Episode 79: How to deconstruct blame, shame and guilt for deeper self-trust

With Shanti Zimmermann

On the Secret Witch Show today our guest is Shanti Zimmermann. Shanti described herself as “a human, just like you”. She has learned how to navigate being human with deep integrity, clarity, and a focus on growth and real life. She has complex and compound trauma from her childhood that, for a portion of her life, made it hard to be alive. The work that she facilitates is based on how she found her way to a life worth living. She had a whole lot to unlearn and a ton of adult skill-sets she had to develop and practice and she shares everything she knows from her lived experience. She believes that liberation is our natural default setting as human beings and she contributes to it in every moment of her life.

In this episode we explore the notion of ‘healing’ and the language around it - and especially how we don’t need to outsource our power to ‘quick fixes’, but if we learn to deconstruct blame, shame and guilt, we can learn to embody our adulthood, make new choices and embody deep self-trust. Shanti describes blame, shame and guilt as “synthetic” constructs - “behaviour controllers” that are not our innate natural emotions - and narratives that invoke emotional response, or a ‘habit’ that creates somatic response in our bodies - exploring how it is possible we can alchemise shame and radically refuse to engage with our self-oppression.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

Blame, shame and guilt are the foundational ‘root’ of other ‘synthetic’ emotions that feel awful in our bodies - that’s usually how we know we are experiencing them
Yet, blame, shame and guilt are not ‘natural’ emotions to us as human beings; they’re what we’ve been taught and conditioned into
We each have our own ‘inner Gollum’ who helps us actively engage in these shame habits by beating ourselves up - yet we would never dream of speaking to others in this way, and our innate self wouldn’t think like that
We didn’t do it to ourselves; shame was usually done to us, but as *soon* as we become ‘aware’ of that, we can no longer say that because we are beginning to do it to ourselves - and now, we have a new choice
The deconstruction of these ‘unnatural’ emotions requires us to become curious and open to more awareness. From there, we can choose to grow into adulthood and begin to take radical care of ourselves - from the inside - most often we have an “adolescent mind-frame” (because we’ve learned to, innocently) - as we grow in awareness we can begin to say “no, thank you”
As aspiring ‘healers’ - real healers - it is so important that we embody healing shame and embody what we are teaching for ourselves first (or be in the practice of) - we need to feel absolutely 100% in our own bodies with lived experience of being grounded in that role.

Resources and things that we spoke about: