As I have mentioned before in earlier blogs, I am a big fan of the work of Dr Meg-John Barker. Their website rewritingtherules.com contains many useful writings and resources that can help with understanding our identities and the mental health challenges we humans can sometimes face. They are a queer, non-binary psychotherapist, lecturer, author and zine maker and I feel their contributions to the field of counselling, psychotherapy and mental health in general benefits greatly from their perspectives on life.
I wanted to share this recent piece of writing from their blog entitled ‘Fear/Shame and the Anatomy of a trauma response’. In it they discuss how when something has set off their flight, fight, freeze, fawn response, they have noticed that the underlying feeling is a combination of fear and shame in response to feeling like their either have to choose between themselves or other people.
You can find the blog post here. It’s well worth a read!
Nat Creighton Counselling 