Edge of Real Podcast | Midlife Identity and Rediscovery
Helping you remember you’re not lost, you’re on the edge of something real.
Edge of Real is a podcast for women who are waking up later in life - and realizing they’re ready for something more.
Hosted by Kristin Hamilton, this is a space for rediscovery beyond the roles, rules, and expectations that never quite fit. Part soft rebellion, part spiritual journal, Edge of Real invites you into the honest, often messy process of unbecoming what you’re not… so you can remember who you really are.
Each week, I invite you into my own re-becoming - sharing stories, spiritual insights, personal permission slips, and real-time reflections from the messy, beautiful middle. I discover and discuss soul-level tools for returning to what’s real - exploring self-discovery beyond the titles, timelines, and expectations that never quite fit. As one woman, shedding and shifting in real time - I offer encouragement, reflection, and permission to evolve on your own terms.
Whether you’re standing at a threshold, questioning what’s real, or craving something deeper… this is for you.
Because the edge isn’t the end.
It’s the becoming.
Edge of Real Podcast | Midlife Identity and Rediscovery
#8. The Weight of Shame and the Freedom Beyond It
We take a hard, honest look at shame - the kind that tells you you’re the problem - and trade the old scripts for a new practice of self-return. Along the way, we unpack how culture taught many midlife women to internalize blame, explore why younger stories are reframing shame as something external, and draw strength from surprising places: the action-packed K‑pop Demon Hunters with a deeper message and Keely Jones’s refusal to carry someone else’s violation in Ted Lasso.
I share the language that helped me separate identity from behavior, and a personal moment of catching myself mid‑edit—tempted to polish away my pauses—then choosing to leave them in as an act of unshaming. From there, we get practical with four simple tools you can use today: name the shame and bring it into the light, regulate your nervous system with 4‑7‑8 breathing, reframe with compassion by asking what you needed back then, and take one inspired action that tells your brain it’s safe to be seen. We close with a journal prompt to help you hand back what never belonged to you and a reminder that freedom isn’t earned; it’s remembered.
If you’ve been shrinking, apologizing, or second‑guessing your voice, this conversation is a gentle push toward clarity, confidence, and self-acceptance. Listen for relatable stories, actionable steps, and a steady invitation to live unashamed—without waiting for permission. If this resonates, share it with a friend who’s ready to set down her shame, subscribe for future episodes, and leave a review to help more women find their way back to themselves.
🦋 Would you like help walking through these steps, or with accountability, or deeper dives into these topics? Interested in learning more about working 1:1 with me to transform your life in your rediscovery? Schedule a free Discovery call with me here: https://stan.store/edgeofreal
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Welcome back to Edge of Real, a podcast for women rediscovering who they really are, beyond rules, roles, timelines, and expectations. I'm Kristin, and I'm so glad you're here. Today I want to talk about something that I know lives inside so many of us. It can feel like a real hurdle in living as our true selves. Shame. For so many of us, it's been one of the most powerful forces shaping our choices and our lives, and generally not in ways that serve us. So the dictionary says, just so we're all on the same page here, shame is an intense, painful emotion that makes a person feel inherently flawed, bad, or worthless, rather than just being wrong about a specific action. It's a desire to hide or disappear, and stems from the belief that one is unlovable and unworthy of connection. While mild shame can play a role in socialization, excessive or chronic shame can lead to negative impacts on mental health, including anxiety, relationship problems, low self-esteem, and isolation. That's all the official stuff. So shame is is sneaky. It's not just I made a mistake. That's guilt. Shame says, I am the mistake. It convinces us that we are the problem, not just we have a problem. And if you've ever carried that feeling, whether about your body, your choices, your desires, or even just your existence, you know how heavy it can be. It is heavy. It lives in the shadows. It thrives when we don't talk about it. And for a lot of us in midlife, we were raised in a culture where shame was woven into everything. You were too loud, too quiet, too much, not enough. If you have sex, you're bad. If you don't have sex, you're disappointing. Have a career. Don't work outside the home. We learned to carry the blame for things that were never ours to carry. And we just got so used to swallowing shame that it became a part of our identity. But it doesn't have to stay there. Before I get too far into this, I want to zoom out and talk about what's happening in our culture, particularly our media right now, because it's fascinating and I feel like it's helpful. So shame is being named, confronted, and reframed in ways that many of us never saw modeled when we were growing up. I'm going to start with something and just please bear with me. So my 18-year-old daughter came home over the summer and she'd been hanging out with friends, and she's like, Mom, there is a movie we just watched, and we gotta watch it. Will you watch it with me right now? I'm like, cool, movie night. Let's order a pizza, grab our blankets, let's get cozy, and let's watch a movie. She's like, okay, but mom, it's called K-pop Demon Hunters. Okay, she really wants me to watch it. Let's just do that. For those of you who haven't seen it, it is visually beautiful. It's funny, it's charming, it's super fun, has empowering music. And on the surface, it is