Guilt-Shame-Blame
Ending the Flood of Negative Self-Talk
Self-blame, negative self-talk, endless pummelling by the inner critic and the relentless self-shaming that can hijack our minds and torture our hearts can effectively poison our trust in ourselves to cope and derail any hope of bouncing back from stress and trauma. I’ll be offering 14 very practical and very useful exercises to push back […]
Pushing Back on the Inner Critic
One of the important lessons I learned in recovering from being hacked and scammed three weeks ago (see Hacked, Scammed – Lessons Learned) was the importance of pushing back quickly on the inner critic. When that harsh, negative, judgmental, shaming-blaming inner voice takes over, we quickly lose any memory that we can be resilient and […]
Tired of Your Inner Critic? – Here’s How to Retire It
I have just about had it with my inner critic – the irritating self-critical remarks I hear so often when I’m just trying to live my life – “Oops, that wasn’t very smart, was it?” “Are you kidding? Now they’ll really know you don’t know what you’re doing.” Maybe you have an inner critic, too. […]
Using the Inner Protector to Calm the Inner Critic
I often teach about retiring (re-wiring) the inner critic, in these posts and in workshops everywhere. And I often re-post, with permission, the Just One Thing e-newsletters of my colleague and friend Rick Hanson, because Rick can present deep and practical wisdom in such clear and immediately useful ways. Here’s Rick’s latest on using […]
I’m Hiding, Please See Me: Unmasking Shame
Now in week #3 of my August 2020 Sabbatical-Sort Of, I’m still meeting with clients, and last week one very hard-working client sent me the article I’m Hiding, Please See Me: Unmasking Shame by Dr. Nikki Rollo. It’s excellent. I’ve written and taught passionately for more than a decade about the power of shame to […]
The Yin-Yang of Mindful Self-Compassion
As we learned in this interview with Chris Germer, mindful self-compassion gives us permission to ask “What do I need?” Here’s a practice for offering comfort and care from Resilience. Recovering from a Shame Attack 1. The instant you recognize the disturbance in the force field that is the signal of distress or upset, place […]
Dialogue with the Inner Critic
When we hear too many negative messages about ourselves, from too young an age, for too long of a time, we’re vulnerable to internalizing those voices, hearing themselves inside our own heads, as a well-practiced annoying inner critic. [See the May 2018 e-newsletter “The Most Powerful Derailer of Our Resilience.”) “You’re really pretty inept, you […]
The Most Powerful Derailer of Our Resilience.
I’ll be teaching “Resilience: Healing from Loss and Trauma with Compassion, Clarity and Courage” on June 11, part of a comprehensive online Healing Trauma Summit sponsored by Sounds True, June 4-13, 2018. In that presentation I suggest that certainly one of the most powerful derailers of our resilience, if not the most powerful, is shame. […]
Powerful Tools to Reverse Toxic Shame
I have been teaching tools to reverse toxic shame forever. In my book Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being, in every workshop I teach everywhere, in posts and article like “The Power of Mindful Empathy to Heal Toxic Shame.” The well-respected shame researcher Brene Brown says: Shame is the intensely painful […]
The Power of Mindful Empathy To Heal Toxic Shame
© Linda Graham, MFT 2010 This article was published as part of the Wise Brain Bulletin, Volume 4.1. Download the complete issue as a PDF I want to explore how Mindful Empathy can help us hold and heal the sense of failure, rejection, and shame that catches us in the suffering of the belief that […]