One suggestion that has been sometimes helpful to me is to notice that feelings come in layers, which you often have to peel off systematically. How do you feel about the feelings?

My colleague Dale Emery writes eloquently about his personal experience noticing and leveraging meta-feelings:

Several years ago, on the day I moved to California, I was carjacked at gunpoint in the parking lot of the apartment complex that I was moving into. For a half hour, two carjackers drove me around in my car, one driving, the other sitting behind me, holding a gun to the back of my head. I won’t go into the details, but I was, as you can imagine, terrified.

A few days later, I was walking across a parking lot to a store. As a woman walked out of the store in my direction, I began to panic and shake. Then I began to panic about my panicking, fearing that I would forever be terrified of people in parking lots.

At that moment, some very wise part of me asked, “How do you feel about being afraid?” After a few seconds, I realized that, at that moment, I felt good about being afraid. My fear didn’t mean that I would always be afraid in parking lots. It meant that, for a while, it would be healthy for me to be more attentive to my surroundings. That reframe was a big step in my recovery.

How do you feel about your shame and worries?