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Understanding Shame & Humiliation - a research project

Do you struggle with shame and humiliation, sometimes stemming from past experience? Are you capable of shaming or humiliating other people, either deliberately or by accident? Would you like to better understand the structure of shame and humiliation - including the costs and benefits - so you can have more of the benefits and fewer costs?

Caitlin Walker is a specialist in Clean Language modelling and Treesje Verlinden brings neuroscience and psychological critical theoretical and practical research skills. Together they are on a research journey exploring the connection between shame, humiliation and mental health. They’re interested in how shame and humiliation show up in families, classrooms, workspaces and communities and how it can be detected and worked with more generatively.

This is a part of this research, all sessions will be recorded, transcribed and anonymised and then data about metaphors and themes emerging about indiviudal and group experience of shame and humiliation will go into the data set. Before the course starts you will be asked to sign a consent form to release your data for research. This research will be part of a wider grounded theory research project which will endeavour to explore direct lived experience of shame and humiliation, how it impacts our mental health and what impact having a clean language and systemic modelling approach might have on our personal experiences of shame and humiliation. As well as these six sessions we will invite you to a reflection session six months after the end of the course.

Over these six sessions you will be bringing your personal experiences and working with the facilitators and other participants to develop embodied models for how you experience these two emotions. You’ll be working within the whole group or sometimes in triads - using clean, non-leading questions to enquire into and better understand the structure of shame and humiliation across this group. 

During a ‘structures for living’ course you can expect high levels of care, compassion, attention, learning, healing and laughter. The Clean Language questions help us to be able to enquire into another’s experience while protecting them and us from any assumptions or projections we may be making. This will help us to develop an atmosphere of psychological safety - and if someone makes an assumption or a mistake, we will patiently explore that together. We’ll be particularly mindful of confidentiality given the private and personal nature of the topic.

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