Shame and Anger in Psychotherapy

This book examines shame and anger, their relationship with one another, and how mental health providers can work with each of them to produce therapeutic change.

Although very different emotions, shame and anger are highly related in therapy. Because shame and anger have both adaptive and maladaptive forms, intervention differs depending on what type of shame or anger is being experienced and in what sequence they occur. Therapists need to consider the type of shame or anger they are dealing with and how the two emotions interact before they can make process diagnoses of what is occurring at different moments in a session.

This book emphasizes the benefits of accessing and experiencing shame and anger viscerally to promote emotion change in therapy. It teaches therapists how to help clients access their shame or anger in a safe therapeutic setting to make this emotion amenable to transformation, and create new narratives based on the transformed feelings. 

Leslie S. Greenberg, PhD, is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of psychology at York University in Toronto, Canada and the primary developer of emotion-focused therapy. He has authored many books, the most recent being Changing Emotion with Emotion (2021). He has received the Distinguished Research Career Award of the International Society for Psychotherapy Research, as well as the Distinguished Professional Contribution to Applied Research from the American Psychology Association. Dr. Greenberg has also received the Canadian Psychological Association Professional Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology as a Profession. He is a past president of the Society for Psychotherapy Research. Although retired, Dr. Greenberg is still currently training and supervising people internationally in emotion-focused approaches.

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Emotion: Its Nature and Function
Chapter 3: Shame in Psychotherapy
Chapter 4: Helping Clients Arrive at Shame: Relational Validation and Accessing
Chapter 5: Regulating Shame
Chapter 6: Accessing and Transforming Shame
Chapter 7: Case Examples
Chapter 8: The Many Shades of Anger
Chapter 9: Activating Interrupted Anger
Chapter 10: A Model of the Resolution of Interrupted Anger and its Validation
Chapter 11: Working with Non-Adaptive Anger
Chapter 12: Case Example
Chapter 13: Conclusion: Anger and Shame, for Better or for Worse