Joe tells the story of a coaching client who was consumed with shame about getting fired from a golden opportunity — only to discover that getting fired led him to build an app making $150,000 a week. The shame was preventing him from seeing that his life was actually great. The moment he saw it, he started laughing and smiling.
This pattern is universal: everyone beats themselves up for something that, if they traced the consequences forward, led to something great in their current life. The shame functions as a mechanism to prevent the experience of aliveness and pleasure that would come from seeing how good things actually are.
“All the shame was doing was preventing him from feeling how good life was.”
This connects to the broader pattern where pleasure, being so expansive and self-dissolving, scares people. Shame gets injected alongside pleasure as a way to keep the experience manageable — to prevent the loss of self that deep pleasure entails.
Related Concepts
- Shame after feeling good pattern
- Foreboding joy blocks gratitude
- Shame creates the behaviors it punishes
- Shame becomes addictive and creates empty fulfillment
- Shame interrupts openness and pulls you out of spaciousness
- Avoiding shame creates more shame through disconnection
- Shame is a signal of disconnection, not a problem to solve