Examines how twentieth-century women writers depict female bodily shame and trauma.

Chronic shame is painful, corrosive, and elusive. It resists self-help and undermines even intensive psychoanalysis. Patricia A. DeYoung’s cutting-edge book gives chronic shame the serious attention it deserves, integrating new brain science with an inclusive tradition of relational psychotherapy. She looks behind the myriad symptoms of shame to its relational essence. As DeYoung describes how chronic shame is wired into the brain and developed in personality, she clarifies complex concepts and makes them available for everyday therapy practice. Grounded in clinical experience and alive with case examples, Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame is highly readable and immediately helpful. Patricia A. DeYoung’s clear, engaging writing helps readers recognize the presence of shame in the therapy room, think through its origins and effects in their clients’ lives, and decide how best to work with those clients. Therapists will find that Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame enhances the scope of their practice and efficacy with this client group, which comprises a large part of most therapy practices. Challenging, enlightening, and nourishing, this book belongs in the library of every shame-aware therapist.

The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism, and the Socially Shaped Body investigates the concept of body shame and explores its significance when considering philosophical accounts of embodied subjectivity. Body shame only finds its full articulation in the presence (actual or imagined) of others within a rule and norm governed milieu. As such, it bridges our personal, individual and embodied experience with the social, cultural and political world that contains us. Luna Dolezal argues that understanding body shame can shed light on how the social is embodied, that is, how the body—experienced in its phenomenological primacy by the subject—becomes a social and cultural artifact, shaped by external forces and demands. The Body and Shame introduces leading twentieth-century phenomenological and sociological accounts of embodied subjectivity through the work of Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias. Dolezal examines the embodied, social and political features of body shame. contending that body shame is both a necessary and constitutive part of embodied subjectivity while simultaneously a potential site of oppression and marginalization. Exploring the cultural politics of shame, the final chapters of this work explore the phenomenology of self-presentation and a feminist analysis of shame and gender, with a critical focus on the practice of cosmetic surgery, a site where the body is literally shaped by shame. The Body and Shame will be of great interest to scholars and students in a wide variety of fields, including philosophy, phenomenology, feminist theory, women’s studies, social theory, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, and medical humanities.

This book brings together the research findings of contemporary feminist age studies scholars, shame theorists, and feminist gerontologists in order to unfurl the affective dynamics of gendered ageism. In her analysis of what she calls “embodied shame,” J. Brooks Bouson describes older women’s shame about the visible signs of aging and the health and appearance of their bodies as they undergo the normal processes of bodily aging. Examining both fictional and nonfiction works by contemporary North American and British women authors, this book offers a sustained analysis of the various ways that ageism devalues and damages the identities of otherwise psychologically healthy women in our graying culture. Shame theory, as Bouson shows, astutely explains why gendered ageism is so deeply entrenched in our culture and why even aging feminists may succumb to this distressing, but sometimes hidden, cultural affliction.

When women are told that what is important about us is how we look, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to feel comfortable with our appearance and how we feel about our bodies. We are told, over and over—if we just lost weight, fit into those old jeans, or into a new smaller pair—we will be happier and feel better about ourselves. The truth is, so many women despise their appearance, weight, and shape, that experts who study women’s body image now consider this feeling to be normal. But it does not have to be that way. It is possible for us as women to love ourselves, our bodies, as we are. We need a new story about what it means to be a woman in this world. Based on her original research, Hillary L McBride shares the true stories of young women, and their mothers, and provides unique insights into how our relationships with our bodies are shaped by what we see around us and the specific things we can do to have healthier relationships with our appearance, and all the other parts of ourselves that make us women. In Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image McBride tells her own story of recovery from an eating disorder, and how her struggles led her to dream of a new vision for womanhood—from one without body shame, negative comparisons, or insecurities, to one of freedom, connection, and acceptance.

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Liberate yourself from the limitations and judgments imposed by your inner critic, and develop “soul qualities” to experience freedom and vitality Whether we call it the inner critic or the superego, most of us have a judge within who nags us and is constantly on our case. Byron Brown provides a comprehensive guide to understanding how the inner critic works as well as practical, positive suggestions for breaking free of it. Using straightforward language and everyday examples, you’ll explore: • Where the inner judge came from • How it operates • Why it trips us up • Why we believe we need it • How to develop awareness of it • How to disengage from it • The "soul qualities" we can develop to weaken its influence Each chapter begins with an episode of the story of Frank and Sue to illustrate the insidious nature of the inner critic inside all of us. A simple exercise is also included at the end of each chapter, designed to help readers move along the path of self-discovery.