Re-patterning Shame

When shame inhabits your body, you are distressed, humiliated, and embarrassed by who you believe yourself to be.

It is a terrible feeling.

It’s an unforgiving, internal place of exclusion and a deep sense of failure that may be born of your childhood trauma, rejection, or more recent emotional wounds.

Healing shame is possible and you deserve freedom from a life built on self-respect and dignity. So...How do you get there?

You start with the inevitable tie between the body and mind. 

To live with shame is to live with a fear of interpersonal connection.

Relationships carry the fear of rejection that leads to shyness, sabotage, and suspicion. The body reflects this. Chronic, un-repaired shame often shows up physically as a deflated state.

It may cause you to hide, look down, shrink yourself, blush, or might give nausea, chest tightness, fatigue or lethargy.

It’s as if your body pulls back from connection…even if it is what you long for most. The deep-seated sense of undeservedness is locked in your nervous system.

Somatically this needs to be re-patterned to find lasting relief and finally open a path toward expressing your true self and then slowly open to new possibilities and work towards your hearts desires.

I often go to the words of Brené Brown for guidance here and her distinction between guilt and shame is convenient: where guilt is “I did something bad,” shame is “I am bad.”

Brown writes that “shame gets its power from being unspeakable.”

Somatically speaking, it is the desire to hide when feeling more than tolerable discomfort with being seen. When we feel shame, we are often motivated to hide at any cost- sometimes literally, sometimes behind thoughts and words.

The most painful and insidious is that shame can be so good at getting us to hide that we will sometimes hide from ourselves.

Releasing shame and discharging strain in the body is not an overnight process. It is also not a solitary process. Gently working shame out of your body and mind is possible with support, empathy, resources, tools and compassion.

That guidance is important for progressing interpersonally as well as somatically. Working with shame means regularly walking the line between tolerability and traumatization.

That is exactly why trauma work requires a trained and practised professional. Somatic therapy and deep embodiment repatterning and healing is a speciality that requires someone with experience and training.

The therapy sessions and the healing potential are much more effective when you feel physically and emotionally comfortable.

I want to help you create a safe holding space for yourself right now so that you can get on with the beautiful experience of being free to feel.

But shame can’t be rushed out the door too quickly, or it comes back louder. The work is only done well at a steady pace. 

Let’s begin the journey from shame to healing to loving yourself and embodying your true potential and free self.