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If shame feels like who you are, not just something you feel, this episode is for you. Today we're talking about why shame fuses with identity and how to create space without bypassing the pain. 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 Alysia and welcome back to Relish. This is part two of a three-part series on shame. And today we're going to talk about why shame fuses so tightly with our identity, why it feels so personal and so true, and we're going to talk about how
mindfulness creates space between you and shame story without denying the pain that's underneath there. This episode is where we're going to get a little deeper beneath the surface. If you are just dropping in here, I strongly recommend starting with part one where we talked about what shame is, how it forms, what's happening in your brain and body when it shows up. That will make sure that you have all the information and context to really get the most out of this one because this is a specific threepart series. So, each episode is building on the last. As always, if this podcast supports you, please follow, subscribe, download the episode. Please leave a five-star rating and review. It
genuinely helps the work to reach more people. If you know someone who lives with that sense of being not enough, maybe it's a quiet sense, maybe it's a not so quiet sense, this series might be really powerful for them. So, I hope you'll share it. Let's do a super quick recap of part one just so that we have the context necessary. We established a couple of key ideas. The difference between shame and guilt. Guilt is about behavior. Shame is about identity. Shame forms through a rupture of our needs not being met when you're a child, when your brain's just developing. And more importantly, the meaning we make of that rupture, especially early in life. Shame is not just a thought. It's not
something we intellectually take on. It is a nervous system state that is tied to belonging and threat. Shame shows up in the body before it becomes a story in the mind. and we introduced the idea that shame operates like a lens. It's coloring how we interpret ourselves in the world. Today we are going to zoom in on a specific question. Why does shame feel like me? I've talked about this hamster wheel of healing and fixing many times. It's like I need to do more of something to finally have enough because then I'll be enough. I don't have enough now. So, I need to get it. I need to earn it, achieve it, find it. And that belief that I don't have enough is rooted in a deeper subconscious
feeling and belief that I am not enough. Shame is the fuel for that hamster wheel. There's a sense that I'm not enough, so I need to fix myself to be enough. I am flawed, so I need to fix myself to be perfect. I'm broken, so I need to fix myself to be whole. I mentioned in part one that shame is the most selforiented experience we have. It is all about me. I am a problem. And that is one core difference between shame and many other emotional experiences. It is self-oriented and making meaning in advance. So we've talked about how emotions are information. Fear says something bad might happen. Grief says something was lost. Anger says there's a boundary that was crossed. But shame is not clear emotional information. It's
already interpreted. It's already distorted information. So through the lens of shame, it's this means something about me, about who I am. And once it lands in our identity, it stops feeling like an emotion. That's something that comes and goes. It starts feeling like a truth. This is why it's sticky. Shame is sticky. I want to briefly recount how shame develops. The super fast version to remind you, please listen to part one if you didn't. Okay, so that this makes sense. Basically, you're in the womb. You feel whole, connected, belonging. You are unconditioned. And then you're born into this big scary world of conditions. And now you're separate from mom, from safety, from belonging. You
know, it's terrifying. In the womb, all your needs are met. Now your needs are not being met 100% of the time, at least because as an infant, you're completely dependent. And no human, even the most intentional parent, can be there every moment. No one can totally protect their infant from all the conditions and biases of the broader society they're born into either. So when those needs aren't met, we experience what I'm calling a rupture, a kind of disconnection, which becomes what I call your original wound. So before in the womb, there was no separation of you and me. You're whole. You're one with mom, with everything. And shame in some ways neurologically happens when we start to discover this concept of me. This is
