Working With Shame in Addiction and Trauma: From Collapse to Connection
Live Event

Working With Shame in Addiction and Trauma: From Collapse to Connection

Sat, Dec 5th, 2026
2:00pm – 4:00pm US Eastern Time
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About the Event

Shame is among the most common and least directly addressed clinical phenomena in addiction and trauma treatment. It is strongly associated with relapse, treatment dropout, and poorer long-term outcomes, yet it is routinely misread in clinical settings as resistance, denial, manipulation, or noncompliance and is often met with responses that intensify it.

This two-hour training gives clinicians a practical, evidence-informed framework for recognizing, assessing, and working with shame. Participants will distinguish shame from guilt, a distinction with well-documented and differing associations with treatment and legal outcomes; identify shame through behavioral presentation rather than client self-report; and examine how to sequence interventions in a way that matches a client’s nervous system state rather than attempting to challenge a belief the client is not yet able to experience differently.

The training presents shame as a social injury: an injury to the felt sense of belonging and acceptability. Four distinct pathways to that injury are examined—relational, structural, self-evaluative, and deprivation-based—including presentations that involve no victimization, such as moral injury and self-judgment against internalized cultural standards. Because the injured system is relational, the repair must also be relational, making therapeutic alliance, group process, and community active mechanisms of change rather than supportive background conditions.

A dedicated section examines how well-intentioned treatment practices can deepen shame, drawing on outcome research concerning confrontational counseling styles, stigmatizing clinical language, and program structures built around punitive consequences. Clinician shame and parallel process are also addressed.

The final section presents a sequenced intervention framework—regulate, relate, reason—and maps compatible approaches across Compassion Focused Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Internal Family Systems, EMDR, Motivational Interviewing, and somatic approaches. Community-based and culturally grounded models of reintegration are examined for mechanisms clinicians can adapt to group and program settings. Participants will leave with a clinician-facing response guide for matching intervention choices to observed shame presentations.

The training draws on the presenter’s clinical practice, a decade of psychological leadership in residential addiction treatment, and teaching experience in an accredited addiction counseling program.

Live Event
This live online event will be held as a Zoom Webinar. Attendees will have the option to interact through features such as the Chat and Q&A, but cameras and microphones will not be enabled.

Live Event Instructor

Martin Lajoie

Martin Lajoie

Dr. Marty Lajoie, PsyD is the founder and director of Holistic Psychology Inc., an integrative mental health therapist group practice in Santa Rosa, CA. He has also worked for the past decade in psychological leadership at Duffy’s Napa Valley Treatment, an integrative treatment center for substance addictions in Calistoga. For several years, he helped develop and direct Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy programs at Be The Change in Mental Health and Window’s Health Clinic in Sonoma County. He earned his Masters and Doctorate in clinical psychology from California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he conducted dissertation research on integrative and psychedelic-assisted approaches to treating substance use disorders. He underwent post-doctoral training in Internal Family Systems (IFS), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Motivational Interviewing (MI), Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR), Brainspotting, and Nonviolent Communication (NVC), as well as certification in Integrative Mental Health and Neurodynamic Breathwork facilitation, and post-graduate certification training in psychedelic assisted therapies with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and Polaris Insight Center.

Dr. Lajoie is also an instructor in the addiction counseling department at Santa Rosa Junior College, where he teaches several classes in the substance use disorder counseling department including neurophysiology and pharmacology of addiction, and mentors students entering the field. In the decade prior to psychology, Marty worked as a residential care counselor at the County of Sonoma’s child protective services shelter, and in the decade before that, he produced and performed at large-scale events in the San Francisco Bay Area electronic dance music scene. In his personal life, Marty has been a consistently active and contributing member of addiction recovery support communities since 2004 — an experience that, in particular, inspired him to further his education and become the psychologist he is today.

Target Audience

This live interactive is intended for Addictions and Behavioral Health professionals, including psychologists, social workers, counselors, marriage & family therapists, art therapists, school psychologists, psychoanalysts, music therapists, behavior analysts, school counselors, and addiction counselors. It is appropriate for all levels of knowledge.

