Removing Shame and Shedding Limiting Beliefs: Silencing the Voice of Shame That’s Running Your Life
I remember when I turned thirty-nine and bought my first crop top. It was an act of beautiful rebellion. Not against age, nope! I’ve never had a problem with growing older, and no part of me wanted to dress like a teen in some sort of mid-life crisis.
I was rebelling against shame.
Against all the messages I’d heard growing up that sunk in deep and made me feel like revealing any part of myself– both physically and emotionally– was something to be ashamed of.
Like most women throughout history, but even specifically those growing up like I did, in the American south in the last half a century, showing any amount of skin was met with disapproving glares, gossipy whispers, and choruses of “bless her heart.”
Can you relate?
We’ll talk more about this in a later chapter, but it’s important to say it now too. How I dress and what I share of my body and my life only needs to stand up to the standards I set for myself. It only matters what I’m comfortable with, and that I’m making choices that reflect my soul instead of others’ insecurities.
It isn’t my responsibility or yours to control what the people around you say, do, or think in response to your wardrobe choices.
And anytime you hear the word “should” thrown around, that’s a pretty sure sign that someone is trying to play the shame game.
“You should really cover up.”
“Do you really think you should be wearing that at your age?”
“You should mind your manners.”
“You should be ashamed of yourself!”
Rejecting shame is an act of beautiful rebellion because it separates you from your ego. We talked all about ego in last month’s chapter of The Path Back to You, but when you live out of ego, you’re way more concerned with what others think of you than what your soul really desires.
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Our impulse to rebel comes from a hunger to know ourselves.
Our truest soul selves. The self that shame tried to hide from us. The self that we shoved down and ignored to please those around us. The self that we trained ourselves not to trust. The self we hid.
It’s an act of examining all the things we’ve been told and discovering firsthand if those beliefs ring true to us.
True rebellion is where we look society in the face and say, “I understand what you want me to be, but I’m going to show you who I actually am.”
Because that’s love. And a rebel speaks ONLY from a place of love.
True rebellion isn’t harmful. It’s beautiful.
It’s often the only way we make it back home. To ourselves.
There’s something about baring all– about revealing ourselves both physically and emotionally that we’ve been taught should be shameful. And I’m not a nudist by any stretch of the imagination, but this simple act of wearing a damn crop top has been a symbol for me of letting my soul self out into the light.
Every time I put on a crop top, I say a little “F*ck you!” to the voices of shame who try to tell me that not only what I do is wrong, but that I’m bad.
Guilt can be a helpful tool that tells us when we’re living out of soul alignment, but shame is never helpful and is only destructive.
You’ll have many voices in this life, maybe even your own, that tell you “shame on you.”
I’m here to tell you “shame off. Shame off.”
Shame is one of the main things that can keep you from being who you were meant to be and living the life you were made to live.
Standing up to shame isn’t disrespectful, it’s choosing to honor your own inherent value.
Let’s look at this through the lens of hustle culture. As a mom of three kids with social lives more active than mine, most of my conversations with other parents look like this, “How y’all doing? Good?”
“Yeah, we’re good! Busy!”
We wear busy like a badge of honor and ignore the real soul-level exhaustion that’s the price of keeping up our overfull lives. And no matter how hard we try, there’s still a voice telling us that we’re not doing enough. A lot of us were raised to believe rest is lazy. Your entire body is begging you for a nap. You’re yawning. You’re tired. Your brain isn’t able to make decisions well. You’re irritable, but it’s 3pm. Your body says, “please let me rest.” Your brain says, “You shouldn’t nap. You should be productive. You’ve got too much to do! Better get busy staying busy.”
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Part of removing shame and shedding limiting beliefs is recognizing what we learned in the last chapter - the soul vs. the ego. The soul says rest. The ego says work.
Many women today believe they should work. Raising children isn’t considered work. Women are brought up in a society that says they aren’t enough unless they work as if they have no children.
Only by living a life guided by soul instead of shame can you become who you were made to be instead of who the world wants you to be.
You’ll never be fulfilled living out someone else’s misguided expectations of you. They’ll never be satisfied no matter how hard you try to fit yourself into their box. You were made for more. And you can never become your truest self if you’re letting shame run the show.
So stand up, rebel. Silence those voices. Come home. Live your truth. It’s time.
If you want to hear more of my shame stories and go deeper into how shame affects how we embody our truest selves, I invite you to join The Path Back to You course, which goes deeper into each weekly topic, shares practical tools in a weekly workbook, and gets more into the personal stories I don’t share on so public a platform. Click here to join.
And make sure to come back next week when we talk about shedding limiting beliefs!
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