Sublime

Combating shame requires more work than you might imagine.

6. Become counselors.

Jeffrey Schwartz and Sharon Begley (2002) credit Buddhist mindfulness practice with providing insights to help obsessive-compulsive patients.

Influenced by the groundbreaking psychoanalytic research of Joseph Weiss and Harold Sampson, I believe that people in therapy are always struggling against their pathogenic beliefs, unconsciously looking for ways to disprove and transcend them.

So you’ll notice that I refer to modern therapeutic ideas like “cognitive distancing,” which is the ability to distinguish our thoughts from external reality, and “functional analysis,” which is evaluating the consequences of different courses of action.

By optimizing the brain’s full capacity for social learning, these practices expand the mind’s openness to shared introspection and corrective dialogue; and by cultivating that shift in a stable, supportive social learning environment, they sustain that openness though repeated practice over time. As a result, they facilitate a gradual dismantling

Robert Waldinger