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What if the parts of you've tried hardest to fix were never the problem? What if shame formed around something true? Today, we're talking about what's been hiding underneath and how it might be a very important part of you. You're listening to Relish, the podcast for people ready to stop chasing self-improvement and start savoring their lives. If you're tired of the hamster wheel of healing and hungry for more joy, presence, and meaning, you're in the right place. Hey friends, it's Alyssia and welcome back to Relish. This is part three and the final episode in our threepart series on shame. If you haven't listened to parts one and two yet, I highly recommend starting there so that you can have all the full context and
information. We dove into what shame is, why it developed. We discussed shame as a lens, how it fuses with identity, and how mindfulness helps us create separation from shame story. In this final episode of the series, we are going somewhere that I have personally not seen many go with this topic and that is the potential gifts that can come from looking at shame. I have found this very powerful in my own journey and I am excited to share it with you. Before we begin, if this series has been supporting you, please follow, subscribe, download, leave a five-star rating and review. It really helps the work reach more people. Okay, so let's bring this series home. A quick recap. Across the series, we have
established a few core things. Shame is not guilt. It's not about behavior. It's about identity. Shame forms through rupture and meaning making and it often is going to start early in life. Shame is a nervous system state, not a character flaw. And we take on shame when our brain is developing that sense of self. So it is a selforiented experience and that makes it sticky. Shame is sticky and powerful because it fuses with identity. So I feel bad becomes I am bad. Mindfulness helps create that separation from shame by shifting us from identification with it to awareness. And freedom from shame comes from a paradigm shift, not a perspective shift.
We need to shift from the paradigm that the self-improvement world puts us in, which says, "I'm broken, so I need to do something to be fixed." We need to shift into I'm already whole as I am. Today we're taking an additional step towards and within that paradigm. And it's not by working harder on our shame, but by asking a different question altogether. If shame isn't the truth, what is the truth that it's been hiding? So, first let's acknowledge when we talk about healing shame, what does that even mean? for that. I want to back up for a moment and talk about a personal growth journey more broadly. There are many layers to this work and this podcast, especially this series and this episode is really
oriented toward people who have already been on a healing path for some time. people who have done some amount of personal growth work who have you know tried to heal and fix themselves and now almost feel stuck in fixing mode like doing trying to earn their sense of enoughness. I don't think it's possible for most of us to bypass that phase. You know, it's like we wake up to our conditioning one way or another. We realize freedom's possible and then we get on that hamster wheel trying to achieve that freedom, but at some point we realize that hamster wheel is exhausting and it's not actually delivering what we are looking for. And that's where this work, this step comes in. You've done some healing
and now you're sensing that feeling enough shouldn't be so hard. It shouldn't require so much striving and doing. But there's a key distinction I want to reiterate. We don't integrate the shame directly. Shame is a lie that formed in response to pain. What we heal and integrate is not the shame, but the pain that it's rooted in, the unmet needs, the ruptures, what your nervous system learned, the parts that learned to protect us, the past experiences that gave and still give in some ways shame its power. But the shame itself is not what we're trying to integrate. Shame is a lens. It is a conclusion that formed around pain and we are learning to see through it.
