Toxic Shame and Childhood Trauma
Explore how childhood shame carries into adulthood—and learn tools for reparenting yourself with understanding.
Toxic Shame and Childhood Trauma
Explore how childhood shame carries into adulthood—and learn tools for reparenting yourself with understanding.
- 1.5-hour recorded video session
- 12-page worksheet with dialoguing exercises
- 36-slide presentation deck
In this course, you will learn
How shame manifests in childhood trauma — Understand direct shame (weaponized by a parent) and indirect shame (absorbed from family dysfunction), and how both fuel adult symptoms like self-blame, baseline restlessness, and emotional triggers
How shame becomes a survival strategy — Learn why unsafe children adopt shame as a way to make sense of chaos, and how self-blame creates an illusion of control that persists long into adulthood
The role of your inner adult in healing shame — Discover how the prefrontal cortex (inner adult) can steady the amygdala (inner child) when shame is triggered, shifting you from survival mode into present-moment awareness
Dominant and non-dominant hand dialoguing — Practice a bilateral stimulation technique that engages both brain hemispheres to help your inner adult parent your inner child through shame attacks and triggers
Overview
Toxic shame is one of the most pervasive and least understood legacies of childhood trauma. In this course, Patrick Teahan explores how shame takes root in unsafe family systems — both through direct shaming (criticism, blame, emotional weaponization) and indirect shame (growing up with parents whose behavior you internalized as your own failing). Using developmental psychology, the inner child/inner adult framework, and vivid examples, Patrick maps how a child's survival strategy of self-blame carries forward into adulthood as baseline restlessness, imposter feelings, and relentless self-criticism.
The course moves from understanding to action, teaching a dominant and non-dominant hand dialoguing technique — a bilateral stimulation practice akin to EMDR — that helps you engage your inner adult (prefrontal cortex) to steady and reparent your inner child (amygdala) when shame is activated. The accompanying worksheet walks you through recognizing shame triggers, common shame beliefs rooted in childhood, and a step-by-step dialoguing process you can return to again and again.
What's included?
1.5-hour recorded video session on shame, survival, and reparenting
12-page worksheet with dialoguing exercises and shame belief inventory
36-slide presentation deck
Why This Matters
Most childhood trauma survivors don't fully recognize how deeply shame has woven itself into daily life — not just as an emotion, but as a lens through which everything is filtered. Shame that began as a child's survival strategy continues to run the show in adulthood, fueling self-doubt, disconnection, and a quiet sense of never being enough. Understanding where shame comes from and how it operates is the first step toward loosening its grip, and developing your inner adult's capacity to meet that shame with steadiness and compassion is what makes lasting change possible.
Who It’s For
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