this wild adventure with lots of supernatural battles. But underneath, it's actually about battling the weight of shame and confronting the ways it shows up. The characters struggle with secrets, with expectations that they can't live up to, with failures that they carry, with fear of rejection, feeling unlovable, unworthy, those hidden uh internal scars of shame. And then there's the ultimate shame, which is that that makes us feel alienated and unable to connect with others. The characters in this movie struggle with carrying secrets that threaten to define them. And an interesting thing is even the shame of feeling shame is addressed in this movie. The villain who controls all the demons does so with none other than whispers of shame inside their heads. That's literally how he controls them. The characters ultimately choose to embrace their shame, embrace who they are, embrace it as a part of the story of who they are, and release it rather than be defined by it. The message is super clear. Shame is not proof that you are broken. Shame is something outside of you, something you can face, something you can choose to release. And these younger audiences are being shown that shame is externalized. It's something you can look at, talk about, and even fight. And that is a radically different message than what many of us in midlife were taught and grew up with to internalize shame, to carry it silently, to believe that it's evidence that we aren't worthy. So these stories matter. They are rewriting the script and they're teaching these younger generations that shame isn't truth. Shame isn't identity. Shame is something outside of you and you can face it. And that is powerful. They're seeing shame as being externalized and not swallowing a person. They're learning that it doesn't have to live inside them and define who they are. And then just one more example in media. And that is the character of Keely Jones in Ted Lasso. In the episode that's called We'll Never Have Paris, Keely's private photos are leaked online without her consent. And this is a moment that is so devastating and unthinkable that it could have crushed her with shame, like it would many people, like it has many people. But instead of shrinking or letting it define her, Keely does something that I still think about on a regular basis and still use as a model in how to handle certain things in my life. She doesn't play by the old rules. She refuses to apologize for existing as herself or for somebody else's violation of her. She doesn't shrink. She refuses to apologize for simply being human or for her sexuality or for her choices. She takes control of the narrative, she holds her head high, and she doesn't let the shame stick to her. She doesn't absorb it. So think about that for a second. How many of us in our 40s, 50s, and beyond were taught that if something like that happened, we were to blame, that the shame was ours to carry. Keely models a different path. She separates herself from the violation, placing the responsibility where it belongs. And in doing so, she shows us what it looks like to live unashamed. And for us as women rediscovering ourselves in midlife, these stories can serve as an invitation to unlearn the messages that we were handed and that we grew up with and to start practicing a new way, a new response to this. One that says, I will stop carrying the shame that never belonged to me in the first place. I will not shrink myself for your comfort. I get to choose who I am. I get to live out loud, and I will not apologize for my existence. So I would say that about probably 75% or so of the women that I have worked with are held back in some way by shame. I know how prevalent it is. Personally, in my own rediscovery journey, I used to have a tendency to turn things that went wrong in my personal life into me doing something wrong. Even beyond that, me being wrong. So this obviously resulted in me feeling shame on pretty much a regular basis. Feelings became pervasive and basically essentially destroyed my sense of self and my confidence along with it. I had this overwhelming sense of being inadequate and a very strong desire to avoid others. I knew that I would have to be fake in front of them because of how much I was hiding in shame about just everyday things. And I didn't want to be fake in front of them. And so I avoided them and others. I would preface so many things with a disclaimer. It was everything from, oh, I probably overcooked the meat, but dinner's still gonna taste pretty good. Or, well, it still needs work. But here's my painting so far. And I would say, I'm just all the time. I minimized myself and put shame on myself so that I wouldn't have to feel it from others because I was sure that it would. And in doing so, I completely abandoned myself. I just left myself stranded. But it was actually my kids who came to my rescue as teenagers and young adults. They helped me see that this was the state I was living in. Their unconditional love of me and their acceptance of my faults as much as my victories. Once I had the realization in that way, I was then able to move forward to see where in my past this had come from and deal with that. Also accept it as a part of me and where I am in my story. I really like to see things from the past as wisdom that I've gained now rather than regrets. So this was definitely a part of that and the part of the healing with that for me. And then I was able to move forward from a place of self-acceptance and the ability to evaluate myself and my choices from a much healthier place. I have worked really hard to remove the phrase I'm just from my vocabulary. Still catch it sometimes, but I'm working on it. Okay, this might sound a little different because I'm recording it after I recorded the full episode because I had a thought and I wanted to add it in because it it completely demonstrates the fact that we're always growing and always learning and always rediscovering ourselves. So I had a moment of feeling