Shame is basically the fear of being unlovable—it’s the total opposite of owning our story and feeling worthy. In fact, the definition of shame that I developed from my research is: Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.

In addition to hopelessness, another primary indicator of an image is a pervasive sense of shame, a feeling of not being worthy or deserving. A specific shame lives in the inner child of all of us, stemming from the time we discovered, with a great shock, that our parents and our world were not perfect. The child has a great need to believe that

Shame is when you feel like you will never have a place where you are accepted and can feel at home. We have an image we want to project (the first voice) because this internal narrative of shame (the second voice) is driving us. The image we want to project by proving or hiding isn’t who we really are. The driving narration of shame isn’t who we