Answering your questions about Trauma & Abuse: The Unshaming Way
Many of you have sent in questions about this program, so I wanted to take a moment to answer them here:
Why is it important to go through your abuse story?
If you don’t heal your abuse story and learn to view it with unshaming eyes, it can become your life story. You will continue to repeat the same themes and hurts of past abuse in your life, career, relationships, internal criticism, etc.
In Trauma & Abuse: the Unshaming Way, you will become a loving witness to your own story, and find healing and relief from your suffering without retraumatizing yourself.
By working through your trauma in this way, you can stop the cycle of unconsciously recreating painful themes in your life. You’ll reconnect with your deepest intelligence and access all the precious vulnerability, sweetness, silliness, joy, and medicine that has been cooking within you and is waiting to be unveiled.
What is “alchemy”? Why is this an important part of the course?
Alchemy is a psychological and spiritual process where you take material that you think doesn’t have value, and you use that as your primary element in transformation.
In the context of this course, we’re looking at the things that are “wrong” with you, the places where you are “unworthy,” things you want to get rid of. In particular we will be focusing on the “symptoms” of your trauma. You will look at those parts of yourself and pour the warmth of loving awareness onto it.
By doing that, those parts of yourself that you “don’t like” transform and become gold. They become the medicine you’ve been craving and the path forward you’ve been looking for.
How does this work relate to unshaming?
Abuse becomes trauma when the violence we experienced is not witnessed with respect, compassion, and a protective instinct. Shame is a key component here. Shame is created when individuals, and the culture at large, witness violence with denial, dismissal, gaslighting, disrespect, or disbelief. Unshaming is the medicine for this malaise.
The work of UNSHAMING and the work of ALCHEMIZING/TRANSFORMING ABUSE are entwined. You can think of alchemizing abuse as a more advanced level of unshaming. It means unshaming the darkest, most painful parts of ourselves.
Is it really possible to change my life in just 6 weeks?
Yes.
This training program is much more than just learning theory. Everything you learn during Trauma & Abuse: The Unshaming Way is designed for you to carry it with you for the rest of your life. Once you learn how to be a loving witness to abuse, you will be able to call upon these tools to live with more joy and purpose long after this program is complete.
It is important to know that this is not a one-time solution. It is a life-long project that you will return to again and again.
The foundational skills of alchemizing and unshaming your abuse, which you will learn in this course, will usher in a new era where you connect more deeply to your soul, see your darkest moments with love and compassion, and have greater appreciation for yourself and your humanity.
While you will learn a lot about the psychology of abuse and trauma, the real gold lies in witnessing the pre-recorded calls, where David coaches real students just like you in working through their abuse and trauma. You will have lifetime access to these recorded calls.
During that time, you will learn how to practically apply these practices to the violence and trauma you’ve experienced. Past students have said this was the most impactful part of the course.
I’m a practitioner. Is this for me?
Trauma & Abuse: The Unshaming Way is for anybody who wants to change their relationship with abuse. In this course, you will specifically be looking at your own story. However, if you are a practitioner, these teachings and insights will be enormously helpful in enlightening your own practice.
I’m not sure if what I experienced is abuse. Is this right for me?
Abuse includes the obvious examples of being physically or sexually violated, or child abuse.
But we’re also looking at more subtle and insidious violence, such as…
Being criticized
Being neglected
Being unseen or unheard, made invisible
Being objectified.
Being treated like a problem
Being told “something is wrong with you.”
Being punished in a way designed to hurt you.
Being sent to a therapist for being “abnormal” in some ways
Having others comment on your sense of style
Being a member of society from a marginalized and oppressed group
You could grow up in a world where no one does anything that looks like “typical” violence towards you, and still internalize an incredible amount of violence.
I hear you saying that there is intelligence hiding in the abuse I experienced. But I still don’t WANT to have experienced that. Is this course for me?
Many people, myself included, have experienced horrific levels of abuse in their lives. Things no person deserves to go through. This course is NOT designed to paint anyone’s abuse as something positive. What you went through is injurious, unjust, fucked up.
Let me ask you this: Does your abuse still impact you most days?
Are the symptoms of your abuse and trauma – like feelings of unworthiness, loneliness, or depression; or physical symptoms like chronic pain or illness – still present in your life months or years later?
If you answered yes, I’m guessing you’ve already tried a number of different approaches to “fix” or “heal” your trauma. You’ve spent years trying things.
I don’t want you to try one more thing.
I want you to radically reimagine your story to leave room for beauty to bloom even in the darkest moments of your life.
When you begin to transform your relationship to your abuse and trauma, you may also find relief from it. I’ve seen this happen for dozens of my clients for over 3 decades.
Within just 20 minutes of investigating the problem from an unshaming perspective, you will learn something that is fundamental to who you are. Even if the abuse happened years ago.
