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Toxic Shame: The Poison That Keeps You From Being You

Episode: Monday, May 26, 2025

Show Description

In this deeply vulnerable episode, Suze and Jakko explore toxic shame – the kind of shame that isn’t about what you did, but about who you are. Unlike regular shame about actions or mistakes, toxic shame creates a fundamental feeling of being wrong for existing, taking up space, or expressing yourself. Through raw personal stories and profound insights, they reveal how toxic shame develops in early childhood, how it manifests in adult relationships, and why traditional healing approaches often fall short. This conversation illuminates the difference between fixing shame patterns and building an entirely new foundation where you can be held while healing occurs.

Episode Highlights

• The difference between regular shame and toxic shame that poisons your existence
• How toxic shame develops through early childhood interactions and attachment wounds
• Why asking for permission to exist reveals deep shame patterns
• The phenomenon of “shame rage” and how it shows up in relationships
• How toxic shame creates survival behaviors like people-pleasing, hiding, or constant busyness
• Why you can’t heal toxic shame in isolation – it requires being met in connection
• The role of spiritual connection in building a foundation strong enough to hold healing

Key Insights

• Toxic shame isn’t a belief you can simply reframe – it’s a nervous system pattern that releases actual toxic chemicals when triggered
• The child makes themselves wrong rather than the situation wrong because they’re dependent on caregivers
• Even well-intentioned parenting practices like timeouts can teach conditional love
• Shame rage is often directed at those closest to us because they can hurt us most
• Building a foundation of feeling beautiful, trusted, and embraced is prerequisite to healing shame

Quotes from the Episode

• “Toxic shame starts in early childhood development… where we feel shame about taking up space, where we feel shame about our existence.”
• “The minute you want to give yourself permission, the levels of toxic shame start releasing. That means in order to take up that space, you will need to poison yourself a little bit.”
• “The fact that you have a chair at the table means people want to hear you. It is not the other person who needs to make space for you. It is you who needs to take the space that’s there.”
• “We can’t work on shame if there is not a huge foundation of places where you actually feel beautiful, where you feel all right, where you feel trusted.”
• “We need to heal these foundations in our nervous system… This is the permission – the fact that you are.”

Next Episode Teaser

Join us next week as we dive into practical approaches for building the foundation needed to heal toxic shame – moving beyond theory into what healing actually looks like in practice.