Shame itself is not who you are and it's not something we make room for as valid self-defin. Working with shame means we see through it. We're not incorporating it. It's a lens that obscures your view of yourself, your truest self. And the good news is lenses can be removed once we know they're there. Now, if we accidentally treat shame as something to integrate, we're subtly reinforcing the belief it belongs, that it some inherent part of who we are. And I know this can be confusing because I'm saying we want to integrate all parts. Shame is not a part, it's a lens. So, this is the next level of work. Once we've done enough healing to tend to the pain that the shame was rooted in, we can start to get curious about what the
shame is protecting. This is where we start to access parts of ourselves that were buried in that process of hiding. And I call those parts gifts. You don't get those gifts because the pain was worth it. It's not like you earned it because of the pain. Those authentic parts were always there. and the pain and the shame really the shame made them hard to see. So the gift is not the shame. The gift is what the shame formed around and tried to protect or hide. Now we can't access those gifts before we've done some work to tend to that pain that the shame formed around. But as that healing happens, as we bring curiosity instead
of judgment, those gifts often start to reveal themselves as deep sources of purpose and authenticity and aliveness. And this is an ongoing nonlinear process. At least it has been for me. In part two of the series, I talked about the model that I use with clients that I developed called the embodied spirituality paradigm. And there is a metaphor I found really helpful to explain this paradigm that we're working with. If you've ever heard of this Japanese art form called ksugi, it is a form where broken pottery is repaired with gold. And in this work, the cracks of the final piece are not hidden. They are exposed and they actually become what makes it beautiful. your vessel which is your body, thoughts
and emotions. It's like the vessel of that pottery. You comes into the world whole and pure and then life happens. Ruptures happen. Needs are not met and we shatter. We break and we feel broken. [snorts] Most of us try to fix ourselves by sealing up the cracks so no one can see. This is what so much self-improvement is. Fixing or even eliminating the parts of us we don't like. But Ksugi reminds me that the cracks are important. With Kugi, the vessel is put back together with gold. The cracks are evident. The cracks tell a story of what we've lived through. We think we need to perfect ourselves to feel whole, but we can't ever feel whole if we are rejecting a part of ourselves.
This is about embracing, accepting ourselves. Really, my approach is about meeting all of these parts with compassion and integrating them, all the parts, including our pain. And not only that, the golden cracks in that final kinugi piece, in some ways, it's like that's where the light shines through. This is where my approach, I think, differs from other models. What if it's not just about shedding the conditioning to reveal your authenticity and the truth beneath? What if the very pain you experienced becomes an important part of your authenticity? And the cracks are not the shame. The cracks are the pain.
They're what we've lived through. Shame was the story we told ourselves about the broken pieces before we did the healing work to put the vessel back together. So, here's a reframe that's changed everything for me. What if shame doesn't point to what's wrong with you? What if shame formed around something sensitive and meaningful? So, please review the first two parts of the series for a deeper dive into how shame develops. We're born authentic, unconditioned. We just want to be ourselves, our true selves, but early on you learn who you really are isn't safe. It's not okay. Maybe you try to express yourself and you're told maybe implicitly or explicitly you're too much. Maybe you ask for help and you learn I'm a burden. Maybe you're
criticized and learn there's something wrong with me. So, let's go with that for a minute. I'll share a story. I remember coloring as a child, like in a coloring book, and I wasn't coloring in the lines, and I liked it, and I thought it was cool, and an adult told me, "You're supposed to color in the lines." Did this adult mean any harm? You know, whether they said it with a critical tone or not, probably they didn't. But as a little kid, what might I have learned? You know, the way I'm expressing myself is wrong or I need to be perfect. And because of our inherent neurological development through self-orientation, which we talked a lot about in the first two parts, we take it as I am wrong. I am broken. The way I am isn't okay. But
I wasn't even doing anything wrong. In fact, expression that expression was an authentic part of me. And the shame I took on led me to believe I'm bad at art. I'm not creative. I'm weird. I don't belong. I need to be perfect. All kinds of thoughts that I believed were true. So, do you see how innocent we are when it starts? These beliefs are not true. They're a lie. But we internalize them as true and that they must be me. But that creative part of me was important, an important authentic quality within me. In my experience personally and professionally, when we get to the root of it, shame often develops around a very sensitive, authentic moment. And that's what a rupture is. We are being true and
authentic to ourselves. And the wound is the experience of being told either explicitly or implicitly, you can't be that. You're wrong to be that. Shame develops around moments of importance, of care, of depth, of creativity, of attunement, of desiring connection. Sometimes moral goodness or responsibility. It doesn't grow around emptiness. It grows around what we value. And this is why shame hurts so much because it's often wrapped around a tender part of us. Again, shame's not the part, it's the strategy that those tender parts of us use to protect themselves. It's the lens. So the gifts we can discover by going
toward our shame, they're not a reward for our suffering. They are taking us back to what was already true. But the pain and the shame made them hard to see. So I'll share a client example to illustrate this. This is nuanced though, okay? So stay with me. This person was someone who had spent most of their life caretaking other people. She's a responsible person. She's the reliable one. She's the one who uh anticipates everybody's needs before anybody even asks. She's always the host. And over time, this became her identity. I am a caretaker. That's who I am. But underneath that identity was a deep unspoken belief. My worth comes from being needed.
