SHAME IS NOT WHO YOU ARE
A BODY-BASED PATH TO RECLAIMING YOURSELF
Understand shame. Work with your nervous system. Reconnect with your true self.
You are not alone
Shame touches everyone.
Shame can make you feel like you’re too much, not enough, or somehow wrong. But shame is a nervous system response, not a truth about who you are. This course will help you recognize shame, understand its roots, and develop practical ways to work with it so you can live with greater ease, choice, and connection.
Gain clarity
See shame for what it is
Reclaim yourself
Separate shame from your identity
Regulate your nervous system
Feel more grounded
Live with more freedom
Make choices from a steadier, truer place
A self-paced, experiential course to help you recognize how shame operates in your mind and body, how to work with it in real time, and begin responding with greater choice, ease, and self-trust.
Approximately 6 hours | 5 parts | 27 lessons | Self-paced and experiential
IS THIS COURSE FOR YOU?
You’ve done the work. You’ve read the books, maybe gone to therapy, and gained insight into your patterns. You may even recognize shame as part of what’s keeping you stuck.
But awareness hasn’t been enough.
You still find yourself caught in self-criticism, perfectionism, collapsing in conflict, struggling to receive a compliment, or replaying conversations at 3 a.m. You know you want to respond differently, but the same patterns keep taking over.
Shame Is Not Who You Are will help you move beyond understanding your patterns to recognizing how shame lives in your mind and body, and learning practical ways to work with it so you can respond with greater choice, ease, and self-trust.
What If the Thing Keeping You Stuck Is Shame?
Most of us try to heal from shame from the outside in. We read, reflect, and understand intellectually that shame isn't the truth about who we are, and yet, nothing changes.
Here's why: we're trying to think our way out of a body-based experience.
Shame doesn't live only in your thoughts. It is also experienced in your nervous system as a powerful survival response. Insight alone may not be enough to change that response.
The other problem is that many people aren't working on shame directly. They're managing the anxiety or the anger. Shame may be underneath. It is disguised, and without the tools to recognize it, you can keep treating the symptom and wondering why the root never moves.
A Different Way to Work With Shame
Using what I call bottom-up processing, this course works with the body first and the story second. You'll recognize shame through real examples and stories you'll map directly onto your own life. You'll meet it in your body before it hijacks your behavior.
Session by session, you'll develop the capacity to see through shame rather than be swallowed by it.
A Practical, Compassionate Approach
What You’ll Learn
This course combines teaching, guided practice, and real-life examples
Recognize it.
See how shame shows up in your own thoughts, body, relationships, and behavior.
Separate from it.
Begin experiencing shame as a nervous system state rather than the truth about who you are.
Work with it.
Use body-based practices when shame appears in real life
Reclaim choice.
Begin responding from greater agency rather than automatically following shame's familiar patterns.
Your Signatures of Shame
Throughout the course, you'll create your own personalized Signatures of Shame guide, mapping how shame uniquely shows up in your life and what helps you work with it when it does.
By the end of the course, this becomes a concrete, personalized tool you can continue using in your everyday life.
Your Path Through the Course
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What shame actually is, where it lives in the body, its evolutionary role, and why we have such a powerful tendency to identify with it. Jeffrey shares his own journey. You'll leave Part 1 knowing, for the first time, exactly what you're working with.
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Guided exercises and practices to find shame in your own life, including your relationships, your work, your inner critic, and your body. You'll begin creating a concrete, personal map of where and how shame has been running things.
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In this part of the course, we’ll get into real-time tools for catching shame as it's happening and before it tips into anger, shutdown, or collapse. We’ll gain insight into how to work with resistance, snap-backs, and the shame of trying to heal shame.
We’ll practice tools to stop letting shame rob you of your agency and begin claiming your voice and capacity for choice.
meet your guide
Hi, I’m Jeffrey.
I’m Jeffrey Rutstein, PsyD, a clinical psychologist, and for more than 40 years I’ve been helping people work with trauma, chronic illness and pain, dissociation, and the patterns that can keep us from living with greater ease and connection. My approach draws from Mindfulness-Centered Somatic Psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, expressive arts, energy work, and decades of meditation practice and teaching.
