shame Matters, address the pervasive shame inherent in disorders of attachment, not only on an individual psychotherapeutic level, but also as it is manifested as a result of trauma on a group and societal level. The book's title succinctly captures the double meaning intended in the topics addressed, namely, matters of shame, and the fact that shame as an often-ignored legacy of trauma truly does matter in psychotherapy.
Elizabeth Howell's foreword summarises for readers the history of shame as a topic of focus within the psychotherapeutic community, including its relatively recent emergence as an affect as important as, if not more relevant to trauma recovery, than guilt. Noting that guilt has long been considered a superior affect to shame, Howell summarises the critical differences between the two:
Shame goes to the core of one's identity and can be unremitting. To make matters worse, while in guilt, the person is still an agent, in shame the person is helpless. Furthermore, guilt can often be remedied by an act of penance. In contrast, one cannot “do something” to make shame go away. (p. xv)
Having established the case for shame as a major focus of attachment psychotherapy, Howell continues with summaries and high points of the nine essays contained in the book that were inspired by the twenty-fourth John Bowlby Memorial Conference of the same name, “Shame matters”. The book's introduction by Badouk Epstein fleshes out what was summarised in the foreword.
Orit Badouk Epstein, editor of the volume and specialist in attachment theory,