Shame has stolen enough of your life already
Your voice. Your wanting. Your anger. Your appetite. Your pleasure. Your ambition. Your ridiculousness. Your power.
Your fucking aliveness.
Time to take it all back.
Step Inside
You’re desperate for the connection that comes from being seen.
But somebody actually looking means they might also reject you.
So suddenly you’re editing to make sure they never quite get the chance:
You change the outfit. Swallow the opinion. Explain the joke. Soften the boundary. Temper the ambition. Pull back the enthusiastic guffaw. Leave the itch unscratched. Call the desire ridiculous before anybody else gets the chance.
You scan their face.
Hear the imaginary tut.
Anticipate the verdict.
Then replace yourself with the version least likely to provoke one.
And then you wonder why nobody actually sees you.
But how can they, when shame keeps replacing you with somebody safer to look at?
The version you’re performing can be loved… while you wonder whether they’d love you if they really knew.
If they reject the performance, you can tell yourself they never really knew you anyway.
But if they love it? Now you have to keep it up.
Instead of being fully IN your life.
You’re also watching yourself live it through everybody else’s eyes, trying to work out what they can see, what they’re thinking and what it all means about you.
Welcome to the CCTV room
Fuckteen different imaginary feeds all running at once in your head.
Her face. His reaction. Their silence. Your body. Your voice. What you said. How you said it. How it landed. What they might be thinking now.
You’re dancing, but you’re also watching yourself dance.
Talking, but watching them listen.
Having sex, but looking down at your body from the fucking ceiling.
Walking into the room...
while simultaneously standing outside yourself with a clipboard...
assessing whether the woman who just walked in is acceptable for public consumption.
And it’s fucking exhausting.
You’re so busy trying to control everybody else’s experience of you, you’re barely having an experience of your own.
Step Inside Mirror Bitch
And while your attention is elsewhere...
So are all the ‘shameful’ sexy, creative, joyful, energetic, sensitive, furious, feral, hungry, full-of-fucking-life-force parts you evicted while trying to control the feed.
And that is the real fucking cost of shame
Not just that it makes you feel terrible about yourself.
But that it removes you from your own life.
Because shame has mistaken some of your most powerful qualities for character defects.
Underneath too loud is your voice.
Underneath too angry is your authority.
Underneath too selfish is your wanting.
Underneath too difficult is your discernment.
Underneath too much is your fucking aliveness.
So every time you banish the thing shame told you to hide, you’re banishing the very thing that made you powerful in the first place.
Because not only does shame remove you from your own experience, it puts the authority somewhere else.
In their face.
Their reaction.
Their approval.
Their imagined judgement.
It takes every experience and turns it into a total fucking character assassination without giving a single shit about you inside that experience.
It doesn't care about:
What you needed.
What support you had.
What conditions you were living inside.
How all of that felt.
What was true for you.
It just tells you what the whole thing proves about you:
You’re shit.
A shit mother.
A selfish wife.
A lazy cow.
A fraud.
Maybe you’ve been calling it a confidence problem.
Or a visibility problem. A vulnerability problem. A comparison problem. A body image problem. A sister wound. People pleasing. Perfectionism. Imposter syndrome. Your inability to stop giving quite so many fucks about what everybody else thinks.
Maybe they’re not separate fucking problems.
Maybe shame just has a lot of outfits.
Because running underneath so many of them is the same tiny fucking calculation:
What will it mean about me if they see this?
If I say it.
Want it.
Wear it.
Do it.
Get it wrong.
Take up the room.
Let another woman be brilliant without making myself less.
Let myself be brilliant without making her less.
Disappoint them.
Need something.
Show them.
Too loud. Too quiet. Too pushy. Too passive. Too slutty. Too frigid.
Too fucking much and still somehow nowhere near enough.
The contradiction is the clue.
Shame doesn’t need to make sense.
It attaches itself to anything it can get its hands on and then makes sure you believe the verdict.
Because when the verdict is YOU...
of course you hide.
Shrink.
Cover up.
Edit.
Just like it fucking told you to.
Just like every woman before you
Look closely at the mirror and there are generations of women staring back.
