Born Into Borrowed Shame
Why the wound you're carrying was never yours to carry and how to finally leave it
This is worth saying: You came into this world whole.
I need you to sit with that for a second because everything I’m about to say hinges on it. You weren’t born broken. You weren’t born anxious, insecure, people-pleasing, or “too much.” You arrived complete, connected to your instincts, your voice, your body, your knowing. If you’ve ever watched a toddler move through the world, you’ve seen it. They don’t question whether they deserve to take up space. They just do.
So what happened?
Where It All Began
My first teacher, a Lakota Medicina man trained by Archie Fire Lame Deer, taught me many things about walking with spirit, the shadow, and the psyche. One of his foundational teachings is that we are all born into a “sick” kingdom.
That is to say, a family dynamic riddled with ancestral trauma, social beliefs, and a set of unspoken rules about who we’re allowed to be and what we’re allowed to feel. Being the newcomers to this landscape, we accept this as normal.
Your mother’s anxiety or mental conditions weren’t given a second thought. It was just “how mom is.” Your father’s emotional absence wasn’t called avoidance. It was “he works hard.” The way your family shut down conflict, avoided vulnerability, punished bigness, or rewarded silence, none of that came with a warning label. It was just the water you swam in.
Unbeknownst to you, beneath the surface, you were being taught. Every interaction was a life curriculum. Your soul was paying attention, even though you were not consciously aware of it. Taking notes of the things that were slowly being stolen away from you, leaving you fragmented, one piece at a time.
It’s important to understand that your parents weren’t villains in this story. They were wounded people doing the best they could with the tools they had, which were the same limited tools their parents gave them. Hurt doesn’t need malice to travel. It just needs silence and a lack of awareness. And most families have plenty of both.
Borrowed Shame
One of the big imprints that is passed on to us that I want to speak to is shame. Shame, like all wounding, doesn’t show up and announce itself. It doesn’t say, “Hi, I’m an inherited belief system that was placed on you before you could speak, and I’m going to run your entire adult life.”
Instead, it disguises itself as truth.
And so the programming that runs in the background of your mind begins. “You’re too sensitive.” “Don’t be so dramatic.” “Who do you think you are?” And little by little, parts of you are stolen away, like a thief in the night, under the guise of love.
And when you’re three, four, five years old, you don’t have the capacity to say, “Actually, that’s your unresolved wound talking, and I’m choosing not to internalize it.” Your survival literally depends on the people saying these things. As so, you believe it.
You take the shame on. You wear it. You build an identity around it.
The little girl who was told she took up too much space, the one whose needs were treated like an inconvenience, learned to stop having them, or at least stop showing them. The one who only got love when she performed learned that love is conditional and that her worth is measured by output.
None of these were conscious decisions. They were adaptations. Brilliant, creative, survival-driven adaptations that allowed you to stay attached to the people you needed most. And I genuinely want to honor that. The version of you who figured out how to navigate a sick kingdom? She’s extraordinary. She kept you alive. What a gift!
But she also created something that’s now running your adult life without your permission. And this is the part that needs to be de-programmed.
The Adaptive Self
I call it the adaptive self. Psychology calls it the false self. Different traditions have different names for it. But the mechanism is the same everywhere.
When the “sick” kingdom tells you that certain parts of you are unwelcome, you don’t destroy those parts. You can’t because they are built into your design. So instead, you exile them. You send them underground, where you think no one can see them. And in their place, you construct a version of yourself that becomes acceptable and normal.
The good girl. The responsible one. The overachiever. The peacekeeper. The one who never makes waves. The one who’s always fine.
That construction project usually happens between the ages of three and ten. And by the time you’re a teenager, it’s so embedded that you don’t even know it’s a construction. You think it’s you. The mask fused with the face so long ago that you forgot there was a face underneath.
And here’s the part that makes my chest tight every time I sit with it: the parts of you that went underground didn’t die. In shamanic tradition, we call this soul fragmentation. The parts of your wholeness that weren’t safe to express didn’t disappear; they froze. They went into a kind of suspended animation, waiting for conditions to change. Waiting for it to be safe enough to come home.
They’re still waiting.
The confident little girl who got shamed for being loud? She’s in there. The creative one who was told to be practical? Still there. The sensitive one who learned to build walls because feeling was dangerous? She’s behind those walls right now, listening for your footsteps.
The Moment the Kingdom Stops Working
For a while, the adaptive self works. Sometimes it works spectacularly. You build a career. You cultivate relationships. You raise children, earn degrees, and hit milestones. The good girl strategy pays dividends for decades because the world rewards performance, compliance, and self-abandonment, especially in women.
And then something shifts.
Maybe it’s gradual. A slow leak of meaning from things that used to matter. A growing distance between the life everyone sees and what you actually feel. Maybe it’s sudden: a loss, a health scare, a relationship that cracks wide open. Or maybe there’s no event at all. You just wake up one Tuesday morning and realize that the life you built, the one you worked so hard for, feels like it belongs to someone else.
