When Healing Becomes a More Sophisticated Shame

There was a long stretch of my life where I was driven. I built things, I pushed, I reached escape velocity, and from the outside it looked like a man who had his life together. What I could not see at the time was what was actually driving it. I needed to be seen. I needed the validation. I needed the money and the approval and the proof, because somewhere in me was a feeling of not being okay, and the achievement was how I kept that feeling out of sight.

Then I did what I imagine a lot of you reading this have done. I started doing the work. I got self aware. I learned to see the patterns, the masks, the places I was performing. And I thought, finally, I have nailed it. I am becoming conscious. I can name my attachment wounds and my coping strategies and the trauma underneath the ambition.

The costume I could not see

It took me a long time to notice the trick in that, so I will say it plainly. I had not actually put down the shame. I had given it a more intelligent vocabulary. Before, I covered the feeling of being bad with ambition and effort and going out to make something of myself. Now I covered it with insight. I could look at almost anything I did and trace it back to a wound, an injury, an addiction, a deficiency, and I called that healing. But the background hum was identical. The way I am is not okay. I am defective and now I have the diagnostic language to prove it.

This is the part I want the men reading this to slow down on, because I see it constantly in the men I work with. We can become almost addicted to the lens itself. Everything gets read through pathology. Every impulse is a trauma response. Every longing is suspect until it has been processed. And underneath all that careful self examination is the same old virus, the quiet conviction that there is something fundamentally wrong with us that enough work will eventually fix. We just traded one costume of shame for a better tailored one.

The analogy that cracked it open

My therapist gave me an analogy that cracked this open for me. He is a gay man, and he talked about what it was for him and for so many people to be told, across whole lifetimes and whole histories, that who they are at the core is broken and could be corrected. Imagine telling a gay man that who he loves is a malfunction, that trauma made him this way, and that if he just did enough work he could be made straight again. We can see how violent that is. We can see that it is not healing at all, it is the deepest form of being made wrong, dressed up as help.

And then I had to ask myself how often I do exactly that to my own parts. How often I take something that might be a true and authentic part of who I am and immediately file it under damage. Maybe some of what I find in there did form around an old wound. That can be true. But the reflex to treat every part of myself as a problem to be solved is not freedom. It is shame wearing the robes of a healer.

Men get caught in this from both directions. A man who has developed real sensitivity, attunement, the ability to feel, often learned early that those qualities made him weak or too much, and he carries quiet shame about the most tender parts of himself. And a man with a more grounded, fierce, traditionally masculine nature now often finds that his fire and his edge are met with suspicion, as if his strength itself were something faintly toxic that he ought to apologise for. So a lot of us end up standing in the middle wondering where exactly we are allowed to put ourselves, editing whichever parts seem least welcome, never quite landing as the whole man we actually are.

Loving what is, not fixing what is

This is why the work we do is not what people often expect. The heart of Heart iQ is loving what is. Not fixing what is. The point was never to make you more aware of everything wrong with you so you can manage it better. Shadow work, the way Maanee and I hold it, is the practice of letting the parts that were never allowed finally come into love. The parts you caged as a boy. The longings you decided were shameful. The tenderness, the fierceness, the hunger, the grief. Not to analyse them into submission, but to let them be felt, met, and lived in ways that are safe and whole, so that you stop being quietly run by a shame you cannot even see anymore.

There is a place past all of this that I am only beginning to know myself. A stillness where I do not need to push and I do not need to fix, where action comes from something grounded rather than from the old need to finally be enough. I cannot promise anyone that ground in ten days. But I can tell you that the door to it is not more excavation of what is wrong with you. It is the opposite.

The invitation

This July, from the fifth to the fifteenth, I am holding a retreat at our sanctuary in the Netherlands called Love Is What We Came Here For, with Maanee Crystal. People hear the word love and assume it is a relationship event, something soft. It is ten days of deep, embodied, somatic shadow work on love, intimacy, and the parts of our desire we have learned to hide, and it begins with your relationship to your own disowned parts long before it is about anyone else. It asks for honesty more than anything, and it is genuinely not for everyone. If you are looking for technique or a peak experience, this is not that.

But if you read all of this and something in you went quiet, if you recognised the costume you have been wearing, I would love to talk with you about whether this is your time.

You can read more about the retreat and reach out here: Love Is What We Came Here For