Good women.
Grateful women.
Women who didn’t make a fuss.
Women who knew their place:
Be desirable but not attention-seeking.
Clever but never threatening.
Successful but grateful.
Sexual but not slutty.
Maternal but never cloying.
Devoted but not needy.
Independent but not difficult.
Powerful but, for fuck's sake, make sure everybody remains comfortable around your power.
Women who learned what happened when they wanted too much, spoke too loudly, got angry, took up room, prioritised themselves, enjoyed their bodies, trusted their own knowing or refused to make everybody else comfortable.
And their voices got passed down.
And when you inevitably fail any one of those completely contradictory standards?
Shame makes the whole thing violently personal.
A whole system of rules about what a woman is allowed to be starts sounding like intimate truths about you.
That's internalised patriarchy's insidious fucking genius.
Nobody needs to keep you in the cage once you've learned to patrol its edges yourself.
So instead of questioning the rule, you question yourself.
Instead of rejecting the verdict, you improve the defendant.
Instead of asking who smeared this shit all over the mirror...
you spend your life trying to fix the woman reflected in it.
Mirror Bitch doesn't fix her.
We clean the fucking mirror.
And find out what becomes possible when you stop mistaking everything smeared across your reflection for the truth of who you are.
That’s what breaks
the pattern
We could waste our energy trying to make you impossible to shame.
Good fucking luck with that.
There IS no sufficiently thin, clever, generous, successful, beautiful, selfless, useful, desirable, undemanding, enlightened version of you that shame will finally look at and say:
Excellent. Nothing to report.
Fix the thing shame's attached itself to and it'll find another fucking thing.
And another.
And another.
And while you're busy fixing yourself, shame never has to answer for a fucking thing.
So we ain't gonna beat it that way.
But we are gonna build the capacity to feel shame arrive without automatically abandoning
yourself when it does.
That is a very different kind of freedom.
And yes, it’s going to feel totally fucking gross to begin with, because shame is so, so good at its job.
But so are we.
And when you realise you no longer need to shape your life around avoiding that discomfort at all costs?
Well…
- You can want without making wanting a moral failure
- Speak before the sentence has been padded into invisibility
- Be misunderstood without launching an emergency reputation-management campaign
- Have an opinion without immediately producing Exhibit A through fucking G in its defence
- Disappoint somebody without abandoning yourself
- Let somebody look at you without simultaneously climbing outside yourself to supervise what they see
- Wear the thing without spending the evening watching yourself wear it
- Laugh too loudly without dragging yourself into an internal disciplinary hearing afterwards
And slowly, the parts shame evicted begin participating in your life again.
Not fearless.
Not bulletproof.
Not shameless.
Still fucking here.
Not as a better-behaved Good Girl.
But a whole fucking woman, living a whole fucking life instead of managing it on fuckteen feeds from the CCTV room trying to control how it all looks to everyone else.
STEP INSIDE
This is Mirror Bitch...
This is not another course on confidence or visibility.
Not a perfectly packaged teaching on shame.
Or twelve weeks of learning to explain yourself more beautifully.
It is a held, somatic experiment in seeing, being seen and not fucking running away when we look at the thing shame told you to hide.
And in order for us to look? You’re going to have to show us.
You choose what we see. You choose when. You choose how much.
Because this is not about forcing yourself to be seen. It is about no longer being at the mercy of being seen.
Each session, you’re going to put something you would usually hide, polish, minimise, apologise for or make palatable into the room...
We witness what is actually there, rather than what shame says it proves about you.
We catch the verdict being issued.
We notice what your body does next:
The laugh after the vulnerable sentence.
The twelve caveats.
The sudden need to become very fucking clever.
The scan for reassurance.
The urge to explain.
The joke that softens the truth.
The instinct to pull back, cover up, smooth over or become somebody else entirely.
And instead of immediately obeying it...
You look.
We look.
Shame arrives.
You remain.
So let’s put shame back in its fucking place
See, shame may be efficient, but it’s totally fucking predictable.
Shame says shrink. We dial it up.