Caretaking was in a way her hustling for her worthiness. That's what Bnee Brown calls it. Now, this client, she always had to take care of her own mom when she was growing up. She was what we'd call a parentified child. So the first step of her personal growth was gaining awareness of this pattern of caretaking and seeing that as a problem and seeing how she learned that as a child. You know, her nervous system learned to get love, she had to be vigilant. She was a child who learned being useful was safer than being needy or having needs. She learned if I'm not taking care of other people, I'm not enough. So, she has done a ton of personal work to dismantle those patterns around caretaking and
believing that her needs don't matter and heal that pain. And there are many different models to approach that kind of work of shedding conditioning. It's what, you know, Buddhists do when they sit down and meditate. It's what we do at the Hoffman process with patterns. It's what IFS um internal family systems parts work is about with unbburdening protective parts. But what many of these models unintentionally can do is imply that conditioning is bad. So the more personal growth work that this client did, she started to view her caretaking as a problem. She started to reject this part of herself because the implied sentiment is, you know, well, this pattern is preventing me from living authentically, so I need to fix
it. I need to get rid of it. And so you see how that pattern becomes another self-improvement project and that hamster wheel of fixing it just keeps on spinning. But remember, we can never feel whole if we are rejecting a part of ourselves. So much of this client's work we've done together has been around her finding purpose. And as we got curious and as she had the courage to examine her shame and the pain that it came from. So I want to acknowledge this was after she'd already done some healing around it. What she started to see was that her caretaking and her love of hosting people is not just a pattern. Now, it might have come in great part from that conditioning, and she did learn some of those patterns
and behaviors to survive, but she also genuinely authentically loves hosting. She loves connecting with people and bringing people together. She loves creating a shared space where people can connect and belong. This is true to who she is. I've actually been with her when she's hosting. She is such a bright light. She's in her element, but for so long she did her own personal work thinking if she was in those people pleasing patterns. If she was taking care of anyone, she wasn't being authentic because it becomes binary. Patterns equal bad. Authenticity equals good. I see this all the time. people who have done years of personal work that get stuck having internalized the binary belief. I've done so much work and so there must be
something wrong with me that I'm not further along. No, there's nothing wrong with you. The frameworks that these models use are just not nuanced enough to hold the complexity of being human because even the creators of these frameworks are humans. They've been conditioned inside systems of binaries and measuring human worth. And so many of the frameworks that they developed implicitly become about making people better or improved. When this client and I could get together and actually meet her experience with curiosity, what we find is she's not really one or the other. Her authenticity has been informed by all of her experiences, including her pain, her caring for her mother as a child. It was out of
necessity, and it was also out of love and compassion. And she did deserve and need to heal the pain that her child felt. And she had to do that work. And once she did that, then she could also tap into the love that was true, that was deeply there. So now she's leaning into her strengths and her gifts of compassion and care and connection, seeing that her purpose actually comes from those gifts, not by getting away from those patterns. It's not the pattern or the behavior itself that's the problem. It's how we relate to it. This is always the answer with mindfulness. If we are compulsively acting out a pattern because we learned to survive that we had to do that, then the pattern's controlling us. But if we are
in our power and in our agency and choosing to use those gifts and skills, then we are the one in control and then we're acting authentically. But it's not black or white. We all want to feel enough because we all want to feel whole. But we cannot feel whole if we are rejecting a part of ourselves. Wholeness comes from accepting and loving all parts of us. Even the parts you don't love. In fact, especially the ones you don't love right now. This is what I really see as the work. What this client integrated was not the shame belief that she wasn't worthy. That belief actually loosened as we did our work together.