Throughout my career, I’ve worked with thousands of people in individual therapy and group programs. My work focuses on understanding our struggles through the lens of the nervous system and recognizing that many of the reactions we judge most harshly in ourselves developed as intelligent attempts to protect and survive.
Additional Resources to Support You
The Shame Recognition Guide
The Shame Recognition Guide is a standalone reference tool that clearly lays out shame's most common disguises. It includes real-world examples you'll recognize and can be used before, during, and after the course.
Five Somatic Reset Practices
Five short guided audio practices, approximately 10–15 minutes each, designed for in-the-moment use when shame is activated and you need something to do with your body right now.
Founding Cohort Live Q&A: Where Am I Getting Stuck?
I am hosting a 60–90 minute live group call after the founding cohort has had time to move through the material. This is an opportunity to explore questions, snap-backs, resistance, and places where you may be getting stuck in real time.
This live Q&A is available to the founding cohort only.
Join the Founding Cohort
$397 Founding Cohort Rate
Future course price: $497
Your Journey, with over 6 hours of content, includes:
A clear map of how shame actually operates — in your mind, your body, and your nervous system — so you finally understand what you've been up against.
Your own Signatures of Shame guide, built step-by-step through the course, so you can learn to recognize your unique patterns the moment they start rather than after they've already taken over
Real-time tools for catching shame as it happens — before it tips into shutdown, snap-back, or collapse — so you can respond with choice instead of being run by old survival patterns
Five Somatic Reset Practices for the moments shame is already activated and you need something to do with your body right now, not another concept to think through
The Shame Recognition Guide, a standalone reference for shame's most common disguises, to use before, during, and after the course whenever you need it
A live Q&A with Jeffrey, exclusive to the founding cohort, to work through your specific snap-backs, resistance, and sticking points in real time
Lifetime access to the full course, so you can return to the teachings and practices whenever shame shows up again — because it will, and now you'll have a system for it
30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
Go through Parts 1 and 2. If you don't feel like this is the right fit for you for any reason, email us within 30 days for a full refund. No questions asked.
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Not at all. In fact, one of the reasons shame can be so difficult to work with is that it doesn't always look or feel like shame. It can show up as self-criticism, perfectionism, anxiety, anger, people-pleasing, withdrawal, or feeling stuck. Part of this course is learning to recognize your own signatures of shame and the ways they may be affecting your life.
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No. Shame Is Not Who You Are is an educational and experiential program, not psychotherapy or a substitute for professional mental health care. The course offers information, guided practices, and opportunities for self-reflection that you can explore at your own pace
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No. Jeffrey will introduce the concepts and practices you need as you move through the course. If you're already familiar with nervous-system or somatic work, you'll have an opportunity to apply that understanding specifically to shame.
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This course focuses specifically on shame and the ways it can operate beneath other patterns in your life. If you're familiar with Jeffrey's work through the Healing Trauma Program, some foundational nervous-system concepts may be familiar, but you'll apply them here specifically to recognizing and working with your own signatures of shame.
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You'll have lifetime access to the course, so you can move through it at your own pace and return to the teachings and practices whenever you need them.
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There's no need to rush. The course contains approximately six hours of content, but it is designed to be experienced and practiced, not simply watched. Give yourself time between sessions to notice how the material relates to your everyday life and to practice what you're learning.
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Shame can be tender material. You're encouraged to move at a pace that feels manageable, pause when you need to, and choose whether or not to participate in any particular exercise. This course is educational and is not a substitute for individualized mental health care. If you need additional support, we encourage you to reach out to a qualified mental health professional.
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Yes. The founding cohort Q&A will be recorded so that enrolled participants can watch it if they are unable to attend live.
Frequently Asked Questions
Shame Is Not Who You Are
Shame doesn't respond to insight. It responds to practice.
Shame Is Not Who You Are guides you through a complete, body-based path from recognizing shame's disguises in your daily life to seeing that shame is not the truth about who you are.