What if the quiet feeling that you're not enough isn't a character flaw — but something your nervous system learned long ago just to keep you safe? In episode 266 of Joy Found Here, psychotherapist and author Kristine B. Jensen unpacks one of the most misunderstood and under-named emotions we carry: shame — and how the stories we've been telling ourselves for decades may finally be ready to be set free.

In This Episode, You Will Learn:

(4:45) Kristine's decades as a psychotherapist couldn't shake her own unnamed inner struggle

(6:27) Retiring forced her to face herself — and what that revealed

(9:53) The moment she named her feeling as shame for the first time

(13:00) Shame as a survival instinct — and why we never choose it

(15:42) Where "shame speak" comes from and why it once protected us

(19:33) How childhood emotional nourishment shapes our nervous system and self-worth

(29:23) The client who sparked a book that almost didn't get written

(32:55) Compassion for our younger selves and seeing our parents differently

(35:23) Forgiveness as an inside job — and the freedom it brings

(44:48) First steps: self-talk awareness, journaling, and breaking the cycle of old stories

Kristine B. Jensen is a speaker, author, and licensed psychotherapist with over four decades of experience helping people understand the hidden roots of self-doubt. She reframes shame not as a personal flaw but as a survival response — and knows this territory from the inside out. She is the author of Bruised Not Broken: Healing the Shame of a Troubled Childhood.

In this episode, Kristine shares how — despite decades as a successful psychotherapist — she carried a feeling she couldn't name until retirement forced her to sit with herself and she finally identified it as shame. She explains that shame is not a character flaw but a survival instinct the nervous system triggers automatically, often rooted in childhoods where feelings didn't matter or approval had to be earned. Healing, she offers, means speaking to our younger selves with compassion, doing the work of forgiveness as an inside job, and noticing our self-talk — because what's waiting on the other side is freedom.

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Book: Kristine B. Jensen - Bruised Not Broken

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