You know what I want to say to you first, before we go anywhere else?
Stop calling it that.
I’m serious. The moment you label what you’re carrying as “shame from previous relationships,” you’ve already put a verdict on yourself. You’ve already decided there’s something wrong with you that needs to be fixed or cleaned up or gotten rid of. And I won’t sit here and let that frame stand unchallenged.
Here’s what I actually think is happening.
You got hurt. Maybe more than once. Maybe by people you trusted completely, people who were supposed to show up for you, and they didn’t. Or they did something that made you feel like you were the problem. And your nervous system, which is extraordinarily good at its job, learned a lesson. The lesson wasn’t a rational one. It wasn’t thought through in a boardroom. It was wired in. Something like: “I am the kind of person that bad things happen to. I am the kind of person that is too much, or not enough, or fundamentally flawed in some way that makes love dangerous.”
That’s not shame in the clinical, detached sense. That’s a wound. That’s what happens to a person when the people who were supposed to make them feel safe instead made them feel like the problem.
And here’s where I get a little fiery, because I care about this.
Most of the advice out there will help you pathologize yourself around this. They’ll help you build a case against yourself. “Here’s all the ways your shame is showing up. Here’s how it’s sabotaging your relationships. Here’s your homework to fix it.” And you’ll sit there nodding, adding it to the list of evidence that yes, you really are broken.
I won’t do that with you.
What I see, when someone comes to me carrying what they’re calling “internalized shame,” is a person who got very little of what I call the Missing Experience. The moment where someone was supposed to look at the most vulnerable, scared, small version of you and say, “I see you. You’re not bad. You’re not too much. You’re not the problem.” And instead, you got the opposite. You got silence, or criticism, or someone who made their own discomfort about your pain the center of the story.
What that creates is something I think about a lot. The part of you that got hurt, that little one that’s still in there, still doesn’t know it’s safe to exist. It doesn’t know it has the right to take up space, to have needs, to ask to be loved without bracing for the consequence.
And so what does it do? It hides. Or it overworks. Or it watches for danger constantly. And then you get into a new relationship and something happens, something small, a look, a pause before someone responds to your text, a moment where your partner seems distant, and your body doesn’t say “hmm, that’s interesting.” Your body says “HERE WE GO AGAIN.” Because it’s not responding to what’s happening now. It’s scanning for the danger it already knows is coming.
That’s not weakness. That’s your nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to keep you alive.
The work isn’t to get rid of the shame. The work is to stop treating the part of you that carries it like it’s the enemy.
And eventually, in the right relationship, with the right kind of presence, what becomes possible is something I see over and over in my office. The moment where someone actually stays. Where they don’t flinch at your pain. Where they don’t make it about them. Where they witness you, the real you, the scared one underneath all the strategy, and they choose to stay anyway. That moment doesn’t erase the past. But it begins to rewrite what your body believes is possible.
That’s the real work. Not fixing yourself. Letting yourself be seen. And learning, slowly, that being seen doesn’t have to end in devastation.
You’re not broken. You’re someone who got hurt and survived it. And that, I promise you, is not the same thing.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: How Shame Destroys Relationships
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