ABSTRACT
According to Geist, the heart of every self psychological treatment is the client's need for connectedness. This is more than a need for the therapist to provide one way empathic attunement. The most powerful therapy for shame is one that provides both attachment connection and intersubjective connection, both attuned affect regulation and the lively contact of mutuality. Opening up family stories may make more explicit the power of shame in our client's lives. But sometimes chronically shamed clients aren't interested in talking about family history. The absence of mutual connection was where their chronic shame started, and that absence continues. Chronically shamed clients need interaction and engagement with their therapist so that they can feel her as an embodied, emotional human being. Self-in-relation therapists and interpersonal/relational psychoanalysts call this contactful quality of therapy 'mutuality'. Finally, the chapter also presents family systems theory of major topics related to shame, but in the spirit of open-minded curiosity and playful co-creation.