Learning Objectives

After taking this activity, you should be able to:

  1. 1 Differentiate shame from guilt, embarrassment, and humiliation, and describe how shame proneness and guilt proneness are associated with differing clinical and behavioral outcomes.
  2. 2 Identify at least four behavioral presentations of shame, including presentations commonly misinterpreted as resistance, denial, manipulation, or noncompliance.
  3. 3 Describe four pathways through which shame develops (relational, structural, self-evaluative, and deprivation-based) and explain why each requires relational as well as cognitive intervention.
  4. 4 Identify at least three common treatment practices that inadvertently increase client shame, and describe evidence-informed alternatives.
  5. 5 Apply a sequenced intervention framework to select and pace shame-focused interventions matched to a client’s observed arousal state.
  6. 6 Describe at least two community-based or culturally grounded models of reintegration and identify mechanisms that can be adapted to clinical group and program settings.

Batchelder, A. W., Glynn, T. R., Moskowitz, J. T., Neilands, T. B., Dilworth, S., Rodriguez, S. L., & Carrico, A. W. (2022). The shame spiral of addiction: Negative self-conscious emotion and substance use. PloS one, 17(3), e0265480. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265480

Dearing, R. L., Stuewig, J., & Tangney, J. P. (2005). On the importance of distinguishing shame from guilt: Relations to problematic alcohol and drug use. Addictive behaviors, 30(7), 1392-1404. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.addbeh.2005.02.002

Gilbert, P., & Procter, S. (2006). Compassionate mind training for people with high shame and self‐criticism: Overview and pilot study of a group therapy approach. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy: An International Journal of Theory & Practice, 13(6), 353-379. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.507

Kelly, J. F., Humphreys, K., & Ferri, M. (2020). Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12‐step programs for alcohol use disorder. Cochrane database of systematic reviews, (3). https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD012880.pub2

Kelly, J. F., & Westerhoff, C. M. (2010). Does it matter how we refer to individuals with substance-related conditions? A randomized study of two commonly used terms. International Journal of Drug Policy, 21(3), 202-207. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2009.10.010

Litz, B. T., Stein, N., Delaney, E., Lebowitz, L., Nash, W. P., Silva, C., & Maguen, S. (2009). Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: A preliminary model and intervention strategy. Clinical psychology review, 29(8), 695-706. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2009.07.003

Luoma, J. B., Kohlenberg, B. S., Hayes, S. C., & Fletcher, L. (2012). Slow and steady wins the race: a randomized clinical trial of acceptance and commitment therapy targeting shame in substance use disorders. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 80(1), 43. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026070

Millard, L. A., Wan, M. W., Smith, D. M., & Wittkowski, A. (2023). The effectiveness of compassion focused therapy with clinical populations: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of affective disorders, 326, 168-192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2023.01.010

Moyers, T. B., & Miller, W. R. (2013). Is low therapist empathy toxic?. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 27(3), 878. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030274

Randles, D., & Tracy, J. L. (2013). Nonverbal displays of shame predict relapse and declining health in recovering alcoholics. Clinical Psychological Science, 1(2), 149-155. https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702612470645

Spata, A., Gupta, I., Lear, M. K., Lunze, K., & Luoma, J. B. (2024). Substance use stigma: A systematic review of measures and their psychometric properties. Drug and alcohol dependence reports, 11, 100237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dadr.2024.100237

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Event Agenda

Agenda times are listed in US Eastern Time. That is 3 hours later than US Pacific Time. The event starts at 11:00am US Pacific Time.

2:00–2:05 PM: Welcome and Introduction

2:05–2:20 PM: What Shame Is: Definitions, Distinctions, and Why It Is Missed

2:20–2:40 PM: How Shame Shows Up: Behavioral Presentation and Assessment

2:40–2:55 PM: Where Shame Comes From: Four Pathways to One Injury

2:55–3:15 PM: How Treatment Can Deepen Shame

3:15–3:35 PM: Working with Shame: Regulate, Relate, Reason

3:35–3:40 PM: Clinical Application and Take-Home Tool

3:40–3:55 PM: Q&A and Open Discussion

3:55–4:00 PM: Closing and Resources

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