We Need To Talk About Shame

THIS WEEK: Why I am doing this. Next week: Shame and .... Voice

Why I Am Doing This: We Need To Talk About Shame

I am not an academic, I am not a doctor, I am not a therapist or a psychologist or a life coach. I LOVE those guys - the good ones - but in this instance, that is the point. We need to talk about shame. The rest of us. So it has fewer opportunities to eat us alive.

Community

This is a space for people who are curious about shame — not as a personal failing, but as something shaped by relationships, systems and power. Think ‘How To Fail …’ but for stuff you could not control.

It is not about failing well. It’s about refusing to call it failure at all.

You don’t need to agree with what I write. You don’t need to have the right language to comment. You don’t even need to be sure what you think yet.

What matters is that we hold the conversation.

This community values:

• curiosity over certainty

• nuance over slogans

• humour as a form of care

• and kindness

It is not a place for pile-ons, hot takes or fixing each other. It is a place for sitting with difficult ideas, sharing lived experience carefully and recognising when shame has been quietly shifted onto the wrong person.

Many people with an interest in this will have histories shaped by trauma, power imbalance or institutional failure. Or all three. Please comment with that in mind — including when you disagree.

If you’ve ever felt that something important was happening in your life, or therapy, or work, but you couldn’t quite say it without feeling ashamed — you’re probably in the right place.

Welcome. Take your time.

A note on comments, care and self-disclosure

A quick but important note.

I am not a therapist, clinician or crisis service. I’m a writer, journalist and law graduate thinking — sometimes out loud — about shame, power and the systems we move through.

This Substack is a place for reflection and discussion, not therapy.

You do not need to share personal or traumatic details to take part here. In fact, I’d gently encourage you not to. Shame often tempts us into disclosure as a way of seeking relief — but doing that in a public forum can sometimes make things feel heavier rather than lighter.

You’re very welcome to comment on ideas, patterns, questions, moments of recognition — without telling your whole story.

Please also be mindful that others reading may be carrying their own difficult histories. Write with care. Avoid graphic detail. Avoid diagnosing yourself or anyone else. And please don’t ask other readers to hold or respond to material that really needs private, professional support.

If something in these essays brings up distress for you, that matters — but it’s a sign to reach out to someone who can properly support you, not to push yourself to share.

This community is about thinking together, not fixing each other.

Thank you for helping keep it that way.

What to expect

A weekly essay on shame, power, and survival. I am job hunting, so I will let you know if this becomes untenable … if I ever actually get a job, basically.

ONE: Shame and … Me

I am writing this from the treacly centre of one of the worst shame spirals of my life.

Nice to meet you. Subscribe now! I am a barrel of laughs.

How I wish that opening sentence was hyperbole.

How I wish it was written with retrospective flourish – a reflection from the safe place. The ‘did I tell you about the time? / this one needs a glass of wine / it was five years before I could look him in the eye’ place.

I am not there. I am right in the sticky fucking thick of it: barely sleeping, replaying conversations, rewriting emails like a deranged copy editor. You see a middle-aged woman in pink boots walking round a park. I know I am a rabid animal, desperately seeking a form of words, an organisation of thoughts, that might remove the scarlet letter from my chest. I am honestly this close to leaping at you, frothy-mouthed, and biting the shit out of your leg. Anything to be put down. Stay back.

There is no worse feeling in the world than wanting to hide your hot, regretful face in shame.

I wish I didn’t know it so well.

And the cause this time …

A private trauma?

A public mistake?

It is worse, far worse, and it is the reason I have turned to writing.

The cause was therapy. Excellent, skilled, compassionate therapy.

To be specific, it was the power dynamic at the heart of the excellent therapy. A dynamic rarely examined in laypersons’ forums, and often idealised, by the client. We can experience ‘transference’ – the emergence of past attachment patterns, intensified by our therapist’s relative opacity and authority. It is an experience that for some of us (I am convinced I am not alone) appears not to soothe shame but to actively provoke it.

Why is that allowed to happen? If it is part of a process, then it should be talked about far more openly.

How many clients sit through therapy feeling disempowered by their therapist’s supposed neutrality? Never naming it, for fear of sounding needy or weird, becoming increasingly vulnerable, feeling intense shame about their inability to just accept the power differential?

It leads me to wonder how many other constructs out there create and maintain a feeling of individual failing, of shame, which is a product of that construct. Which does not belong to the self at all.

We need to talk about shame. How it begins, how it holds us, how it is amplified, how it can be weaponised by the systems all around us.

I told you I was fun.

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Don’t Let It Break You

Last July (2025), my memoir Don’t Let It Break You, Honey was published. It comes out in paperback in May (2026). I thought readers would respond most strongly to its investigative spine: how private details of a sexual assault I reported to the police ended up in a tabloid newspaper. How I trained as a journalist to try to expose how that happened. How I ended up working on what became known as ‘the phone hacking scandal’, less a story about Hugh Grant’s voicemail, more about police corruption and total political failure. Somehow I feel that always gets missed.