Shame says hide it. Keep it in the dark. Don’t let them look. We bring it into the light and witness the fuck out of it.
Shame assumes the verdict and makes you apologise in advance. We let the thing exist without explaining, minimising or making it more palatable.
Shame masquerades as the fucking truth. We get curious about what is actually true.
And when shame evicts another part of you because it’s too loud, too sexy, too demanding, too inconvenient, too strange, too fucking much?
We invite that bitch back in and see what happens when she takes up some room.
Not rescuing.
Not reassuring.
Not rushing to tell you you’re wonderful so the uncomfortable feeling will go away.
Because this isn’t about making sure everybody approves of what they see.
It’s about discovering what happens when they see it and you don’t immediately abandon yourself because they did.
Where shame has made being seen synonymous with danger, we build your capacity to stay with yourself while it happens and prove it the fuck wrong.
Not so you become shameless.
Not so you start revealing every private thing in the name of liberation whilst giving precisely no fucks about what anybody else thinks...
But so your ability to stay with yourself becomes more powerful than shame’s ability to make you leave.
I know what it costs to disappear.
I’ve carried deeply entrenched shame for most of my life. About pretty much all the things:
My body.
My size.
My weight.
Money.
Wanting…being seen wanting.
Being clever.
Being stupid.
Being loud.
Not doing enough.
Taking up too much room.
Getting things wrong.
Being SEEN getting things wrong.
You name it, I’ve probably found a way to make it evidence for the prosecution.
I’ve also spent the last ten years coaching women around patriarchy, internalised patriarchy and all the ways we learn to live inside rules we didn’t fucking write.
I’ve studied shame, including with the legendary David Bedrick, and I currently work directly with women 1:1 dismantling the shame that keeps them hiding, shrinking and abandoning themselves.
And then this year, I turned the lens on myself.
I decided shame was going to become my bitch, rather than the other way round.
So I went after it.
And the deeper I went into my own body shame, the more I thought I’d be digging down into the gross, disgusting, unacceptable thing underneath it all.
Looking at the thing I’d spent my life trying not to look at and saying: OK. Even this. I can love myself anyway.
Except that’s not what I found...
And then one day I was cavorting about with my son in a waterfall (as you do), and I noticed something.
I wasn’t thinking about my body.
Not what does my stomach look like from there?
Not is this angle flattering?
Not can they see that bit?
Not should I pull this down?
Not should I cover that up?
Not who’s looking?
Not what are they thinking?
Nothing.
I was just up the mountain.
Playing in the waterfall.
Then at medicine dance I realised I was just dancing…not also watching myself dance.
Speaking at an event…not also double checking every fucking face in the crowd for validation.
I only noticed how much of my life I’d spent running that surveillance operation all day long, when it finally fucking stopped.
All those tiny checks. Adjustments. Calculations.
That constant low-level awareness of how my body might be being seen from outside it.
How much attention that took.
How much energy.
How many fucking spoons.
I went in thinking I was freeing my body.
Turns out I also got my fucking brain back.
And this is bigger than feeling better about yourself.
I realised the other day that I really fucking care about this shame work because I care about women. And mothers. And children.
And because I care about the world we're creating and the one our children are inheriting from us.
I cannot fucking bear how many brilliant, furious, wildly intelligent, deeply loving women are spending their power wondering whether they're too loud, too difficult, too angry, too selfish, too visible, too much.
How many women can see exactly what is wrong and then question their right to say so.
How many feel their fire and immediately apologise for the smoke.
How many have something to say, make, lead, challenge, refuse or change, but waste all that fucking energy trying to make it palatable enough, perfect enough or safe enough to be seen…and sometimes never let it be seen at all.
I don't want women spending another forty years negotiating with shame for permission to exist.
I want us here.
In our bodies.
In our lives.
In our relationships.
In our work.
In our communities.
In the rooms where decisions are made.
Where actual change can happen.
And in the homes where the next generation is learning what power, truth, love and belonging look like.
I want women who can tolerate somebody being disappointed and tell the truth anyway.
Women who can feel shame flare without mistaking it for an instruction.
