Ken Benau

Ken Benau, PhD is a licensed clinical psychologist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dr. Benau is a psychotherapist, consultant, trainer and author. As psychotherapist, he works with individuals, couples and families. Dr. Benau has a special interest and expertise in working with children and adults with various learning and developmental differences, including LD, ADHD, high functioning Autism (ASD), and other neuroatypicalities. Dr. Benau's interest in working with shame and pride in psychotherapy, particularly with survivors of relational trauma, has been longstanding. He has done several professional presentations, webinars, and podcast interviews on this theme. Dr. Benau has also written peer reviewed articles about shame, pride and relational trauma. His well-received book, "Shame, Pride, and Relational Trauma: Concepts and Psychotherapy", was published by Routledge in 2022. Dr. Benau coined the term "pro-being pride" to connote the delight a person takes in being their unique self, self with self (intrarelational pro-being pride), self with others (interrelational pro-being pride), and self in the world (extrarelational pro-being pride). The embodied, enlivened experience of pro-being pride has been shown, in Dr. Benau's work, to be the most powerful antidote to traumatic shame states. Shame states are painful sequelae of relational trauma, and are particularly difficult to work with psychotherapeutically. Dr. Benau's work describes many useful ways of understanding shame and pride, both adaptive and maladaptive subtypes, and how identifying pro-being pride phenomena offers therapists new, powerful avenues for transformation.