Shame is one of the most common — and most misunderstood — experiences in the healing journey. It's not embarrassment. It's not guilt. It's the quiet, persistent belief that something is fundamentally wrong with you. In this first episode of our May series on shame and self-worth, Jessica lays the clinical foundation: what shame actually is, where it comes from, and why understanding it is the first step toward being free of it.
What We Cover
Shame vs. guilt — they feel similar, but they operate very differently and lead to very different outcomes. Guilt says I did something bad. Shame says I am bad. That distinction is everything, and it matters deeply for how we approach healing.
Where shame comes from — shame isn't something we're born with. It forms in childhood, in the relational environment around us, shaped by how our emotions and needs were responded to. When a child's needs are consistently met with criticism, dismissal, or withdrawal, they don't conclude the adult is struggling — they conclude something is wrong with them. That belief can quietly run the show for decades.
How shame hides in plain sight — by the time you've been carrying it long enough, shame doesn't feel like shame anymore. It feels like truth. Jessica walks through some of the most common ways it shows up: chronic people pleasing, perfectionism, difficulty receiving care, over-functioning in relationships, and numbing behaviors.
The path toward healing — healing shame isn't about arriving at a destination where you never feel it again. It's about developing a different relationship with it. Recognizing it. Getting curious about it. And most importantly, letting yourself be witnessed — because shame grows in secrecy and heals in connection.
Resources & References
Research psychologist June Price Tangney's work on shame and guilt is referenced in this episode. Her decades of research distinguishes shame as a painful sense of being a flawed, unworthy person — not someone who made a mistake, but someone who is the mistake.
Internal Family Systems (IFS) framework is referenced as a lens for understanding how early shame experiences become carried by younger parts of the self.
This Month on Healing Is My Hobby
May is our shame and self-worth series. Each episode goes deeper — through the lens of what you've inherited, your emotional life, practical experiments you can try at home, and the trauma-informed perspective that every conversation about shame deserves.
shame, shame vs guilt, what is shame, self-worth, healing shame, clinical social worker podcast, LCSW podcast, shame and identity, shame in therapy, internal family systems, IFS parts, core beliefs, childhood shame, trauma and shame, people pleasing, perfectionism, over-functioning, emotional healing, self-compassion, window of tolerance, healing is my hobby, Jessica Colarco, mental health podcast, therapy podcast, shame series, shame and self-worth, worthiness, emotional wounds, generational shame, June Price Tangney
Transcripts
Jessica Colarco (:
Hi and welcome back to Healing Is My Hobby. I'm Jessica Colerco, a licensed clinical social worker, therapist, and someone who is genuinely passionate about making the inner work accessible to the people who need it most. This month, we're going somewhere that I think is one of the most important and most avoided places in the healing journey. We're talking about shame. not guilt, not regret.
not the uncomfortable feeling of making a mistake, I mean the deep, quiet, often invisible belief that something is fundamentally wrong with you, that you were too much or not enough or somehow broken at the core.
sat with hundreds of clients over the last 20 years, many of them high achieving, deeply caring, outwardly capable. And I can tell you shame is almost always in the room. It just doesn't always announce itself by name. So today, in our first episode of our May series on shame and self-worth, I want to lay the clinical foundation. I want to tell you what shame actually is.
where it comes from, and why I think understanding it is the first step toward being free of it. So let's get into it. It's so interesting for the month of April, we talked about grief, disenfranchised grief, identity grief, kind of, I don't know, alternative or outside the box ways of looking at grief, not just grief from death and loss of a loved one.
And ⁓ it's so interesting, I didn't know how deep to go when I started healing as my hobby and you guys have been loving it. In March we talked about trauma and talking about grief and there are so many downloads for these last two months. So we're just gonna keep going deeper and Shane, here we come.
When most people hear the word shame, they think of embarrassment, they think of getting caught doing something wrong or feeling red-faced in public. But clinically, shame is something much deeper than that. Shame is a self-conscious emotion, meaning it's an emotion that is directly tied to how we see ourselves as a person. And the core message of shame is not, did something bad. The core message of shame is,
I am bad. I am defective. I am unworthy.
Research psychologist June Price Tangney, who has spent decades studying shame and guilt, describes shame as the painful feeling of being a flawed, unworthy person. Not someone who made a mistake. A person who, at their core, is the mistake. And here is why that matters so much. Shame doesn't motivate change. It doesn't say, let me repair this.
Shame says hide, disappear, don't let anyone see you. It is paralyzing. And in the therapy room, I see this play out constantly. People who are not lazy, not unwilling, but deeply stuck because the shame they carry tells them they are not worth the effort of healing. Shame lives in the body. It is the heat in your face, the collapse in your chest.
the sudden urge to shrink. It is a full system response and it is deeply, deeply exhausting to carry.
One of the most important distinctions in the clinical world, and one that I come back to regularly with clients, is the difference between shame and guilt. They feel similar, and they often get tangled together, but they operate very differently, and they have very different outcomes. Guilt says, I did something bad. Shame says, I am bad.
Guilt is about behavior and shame is about identity. And it's important to recognize that that distinction is everything. When we feel healthy guilt, it actually functions as a moral compass. It says, that action wasn't aligned with my values. I caused harm, I wanna make it right. Guilt motivates repair. It keeps us accountable. It's uncomfortable, but it's productive.
