Abstract
While parents are extremely vulnerable to experiencing shame, they also have a built-in advantage in regulating shame, namely, the advantage of being two. Parents’ greatest resource for shame regulation is their relationship with each other. When parents work well as a team, give each other supportive feedback, and comfort each other after having a painful fight with the child, they provide the nurturance that keeps shame at bay. The capacity to turn the parental relationship into a source of advice, empowerment, and mutual soothing is dependent upon the parents’ capability to regulate each other’s shame. When parents find it difficult to do so and, instead, argue, criticize, and accuse each other, they turn what should have been an advantage into a disadvantage. This chapter presents a therapeutic method aimed at transforming parental fights fueled by shame into constructive and intimate conversations, thus helping parents to become a highly effective shame-regulating team. The model suggests how therapists can monitor the parents’ level of shame and provides ways to help them shift from unregulated to regulated shame states.
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- 1.
I Focus in this chapter on two parent households. Single parents may come by the two-person advantage from elsewhere – a grandparent or friend or caregiver.
- 2.
When I give workshops on parent training and ask participants in role-play activities to play a difficult family, they always choose parents who are fighting among themselves.
- 3.
One of the common complications of the parents’ high shame state is that the therapist gets sucked into a high shame interaction with one or both parents. Once I am aware of that happening to me, I stop focusing on parenting issues and focus instead on repairing my relationship with the parents.
- 4.
In working with divorced parents, this strategy is effective because there is no need to repair the intimate connection between the parents.
- 5.
This complaint is often raised by the father.
- 6.
In this book, I have not elaborated on the differences between guilt and shame but in a nutshell: guilt is specific to a behavior (I have done a bad thing) and leads to acts of repairing (contrition). Shame is much more global (I am bad) and most commonly leads to attacking the other or attacking the self (Tangney and Dearing 2002).
- 7.
The second example is another example in which the mother regulates the father’s shame. I have no intention of suggesting that this is the mother’s role, more than it is the father’s. In the next example, it will be the father regulating the mother’s shame.
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Weinblatt, U. (2018). Regulating the Shame of Parents: Helping Them to Become the Best Team They Can Be. In: Shame Regulation Therapy for Families. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77470-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77470-1_5
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