ABSTRACT
Psychotherapists of various relational schools feel at home with affect regulation theory, for its description of what the “relational brain” needs for growth and health validates what they have always believed via interpersonal intuition and clinical experience. Neurobiological affect regulation theory supports the proposal that shame is relational, an experience of self-disintegration in relation to a dysregulating other. The right brain is the home of the capacities damaged by early relational trauma. Through consistent, accurate affect attunement, right-brain psychotherapy repairs dissociative breaks in right-brain connectivity. A fragmented right brain produces shame in adult-onset trauma as well as in childhood trauma. Allan Schore’s general right-brain theory of psychotherapy offers three different and complementary descriptions of right-brain shame phenomena.
