Episode 29 Family Shame & Addiction Watch Now https://youtu.be/qMS9I25s_Qk Listen Now Episode 29 Our Family Recovery Coach, Lisa Smith is back on our show to discuss family shame and how to journey through this difficult emotion. Topics: Jason and Lisa explain what the difference is between embarrassment, guilt, and shameWhen a family member feels shame and what that looks like in different scenariosThe entrapment of shame within substance abuseHow do we shift a family behavior that has been passed down generations? Select Quotes If we can go up the river a little bit as a family and speak what we feel, what we fear, what we are disappointed in, and what we need, a little bit up the river maybe that person who is struggling can reach out to us and we can pull them out before they get further. Or maybe they can even grab onto a branch that’s hanging and can get themselves out because they are seeing how their family is dealing with their own shame and emotions. That can stop the generational passing of it. Lisa Smith, BA MME, CCAR Certified Family Recovery Coach Episode Transcripts Episode 29 Transcripthello everyone and welcome to finding peaks my name is jason friesma i'm the chief clinical officer at peaks recovery centers here in colorado springs and sitting with me guest today is lisa smith family recovery coach with reclaim and recover she joined us i don't know a few weeks ago and and we had just started kind of having some good conversation and so i decided i wanted to have lisa back and um dive into the the shallow end of the pool and talk about shame and families um before the show we were just kind of talking about that this is a challenging topic and i think it's challenging because um well obviously shame is difficult to talk about and i think it would be helpful if i kind of start by talking about what shame is a little bit and and then how i see it in the family and then maybe you could talk about how you see it in families too as you're coaching them but um just really quick uh shame guilt embarrassment these these words kind of get tossed around and intermix quite a bit but you know clearly they're very different terms and um embarrassment is uh some people say things are embarrassing and really they're probably much more shameful or guilt-ridden but embarrassing is just something kind of light that happens that people are going to laugh off later like leaving your fly down during a presentation or something that's embarrassing and guilt is feeling bad about something you have done and then shame is feeling bad about who you are right and everyone that i've ever talked to that has kids for instance has a i'm a bad mom or i'm a bad dad shame button yeah and and that shame button um i don't care how good a parent they are everybody has it because they have moments where they feel like they could have shown up differently um and that almost inevitably can lead to people feeling a great deal of shame is what i've noticed and then it leads to all kinds of interesting behavior because shame also tells us to not talk about it right to keep keep this a secret or hide it or people knew that i was feeling so shameful they wouldn't want to be in relationship with me and so it leads to all of this kind of externalization of shame and shame comes out in all these really weird places and so that's what i've observed i'm wondering kind of how you see shame in the family recovery coaching yeah realm yes um all of that so i agree um in working with families one of the things that frequently i say is it's okay to feel guilty um and it's okay for your person to feel guilty about their behaviors because if their behaviors are hurtful um to themselves or other people we should know that they're hurtful to other people and that's okay and i think as parents sometimes we feel shame when our kids feel guilty um and that's an important it's an important lesson it's a n...