where I learn. This is the time when I'm learning subconsciously that I exist developmentally. And now I don't feel whole. I feel separate. And there's some me to feel that separation to be aware of it. Shame is all about me. It is a self-oriented experience. This podcast rests within the topic of self-improvement. Think about it explicitly. It implies that there is some self which needs to be improved. So which self are we improving? In the paradigm of self-help, what I often see is we are trying to improve or fix the part of us that we feel is inherently broken. And this podcast, Relish, is really not here to offer more strategies for that self-improvement paradigm because that paradigm keeps you stuck on the hamster wheel. I wanted to do this podcast to
offer a paradigm shift into what if you didn't need to be improved. What if instead you learn to lead your life from the deeper, more expansive, truer parts of yourself, the more authentic self that you really are, the one that you were born into this world as before that conditioning took over. And that self, that authentic self, higher self, capital S self, spiritual self, your light within you, different people call it different things. That part of you was always enough, will always be enough, already as you are now. So maybe rather than self-improvement, we look at this as selfdiscovery and that's a different self. So that self is already enough already as you are now. And if when I
say that some part of you wants to believe it but struggles, that might be because you are still living in that paradigm that you need to be fixed. That's why I'm I call it a shift. It's not a perspective shift. It is a paradigm shift. It is drastic. It's not something you can think your way into. It's something you have to feel. You learn to embody. That part of you that feels not enough, it's not the whole of who you are. It's a part and it's not even a true part. It's not representative of your authenticity. It's a part that you learned to protect yourself and you learned it so young when your brain was just developing. So, it totally distorts your view of that truer self in the world. Shame keeps us believing we are broken and gives us
this idea we need to do something to become whole. We've talked about binaries in this podcast before. Good versus bad, black versus white, light versus dark, me versus you, broken versus whole. This kind of dualism keeps us suffering. I believe most spiritual paths are ultimately about coming back into knowing that I am whole. Wanting to feel that oneness and to know I'm not separate from others. I'm not alone. I belong. Neuroscientifically, this developmental model of shame makes sense. Our brains are constantly building and updating a self-model. This internal map of who we are and what we're capable of and how safe we are in the world. That self-model is shaped not just by facts, but by emotionally
charged learning, especially learning tied to belonging and approval and rejection. So when shame shows up repeatedly, especially early on, it's not registering just as like this hurts. It gets encoded as this is who I am. And once something becomes a part of that selfmodel, the brain treats it as stable and predictive. It doesn't question it. That's why shame feels like certainty. There's safety in certainty, isn't there? I mean, think about the unknown. It is so scary, right? Our brains like what's familiar because it's known. It's certain.
Shame offers protection through a sense of certainty. But it is a certainty that I am [__] up. There's something really wrong with me. When I shared the example in part one about being diagnosed on the spectrum and how that I think I used the words shook my identity, the reason it did that is I felt shame. Shame is selforiented and the me that I was before I got the diagnosis, you know, I thought I was this like mindfulness person who's emotionally intelligent and however else I identified. And because of my internalized abbleism and ignorance and lack of education at the time around neurode divergence, those qualities that I had identified as couldn't coexist with me, the me who might be autistic. And we become very attached to our
identities. That's what our brain does. If shame comes up, our identity feels threatened. Looking at shame means getting to know those identities and loosening our grip around them. And that's uncomfortable. In this episode, I want to talk about ego because that is a word that gets thrown around a lot meaning different things in the self-improvement world and spiritual circles. From a psychological perspective, ego is really just your self-concept. It's your identity, your roles, your narrative, your sense of um continuity over time. Ego is not necessarily bad. Psychologically, it is the part of us that says like this is me. This is not me. It's the functional self that
lets you operate in the world. You need it. We all need this. From a neuroscience perspective, that psychological ego is related to predictive processing. We've talked about it. The brain is constantly maintaining that self model, that coherent self-model to reduce uncertainty and keep us safe. And that is necessary for survival. And it's also related to the part of your brain that helps you have a narrative experience for your life. Memories of your past, dreams for your future. This is the default mode network. This is a necessary part of you as a human. Now from a spiritual perspective, ego I would say it's also not bad.