Shame doesn't do any of that. When we are in shame, we don't think about how to repair a relationship or change a behavior. We think about how to escape the unbearable feeling of being fundamentally unworthy. And the most common ways people escape that feeling are withdrawal, perfectionism, rage, or numbing. I want you to really sit with this because I think,
Many of us have spent years treating our shame like it was guilt, treating it like it was information about something we needed to fix, when really it was a wound we needed to tend. The behaviors are not the problem. The shame underneath is the thing that needs attention.
Here's what I need you to understand. Shame is not something we are born with. It's something that we learn, and most of the time we learn it pretty early. Shame forms in the relational environment of childhood and how we were responded to when we cried, when we made mistakes, when we had big emotions, when we needed something, when a child's emotional needs are consistently met with criticism.
withdrawal, dismissal or punishment. The child doesn't conclude that the adult is struggling. Children don't have the cognitive capacity for that. What they conclude is, there is something wrong with me. I am too much, my needs are too much. I am the problem. And that's a survival adaptation. A child needs to stay connected to their caregiver to survive.
So rather than perceive the caregiver as dangerous or unreliable, they internalize the problem. They make it about themselves and that internalized belief, I am not enough, I am not lovable, I am defective, becomes a core schema, a lens through which they see themselves often for decades.
In trauma work, we call these core beliefs. In internal family systems, we might call it an exile, a young part of the person that is carrying the pain of those early experiences, still believing the story it formed in order to make sense of what happened. And then there is generational shame. The messages about worth, about emotions, about who you are allowed to be. These travel through family systems, often without
single word being spoken. You absorb them. You watch how feelings are handled, how mistakes are treated, what gets praised and what gets punished, and slowly a framework forms. For many of my clients, especially high achieving women, that framework sounds something like, am only valuable when I am producing. I am only lovable when I am performing. When I stop achieving,
I stop being worthy. That is shame, dressed up as drive, masked by success, but underneath there is a wound.
Part of why shame is so hard to work with is that it rarely walks into the room and says, hi, I'm shame. It disguises itself. It hides in plain sight. And if you've been carrying it long enough, it doesn't even feel like shame anymore. It just feels like the truth about who you are. So let me name some of the ways I see shame show up in my office with my clients in case any of these might land for you. Chronic people pleasing.
When you cannot tolerate someone's disappointment or disapproval, when you reshape yourself constantly to maintain connection,
driving the bus. The belief that who you actually are is not acceptable. Perfectionism, not the healthy kind that cares about quality, but the relentless, anxious kind that can never rest because if you stop performing,
Someone might see the real you and the real you is not.
ng a lot of work on myself in:
When people let you down, it's not really them you're upset with, it's yourself that you're upset with because you are struggling with feelings of worthlessness. And at the time I was just like, what the heck are you talking about? But it finally started showing up for me and I started recognizing that. And so for me, for the first 40 plus years of my life,
had an incredibly difficult time receiving. Receiving compliments, receiving help, receiving care from others, and that leads into something that I was chronically doing, which was over-functioning in relationships. When we over-function in relationships, we are taking on everyone's emotional labor. Anticipating every need, making yourself indispensable, because somewhere inside, you don't trust that you are lovable just as you are.
you believe you have to earn your place. Maybe we're numbing, scrolling, overworking, overeating, over drinking, any behavior that lets you not feel the thing underneath. None of these things make you broken. They make you human. They are adaptations. They are the ways a younger version of you learn to survive a wound. The work is not to shame yourself for the coping strategies.
The work is to get curious about what they're protecting.
I wanna close by talking about healing because I think sometimes the word gets thrown around in a way that makes it sound like a destination you arrive at. Like one day you'll be done with shame and you'll never feel it again. But that's not what healing looks like. Healing shame means developing a different relationship with it. Learning to recognize it when it shows up, learning to ask whose voice is this? When did I first believe this about myself?
Is this actually true? It means building what we call in trauma work a window of tolerance for vulnerability, the capacity to sit with being seen without collapsing.
It means practicing self-compassion not as a platitude, but as a genuine, deliberate act of care toward the parts of you that are still carrying old pain. And it means relationship. Shame grows in secrecy and isolation. It heals when we are witnessed, when we let someone see the thing we have been hiding and they do not turn away. That can happen in therapy. It can happen in, say, friendships.
and it can happen in your relationship with yourself. This month, that's what we're building toward. Episode by episode, we're going to go deeper into this work through the lens of what you've inherited, through the lens of your emotional life, through practical experiences, through practical experiments you can try at home, and through the trauma-informed lens that I believe every conversation about shame deserves. You are not what shame told you.
and the work of finding out what's exactly true is some of the most important work there is. Thank you so much for being here. If today's episode resonated with you, I would love for you to share it with someone who might need to hear it because I truly believe this conversation is one more people need to be having. If you'd like to read my blog or stay up to date, you can sign up for the newsletter at healingismyhobby.com.
You can follow me on Instagram at Healing Is My Hobby or on YouTube at healingismyhobby.com. And if you'd like to know more about my clinical practice, you can visit jessicacolarcolcsw.com or follow me on Instagram at Jessica Colarco, lcsw. I'll see you next week. Keep healing, it's worth it. You're worth it.
