ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the horrid conscription of shame after being idealized by two clients: one a child who was physically abused, the other an adult who revered me as Jesus. This mutual shame dynamic resonated both within the treatment and each patient's own experiential vulnerabilities due to their developmental traumas, as it did in me due to my own abuse history and professed atheism. In considering shame as painful affect states or introjects that assault the integrity of the self and one's self-representations, there are innumerable forms that shame can manifest with regard to content, form, scope, intensity, duration, and qualia. Time is a succession of phases experienced through our river of consciousness, a patterned fluidity of perishing awareness that contains the coming into being and passing away into nothing of previous series of moments, what may be called phenomenal diachronies of difference and change within a transmuting process of persistence.