However, it's more often viewed as a collection of your unhealed protective strategies that formed around your pain. Ego creates separation. And spiritually part of why it's there as many orient to it is it's there to show us what we need to heal and what we need to transcend. So ego is our unhealed patterns, our unhealed wounds. So in other words, ego in the spiritual sense, it's the part of us that we learned I need to be this way to be okay, to be safe. When I talk about ego or what I'm going to call the protector, I'm talking about a part of you. And parts are real, adaptive, and meant to be integrated. But the belief that I am bad or I am not enough, that's not the part itself. That belief is like the lens that protector learned to see the world
through. The protector itself is actually intelligent and protective. It's it's trying to take care of you. The shame lens that it learned to wear is not the truth. I think it's helpful to think about this as a lens. The ego is trying to use it as a tool of protection. And shame creates control. It wants to control. Shame says there's something wrong with you. And then there's this part, this ego trying to protect you that says, "Okay, let's make sure no one ever sees that. So maybe you learn to overachieve or people please or control, compare, overfunction, perform, become perfectionistic, try to manage your image or not be found out because that's the reaction I'm going to have if I
believe I'm fundamentally flawed. Shame is keeping the system in line. And the larger system keeps us in shame. This is reinforced by the world around us telling you, telling us we're wrong, there's something wrong with you. And it's what keeps you on the hamster wheel of self-fixing because no matter how much you achieve, shame kind of keeps moving the goalpost. You know, you did well but not enough. You were liked but they don't really know you. You rested but you didn't really earn it. You're smart for a woman.
The underlying sentiment is you are still not enough. in some way you are inferior because of who you are. So let's apply that back to the example of me being on the spectrum. My ego, my unhealed wounds led me to believe there was something wrong with being different. You know, I was made fun of as a kid or criticized by all kinds of people for being weird, for being different, for, you know, that could have been related to neurotype, it could have been related to race, but for whatever reasons I learned it was bad. And so that ego part of me learned hide that. Don't be different. Fit in. Don't let people find out you actually are
different. So people please and act normal. Put on the mask. Perform. Because if they find out, then they will know you're [__] up. You don't belong. There's something really wrong with you. This is all happening at a subconscious level because I'm believing the thought is true. I'm believing being different is bad. And so that means I'm bad. I'm internalizing it because that's what I learned when my brain was developing. So let's talk just a little bit more about ego. The actual definition of ego, like the word itself, is a person's sense of selfesteem or self-importance.
I've talked about the research on self-esteem before. Self-esteem is not such a helpful marker actually because it's dependent on comparison. My self-esteem is high if I'm better than you, smarter than you, prettier, taller, wiser, you know, more whatever. Self-esteem does serve me. The research says if it's high. But if my self-esteem is low, if I'm worse in some way, I'm less intelligent, competent, uglier, whatever it might be, what I feel is shame. Because self-esteem is rooted in comparison, then my worth, okay? My self-worth is dependent on what I do compared to you as opposed to just my worth being in who I authentically am, which is inherently whole. With ego, there's a sense of selfimportance. You've probably met
people out there where there's this overt expression of ego. Like you can see them walking around trying to feel important, but you can also feel sense their insecurity because at the root, at their core, they feel insignificant, unworthy, bad. It's shame. You know those people, they think they're hiding their shame, but they are highlighting it. Everyone can see it. People talk a lot about narcissists and inflated ego. Ego is fueled by shame. Narcissism is So when we say work with shame, we're not trying to integrate the shame itself into who we are. We integrate our experiences, our pain, and the parts of us that learn to protect us, not the
shame itself. Because shame isn't a true part of you. It's a lens that those parts learned to see through. And we don't integrate the lens. We learn to see better through them. It's a voice that we learn to hear is not true. That distinction matters. I'm not going to integrate the belief I'm bad or that difference is bad because it's not a truth. I integrate and heal the pain of that little girl who felt so hurt for being different. This concept of ego is central to both psychology and contemplative traditions even if they use different language. So some call it selfing. I resonate with that word. I'm going to use it here.
