If you carry a quiet sense of heaviness or self-doubt that feels hard to explain, you may be holding unresolved trauma or shame. This inner ache can leave you feeling disconnected, tense, lonely, and anxious. Living with this heaviness makes it hard to feel safe in your own body or confident in your relationships.

As a trauma-focused therapist, I prioritize addressing shame and trauma with curiosity and compassion. My goal is to offer a safe space where your experiences are wholeheartedly honored. We will move at a pace that feels comfortable for you, helping you build a more mindful awareness of your patterns and develop a kinder, more supportive relationship with yourself.

Understanding How Trauma and Toxic Shame May Be Impacting You

Trauma and shame affect how you relate to yourself and others in ways that can feel confusing, frustrating, or exhausting. Unlike guilt, which tends to focus on a specific behavior (“I did something wrong”), deep-seated shame often centers on the whole self. Those who experience shame often carry beliefs like, I am wrong, or Something about me is fundamentally flawed.

Because of this, shame can feel pervasive, making it difficult to feel safe, worthy, or capable of cultivating self-acceptance and connection with others. There's a persistent sense of not being good enough, even if you're high-achieving or functioning well in life.

When it comes to unresolved trauma, shame is often an understandable survival strategy. Your nervous system is trying to keep you safe and protect you from further harm, even if it sometimes causes pain in the present.

Here are some ways shame and trauma may be showing up in your life:

Feeling like you don't know or can't express your needs: You may have learned early on that your needs were inconvenient or unlikely to be met. Over time, this can lead people to ignore their needs to attune to others. In many cases, it can also be difficult to recognize what you want, and you may feel guilty or afraid to assert yourself.

Shame around having specific emotions: Some people with trauma feel ashamed when they experience certain feelings like sadness, anger, guilt, or loneliness. You may judge yourself or assume these "negative" emotions are irrational or disproportionate. 

A constant sense that something bad will happen: Trauma can result in the body staying in a state of high alert, scanning for potential threats even when things feel relatively okay. This lingering sense of dread is its own coping strategy, as your brain doesn't want to miss something critical. However, hypervigilance can make you feel disconnected from the present moment, as you may struggle with feeling consistently anxious about what the future holds.

Desires to maintain control and manage situations to avoid problems: Trying to stay in control is a way of protecting yourself from unpredictability or disappointment. This strategy absolutely offers some relief, but it can also create exhaustion and make it harder to trust others or delegate when needed.

Feeling very critical toward yourself: Trauma can result in shaping harsh inner voices that reinforce self-blame, self-criticism, and high levels of shame. This voice developed as a way to protect you or help you cope, even if it also comes with some pain.

Difficulty relaxing or resting even when you know it's important: Productivity is often praised, and rest may feel either unfamiliar or undeserved if you learned to stay vigilant to stay safe. Slowing down also sometimes comes with its own difficult feelings, including guilt, anxiety, or boredom, and these may be hard to reconcile.

Fears around rejection and abandonment: If intimacy felt either inconsistent or conditional in the past, you may resonate with having low self-esteem, and relationships can certainly trigger fears of being judged or pushed away. These fears are often rooted in early attachment experiences and may impact how safe you feel around others today.

The Connection Between Shame and Trauma

Chronic shame is often one of the most lasting imprints that trauma leaves behind. The nervous system often looks for meaning when overwhelming or painful experiences occur in environments that are meant to be supportive or protective. Rather than recognizing that something unfair happened, many people internalize the belief that they were the problem.

Shame becomes a way of making sense of trauma. Here are some ways feelings of shame and trauma symptoms may reinforce one another:

Turning distress inward rather than outward: If expressing certain emotions (anger, anxiety, loneliness, sadness) wasn't welcomed or safe, you may have redirected those emotions inward. Shame can develop as an adaptive way to contain distress, even though it comes with self-blame and emotional isolation.

Internalizing that your reactions mean that something is wrong with you: Shame often codes common trauma responses like anxiety, flashbacks, avoidance behaviors, or memory struggles as moral failures. You may judge yourself intensely for struggling, and that can intensify the shame.

Learning that acceptance is conditional: If you experienced trauma, you may have learned that love or approval depended on how well you behaved or met others’ expectations. Over time, this can lead to feeling like you must earn acceptance by being successful or low-maintenance. In your adult life, this can show up through patterns of perfectionism or people-pleasing. 

Fearing being seen too closely: Shame conveys that the true self is unacceptable. It makes sense, therefore, that closeness can feel risky. Even if you long for connection and meaningful relationships, vulnerability can trigger anxiety and withdrawal. You may find yourself hiding parts of yourself even if you want to air them out.

How I Treat Chronic Shame and Complex Trauma

Chronic shame and complex trauma require compassionate therapy that prioritizes safety, attunement, pacing, and respect for your needs. Healing shame or trauma is never about forcing insight or pushing yourself to move on. Instead, therapy is meant to be a warm and consistent space to understand how your experiences shape you and how to slowly build a different relationship with yourself.

My work is always grounded in the belief that all symptoms make sense. Together, we will focus on creating greater emotional safety and expanding your innate capacity to stay present with your inner experiences. Some core elements of my work include:

Understanding that how you feel shame is a survival response:  We will explore how shame developed as a way of protecting you in past situations or relationships. By understanding- and having compassion- for its origins, we can begin to soften its grip rather than simply reframing or fighting against it.

Building self-compassion toward your needs and inner world: Trauma work involves cultivating a kinder and more supportive relationship with yourself. This, too, softens self-criticism and allows you to be more caring when shame gets activated.

Exploring attachment and relational patterns: We will gently unpack how early relationships may continue to influence negative feelings, boundary difficulties, and closeness. This insight can help you feel more empowered in how you relate to others.

Strengthening emotional tolerance: Learning to trust that you can manage difficult situations is often a key part of overcoming shame and trauma. We will work on how to take care of yourself if you're experiencing hypervigilance or shutdown-like responses. You will develop strategies that support you in feeling grounded and connected without bypassing your emotional experience.

Integrating insight with practical support: As understanding deepens, we will also focus on cultivating coping skills to help you manage difficult situations. These may include self-compassion exercises, mindfulness techniques, boundary work, and other skills to support your overall regulation.