What she integrated was the pain, the protector and the authentic capacity to care. So this is the paradigm of work that I'm living in now. Not fixing what's broken, but embracing yourself as you are already enough with everything you need. all these gifts of your purpose already here and a part of you. Earlier in the series, I shared how shame formed for me around being autistic and how difference slowly turned into defect and how I learned to mask in order to belong. So I want to take that same story a step further into what became possible when I stopped relating to that shame as truth. So for most of my life, and I wasn't diagnosed until I was an adult, so I didn't know, but I spent my life believing there was something
fundamentally wrong with me. I believed I was too intense, too direct, too sensitive, too analytical, too weird, too much, and at the same time, not enough. And so I learned to hide those parts of myself. I learned to mask. And looking back, I can see there was a time before the mask. In first or second grade, I can remember I was different, but I didn't think of that difference as a problem yet. I mean, I noticed other kids were like more organized and more regulated, I guess, through their behavior, but it hadn't become an identity for me. Over time, that started to shift. I started getting left out. I started getting rejected and started feeling separate.
My teacher in first grade told my parents to get me assessed by a professional and my parents were not going to do that. I mean, this was the '9s. There was just not much understanding around neurode divergence. But I remember learning that my teacher wanted to hold me back. And I can see now that's when the shame hit. I didn't have the language for it, but shame entered the picture. The conclusion wasn't just like this is hard or I'm different. It was there's something wrong with me. And that's when I realized I need to cover these parts of me. Over the holidays this year, I went back to my childhood stuff and looked at my report cards and it was wild, honestly, to see it on paper. So you look at my first and second grade report
cards and they were basically all C's, like even lower in verbal and physical control. Then you get to third and fourth grade and it's like a different child. It's almost all A's. Like still maybe a little bit of struggle with the verbal and physical control, but there's an obvious interesting shift. And it's interesting to consider, you know, just a little side note that even through grades in school, we learn to start measuring ourselves in terms of whether we're enough, smart enough, good enough, normal enough. But the point is that was the mask coming on. I learned don't be so loud. Don't talk about what other people think's weird. Don't cry in front of people. Don't let anyone see who you
really are. And I lived a long time inside that mask, even unknowingly fueled by shame. Now then when I was diagnosed as autistic as an adult, so this was six or seven years ago, it was so validating. It really helped me understand myself. But more than that, it revealed something crucial. The problem was not my difference. It was not the autism itself. It was the way I had learned to relate to my difference through shame through the lens of shame. And as I in my own personal work began turning toward that shame with curiosity instead of judgment and as I healed the pain that it had formed around. I did a lot of therapy. Something surprising happened. the traits that I had been
taught to hide, they began to reveal themselves a little bit differently. So my directness, now I wasn't seeing it as a flaw. I was seeing it as like, oh, this is clarity. This is honesty. My sensitivity wasn't a sign of weakness. Now it was a sign of depth, of my perception, of my attunement. My different way of thinking about things wasn't a problem anymore. It was creativity. was pattern recognition and my unique ability to synthesize. What I once believed made me too much turned out to be essential to how I experience and contribute to the world. And now I can see these things are in a lot of ways my superpowers.
