You can’t truly understand trauma, without understanding shame.
UNSHAMING is the essence of trauma healing.
MOST OF US ARE, CONSCIOUSLY, OR UNCONSCIOUSLY,
IMPRISONED BY SHAME.
What is Unshaming?
When you Unshame, you stop viewing the things you’re ashamed of as broken parts of yourself that need to be fixed or healed.
You integrate the deep meaning behind your difficulties, as if they are invitations to embrace your wholeness and doorways to your shadow’s gold.
The result is a life liberated from judgment, connected to your inner intelligence, and attuned to a profound sense of wellness.
A life where you understand what your next steps should be, as you begin to walk a path that is aligned with your soul purpose and the unique medicine you are here to share with the world.
Unshaming is one of the most impactful and fast-working techniques available to help you understand the true value and intelligence you and your clients have to share.
Through this work, you will forge a new, loving, compassionate relationship with your most authentic self by addressing shame at the root and learning techniques to release it from your consciousness.
Hi, I’m David.
I’m the author of The Unshaming Way, about which Gabor Mate wrote, ”In this astute work, David Bedrick provides a deep investigation of shame, the most debilitating of our mind states, and offers a workable, practice-based, and accessible path to divesting ourselves from it.”
I’m a teacher, counselor, and attorney. I was on the faculty for the University of Phoenix for 8 years as well as the Process Work Institute in the U.S. and Poland. I’m the founder of the Santa Fe Institute for Shame-based Studies where I educate therapists, coaches and healers. My embodied way of teaching goes beyond informational, students are regularly brought to tears and face to face with their beauty, power, life path and soul.
My passion for studying shame arose from my childhood, growing up with a father who used fists and belts to express his rage and a mother who coped by denying and gaslighting his experience. Forty years of research, teaching, and working with individuals awakened my heart and mind to how the dominant healing paradigm pathologizes people—sees people's suffering and symptoms as something to “fix" instead of messages that deepen our relationships with ourselves and the world around us. My unshaming way treats difficulties as invitations to insight, soul, and the divine unfolding of our lives.
I also write for Psychology Today and is the author of three additional books: Talking Back to Dr. Phil: Alternatives to Mainstream Psychology and Revisioning Activism: Bringing Depth, Dialogue, and Diversity to Individual and Social Change, You Can’t Judge a Body by Its Cover: 17 Women’s Stories of Hunger, Body Shame and Redemption. My 5th book will also be published by North Atlantic Books and available early in 2026.
If you’re an individual new to unshaming, check out my Foundations of Unshaming Bundle.
If you’re a therapist, coach or healer who wants to learn about work with your clients’ trauma from an unshaming perspective, check out my Trauma-Work Bundle.
For Therapists, Coaches & Healers:
Get access to two ESSENTIAL trauma-work TEACHINGS for therapists, coaches and healers for one low price.
Taken together, these two classes will give you a full understanding of all the elements of trauma and how they show up in your clients. These elements include: understanding the role of those people who were told the traumatic story, the impact of trauma on our ability to make boundaries, how trauma locks people into a victimized identity and disconnect them from their power, the critical intelligence of dissociation, and the role of somatic experience in healing.
In addition they will address the single most important issue in working with trauma – the ethics involved in caring for a person and considering their capacity or lack of capacity to consent to the work you're doing with them. Without that ethical clarity, our work with trauma can override a persons needs and responses and re-injure.
What students have said….
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