Ways to heal Shame| Unashamed by Neha Bhat| Book review

 Book review:

"Shame needs three things to grow exponential ly in our lives: secrecy, silence and judgement. "

Shame regarding anything creates or sustains in one's mind for long. Every person faces a traumatic phase in his or her life in any part of his life irrespective of gender. There are so many domains and merely few are treated with the help of a therapist. Even I was startled by the topic Unashamed when I first read it. But being a strong lover of non fiction books I wanted to give it a try.

I was literally intrigued by the topic and wanted to explore it. As the word says, it slowly unfurls the layers of shame that start dominating our personality without even letting us know. In this book, Neha discusses about the fear of shame that she is treating as a phychotherapist in the last decade or more of her experience.

In this patriarch society, men and women are guided in their young age about their boundaries and how to deal with issues related to your sexuality. Most of the times, girls or women are suppressed of their emotional support or needs related to it when they are abused, traumatized and much more. Does it makes you remind of one thing? " Time is the best healer". Yes, it is. But answer my question, how do you feel if any related incident of your past becomes vivid infront of your eyes?

Do you freeze? Or Are you ok with it? This answer may vary from person to person. In this book, I found the basic meaning of a therapy and how she makes a difference in people's life. People suffer from their own trauma but could bot identify it for long. When this pain of trauma starts haunting, they are guided by a therapist. One may find the correct therapist at one go or take time as per their comfort level of trust.

This book is divided in four parts:
🍀Prepare
🍀Listen
🍀Deepen
🍀Heal

Neha has shared few but heart wrenching episodes from her experience that may relate to varied readers. She tries to pour light on sensitive issues that are left untouched by many of us. But the matter becomes a parasite after many years and harm our peace of mind. These episodes makes the reader think or feel how they are effected by these episodes or it hardly makes any difference.

This book is not limited to women but it shares a varied experience from women, children, aged, queer, men or couples. As everyone gets affected by trauma of any kind once in their life, so it needs to be mended and not suppressed.  Neha guides that one should be open to his/her sexual needs and accept them openly.

Any person is taught at a young age few norms of etiquette but with the passage of time, few norms need to be reformed and changed as per the requirement. So the rules that were valid fir a person at the age of 7 cannot be same for the age of 40. So accept your needs and try to empathize yourself.

The best part of this book is the practice questions that are added at the end of each chapter. This helps the reader to summarize what are the takeaways from that particular episode.

Ways to heal "Shame":
💕Expect to 'sit with' your feelings for a long time.
💕Keep a small journal next to you.
💕Share your feelings or reflections with a friend or a trusted person.
💕Pen down on a journal or a diary what is troubling you.
💕 Writing drags out inner most fears and helps to recover.

Overall, This book could also be used as an act of self-permission, allowing yourself the much needed recourse to help alleviate shame, silence and self-judgement around sexual health that has been part of our Indian sexual conditioning. Highly recommended!

This review is powered by Blogchatter Book Review Program ".

This blog post is part of the blog challenge ‘Blogaberry Dazzle’ 
hosted by Cindy D’Silva and Noor Anand Chawla 
in collaboration with Dr. Preeti Chauhan.

Purchase: Unashamed

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