Getting Discomfortable with Shame – 4-week course

Getting Discomfortable with Shame is an intimate, 4-week online cohort course where we will explore the powerful and important "master emotion" that is shame and learn to better understand and manage our own shame patterns, reactions, and defenses.

WHEN: The 2-hour course sessions will take place on the last 4 Tuesdays in August (Aug 8, 15, 22, and 29) from 1 pm to 3 pm EDT (10 am to 12 pm PDT / 19h to 21 h CEST).

The fee for this course is a sliding scale from $100 to $300 CAD (note that Meetup only has one price option, so if you want to take advantage of the sliding scale, use Eventbrite).

The intention behind this online course is to help you reorient your relationship with shame in order to re-interpret it, befriend it, and manage it in more productive and healthy ways. That’s what getting discomfortable is all about—getting comfortable with the discomfort of shame so that we can expand our menu of possibilities and tell a new story about what shame means.

Unfortunately, shame is not something that we can just get rid of or magically “cure”. In fact, much of shame’s destructive power comes from our attempts to run away from it. Shame is a primary emotion that we need to learn to live with, but that doesn’t mean we have to believe everything it tells us!

The Course:
Each 2-hour session will begin with a short presentation about how shame functions, followed by interactive group discussions and breakout room exercises to explore how the concepts relate to your own life.

The course will be a live and intimate group experience on Zoom (less than 10 people) and will be highly interactive, a chance to connect with yourself and others. This class is for those who are ready to turn their camera on and openly explore their own shame in a group setting (if you’re looking for something more private, check out my one-on-one coaching instead).

NOTE: This course is not therapy. Please come prepared to take responsibility for your own well-being and to set your own boundaries around how you participate and what you are willing to share.

What is shame?
At its most basic, shame is when you feel bad about yourself—your actions, your social status, or even your very essence. Shame is an unpleasant spectrum of self-conscious sensations.

At the best of times, these painful sensations function as a healthy sense of guilt or remorse, an important and necessary warning that we’ve failed to live up to our own values and expectations. This form of shame is actually adaptive and helpful!

But for many of us, shame can also manifest as a toxic inheritance from the past connected to the belief that there’s something deeply wrong with us—that we are different, flawed, inferior, and therefore unworthy of love and connection. This debilitating side of shame is what we want to address in this course.

Host:
The course is hosted by A.J. Bond, a shame healing practitioner certified by the Center for Healing Shame in Berkeley and the author of the book Discomfortable: What Is Shame and How Can We Break Its Hold? published by North Atlantic Books.

PAYMENT:
$200 on Meetup, or choose an amount from $100 to $300 using the sliding scale on Eventbrite.