Women who can hold their anger, appetite, desire, grief, brilliance and power all at once without immediately trying to become smaller around them.
Not so we can become better women.
So we can stop abandoning the women we already are.
Because the world does not need another generation of Good Girls holding everything together while quietly disappearing inside it.
It needs women who are fully fucking alive.
And frankly, I need you out here.
We've got a whole fucking paradigm to shift.
Mirror Bitch is a powerful 12 week experiment…
I can’t tell you exactly what we’ll do, how it will go or what you’ll discover because we don’t get to decide the outcome before we’ve entered the room.
I do know there will be 6 live weekly sessions over Zoom.
There will be group work. Individual invitations. Partner work. Mirror work.
But mostly, there will be an intimate group of women in a room willing to see what happens when we stop hiding the fucking evidence.
I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.
We’ll look. Be looked at. Reveal. Conceal. Choose. Expose. Inhabit. Amplify. Squirm. Get curious. Meet some edges. Don’t run. Stay. See what the fuck unravels.
You might be asked to show us something (of your choosing) without explaining it.
You might be looked at for longer than is comfortable.
You might discover the thing you were certain would make you want to disappear doesn’t.
And something astonishingly ordinary absolutely does.
We won’t know until we put it in the room.
There will be more body-led exploration than sitting around politely chatting about it.
No syllabus.
No slides.
No lectures.
No framework to memorise so you can become extremely knowledgeable about shame while continuing to let it run your fucking life.
And no group chat between live sessions.
Once a week, the room exists. Then it doesn’t.
You enter.
Something gets put on the table.
And we catch shame in the act.
You're witnessed.
You notice what happens.
The room closes.
And then - crucially - you go back to your life with it.
I said the thing.
They saw me.
Now I’m on my own making dinner.
And maybe on Tuesday your brain starts rewriting everyone’s facial expressions.
Maybe you suddenly decide you overshared.
Maybe you desperately want to explain what you meant.
The practice isn't just revealing the thing shame told you to hide.
It's sitting inside the gap between being seen and knowing exactly how you were received:
Was I too much?
Did that sound stupid?
Do they think differently about me now?
Should I explain what I meant?
Does everybody still like me?
Without immediately reaching for reassurance.
Without trying to manage the reflection.
Without somebody swooping in to make the discomfort disappear.
There is no promise that everybody will like what they see.
No promise that nobody will judge you, misunderstand you or have a reaction you don’t like.
But I do know that your survival does not depend on our approval.
And every time you experience the cringe, sit inside the not-knowing and discover you are still fucking here, shame loses a little more evidence for the story that being seen is something you need to protect yourself from at all costs.
The experiment might be unpredictable.
The conditions holding it aren’t.
Everything that happens in that room will be held by four things:
Trust. Truth. Witnessing. Capacity.
Four powerful ways to change your relationship with shame, without needing to silence it, solve it or make it disappear.
And we’re going to work with them in two very different places:
Six weeks in the room. Six weeks out in the wild.
Because ultimately, what becomes possible in that room is fun and all, but it means fuck all compared to what becomes possible when you take it all home with you.
So when the six live sessions end, the experiment doesn’t.
Instead we move into Telegram for six weeks of paying attention to what happens when everything we’ve been fucking around with in the room gets to meet the rest of your life.
What shifted?
What’s different?
What are you doing, saying, choosing, wanting, wearing, asking for, allowing, risking or refusing that you weren’t before?
Where is shame still loud as fuck, but somehow less convincing?
What surprised you?
What followed you home that you didn’t even realise you’d picked up?
What are you noticing in your body, your relationships, your work, your decisions, your pleasure, your fucking life?
What do you notice when discomfort rears its head?
Bring that into Telegram.
Let's discuss. Reflect. Notice. Integrate. Experiment in the wild. And fucking celebrate every tiny little shift and then some.
And what exactly is it you might be celebrating...
