What Shame Couldn’t Take

I wanted to start off my year reading books about feminine leadership and aggression among women. I crave to understand the whys and the hows of being a healthy, female community leader. As I sat in my chair in my room, listening to binaural beats for focus because frankly, I have to re-read pages constantly without it. It is just evidence of a life long struggle to stay present in the pages and not in the constant catastrophizing in my head. I recognized too, if my environment is “just right” (as if that’s an attainable goal with 2 kids), I can concentrate a bit better and not be consistently startled by every noise in my environment.

I sat with my books staring back at me, and the weariness of 2025 hanging on me like a shitty, french perfume and I just realized… 2026. A new year.  Then I sat and wondered, will 2026 bring the same “break your heart, fix your vision” energy that 2025 brought me.  Last year was marred with hitting a breaking point with my narcissistic mother, going no contact with my family, receiving soul-crushing musings that the family “should have given up on me long ago”, refusing to play my assigned role as the family scapegoat, struggling to heal myself while simultaneously trying to learn how to tap into the body, to help me and my coaching clients heal.  It’s heavy, raw, real and a mountain top moment to realize that every moment in my fucked up life, has been FOR ME.  

Every moment and how I perceived it, has led me into and out of pain.  

See, my vision of myself and of the world are tinged with the slogan, “I am too much and not enough”. See, when you are raised by a narcissistic mother, you learn way too early that you earn love, you don’t rest in it.  It’s a day to day grind to assess what mood she’s in, what I made her look bad for, comparison to the golden child of how I cannot do it like her, and generally assessing what thing have I done, what characteristic about me, made me unlovable today? This Petry dish of a shame-riddled environment, puts a child from age 0-23, biologically preoccupied with being perfect and exactly like the narcissist, or the opposite like me:  recognizing you can’t measure you, you’re a fuck up, unlovable, hated, and deeply flawed in a way that made you irredeemable.

As I continue to learn the impact of early relationship injuries like this, I am reminded that children have a wiring that makes them biologically NEED (not want, NEED) connection to maintain a healthy sense of Self. Without that connection, our biology takes over to say, “We need that connection to be fed, clothed, and protected,” ancient survival wiring.  When parents do not properly attach to us, we don’t consciously worry “will I be fed, clothed, protected”, our innate wiring kicks in to do anything, and I do mean ANYTHING, to feel connection, warmth, and enoughness, so that the survival instinct quiets. 

I took a moment to sit in my chair and wonder if this experience is my drive to create inclusive, same-as-energy communities for women so that me and every other woman with complex trauma, might one day feel enough in the presence of women.  How many of us women still operate on the premise that love is earned, their humanness makes them unlovable instead of relatable, and the attempt at it is so vulnerable, so painful to open up to, that they’d rather live a lonely existence?

I do know over the last year and a half of moving to the mountain of Western North Carolina, starting feminine connection communities, and navigating my own trauma story that gets triggered at every workshop, retreat, or event I run, that these thoughts are from a time and place in my life that imprinted in my nervous system where I was young and had no power to change my experience. It’s from a time and place in life, that I was caught in an inescapable form of attack, by being cast in the role of the scapegoat. This is the ghost of my role in a system that is not my here and now.  

I am choosing to put my body in the room and let the voices of past dynamics come like an unwanted inner roommate:  a drunk, judgmental asshole, and then I feel the breath in my nostrils, I feel my feet on the cold floor, I feel the hair on my shoulders, that allows me to come back to now, where I am a 44 year old woman who has choice, who doesn’t have to connect to anyone to survive, and where I am learning to create connection over control, collaboration over competition, and community over individualism- because THAT is feminine leadership. 

And this is my challenge to the misfits of humanity, the black sheep, the lost child, the overfunctioner, the ones who hide so as not to be seen and known… we need you.  Humanity needs you.  Your empathy. Your story. Your Anger.  Your presence.  Your perfectly imperfect self. I know this because there is breath in your lungs.  I know this because your upbringing gave you beautiful gifts from a shitty, shame riddled environment and built beautiful capacity to hold pain and hold the story of those around you without judgment.  It gave you the capacity to empathize with those in community, and imagine the pain, joy, and experience of the moment, just as they see it.  

Put yourself in the room.  Feel your feet on the ground.  Feel the breath in your nostrils and come back to your power and I’ll keep practicing the same.