The Shame We Never Realized We Were Carrying
🌿 The Shame We Never Realized We Were Carrying
I had a shame spiral this week over something very small. I was rude to an Uber driver.
Not aggressively. Not dramatically. I simply lost patience. I gave him a couple of chances, by the third moment, I walked away frustrated instead of pausing and responding differently.
And afterward?
The shame hit me like a truck.
Not guilt. Not, “Oh, I wish I’d handled that better.”
Shame.
The deep kind. The heavy kind. The kind that makes you question who you are as a person.
And that’s when I realized… The shame wasn’t really about the Uber driver.
What came flooding in underneath it were all the old messages. The old conditioning. The old stories I had absorbed about myself over a lifetime.
Selfish
Greedy
Too much
Not kind enough
Not good enough
Once those old wounds get activated, your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between today and forty years ago. Your body remembers.
That’s the thing about shame. Most of the time, we don’t even realize how much of it we’re carrying. Because it started so young.
My four-year-old granddaughter was with me this weekend and she commented on how fat I was. Then she asked if I was worried the chair might break underneath me. Now, she wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was matter-of-fact. Curious. Observing.
And that’s what struck me.
At four years old, she has already learned that body size matters. That being bigger is something to comment on. Something to question.
Children absorb everything. They absorb what we say. What we imply.
What we believe about ourselves.
And suddenly I found myself wondering… How early does shame begin for women?
We are surrounded by it.
A colleague of mine recently posted something along the lines of: “Look at my body. I put the work in. Why are you spending money going out to dinner instead of going to the gym?”
And all I could think was…
That’s shame. Not motivation. Shame.
Because underneath it is the message: “If your body doesn’t look like this, you’re failing.”
Women have been taught for generations that our worth lives inside our appearance.
Lose the weight
Fix the wrinkles
Tone the body
Get younger
Take up less space.
Even collagen products are now marketed through weight loss because companies know exactly what sells to women: the fear of not being enough as we are.
We absorb it so deeply that women who are already beautiful, intelligent, capable, loving human beings still say: “If I could just lose ten pounds…”
As though ten pounds is standing between them and a meaningful life.
No one reaches the end of their life wishing they had been smaller. But so many women reach the end of their lives having spent decades feeling ashamed of themselves.
That breaks my heart.
Shame doesn’t just live in the mind.
It lives in the body.
It changes how you walk into rooms. How you speak. How you ask for what you need. How you set boundaries. How you love yourself.
Shame makes women shrink.
Shame makes women apologize for existing.
Shame makes women believe they need to earn rest, love, belonging, beauty, success and peace.
Brené Brown says shame grows in silence. Put it in a dark corner and leave it there. And she’s right. That’s why I talk about it.
That’s why I shared my shame spiral this week instead of pretending I’m beyond it.
Healing doesn’t mean you never get triggered again.
Healing means you notice it sooner. You understand where it came from. You respond with compassion instead of punishment.
Looking back now, I can see how much shame I accepted that never belonged to me. Someone handed it to me years ago…
And instead of taking a small taste, I took the whole platter.
The guilt
The abandonment
The feeling of not being enough
And I know so many women have done the same thing.
That’s why I do this work. Because I know how powerful women truly are underneath the conditioning.
Underneath the shame.
Underneath the nervous system patterns that taught them to stay small, quiet, accommodating and hard on themselves.
Healing shame is gentle work.
It happens through awareness. Through nervous system regulation. Through learning safety in the body again.
It happens one moment at a time.
One breath
One pause
One choice to speak to yourself differently
That’s exactly why I created my upcoming masterclass. Because women deserve tools that help them heal what has been living underneath the surface for years.
On June 17th, I’ll be teaching:
nervous system regulation
breathwork
EFT tapping
gentle trauma release tools
how to begin releasing the shame and overwhelm your body has been carrying
This work changes lives because it works with the body, not against it.
If you know you’re ready for deeper, more personalized support, my private 1:1 coaching is designed to help women gently unwind the patterns, beliefs and emotional weight they’ve been carrying for far too long.
You deserve to feel calm.
You deserve to feel safe.
And you deserve to feel at home in yourself again. 💛
