F* Shame: Why Labels Get in the Way of Healing
Many moons ago I came across a TEDx talk by psychologist Adi Jaffe called “Rebranding Shame” — you can watch it here — and it stopped me in my tracks. I’ve probably watched it a hundred times since. It’s the talk that gave me the name for this practice.
At the end of it, after building a meticulous case for why the labels we place on people with mental health and addiction struggles create more harm than healing, he says simply: “I’m not an addict. I’m not an ADHD sufferer. I’m way more than all those things. I expect success. F*** shame.”
That’s it. That’s the whole philosophy behind Eff Shame Therapy in one sentence.
Labels are not neutral
Jaffe opens his talk with a simple exercise — he asks the audience to look at him and come up with a word to describe him before he says anything. Then he tells his story: motorcycle accident in Beverly Hills, woke up handcuffed to a hospital bed, arrested with a half pound of cocaine, a year in jail, then graduate school, a PhD in psychology from UCLA, a treatment center, a TEDx stage.
The point isn’t the dramatic arc. The point is that the label you formed in the first five seconds — whatever it was — colored everything that came after. And the labels that followed him — addict, criminal, ADHD — became, in his words, the biggest obstacle to his success. Not because they were entirely wrong but because they flattened him into a concept rather than a person.
Shame is the real barrier
In 2010 Jaffe conducted a study asking why nearly nine out of ten people with addiction issues never seek help. Three out of four identified shame, stigma, or the inability to tell anyone about their struggle as the primary barrier.
Not lack of access. Not cost. Not denial. Shame.
And where does that shame come from? From the label itself. From being told — explicitly or implicitly — that what you are doing means something is fundamentally wrong with you as a person.
What we call addiction is really something else
Here is what I believe, and what informs every piece of work I do: what we call addiction is not a disease or a moral failing. It is a coping skill. A harmful one, often, but a coping skill nonetheless — something a person developed to manage pain, trauma, overwhelm, or a nervous system that had no other tools available.
The same is true for most of what gets labeled as mental illness or disorder. Depression, anxiety, substance use, problematic sexual behaviors, disordered eating — these are not character flaws. They are adaptations. They made sense at some point. They have a story underneath them.
When we lead with the label we skip the story. And when we skip the story we skip the healing.
This is why shame doesn’t work
Jaffe makes a point that has stayed with me: the people in his life he most relies on have traits that would earn them their own labels — obsessive, anxious, rigid. But in context those traits are assets. His ADHD, which causes him real struggle, is also part of what got him on that stage.
Labels collapse nuance. They tell a person what they are rather than helping them understand why, and they generate shame that becomes its own barrier to change. You cannot shame someone into healing. You can only shame them into hiding.
What this means in practice
In my work I don’t treat addicts or sex addicts or alcoholics. I work with people who have developed harmful coping skills in response to things that happened to them — and who, underneath those behaviors, are carrying shame that has never had a place to land and heal.
The behavior is not the problem. The shame underneath it is. And shame does not heal in the dark, under a label, in a room where you are reduced to your worst moments. It heals in relationship, in being witnessed as the full complexity of who you are, in having someone reflect back to you that you are way more than what happened to you or what you did to survive it.
F*** shame. That’s not just the name of this practice. It’s the whole point.
If any of this resonates reach out for a free consultation — I’d love to connect.
