Speaking the Unspeakable: Angela Findlay

A unique series of events with four of our storytellers who have grappled with shame. These conversations explore their lives and the insights they have gained as they continue to find a way to navigate their relationship with shame. This is an opportunity to bring language to what is rarely spoken about as it often lies in a place of secrecy and silence.

This conversation explores the dynamics of shame and how, by uncovering the language shame uses in dreams and metaphors, a journey of healing can begin. Angela shares her discoveries of intergenerational shame within her family’s history and questions – whose shame are we carrying?

Angela Findlay is an Anglo-German artist and public speaker who has spent much of her career teaching art in prisons.

For years she had wrestled with an inexplicable sense of her own ‘badness’. Working with prisoners was just the beginning of a search for answers that eventually led her back to her German roots. There, she discovered three generations knotted together by events that took place in Nazi Germany: a grandfather who was a decorated Wehrmacht general on the Eastern Front, her German-born mother who fled the Soviets as a child, and Angela herself. For nearly two decades Angela has been uncovering the deep-lying shame that infused her life, revealing that it is possible not only for the scars of unresolved trauma and wrongdoing to be handed down through generations, but also for them to be healed.

For over a decade, she has been lecturing and writing on the topic as well as on postwar remembrance, resolution and reconciliation. In My Grandfather’s Shadow published by Bantam Press on 14th July is her first book.

Sandra Barefoot has worked for over 13 years leading our prison programme RESTORE. Her extensive experience in facilitating group processes exploring trauma and pain led her to question with colleagues the vital place shame plays in how we see ourselves and others.

Sandra’s exploration of shame has led her to understand how vital the place of finding a new language to be able to explicitly speak of shame. In hosting these conversations, she hopes to explore the complexity of how this language shapes itself within our lives and provides us with the ability to strengthen our resilience from shame.