About Shelly Barkes
I have struggled with shame for as long as I can remember. That feeling of being broken. Worse than broken, really. Just…deficient.
When the things we need most as kids—safety, love, belonging—have to be earned instead of given freely, we believe who we are isn’t enough.
So I learned who I needed to become, what I needed to do, to earn those things. Being a good girl, getting good grades, not making anyone feel mad or jealous or annoyed. I got pretty damn good at it. Got pretty far, too.
But then, as Brene Brown puts it, middle age takes you by the shoulders, looks you in the eye and says, you know all that shit you’ve been doing that got you here? It’s not working anymore. Then you’re faced with a choice, she says. Do the work to change. Or do what most people do: refuse to, and butt clench your way to death.
I butt clenched for as long as I could. But life had other plans. I kept losing things: Jobs, relationships, my health. I was forced to look at all the ways I'd been betraying myself. Staying silent, small, compliant. Doing what I needed to do to just get through my life. I had to give up my half-life in order to live a new one. I’m still learning how to let go.
I had been doing the work for decades—years of therapy, workshops, books, podcasts—good god, so many podcasts. I understood my trauma, but I couldn’t see the ways it was showing up in my life. Nervous system awareness helped me start to bridge that gap. When I learned and started practicing IFS, things really started to change. It’s the most complete framework I’ve found for rewiring the patterns that keep us stuck.
I’m not fixed, not by a long shot. Not because I think we never really get there (we don’t). But because I know now I was never broken. I was just cut off from the parts of myself that knew the way.
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