The Syros Healing Waves II festival, titled "Greece Heals," will bring together scientists, mental health professionals, artists and musicians on the Greek island of Syros from October 1 to 4, built around the theme "From Shame to Acceptance."
More than 30 scientists and health professionals are taking part, led by Professor Georgios Chrousos, in talks, experiential workshops and cultural events covering the brain and body, trauma, joy, neurodiversity, identity and human relationships.
The festival opens a discussion on inclusion starting at the most personal level: a person's ability to accept the whole of their own experience. Acceptance does not mean everything becomes easy, but that no part of the self needs to be hidden for connection to happen.
Who founded the festival
The Syros Healing Waves Festival - Greece Heals was founded by psychotherapist Despoina Plousiou, who specialises in psychological trauma. Ahead of this year's event, the Athens-Macedonian News Agency spoke with Plousiou about empathy, desire and human connection, and about the path from shame to acceptance and healing.
How toxic shame takes root
Asked how "toxic shame" develops after a traumatic or abusive experience, and why a person often comes to believe the fault lies with them, Plousiou said guilt concerns the act itself, the sense of "I did something wrong," while shame concerns judgment of the self, the sense that something is wrong with them. In interpersonal and especially developmental trauma, she said, shame is not simply an unpleasant emotion. It can become embedded in how a person perceives themselves, their worth and their place in relationships.
When a child lives for a long period with fear or threat, she said, this can affect how the developing brain detects danger, regulates emotion and organises memories, processes involving the amygdala, hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.
When the source of that fear is the very person the child depends on for safety and care, a deep developmental paradox emerges, Plousiou said. A child cannot easily accept that the person they need is not safe, so it is often more psychologically tolerable to turn inward and conclude that they themselves are at fault.
She said self-blame can preserve a sense of control, since if the child is the problem, the child might be able to change and stop what is happening. But once that attribution takes hold, it can harden into a negative self-image built on beliefs such as "I don't deserve," "I am inadequate" or "I am flawed."
This, Plousiou said, is the core of traumatic shame: responsibility for what another person did becomes internalised as a negative belief about one's own identity. Trauma therapy, she said, is therefore not only about remembering the event but about reorganising how a person understands safety, responsibility and, ultimately, themselves.
How shame shows itself
Asked about the ordinary ways deep shame hides behind specific behaviours, and when someone should seek help, Plousiou said deep or existential shame rarely announces itself directly. It more often appears indirectly, through behaviours that protect against the possibility of exposure, rejection or devaluation.
It can take the form of perfectionism, an excessive need for control, constant self-criticism, difficulty accepting praise or a persistent need for validation, she said. In other people it shows up as withdrawal, avoidance of intimacy, difficulty asking for help or acute sensitivity to criticism. Sometimes, she added, it appears in the opposite form: anger, aggression, belittling others or intense defensiveness.
Neurobiologically, shame is not the function of one specific brain region, Plousiou said. It involves networks tied to the perception of social threat, self-evaluation and emotion regulation, which is why a seemingly small criticism can, for someone with deeply rooted shame, feel less like a simple mistake and more like a threat to their worth and acceptance by others.
The key question, she said, is not only what a person is doing but what they are trying to protect themselves from through that behaviour. Seeking professional help becomes especially important once shame starts limiting relationships, work, intimacy or authentic self-expression, or when it is tied to persistent self-devaluation, isolation and significant psychological distress.
What often looks like "difficult behaviour," Plousiou said, is not the core of the problem. It is a defence against a much deeper belief, that if a person were truly seen, they would not be accepted.
The path from shame to acceptance
Plousiou said shame is born and sustained within relationships with others, so healing it cannot be a purely internal, cognitive process. Someone who has learned that revealing their real self can lead to rejection, humiliation or abandonment needs to gradually gain a different experience, that of being visible without being in danger.
This is where a safe therapeutic relationship matters, she said. Through repeated experiences of acceptance, emotional attunement and co-regulation, the nervous system can gradually stop treating closeness and vulnerability as a threat. Neuroplasticity shows that the brain is not a static system but continues to change through new and repeated experiences, she said.
Acceptance is not only a therapeutic issue but a social one, Plousiou said. Stigma, exclusion and marginalisation can reinforce shame, while inclusion and a sense of belonging can be protective. The shift from shame to acceptance does not mean erasing whatever feels difficult or vulnerable inside, she said. It means being able to turn toward those parts differently, to see even the parts of the self that learned to hide without rejecting them, to understand and care for them, and to stop letting their shame define one's worth.
