About
Judith M. Pilla, PhD, is a psychotherapist in private practice with over two decades of experience successfully treating individuals, couples, families, and groups. For the past ten years, she has focused her study, research, and clinical practice on accurately understanding and solving the many problems engendered by shame. She contributes as an international presenter and workshop leader on the subject for professional clinicians and the public in countries as diverse as Sweden, Canada, Israel, England and across the United States. Her expertise as a clinical nurse specialist in psychiatry, a clinical social worker, and director of qualitative research for a global healthcare company grounds her commitment to scientific research, evidence-based knowledge, and the use of clinically proven methods in her practice. She is the winner of the Joan Sall Rivitz fellowship award for her doctoral research at Bryn Mawr College and is a charter member of Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing at Thomas Jefferson University. She lives with her husband outside Philadelphia, PA. In addition to her clinical practice and her writing, she devotes time to being the proud mother of two adult children with their wonderful families.
Featured Work
How Shame Runs the World
The emotion you dread above all holds a secret code for living your best life.
Nothing undermines people’s health and happiness like shame, yet we don’t understand how shame really works or how powerfully it influences us. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Judith Pilla completely upends our traditional view of shame as simply the stinging, hurtful emotion we try to silence, hide, or defeat. Instead, shame is a vital personal and social force that guides your life daily.
With practical, clinically-proven, jargon-free steps, Pilla will teach you how to benefit from shame’s essential lessons while you eliminate its destructive messages--for good! Through compelling clinical, cultural, and historical examples, you will learn:
• How to heal shame at the root of anxiety, depression, trauma, and aggression.
• To address shame as it fuels addictive behaviors.
• How to resolve shame as the cause of perfectionism, procrastination, and impostor syndrome.
• Why so much discord between people and in intimate relationships has shame at its base.
• To recognize that our increased use of public shame manipulates culture, commerce, politics, and our shared, national values.
Crack the code of shame’s astonishing power to become your most confident, effective, authentic self—as an individual, in your relationships, and in your wider world.