Selfing is the process by which some you know passing experience becomes about me. Something happens and then we make some meaning around it and that meaning we make forms some kind of identity. So for example, failing at something becomes I'm a failure. Being rejected becomes I'm unlovable. Struggling with some kind of challenge becomes I'm weak. Shame leads to selfing. It's kind of the ultimate form of selfing. And once something happens, the brain stops relating to shame as this separate experience and starts relating to it as a fact of existence. This is why shame doesn't respond well to affirmations because you're not arguing with a thought. You're confronting an identity. So, for
example, a few weeks ago in an episode, I shared a story about how when I was a child, I struggled with reading and how that led me to develop a limiting belief that I was stupid. Okay, now this is a shame message. If I believe I'm stupid, that becomes a part of my identity. I have taken on the identity that I'm stupid. I'm not a smart person. Other people are smarter than me. Um, I identify with stupid, dumb, incompetent, whatever it might be. And that impacts my experience and my behavior. It impacted what I pursued in school. It impacted what I thought was possible for myself. And affirmations aren't going to work with shame. If I
started telling myself the affirmation, I'm smart. At that time, it wasn't going to feel real because I don't believe it. Shame is sticky and tricky because it's this deep rooted subconscious belief and you can't consciously tell yourself to just believe something different at a subconscious level. To retrain those beliefs, we have to go deeper. This is why rewiring the brain and healing the nervous system is a really important part of personal work. You can't just read a book and get transformed. There's no transformation and information. So for me this is where mindfulness has
been essential and where my academic background in mindfulness and my personal meditation practice really inform how I work with shame. I have found Buddhism especially helpful in my own spiritual path. And one of the core teachings in Buddhism is something called anata often translated as nonself or notself. And it doesn't mean that you don't exist. It means there's no fixed permanent identity that defines who you are. And that feels relevant here because shame in a lot of ways is an attachment to a fixed identity. You know, shame says I am bad. I am not enough. And when we believe that, we're not just feeling some kind of pain. We are identifying with it. which also means there's some me to be bad or not
enough. This can be helpful to realize. I know a lot of clients that I work with when we get into shame, it can kind of stop them in their tracks when they realize like, wait a second, shame is actually selfish. It kind of makes everything in that moment about me. Also, in many Buddhist informed mindfulness traditions, the work's not about getting rid of an experience, but about changing our relationship to it. A lot of people don't realize this because so many people are teaching mindfulness these days inaccurately, disconnected from its Buddhist roots. They tell you, you know, like meditate to relieve anxiety. That's not the intention of meditation. It's often a wonderful byproduct. But the point of
meditation from a Buddhist perspective is to sit down and observe your mind so you can be free of the suffering that you cause yourself that we cause ourselves. It's learning to observe our experience rather than merge with it. To experience without becoming it. If you've ever meditated and noticed the difference between thinking a thought and being aware of a thought, you know what I mean. You can try it right now. Actually, just maybe stop and notice and take a breath and become aware. What are you thinking? What thoughts are here? And you're not forcing anything right now. Not judging what's here. Whether it's a lot of thoughts or very few,
whether they're positive or negative, it doesn't matter. Just notice and watching it pass by. Okay. So can you get a sense how a thought can arise but it's possible to not be lost inside of it or following its trail or even thinking the thought there's some distance some separation some space between it that space is mindfulness and we can work with shame in that way a subtle but powerful shift is moving from I am ashamed or I am bad. I'm broken to there is shame. Shame is here. It's not denial. It's not bypassing. It's not pretending it's not there. It's acknowledging what's here without turning it into who you are. When we relate to shame as something we're experiencing instead of something we are, the brain is going to process it
differently. We move out of a sense of self-attack and into awareness. And that alone can soften your nervous system. We're no longer merged with the experience. We're now relating to it differently. When shame is fused with identity, you know the identity I am bad, it is heavily processed through self-referential systems in the brain, threatbased systems in the brain. And when we shift to observing, oh, there's shame. We reduce the narrative self-processing and increase presence, present moment awareness. And when we can observe shame rather than be it, we introduce choice. Awareness interrupts that automatic nature.