That is not the response the book got.

I thought I was writing about journalism, loss, the law, survival. But again and again readers have told me the same thing: I recognised myself in the shame.

Shame, it turns out, is communal. We just experience it alone.

Trauma’s residue, shame shows up first in the body, then lodges in the mind: that cringe-inducing sense that you are too much, and always have been.

The great silencer, it forces anger inwards, persuading your core that you are indeed everything you feared.

Shame is not the same thing as guilt.
Guilt says: I did something wrong.
Shame says: I am something wrong.

It arrives as heat, constriction, a wish to fold in on yourself. I experience it, like grief, as an ache in the chest — a longing for things to be different.

I have heard it described at the ‘flight’ response – the body’s survival system creating a sensation that makes us want to hide to keep us safe. It is so very effective.

And we experience it, so tend to refer to it, as a private affliction — something suffered quietly by individuals when they feel marginal or exposed. When we are experiencing shame, it is the last thing we want to talk about. But that is why we must. Because it also operates higher up the food chain, which I am sure I will write about in greater depth in later posts.

Shame is present in the brittle defensiveness of the powerful men who cannot bear scrutiny; in the compulsive need to be seen as winning, in the flattening of empathy that allows cruelty to be reframed as strength. Shame, unexamined, does not disappear. It metastasises.

Perhaps this is why those most driven to seek power or fame so often appear least able to tolerate vulnerability.

This was a thought that first occurred to me when I was investigating tabloid culture, both for The Guardian, assisting Nick Davies, and for Dispatches on Channel 4. Brave tabloid sources; reporters, snappers, executives, spoke to me about the ways in which shame was used deliberately, in tabloid newsrooms, both to make them comply with unlawful and unethical practices, and to ‘persuade’ the targets of their articles to do their bidding. ‘Shame is the fuel on which tabloids’ engines run’ is how I describe it in my book. Aggression masquerades as confidence. Humiliation is outsourced. When shame is denied, it does not soften, it hardens, and it causes harm.

Again, this is why talking about it matters — not only for those flattened and controlled by it, but because of the systems it quietly animates when left unnamed.

Writing Don’t Let It Break You, Honey was, on one level, my own attempt to escape shame. I wanted to reclaim my narrative — one derailed first by violence, then by unwanted exposure, then by the collapse of my trust in the institutions that are meant to find out the truth, and keep us safe.

It worked. I am proud of my offering. It is exposing, but because of that it took courage, something I value greatly. I know from the messages I receive that it has helped other women and survivors of violence feel less alone. Less ashamed. And that was the point.

I wish that meant it was harder to shame me now.

Back to my therapist

We had worked together for more than two years. She helped me survive the stillbirth of my daughter, revisit childhood trauma and make sense of experiences that appear in the book. I dedicated the epilogue to that work — and to her. The relationship was careful, ethical, professional — and deeply important. I had never felt so vulnerable, or so well held.

When we first began working together, I was terrified my therapist would abandon me. She didn’t. Week after week, at half-nine on a Friday morning, she turned up — and so did I, checking our headphones were working, smoothing our hair. I trusted her. I was also afraid of her. Or perhaps I am afraid of everything.

Perhaps — as a survivor of sexual violence and sudden death — I never feel wholly safe.

I don’t know why I say perhaps. I know this is true.

Sexual violence is dehumanising. My nervous system seems to believe that if people can really see me — see that I am a person — they will not hurt me. But shame whispers a counter-spell: what if they see you and decide you deserved it? What if they see you and leave?

I live on an island between these opposing instincts: to risk being seen and to hide my most vulnerable self.

Therapy is built on trust — and that power asymmetry we are rarely encouraged to examine. One person knows everything about you; you know almost nothing about them. You disclose; they hold. You unravel; they remain steady. For many people that imbalance is tolerable. This experience has taught me that for others — particularly survivors of sexual violence? — it can be actively triggering. They hold power; you have to trust them not to abuse it.

Journalists may be especially ill-suited to this. Our coping mechanism is curiosity. We map systems. We make sense of chaos by understanding context. In therapy, that instinct is politely confiscated. My relationship with my therapist was strong enough that I felt able to raise, many times, how difficult I found that — how much I felt I needed to know more about her in order to feel safe.

I didn’t, of course – the opacity is there for precisely this reason, to bring out the parts that find it confronting and to soothe them. So, I didn’t need the facts I thought I craved, but I did need a relational shift of some sort. My most vulnerable self needed reassurance. We needed to talk about the power dynamic it was responding to, because if you don’t name things, shame can take root.

