Introducing the Compass of Shame

Name: Introducing the Compass of Shame
Uploaded: 2026-02-24T02:59:55.000Z
Description: Recognise withdrawal, avoidance, self-attack, and other-attack to access underlying shame.

Recognise withdrawal, avoidance, self-attack, and other-attack to access underlying shame.

From the course

EMDR for Complex Trauma

So now I want to introduce you to the Compass of Shame. This is a map that comes from Donald Nathanson. If you were to imagine a compass north, south, east, west and on each of those directions you have a different response pattern to shame. That's the compass of shame. So up top we've got withdrawal. When people feel shame, they pull into themselves. They withdraw. They pull away and down. At the bottom, we have the more active response of avoidance rather than pulling inward, people go outward. They avoid. They take flight. They flee. They become promiscuous. They do drugs. They become workaholics. Right? They do whatever they can do that gets them away from that internal feeling of shame. Another response to shame is to attack self. That's probably the response we as therapists are most familiar with. Clients who come in and they say, I hate myself. I'm so ashamed. I feel so guilty. Right? And they collapse in on themselves. Attacking themselves. I'm so stupid, I'm so bad, it's my fault. That's another script, another defensive response pattern that we see with shame. And then on the opposite side to attack self, we see attack others. So these are the clients who are trying to get away from their own sense of shame by attacking others. These are the bullies out there in the world. These are the people who are externalizing their rage rather than closing in on themselves. So we've got four patterns, four responses, four scripts that are related to shame. I find that it's very very helpful to keep these patterns in mind because a client may come in to session and they're full of rage and they're yelling about this or that, blaming other people for this or that. Your first thought might not be shame is at the core. Right? You're going to be thinking, oh, we got to work on anger. But in fact if you can hold the idea that shame is possibly at the core here, is the core affect and the anger is a secondary affect or a defensive affect. You are going to be able to explore the origins of the difficulties that the client is having in a way that will likely lead you to old memories, past memories that are going to allow you to do some transformative work to help the person sitting with you.