Oh, you know, normal life shit like:
- Walking into a room and just walking into the fucking room. Not immediately scanning it for where you belong, who’s looking, how you compare or what version of you would work best here
- Realising you’ve been talking for five minutes and haven’t been simultaneously watching yourself talk (and you didn't rehearse it seventeen times first)
- Enjoying yourself without periodically leaving the experience to check how you look enjoying yourself
- Wearing the thing you’d usually don't fucking dare because you “can’t pull off”
- Saying no without writing a supporting thesis
- Wanting something and actually getting to feel the wanting without shame immediately turning up with its clipboard to explain why you deserve it
- Posting the photo without studying it like forensic evidence...fuck that, TAKING the photo in the first place without changing the angle fuckteen times
- Being misunderstood and noticing you don’t have the same frantic need to get inside somebody else’s head and correct the record
- Somebody being disappointed in you and not immediately shape-shifting to make it stop
- Laughing too loudly. Taking up the room. Changing your mind. Asking for more.
- Catching yourself halfway through an apology you don’t actually fucking owe
- Looking in the mirror and...that's it
- Being quieter than usual without deciding you’re boring. Louder than usual without deciding you’re obnoxious
- Realising you’ve just done something that used to require three days of internal negotiations and barely even noticed. Fuck YES!
- Having whole stretches of time in which you’re present, relaxed, interested, laughing, talking, dancing, eating, creating, working... and not also standing outside yourself assessing the performance.
How come? Because you just spent 12 weeks intentionally building:
- A much sharper eye for shame in the wild. You’ll recognise it faster, including when it’s dressed up as truth, common sense, perfectionism, people pleasing, comparison or just who you are
- More space between shame speaking and you obeying. Less automatic shrinking, hiding, explaining, apologising, editing or abandoning yourself because discomfort arrived
- A greater capacity to be seen without immediately trying to control what somebody sees. Not because you suddenly don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks, but because their response no longer gets to be the sole author of what happens next
- More tolerance for the fucking wobble. The cringe. The uncertainty. The oh shit, did I really just say/do/show that? without needing to immediately make it disappear.
- A clearer sense of what is actually true for you. Beneath the verdicts, inherited rules and imaginary CCTV footage
- More of you available to your own life. Your wants. Anger. appetite. ridiculousness. discernment. pleasure. voice. power. All the shit shame has been making expensive to inhabit.
Not necessarily because shame has disappeared.
Because you’ve become considerably less willing to let it organise your whole fucking life.
The nitty gritty
Start date: 15th November
Live sessions: Sundays 8pm (15/11, 22/11, 26/11 (NB Thursday this week), 6/12, 13/12, 20/12
These are proposed call times and can flex to meet the needs of the group once the group is formed.
Telegram integration: 21st December - 31st January
Investment: Scroll down to choose your price ↓
Choose your investment
Mirror Bitch is offered at three prices: £777, £999 and £1,111.
Pay in full or spread the cost with Klarna Pay in 3. Your checkout will show the full programme price, but when you select Klarna, you'll be taken to Klarna to choose your payment plan before confirming your purchase.
It's the same experience whichever you choose so pick the price that works best for your circumstances, no criteria to meet, no circumstances to disclose, no explanations or justifications required.
You can also add private 1:1 coaching
Six private 60-minute coaching sessions with me, giving you space to go deeper into whatever Mirror Bitch brings up for you.
Sessions can be booked throughout the programme and up until 28th February 2027.
£666 (or Klarna pay in 3 is available)
Just tick the box to add at checkout.
Bring shame into the room. Give that bitch a chair.
And see what becomes possible when you don’t give up yours.
Shame has had enough fucking say.
It has taken enough of your attention.
Enough of your energy.
Enough of your fucking life.
It can speak.
It can squirm.
It can come with you into the room.
But it does not get to decide who you are, what you want or what the fuck you do next.
Got Questions?
See if they're answered below and if not you can email me at hello@courageandchamomile or ping me a WhatsApp here
📍When are the calls?
📍Will I have to tell everyone my deepest, darkest secret?
📍But what if I feel ashamed in the actual shame group?
📍Is this for everyone?
📍Is this therapy?
📍What happens to what I share in the room?
📍What if I already understand where my shame comes from?
📍Can I work with you 1:1?
As Seen In
