Class Description
Many individuals with gambling disorder experience feelings of guilt and shame. While these emotional experiences overlap, they are distinct and have different implications for gambling disorder treatment. Guilt refers to feeling responsible for a thought, act, or feeling in which the individual perceives wrongdoing. Meanwhile, shame is characterized by critical self-evaluation regarding one’s thoughts, actions, and feelings that are likely to be judged harshly by others. This presentation will review guilt and shame in relation to gambling disorder, discuss how these emotional experiences facilitate and/or impede meaningful change, and how therapists can assess and address guilt and shame during gambling treatment.
Learning Objectives
- Define guilt and shame and differentiate these negative emotional experiences across three scenarios as it relates to gambling disorder
- Discuss how shame is connected to stigma, two potential sources of stigma, and how it may be a barrier to treatment engagement
- Identify one reliable and valid method to assess separately guilt and shame and how assessment results lead to two different approaches for gambling disorder treatment
Educational Goals
- Define the experience guilt and shame in the context of gambling disorder
- Understand how shame can impede or be a barrier to engaging in treatment and recovery
- Be familiar with how to assess shame
- Learn about current treatment approaches to address shame in the context of gambling disorder
Outline
- Global definitions of guilt and shame (10 min.)
- Relationship to stigma (5 min.)
- Subtypes of shame (20 min.)
- Shame as it applies to gambling disorder with case examples (20 min.)
- Assessing shame (5 min.)
- Treatment approaches to address shame in relation to gambling disorder (30 min.)