There is a specific kind of disorientation that happens when harm is framed as care. When control is framed as guidance. When silence is framed as obedience. When your internal experience is reframed as wrong, sinful, or untrustworthy. This is where gaslighting inside high control religious environments lives. And for many people, it does not feel like gaslighting at first. It feels like confusion. Like self doubt. Like trying harder to get it right. How Gaslighting Shows Up

Raised on Shame Podcast, Episode 5 Relationships can feel complicated for many reasons. But after spiritual trauma or high-control systems, relationships often feel unsafe in a way that is hard to explain. You may want connection deeply, while your body reacts to closeness as if it is dangerous. That tension can feel confusing, especially if you were taught that love should feel peaceful, certain, or instantly right. In reality, when attachment has been shaped by control, obl

Raised on Shame – Episode 4 Many people expect that leaving a harmful belief system will immediately bring relief. Sometimes it does. But often what comes first is grief. In Episode 4 of Raised on Shame, Kimberly Wilder explores why leaving shame-based environments can bring sadness, confusion, and emotional disorientation, even when leaving was necessary. When we leave systems that shaped our identity, community, and worldview, the loss can be real and complicated. You may

Raised on Shame Podcast – Episode 3 Many of us were taught that our bodies could not be trusted. Not all at once. Not always explicitly. But through rules. Through expectations. Through silence. We learned that hunger was suspicious. That desire was dangerous. That comfort was indulgent. That control was virtue. Over time, many of us stopped listening to our bodies at all. This episode of Raised on Shame explores what it means to reconnect with our bodies after growing up in

Relearning Self-Trust After Shame If you were raised in a shame-based, high-control, or spiritually coercive environment, you may know what it feels like to second-guess yourself constantly. What looks like indecision is often something deeper. Many people were not simply taught what to believe. They were taught, subtly and repeatedly, not to trust their own internal experience. Over time, that can make it hard to know the difference between intuition, discernment, and hyperv

In the first episode of Raised on Shame , we begin with a distinction that is simple but deeply consequential: Guilt says: "I did something wrong." Shame says: "I am something wrong." This difference matters because guilt can guide repair. Shame demands disappearance. Shame is not simply an emotion. From a trauma informed and nervous system perspective, shame functions as a threat response. It often shows up not as sadness or fear but as going quiet, collapsing inward, dissoc

Below are some of the images referenced in my conversation with Linda Marie Cossa during Raised on Shame, Episode 2. Thank you to Linda Marie for such an incredible conversation and for sharing her moving art with me and allowing me to share some of it with you all.

First episode coming January 13, 2026 Raised on Shame is a trauma-informed podcast about unlearning the beliefs that kept us silent, disconnected, and small, especially those rooted in faith, purity culture, and high-control systems. Hosted by licensed therapist and EMDR-certified clinician Kimberly Wilder, the show explores shame, attachment, identity, and healing through grounded conversation, lived experience, poetry, and cultural reflection. This is not a podcast about ab

"Alone. To be told she is not alone denies what she knows. Alone is not the bad news, alone is reliable, alone has been loyal to her like...

Subtle shifts create massive impacts. Presumptions identified as programming. Lonely is simply longing. Desperation becomes decadence....