On Listening to Shame: How to Heal the Inner Critic and Find Self-Compassion
I think a lot about shame. I think about shame whenever I’m speaking with clients who are ruthlessly vitriolic to themselves and yet muster otherworldly kindness when dealing with others in their lives.
The Voice We’d Never Tolerate from Anyone Else
I think about what compels a person to abide by a set of rules that applies to everyone but themself? I often ask pretty naive questions at the outset: If this inner critic was someone else and they spoke to you this way, would you put up with it? If you heard someone speaking like this to someone you cared about, would you do something about it?
When we apply this logic to it, we can clearly say that it would then make sense to treat oneself with more patience and kindness. But the chasm between knowing intellectually and knowing in one’s bones is far. And what use is logic when confronting structures apparently contingent with our conception of self? I won’t attempt to make sweeping claims for everyone who experiences inordinate amounts of shame.
The Shape Shame Takes: When the Body Keeps the Score
But for me, it tends to be a matter of exploring the utility in applying symbolic meaning to what is essentially nothing more than an intense pressure in my chest. This presence has always been there. Never leaving fully and always shifting in tonality from moment to moment. It grows when I am in a stressful situation—as a sign of my growing inability to handle the mundanities of life. It spikes sharply when I am rejected or embarrassed or make some mistake under the watching eyes of another. It bubbles softly late at night when things are calm and peaceful, as if to remind me I am never far from my own incompetence and stupidity.
For me, shame has always announced itself through the body—that pressure in my chest that seems to have no clear source, only a message: you are wrong. It’s a strange kind of knowing that predates language or reason. As The Body Keeps the Score so poignantly reminds us, our bodies hold the imprints of what the mind can’t yet name. The tension in my chest isn’t just discomfort; it’s memory, protection, and warning all at once.
This seems like it wouldn’t do me much good at all. It sounds like a burden on my life that I would do better without. So why have hundreds of mediation sessions and yoga classes not enabled me to simply ‘abandon that which no longer serves me’? Well the voice has not led me completely astray. I have a job and I pay the bills and I am able to experience brief moments of fleeting happiness. This is really all I’ve ever hoped for! That’s all I’ve ever felt I deserved.
The foundation that supported me until now has a number of compelling arguments against its demolition. “Without the constant fear of embarrassment, isolation, and emotional discomfort you wouldn’t have found the will to do anything! Without the harsh biting tone and immediate denial of praise you would be some lump on a couch with nothing to show for yourself. You would be a waste of time and energy to those around you (even though you already are).” Sound familiar?
The Inheritance of Shame
Chief among shame in the list of things I dwell on often is the gnawing sense that things are not as they seem to be. A feeling of unrest that keeps me from ever getting too comfortable or too complacent. If I go back to the origin of the tension in my chest it seems to point to this being its origin. My mother, being an alcoholic and drug addict, was a professional in the art of the rug pull. She could lull us all into a sense of ease only to spiral and leave us questioning our own perception of reality.
“What is wrong with me for trusting this woman after all she’s done?”
“Why am I so naive to her lies and manipulation?”
“It’s obvious she doesn’t love me, so why do I keep hoping this is not the case?”
From her, I learned the early choreography of shame and survival. Children in these environments often develop what therapists call a shame-based identity—a sense that love must be earned through vigilance and self-blame. She took the inner turmoil she experienced nearly every second of every day and offloaded it to those around her.I vaguely remember that feeling in my chest escaping the confines of a stressful situation and simmering constantly.
At school. At home. On the soccer field.
In fact, soccer became a microcosm of my life in general. I didn’t ask to be there and people were shouting at me from the sidelines that I need to keep pushing, hustling, trying. If I’m not having fun, it’s my fault for not putting in the time and effort. If I do something right, I genuinely have no fucking idea how I could do it again. The breaks aren’t long enough and I would rather be looking at bugs in the grass.
When Shame Becomes a Family Language
This seems like an odd tangent but it speaks to the growing number of symbols I had to contextualize and codify the distressed unease in my chest. It seemed to intensify when I did something wrong or believed in something that was never going to happen. It grew when I tried hard and fell short and it was briefly abated by praise for things I felt as tenuous and incomprehensible. It was the reminder of my rightful place in this world: a strange and incompetent loser. This was solidified as my inner voices began to get all their material from my parents and teachers. No longer a vague conspiracy or baseless claim. This hypothesis had repeatable results. My life was rife with supporting evidence. It might as well have been raised to the level of scientific law.
So by middle school, when the chest tension had made itself comfortable in my solar plexus, it made a lot of sense that the feeling meant I was doing something WRONG. I was an EMBARASSMENT. I was about to be reprimanded, chastised, beaten, and punished. A good thing to know for a little squirt like myself who could do no right.
embracing embodiment: moving toward compassion
Whether this blog seems self-effacing or self-loathing, I do have a point. It wasn’t until my mid 20s that I was encouraged to sit with the shame, to notice the pressure in my chest without assigning it meaning or any of the same old storylines. This embodiment practice became my quiet act of healing—an experiment in separating the inner critic from my core self. This was not easy, of course, but it sprouted fruits that quickly affirmed I was moving in some direction. Not a direction that seemed better or worse. Just a new direction and a new way of doing things. Not only was I creating space between the embodied sensation and my applied meanings, but I was expanding my capacity to give myself a break. I was making room for complexity. It used to be so simple: “You feel bad? Well what did you do?”
The Allure of Self-Blame
You see how this logic impacts a person who feels bad all the time. A constant sense of being in the wrong makes things painful, but simple. Eschewing complexity for the sake of simplicity provided me with a radiant lodestar to navigate a terrifying and dangerous world.
I won't universalize my experience but I’m sure it resonates with someone. Shame makes things easy by giving us someone to throw under the bus every time things get complicated. In the worst cases, shame propels escapism through substances and transformation of our pain into a force for violence against those close to us.
healing shame: Listening Instead of Fixing
Maybe the first step in healing isn’t fighting the inner critic, but learning to listen for what it’s been trying to protect all along.
I guess I’d ask that we take time to sit with our shame as it arises—to meet it with curiosity instead of condemnation. Follow the sensations to their roots. Maybe just listen to what they may have to say in a new way. Maybe just entertain the idea that you are worthy of compassion, even when it hasn’t often been there in the past.
Shame can feel like a private language, but it’s one many of us learned the same way—through relational trauma and the slow erosion of safety. Much of what we call “self-discipline” or “tough love” began as protection, a way to survive complex and relational trauma. Healing begins when we let someone else hear that language and still stay close.
This is the heart of complex trauma recovery: learning that you can be met, seen, and understood without having to earn it first.
At Kindman & Company, we believe that healing shame and rebuilding self-compassion are deeply relational acts: rooted in connection, consent, and care. Like Liam, many of our therapists work with complex and relational trauma, helping you cultivate self-worth and trust after years of shame.
Reach out when you’re ready—we’d be honored to meet you where you are.
Featured therapist author:
Liam DeGeorgio, AMFT, is a neurodivergent associate marriage & family therapist who strives to challenge society’s expectations and perceptions of ‘normal’. He lives with ADHD, OCD, and PTSD and enjoys working with clients wanting to challenge toxic masculinity, embrace feminism & anti-racism, and adults with childhood trauma. He loves playing the drums, reading books, his partner, and their four cats.
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