This is why mindfulness is not just like a calming thing. It's liberating. It allows the nervous system to experience whatever it is, including shame, without collapsing into it. So this little shift out of the I or me and into there is a common mindfulness practice to work with the self. By the way, I also find it really powerful to use with all emotions because we have a tendency to identify with them. So think about when we say I'm anxious, I'm afraid, I'm stressed. It becomes who I am. I am this anxious person. I am a fearful person. And could you see how that could become a limiting box keeping me stuck that identity because that's who I am. I'm an anxious person. There's no space for anything
else. So that switch from I'm anxious to oh there's anxiety. Anxiety is here. That's a little tool that you could try for yourself. I want to share another way that I work with shame personally and with my clients in my own programs. That is through a model I developed called the embodied spirituality paradigm. And in that we talk about three core components of you. There's your vessel and this includes your body and your mental events. In the mindfulness world, mental events are thoughts and emotions. So your vessel is your body, the body sensations, your thoughts, your emotions, all the phenomena that's happening inside that vessel carrying you. The second aspect is your light. This is your intuition
sense beneath the conditioning. It's that inner compass. So some people refer to this as your true self or your spiritual self, your higher self. It's this authentic you without the conditioning or the patterns. That's the part that you were born into the world as and the part that also feels whole and connected to something greater than yourself. And then the third part is your protector. I look at this aspect as the part that came to protect you when your needs weren't met. This part as I'm defining it is the ego psychologically, spiritually, neuroscientifically. So in this model, your light is the truest part of you. It knows the truth. The lens of your light is I am whole. I am
inherently worthy. I'm deserving just as I am. Your protector is seeing the world through that lens of shame. So it developed to protect you. But this aspect believes I'm not enough. I'm broken. I'm unwanted. I'm too much. So that shame belief that you carry becomes this lens that the protector orients to everything with. So every strategy it uses the peopleleasing, the performing, the you know disappearing, controlling it organized around that lens. You are risk of being found out as not enough. And my job as the protector is to prevent that. When you're in shame, your protector is activated and trying to prevent future pain. And that will become evident in your body, your vessel if you pay
attention to it, which is carrying the physiological charge of what you've learned in the past. But your light is always there, unchanged, unaffected. Because shame is not who you really are. It is a protector operating through your body. So the work here is not how do I get rid of the shame. The work is can I see the shame clearly without believing it's me. And I share this here because my hope is, you know, I'm giving you a bunch of different ways, but even this little introduction to the ESP model might help you as a tool that you can use when shame comes up. It can be helpful to acknowledge, oh, that's my protector.
This is happening because of some old wound within me that's triggered. And what's needed isn't more self-punishment. It isn't more shame. It's actually love. It's compassion. And when you can start to see shame in this way as something that's there as a protector, not a truth, then something important happens because we can stop asking how do I get rid of this? And we can start tending to the wound. And as we heal those wounds, we can let our light, that truer self, lead the way more often. This is the part we want to start relating to as who I really am. That's the part we want. If we're going to identify with anything,
we want to identify with that self. That's the paradigm shift. I want to offer another practice here, something that you can actually try when shame shows up. In part one, I shared these four practical steps to follow um in real time. Right now, we're going to get a little deeper because one of the reasons shame sticks around is we almost never let it actually move. We get into the story and we get stuck in it. What does that mean about me? How do I fix this? How do I get rid of this? But emotions are physiological events. They're energy that needs to move through the system. Feelings are here because they need to be felt. So what I do and what I suggest to others is when you notice shame arising
for me I'll feel it in my body I feel what I call that sematic shame signature I talked about how that was for me my throat my chest and if I can I need to step away from whatever I'm doing go get somewhere private I'll set a timer 10 15 minutes and for that time give yourself permission to not solve anything no meaning making no fixing no conclusion usions about your identity. Just let yourself feel the emotions and more importantly the sensations even if you can't name the emotions. So you might notice a heaviness in your chest, a tight throat, some kind of heat, a desire to curl up or you might cry.
There might be exhaustion. Just let it be there. I am now very aware of my sematic signature. I talked in part one that's that metal lava feeling in my throat and chest. I just let that flow and watch it without judging it there. And I might cry. I might curl up. I might need to move my body. I might need to rock my body. And if there is this urge to push it away, there always is the urge. Then I just notice that. This is where a reparing frame can be helpful, too. So instead of talking to yourself like a critic, you might imagine a younger part of you, a part of you that learned very early something's wrong with me. And if imagining a
younger part is too much at first, you know, you could imagine you're just with um some child that's not you. It could you could even imagine a pet or another friend who's in pain. And you don't need to correct or fix that part in that moment. You don't need to explain anything. You just offer presence. Like some you might put a hand on your heart. You might just say, "I'm here. You're not alone. It makes sense that this hurts. You don't have to figure this out right now. Just think of it as like sitting with a child, not lecturing them. You might offer a comforting touch. Maybe you um if not a hand on your heart. You might imagine your arms wrapped around them.