I had been blanking in sessions, something about which I had also begun to feel deep shame – honestly I am so good at feeling shit about myself. Gold star for tipping into feeling shit. I thought I was failing. I thought I was letting my therapist down. For many weeks, we approached a particular memory, I thought I felt safe, but a protective part of me shut me down – entirely. I couldn’t speak. I would forget what we were talking about.

It was only after I triggered the ending that I understood it. With a little space I could see that the therapeutic relationship itself was what I was finding difficult.

This was a power dynamic charged not only with attachment wounds and sexual trauma, but with institutional abuse. The police had failed me too, something explored in the book. Ultimately, they had not protected me. I had given them private information that had been able to be used to shame me – the absolutely worst thing that could have happened. My body remembers.

The skill required of a therapist faced with that history is immense. Mine had it.

She coaxed me out of the woods with warmth and humour. Early on — as I describe in Don’t Let It Break You, Honey — she joked that she pictured a taxi driver named Ken, who helped me after an assault, as Ryan Gosling in the Barbie film. She checked if it was okay to say it; this was an intense memory. But she had sensed it would make me laugh and she was right.

We had many running jokes. Memorably that the last inch of tea in your mug, that has gone cold, is cuntea, because it is such a disappointment. We had a shared love of poetry and of dogs and of the outdoors. Sometimes I sent her ‘pebbles’ — funny things from Instagram. It was a bid to stay in touch in-between sessions, a tacit expression of my vulnerability, and an attempt to be seen as a whole person. My therapist responded with kindness.

You do not need to prove to me that you are a person. I will not hurt you is what all her actions said.

She laughed with me, she cried with me. She sat with me as I whispered memories of sexual violence from behind my hands, through thick, snotty tears — and she did not leave.

She did not leave.

Until she did.

I returned to my therapist with my insight about the blanking, triumphantly sharing that the ‘I feel like I need to know more about you’, which in itself I always felt so much shame about, was not a distraction from the work, it was the work. This was it! My most vulnerable part. We had found it and it was worried and it was shutting me down, but that is because we were close. I didn’t know what we needed to do in the relational shift we needed to make, but this felt almost exciting.

I thought my therapist would be fascinated. I thought she would agree - see what we had missed, look forward to finishing what we had started. It surely wouldn’t take long.

Instead, I was told, politely but at a remove, that she would not resume the work. An ‘ending letter’ arrived. She offered to help me find someone else. Crucially — and devastatingly — she would not explain why.

I got sacked by my therapist.

When I asked her directly if she might at some point talk to me about what she thought had happened between us, she said she trusted the parts of me to work it out.

I thought they had. I thought that’s what I was coming back to her with, but it was made very clear – there was no going back.

What followed was collapse. Shame crystallised into something close to panic. When I wasn’t parenting, I lay under my duvet and wept.

What had I done wrong? What had I missed? Was she maybe angry?

When a relationship built on shared meaning ends without it, something essential is lost. That something is trust — in the relationship, in the process, in how safe you ever truly were. The truth is: you were not as safe as you were encouraged to believe.

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Why this matters beyond me

Perhaps this is shame morphing into defensiveness, as it so often does, but I find myself questioning the ethics of such an ending. A psychologist friend explained that if a client activates something a therapist cannot contain — if the relationship becomes too close, or touches unresolved trauma of their own, or requires a relational shift they cannot make — then ethically, they must end the work.

‘Without explanation?' I asked.

‘Perhaps explanation would have made you feel responsible,’ she said. ‘Perhaps she feared it would invite bargaining. Perhaps it was too personal to share. Perhaps she felt that making something up to placate you would be a betrayal of the honesty you had shared.’

I sat with that. I slept on it. I still think it protects the therapist over the client. Ethics matter. Capacity matters. But these frameworks can operate at a distance from emotional reality. Can an ending be correct without being comprehensible to both parties? It leaves the client carrying a burden I am not sure is theirs.

Intellectually, I have scraps to hold on to – a ten minute ending call in which I could barely speak but I could hear the emotion in my therapist’s voice. Bodily, I feel abandoned — the very thing I feared. And I feel shame.

With more people than ever turning to therapy — fluent in its language, trusting its promises — this is something I hope the therapeutic community is willing to examine. That and the unspoken power differential that sends bodies like mine into survival mode. We need to talk about this stuff. Maybe therapy was never going to work for me – all I ever felt was shame about failing at it.

This Substack exists because we need to talk about shame. Shame is not a personal failure, despite very much feeling like one. It is relational. Structural. Political.

And some of the places we are told will heal us need, themselves, to be spoken about more honestly.

So this goes out to my hot-faced, shame-filled brothers and sisters. I thought I was free of it. Here I am again.

We are not broken.
You are not alone.
And this is survivable.

Don’t let it break you.

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