Healing My Toxic Shame After Childhood Trauma

I will never forget the first time I was introduced to the idea that I was trying to heal all wrong.

For years, I pushed my body beyond what it felt capable of.
I hated the parts of me that weren’t “cooperating.”
I ignored the signals my body was desperately trying to send.

It was a one-sided relationship—my wants, my expectations, my timeline… and my body was just supposed to keep up.

I didn’t see it then, but I was forcing a one-sided dialogue with a system that had been carrying me through trauma for decades.

And then someone said something that honestly made me angry:

“Stop hating your shame. Stop hating the parts of you stuck in the past.”

I wanted to scream, Are you crazy?
Stop hating the shame that ruined my life?
Stop hating the reactions that humiliated me, the overwhelm, the fear, the abandonment pain…?

I couldn’t imagine loving the parts of me that caused so much suffering.

But the truth was… nothing I tried before was working.
I was doing the same things over and over and seeing no change.

So I became willing to learn something new.

And what I learned changed everything.

I began to see that the shame I hated so much—
the heaviness, the tightness, the numbness, the shrinking, the freeze—
was actually a survival strategy created in childhood.

Being my authentic self back then was dangerous.
My needs were punished.
My voice was shamed.
My feelings were dismissed.

My body knew I didn’t have a reliable adult caring for me, so it did exactly what nervous systems do:

It protected me.

Like an older sibling shielding a younger sibling from harm,
my nervous system absorbed the fear, the abandonment, the hurt, the shame—so the deeper parts of me didn’t have to.

It hid my authenticity deep within the subconscious,
untouched by trauma,
waiting for the day I could come back for it.

When I finally understood that…
my hatred of my body melted.

I felt something towards my body that I had never felt before:
gratitude.

Because the shame wasn’t the enemy.
It was the evidence of a nervous system that loved me enough to do whatever it had to do to get me through.

And that was the beginning of a brand-new inner relationship—one that transformed my life.

I also learned something else:

The body can only suppress for so long.
The people-pleasing, the isolation, the overworking, the “staying busy”—
they were all shielding me from the unprocessed emotions that were bobbing up, begging to be seen.

My body had done its job in childhood.
But as an adult, it became my job to come back for me—
the me buried beneath the coping mechanisms.

My job was to teach my nervous system that it is no longer alone.
That there is a loving, compassionate, capable adult present now.

Healing toxic shame isn’t about overpowering it, pushing past it, or pretending it’s not there.
It’s about building the capacity to be with it—
to understand it, hear it, support it.

Trauma healing is truly about creating the inner environment you should have had from the beginning.
It’s about building the relationship within yourself that lets you live as who you truly are.

And I won’t sugarcoat it:
This work is not always easy.
It’s challenging because healing means feeling—
feeling what was too big to feel as a child.

But once those feelings complete their cycle, something miraculous happens:

Your body no longer has to spend all its energy suppressing the past.
That energy becomes available to YOU again.
Your clarity. Your creativity. Your identity. Your aliveness.

This journey is hard… but it is absolutely worth it.

I had to walk most of this road alone.
And that is exactly why I created The School of Transformation.

A space where you don’t have to do this by yourself.
A space where your nervous system can finally exhale.
A space where you learn how to build resilience the same way someone goes to a gym to build muscle.

People go to the gym to strengthen their bodies.
People come to The School of Transformation to strengthen their nervous system resilience—to heal, integrate, and become whole again.

If something in this email speaks to you…
If your body is whispering yes…
If you’re tired of carrying this alone…

We currently have a 30% off sale for your first month of the monthly membership.

It’s the perfect time to join us and see if this is the resource your nervous system has been longing for.

You deserve support.
You deserve transformation.
You deserve to come home to yourself.