All this is an example of self-compassion. So you just offer that during that time. You let yourself move through it. Offer yourself some kindness. And then watch the sensations shift on their own. Watch the intensity as it rises and falls. And watch how even shame when it's allowed eventually changes. Everything changes. Emotions, especially when they're not resisted or fed with a story. They are temporary. They're states. We are designed to move through them, not to get stuck in them. And we talked about this in the science of emotions episode about the consequences of not feeling our feelings and how that repressed pain leads to
emotional and mental and physical distress in the body. We need to feel it. So this practice is not about convincing yourself of some new belief. It's not an affirmation practice. It's about letting the nervous system learn directly through your experience that shame can be felt without the annihilation of the self because your truest self cannot be annihilated. And you'll see that through your own practice that you won't disappear when it moves through you. You're not going to die even if it feels like that. And that learning is really regulating.
Sometimes for me it moves more quickly. Sometimes it's more slowly. The practice is staying present regardless. And I find now I can move through it much more quickly as I've had more practice and exposure to it. So as you practice this more, I find something surprising happens. Shame stops feeling like a verdict and it starts feeling more like a signal. And once it's a signal instead of this kind of firm sentence about me, then you can finally ask what it's been trying to protect. I often do real time visualizations and meditations with clients in our sessions. And I have linked one below that guides you through a version of this practice in the show notes. It's obviously not going to be
catered specifically to you. It's more general, but my hope is that it's a tool you can use when you're caught in a shame spiral and when you want to allow that experience to move through you rather than resist it. So, I've linked that below if you want to try it out. And all of these tools I've been talking about, they're here to help us in various ways become aware of our experience and relate to it without being it. So, there's not one right way. But the more we learn to do it, we start to see and feel that we are not so separate. There's not really some separate me and there I'm all of these parts within me and I'm also not separate from what's beyond me. We start to feel less alone.
We start to feel more connected to ourselves which also allows us to feel connected to what's beyond us. Shame is a feeling that I'm flawed, I'm not enough, and so I'm unworthy of belonging. The self-improvement industry, ironically, depends on you living from that paradigm. Because if you did not believe that you were a separate self and if you didn't believe there was something wrong with you, you wouldn't need to be fixed. That is the paradigm I'm inviting you into here. Not only is there nothing wrong with you, not only are you enough as you are now, even if you never did another piece of healing or personal growth work or whatever, but getting to
know that truer you that you really are always has been, always will be enough, that is the shift that's going to give you the freedom you've been trying to attain on that [__] up hamster wheel. You have wounds. You have pain. You are not your past. You are not your pain. And I also believe that the pain that you experienced is important. It's an important part of who you are. And so that's where we're going next. If shame is a lens, if it's a strategy, if it's not who you are, the question becomes, what might it be protecting? What is it covering? and what becomes available when shame loosens its grip. So in part three next week, we're going to talk
about the potential gifts underneath shame. Not because the shame itself is meaningful, but because something meaningful was hidden beneath it. I'm also going to share a little bit more about my own story around masking and neurode divergence and what I once thought was wrong with me and how that turned out to be a profound source of depth and sensitivity and insight. And we'll also talk about healing shame not by fighting it but by seeing through it. So a quick recap on part two. Shame is self-oriented. It fuses with our identity. Ego is not the enemy. It is a protective strategy shaped by our pain. Shame accelerates selfing. It turns the experience into identity. Mindfulness creates space between awareness and
shame. And you don't integrate shame itself because shame is this distorted lie. You learn to recognize that it's a lens, not the truth. And what you're integrating is the pain and learning to tend to that. If this episode resonated, I really appreciate you following, subscribing, leave a little fivestar rating, review. It really helps. Um, email me, let me know what you're thinking of this series. Remember that I've linked a guided visualization to take you through some healing and getting to know your shame in the show notes if you want to try it out. And if you're walking alongside someone who's really hard on themselves or someone who lives in a lot of shame, feels they're not enough, sharing this could be an act
of love. I would love to get this series out to as many people as possible. This is just such an important topic to me and I need your help to share it. So, thank you for, you know, sending it to friends or family, putting it in a group text or on social, whatever works for you. I do this uh because I believe in my heart this work ripples out goodness and I appreciate you being a part of it. So remember, you're not broken. There's nothing wrong with you. You are beautifully whole and human. I'll see you in part three.