These are my gifts. So this is a distinction I want to be really clear about. What needed integration wasn't the belief I was too much or that I was wrong because I was different. Those beliefs loosened. What needed to be integrated were the parts of me that had been hidden because of that belief, hiding my directness, hiding the way that my brain perceived things differently. It wasn't from integrating shame into my identity. It was separating from it and seeing, oh, this is a lens. It's not the truth. so that I could come back to the deeper truth of who I am beneath it. And at a nervous system level, this makes
sense. When shame becomes associated with certain traits, the brain learns to suppress them to avoid threat. Suppression doesn't erase our capacity. It buries it. Healing involves reintroducing safety to those parts of the system, allowing what was once threatening to be experienced without punishment to let those parts come back online. That's what I'm calling reclamation looks like. That's why the gifts beneath the shame, they're not rewards for suffering. They're what was already there waiting for safety to really be seen. So what does healing shame look like practically? For real time shame
navigation, please go back to part one. I outline those four steps of name it, locate and feel it, separate it, share it. I also give some additional sematic and mindfulness tools in part two. But the work of discovering the gifts beneath your shame, it usually doesn't happen in the middle of a shame spiral. This happens when you're regulated, when you are present enough to look underneath the shame without being inside it. So there are really two kinds of healing we've been talking about in the series. One is how you work with shame when it shows up in real time. The other is what's possible when you have the courage and also the support to heal the original wounds that became the
roots of your shame. So high level healing shame is going to look like recognizing it when it shows up. Separating from it so you can see it that it's a story. It's not truth. Learning to tend to the pain underneath it. Sometimes that's in the moment. Sometimes it's later in the safe space. And it involves reclaiming the parts of you that shame tried to hide and choosing truth over self-lame again and again. And this is not a dramatic or instant shift. It is slow. It is uncomfortable. And it requires that deep paradigm shift from believing you are fundamentally flawed to remembering you are inherently good and worthy. And
over time something shifts. Not because the shame disappears but because it loses its authority. The work of tapping into those gifts beneath your shame. It's not something I recommend doing all alone, you know, because shame is very convincing. It feels like you. When I'm in the middle of it, I am it. I become it. And because of that, it can be hard to separate from it. So, it's helpful and often necessary to do this work with someone else, a therapist, a coach, another skilled, safe human that can be a mirror, someone who can help you stay oriented to truth when that shame tries to pull you back into self-lame. Before we close, I want to leave you with a simple reflection that
you can carry with you. So when shame shows up, see if you can gently ask, what is this protecting? What might be true underneath this? And then just notice where that curiosity leads you, your thoughts, your emotions, your body. And you might also offer a reminder to yourself, there's nothing wrong with me. This is pain, not truth. I'm allowed to be who I am. You don't have to force any beliefs. You're just planting a seed. And this could be something that you journal about if you have a journaling practice as well. In fact, I've included some journaling prompts for you to work with as a starting point in the show notes if you want to get some support. So, to close this series on shame, part one was recognition, part two was separation,
and part three is about reclamation. Shame is not who you are. It is not your truth or your authenticity. It is a lens that formed around pain. And lenses can be removed. What's underneath shame is not brokenness. It's humanity and it's authenticity. We integrate what's real. We integrate our pain and our protectors and our authentic selves, not those deep shame beliefs which are a lie. But it's more like the shame dissolves and we are left with the truth beneath. And if you think about your life like kinugi, you don't erase the cracks. You honor what you've lived through. You let it become part of your wholeness. The gold isn't hiding the breaks or the pain. It's revealing
the beauty of what you survived and who you became. You are not a ever going to be a perfected spiritual robot. You are a human being. And that is a sacred experience. If you want to dive deeper into my ESP model and work together, learn how to name your shame, work with your shame, ultimately find more authenticity and freedom, I'm going to link my new program below if you want to check it out. If this series supported you, please follow, subscribe, download the episodes. Please leave a five-st star rating and review. Uh if you took anything from this, that would really mean a lot. And if you know someone who would benefit, sharing this could be a really powerful act of compassion and care. And it's been so meaningful for me
to create this series. It's such an important topic to me. If you found anything insightful, I appreciate you helping it get out into the world by sharing it. Okay. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your presence, your willingness to look honestly and gently. And most of all, thank you for not turning away from yourself. I'm proud of you. You are enough as you are right now. and I'll see you back soon right here on Relish.
