Here at Innova Joy, Shame Resilience Therapy, or simply Shame Resilience, teenagers can learn how to free themselves from their negative thoughts and feelings of guilt and shame. By addressing these parts of teenage depression, they can then build within themselves a feeling of empathy and power to move forward.
Start Your Recovery TodayShame is explained by Brene Brown as an “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging.” It is a feeling so strong that it can create within young teenagers feelings of fear, insecurity, and isolation. These can then become the starting points for depression, anxiety, and substance use.
Feelings of guilt and shame would often arise in teens after they survive a traumatic experience. Some would feel guilty for surviving. Others would feel ashamed that they did not do anything to prevent the event from happening. And these very feelings are what weigh teenagers down who are trying to climb their way up towards recovery.
With Shame Resilience, teenagers will be able to resist and push back the lies their shame or guilt are whispering into their minds. With Shame Resilience, teens can process their intense feelings of guilt and shame in a constructive way so they can grow from those experiences.
The first step to recovery in Shame Resilience Therapy is to learn and understand shame and where it comes from. For example, teenagers are asked where or how do they feel it. Is it like a weight placed upon their shoulders? Or is it like a thick knot inside their stomach?
The next step is to understand how it affects the teen’s life, such as isolating themselves from others or preventing them from speaking normally. Teenage depression, anxiety, and others slowly set in because of how suffocating and restrictive guilt and shame can be.
As the teens slowly begin to recognize the shame in their lives, understand its weight on them, they can start to let go and move forward. Shame Resilience Therapy will help those teens build compassion within themselves, so they can understand they did the best they could. With the strengthening of their empathy, their guilt and shame will weaken. As the teens learn to accept and validate their experiences, their shame lightens until it is nothing.
Now that you recognize the heaviness of shame in your life, you can work to move through it. The opposite of shame is empathy. It is building compassion for yourself to know that you did the best you could with what you had. Empathy and shame cannot co-exist. As you learn to validate your experiences, shame loses its power. However, that requires vulnerability. Shame seeks to build walls and keep you hidden. Vulnerability breaks down those walls and builds bridges of connection - inside yourself and with others.
For Shame Resilience Therapy to work, teens must allow themselves to be vulnerable. Because when the feelings of shame or guilt take root and grow, affected teens build walls around themselves to stay hidden. And by staying hidden, they slowly destroy connections with others and with themselves.
Thus, with the help of Innova Joy’s Shame Resilience group, teens will have a palace where they can let themselves be vulnerable in a safe place. They can break down the walls they have built to reconnect with others as well as themselves.
When at Innova Joy, our staff will work closely with the teens so they can finally let go of the weights holding them down. Along with other therapies and trauma treatment strategies we apply, we will surely heal teens in mind, body, and soul. No one is ever truly alone, even if they want to be.
For more information about Shame Resilience Therapy and how it can help your teenager recover, please contact us today. We would be happy to hear from you.
210-254-3618