some shame. I was listening back to do some editing on this episode and was feeling a little bit of shame around the fact that I pause a lot in my in the way that I talk. Um my brain goes really, really fast. And sometimes I can't keep up with it. And sometimes thoughts don't completely get to an end before I lose where that thought was in the first place. So I know that this is a part of how I speak. And I want to edit those pauses out so that you don't have to sit there thinking, like, oh, is she gonna keep talking or what's going on here? And then I realized, you know what? That's me. That's a part of who I am, that's part of how I talk. So I'm going to do my best not to edit out the longer pauses that I have and to just continue to be as real and as myself as I can in this podcast. So hopefully you don't mind the pauses. Okay, that's it. So back to your regularly scheduled program. So when I think about my journey with all of this, I can see now how shame shaped so many of my decisions and of my actions. It was just quietly running in the background. But I've also learned that once you bring shame into the light, once you name it and start letting it go, you make space for freedom, which is so powerful. So here's the reframe: shame is not proof that you're broken. It's not your identity. It's a signal that points to a place where you abandoned yourself because something in the world told you to. But the good news is if you abandoned yourself, that doesn't mean you're gone and you can return to yourself. And you can do that now. So let's get practical here. Let's talk about some tools and practices to work through the shame. How do we actually move through it when it rises up? So I have four steps. The first one is call it into the light. Shame grows in darkness and in silence. And the moment you speak it, whether it's in a journal, to a friend, or even just out loud to yourself, you loosen its grip on you. So write down the things that you're ashamed of and then ask: does this actually belong to me? Or was this given to me by someone else's fear or judgment? The second is a reset within your body. And I know I've talked about this in past episodes, probably every past episode, because I feel really strongly about it. When shame shows up, it often lives in the body, just like everything else. It might be in the pit of your stomach, it might be the heat that rushes to your cheeks, it might be the constricted throat. So you can try this. Breathe deeply for the count of four, hold for seven, and exhale for eight. I've talked about this four, seven, eight breathing. I do this literally several times a day and to fall asleep and everything. This reminds your nervous system, I am safe, I am here, I am more than this moment. Number three, reframe with compassion. Instead of asking, why am I like this? Try what did I need back then that I didn't get. Shame softens when you respond to yourself with kindness instead of criticism. And number four, inspired action. Once you have that awareness, don't just sit in it. Do one thing that moves you toward reclaiming your power. Speak up when you'd normally stay quiet. Wear the outfit you thought was too much. Reach out for the opportunity that you've been trying to talk yourself out of. Each of these small acts tells your brain, I no longer live in shame. I live in freedom. This is what I choose. So here is your journal prompt to sit with for this week. What shame story am I still carrying that isn't mine to hold? And what becomes possible if I set it down? So shame is heavy, but it doesn't have to be permanent and it doesn't define you. It is not who you are. If you're listening right now and you've been carrying shame quietly, maybe even for years, I want you to know this. You are not broken. You are not too late, and you don't have to hold it anymore. You can let that shit go. You are more powerful than you realize, so stand in it and feel it. The freedom that you are craving is already inside you. And the moment you stop apologizing for who you are, that is the moment you start to step back into your life fully. And that's what we're all here for. If this episode resonated, I'd love to hear from you. And please share it with a friend who you think might need to hear this. And remember, you do not have to walk this alone. So until next time, be gentle with yourself and stay curious. Awareness is the first step in rebecoming who you truly are. Thank you for being here with me today. And remember, you're not lost. You're on the edge of something real. Love you. Bye-bye. If what we talked about today feels close to home, if you're tired of dimming yourself down, second guessing every decision, or feeling like you've lost track of who you really are, I want you to know you don't have to figure it out alone. This is exactly the work I do with women in my one-to-one coaching experience. Together, we talk through what's keeping you stuck, reconnect you with the truest version of yourself, and create simple, empowering steps that help you move forward with clarity, confidence, and a clear path. Knowing the steps is one thing, but actually walking them out is another. That's where coaching becomes so powerful. I'll be there to help you stay accountable, to support you when old habits try to pull you back, and to keep you moving forward even when the path feels foggy. Sometimes we all need a guide, someone who can hold the mirror, remind us who we are, and walk alongside us until we're steady in that truth ourselves. If you've been listening and thinking, yes, that is what I need, I'd love to invite you to book a free discovery call with me through the link in the show notes. In that call, we'll have a real coaching conversation. You'll get a feel for the support and clarity I can offer. And if it feels aligned for us both, I'll share more about what one on one coaching with me looks like. I'd love to meet you and walk this path of rediscovery with you. Because the edge isn't the end, it's the becoming.