This is the moment the kingdom’s operating system starts to crash. And it’s terrifying because the only self you know is the adaptive one, the performer, the manager of everyone else’s emotional experience, and she’s the one losing power. And without her, you don’t know who you are.
Most women interpret this as a breakdown. A crisis. Something is wrong that needs fixing.
I see it differently.
From a shamanic lens, this is the beginning of an initiation. It’s the mythological moment that exists in every ancient tradition across every culture, the moment the child realizes that the “sick” kingdom’s inherited answers are not her own. That the rules she followed to survive are the exact things keeping her trapped. That she has to leave this fabricated story behind. The inherited identity. The shame-built self that was never actually hers.
Oh, my!
Why Understanding Isn’t Enough
Now, here’s where I’m going to say something that might ruffle some feathers.
A lot of women arrive at this point and do exactly what the kingdom taught them to do: they try to understand their way out. They go to therapy. They read books. They learn the vocabulary, the attachment theory, codependency, inner child, and trauma responses. They become fluent in the language of their own wound.
And I think that’s valuable. Genuinely. Awareness is an important first step.
But awareness alone doesn’t change the identity. You can understand perfectly why you people-please and still do it at every dinner party. You can map your entire attachment pattern and still choose the same kind of partner. You can journal about your inner child for five years and still feel that same tight knot of shame in your stomach when someone asks what you want.
Because knowing the wound and retrieving what was lost are two fundamentally different things.
Knowledge is cognitive. It lives in the brain. It helps you see the pattern. Soul retrieval is embodied. It lives in the nervous system, the body, the soul. It brings the exiled parts home, to your wounded soul and your anxious heart.
You don’t overcome shame by understanding its origins alone. You overcome it by healing the identity that shame built and finally standing in the one that was always underneath.
Leaving the Sick Kingdom
In every mythology, there’s a departure. The hero leaves the known world. The young woman walks into the forest. The initiate crosses a threshold and enters territory where the old rules don’t apply.
This is the part of the story most women are standing in right now, whether they recognize it or not.
Leaving the “sick” kingdom means you stop asking your parents’ permission to be who you are. You stop filtering your voice through their fear. You stop measuring your worth by standards that were set by people who didn’t have access to their own wholeness.
It doesn’t mean you abandon your family or torch your relationships. It means you stop living in a story written before you were born. You stop inheriting an identity that belongs to someone else’s pain and mistaking it for your own.
That sounds clean on paper. In practice, it’s messy. There’s grief of a real, bone-deep grief kind because the kingdom, no matter how sick it was, was home. And leaving home costs something. You grieve the parents you wish you’d had. You grieve the childhood that should have been different. You grieve the years you spent performing a self that was never real. That grief is not optional. It’s the toll at the gate. You can’t skip it, and you shouldn’t try to.
But on the other side of that grief? Something extraordinary happens.
You start to feel parts of yourself that have been dormant for decades. Creativity that was shut down. Desire that was shamed into silence. A voice that doesn’t need permission or approval to speak. An aliveness that has nothing to do with productivity or performance.
The exiled parts begin to return. Slowly at first, then with a momentum that reorganizes everything, your relationships, your work, your body, your sense of what’s possible.
This is what I mean by identity-led transformation. It’s not about becoming someone new. It’s about becoming whole again. Retrieving what was always yours and letting your life reorganize around that wholeness instead of around the wound.
The Real Inheritance
Here’s what I want to leave you with.
The shame you carry was placed on you by people who had it placed on them by people who had it placed on them. It’s a chain that stretches back generations, and somewhere along the line, nobody stopped to question whether it was true. They just kept passing it down, like a family recipe nobody actually enjoys but everyone keeps making because that’s what you do. (Don’t do that).
You have the opportunity to break that chain. And when I say opportunity, I mean it’s standing right in front of you in the form of that restlessness, that emptiness, that quiet voice that keeps whispering this isn’t it.
That voice isn’t a problem to solve. It’s the truest part of you, knocking on the door, asking to finally be let in.
The “sick” kingdom gave you a story. The story kept you safe for a while. But you’ve outgrown it. The woman you’re becoming can’t fit inside the identity the “sick” kingdom built, and she’s not supposed to. She’s supposed to leave, grieve, reclaim, and build something that’s actually hers. It’s time!
I know that’s scary. I know it feels like stepping off a cliff without being able to see the bottom.
But here’s what I’ve learned from walking with women through this passage for years: the bottom is always closer than you think. And what’s waiting down there isn’t destruction. It’s the version of you that existed before anyone told her she was too much, not enough, or fundamentally flawed.
She’s still there. She’s whole. And she’s ready.
All she needs is for you to come back for her. The real question is: Are you ready?
Deepest Munay,
Joaquina Mascuch 🦋
Life Coach, Shaman, Mystic, Ceremonial Leader
Munay is a Quechua word meaning “pure love” or “will”—the life force that moves through all things. It is the energy that calls you back home to yourself.
Joaquina is a shaman and identity coach who guides women through identity-level transformation, from self-management to self-leadership. Her work is rooted in shamanic tradition, nervous system intelligence, and the belief that every woman was born whole. Book a free consult here.
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Website: www.joaquinamascuch.com
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