I did UnShamed, should I also do this course? How different is it?
If you got a lot out of UnShamed, you will continue to get a lot out of Trauma & Abuse: The Unshaming Way. The information and practices you learned in UnShamed are an excellent foundation to have for this course.
If you go deep enough into almost any of the issues that people brought up in UnShamed, you will find levels of violence within them. Abuse and trauma are often the glue holding “surface-level” problems together – and trying to address those changes without looking at that abuse will make it harder to make deep changes.
In UnShamed, we spent the last week or two focusing on trauma and abuse. In Trauma & Abuse: The Unshaming Way, we’re spending the full 6 weeks on those topics with totally new skills, understandings, and offerings to help you with this aspect of your life. The whole program will be focusing on how you can process your story.
I did Simone Seol’s Shame Clinic. Is this the same thing?
You can think of Trauma & Abuse: The Unshaming Way as a more advanced level of the unshaming work you began during the Shame Clinic.
There is a little overlap between these courses, but it is not the same. This course is specifically focused on abuse and trauma. So if you would like to take the Shame Clinic teachings deeper, and learn new practices to specifically help with those aspects of your story, this may be a good fit for you.
What kind of support can I expect in this program?
This course features 6 lessons and 6 pre-recorded calls where you can watch David model this work in real time. You will progress through this content at your own pace, and there is no live support.
Previous students have said that witnessing David model unshaming with students during the pre-recorded calls is the most powerful part of the course. There is much to learn from one another.
Why is David the best guide for this work?
I’ve been studying shame and trauma for over 30 years. In that time, I coined the term “unshame” to describe the process of not just changing your relationship with shame, but removing your shame entirely. This is the same framework I bring into my work with abuse.
I've written 4 books, taught psychology at a university for 8 years, and I’m on the faculty of the Process Work Institute. I founded the Institute for Shame-Based Studies, where I teach many courses on unshaming.
BUT, THE TRUTH IS: I have worked with 100's of people, maybe even a thousand over the last 30 years, and I religiously studied each session - what I did, what worked, what didn't work, where I missed the mark, where my own shit got in the way of my clear seeing.
These people taught me, beyond all the books I've read and education I received. They didn't teach me theory; they taught me FACTS - what really goes on in the body and psyche, how a story unfolds, how to access the deep medicine that lives inside people, what healing really looks like (and doesn't look like), the generational force and impact of long term trauma, and the regularly neglected impact perpetrated by those who gaslight and deny abuse and trauma.
And I have my own intimate relationship with abuse from growing up in a physically and verbally abusive household.
Here's what I am most proud of about my work and teaching: I am the real thing. I show up, whether confident or insecure, whether grieving or elated, whether tired or rested EXACTLY AS I AM.
In that way, I model for my students what it means to be radically comfortable with and compassionate towards themselves.
I am what I teach. I haven't only practiced an unshamed approach to trauma for over 30 years, I also LIVE it - it's my personal life, my relational life, my psychological life and my spiritual life.
Will you run this course live in the future?
It’s possible, but I have no plans to do that at the moment. The only way to access this content is by purchasing the pre-recorded course.
Will I have lifetime access to the course content & pre-recorded calls?
Yes.
Ready to jump in? Click here to join Trauma & Abuse: The Unshaming Way.
Or check out what past students have said about this work:
“Working with David has been so amazing. Every single call I think to myself "I don't want this to end." The entire energy of the "room" is so inviting and cozy. Just in general I never want this clinic to end.💛
– Haley Jean
“I’m savouring every moment of being in the Shame Clinic and slowly feeling those deep internalised beliefs and voices shift. This is life- changing work and the reverberations are enormous. Thank you for sharing your life’s work and experience with us ❤️”
– Harmony
“It's a complete paradigm shift! So powerful and so healing to feel this deeply seen and to learn from you.”
– Naomi
“David, this experience has been shifting bedrock-level things inside me in ways I can sense are only just opening. It’s beautiful! I feel like I’m birthing a new me. And I’ve shared ideas and the exercises with my mom who was abused as a child and she’s finding healing she’s never felt 😭 Thank you for these gifts!”
– Shanna
“Shame Clinic is truly fucking me up in the best way imaginable. So grateful for this body of work David, thank you!”
– Melissa
“I had the most incredible breakthrough this morning with something I’ve been struggling with. This work has been life changing in so many ways!”
– Jackie
“You are a powerful teacher. 👏👏”
– Molly
“It’s truly been the most astonishing experience. Monday was life altering for me. Something literally CHANGED in my body. I don’t have words for it. I am so grateful to you for this work. My cells feel altered. Thank you.”
– Catherine W.
Click here to enroll and discover an unshaming approach to processing your abuse story.
