Shame: Free Yourself, Find Joy, and Build True Self-Esteem

Written by Joseph Burgo, Ph.D.

Narrated by David de Vries

An intimate look at the full spectrum of shame―often masked by addiction, promiscuity, perfectionism, self-loathing, or narcissism―that offers a new, positive route forward

Encounters with embarrassment, guilt, self-consciousness, remorse, etc. are an unavoidable part of everyday life, and they sometimes have lessons to teach us―about our goals and values, about the person we expect ourselves to be. In contrast to the prevailing cultural view of shame as a uniformly toxic influence, Shame is a book that approaches the subject of shame as an entire family of emotions which share a “painful awareness of self.”

Challenging widely-accepted views within the self-esteem movement, Shame argues that self-esteem does NOT thrive in the soil of non-stop praise and encouragement, but rather depends upon setting and meeting goals, living up to the expectations we hold for ourselves, and finally sharing our joy in achievement with the people who matter most to us. Along the way, listening to and learning from our encounters with shame will go further than affirmations and positive self-talk in helping us to build authentic self-esteem.

Richly illustrated with clinical stories from the author’s 35 years in private practice, Shame also describes the myriad ways that unacknowledged shame often hides behind a broad spectrum of mental disorders including social anxiety, narcissism, addiction, and masochism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio
• Release date: Nov 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781978643147

Joseph Burgo, Ph.D.

JOSEPH BURGO, PH.D. has been practicing psychotherapy for more than 35 years. His articles and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and other major publications. He also writes a blog on the topic of shame for Psychology Today and covers personal development issues from a psychodynamic perspective on his personal website, After Psychotherapy. He is the author of Why Do I Do That? and mostly recently, The Narcissist You Know.

Reviews for Shame

[laurenvork · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This guy thinks he can "cure" transgender people. No thanks.

[Elsa G · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A highly enjoyable listen. I consumed the entire audiobook in a span of two days because of its cohesiveness and capturing examples. Very informational

[Esvin · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Very enjoyable reading;
This book really hits the nail on what I've been going through.

[Frank Sterle · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

My existence consists of a formidable perfect-storm combination of adverse childhood experience trauma, autism spectrum disorder and high sensitivity, the ACE trauma in large part being due to my ASD and high sensitivity.

Thus, it would be very helpful to people like me to have books written about such or similar conditions involving a coexistence of ACE trauma and/or ASD and/or high sensitivity, the latter which seems to have a couple characteristics similar to ASD traits.

While Dr. Joseph Burgo's 'Shame' is definitely informative and useful to me in other ways, it nevertheless fails to mention any of the three abovementioned cerebral conditions, let alone the potential obstacles they may or likely will pose to readers like me benefiting from the book’s information/instruction.

'The Autistic Brain', for example, fails to even once mention the real potential for additional challenges created by a reader’s ASD coexisting with thus exacerbated by high sensitivity and/or ACE trauma.

I also read a book on adverse childhood experience trauma, titled 'Childhood Disrupted', that totally fails to even once mention high sensitivity and/or autism spectrum disorder. That was followed by 'The Highly Sensitive Man', with no mention whatsoever of autism spectrum disorder or adverse childhood experience trauma.

I therefore don't know whether my additional, coexisting conditions will render the information and/or assigned exercises from such not-cheap books useless, or close to it, in my efforts to live much less miserably.

While many or most people in my shoes would work with the books nonetheless, I cannot; I simply need to know if I'm wasting my time and, most importantly, mental efforts.

It’s no secret that ACE abuse thus trauma is often inflicted upon ASD and/or highly sensitive children and teens by their normal or ‘neurotypical’ peers — thus resulting in immense and even debilitating self-hatred and shame — so why not at least acknowledge it in some meaningful, constructive way? ...

Also worth mentioning is that the author [Dr. Burgo] frequently emphasizes how it’s the unexpected and therefor uncontrollable experiences of shame that leave the most trauma.

Interestingly, the author of 'Childhood Disrupted' writes that it’s the unpredictability of a stressor, and not its intensity, that does the most adverse-childhood-experience damage.

When the stressor “is completely predictable, even if it is more traumatic — such as giving a [laboratory] rat a regularly scheduled foot shock accompanied by a sharp, loud sound — the stress does not create these exact same [negative] brain changes” (pg.42).

I’m still left wondering whether there's some connection there.