You’ve tried to find it. I know you have.
Late at night. Phone in one hand, the other pressed against your sternum like you could hold something down if you pushed hard enough. You typed something like “why do I feel like something is wrong with me” or “shame for no reason” or “constant feeling of not being enough.” And Google gave you what Google gives everyone: a list of symptoms for depression, a quiz about anxiety, maybe a WebMD article suggesting you talk to your doctor.
None of it’s right. Because what you’re feeling doesn’t have a WebMD page.
I’m talking about the shame that has no origin story, the kind you can’t trace back to a single event, a single person, a single moment where something broke. The kind that was in the room before you got there. And I’m going to talk about why it’s so goddamn hard to work with, and what I’ve seen actually move the needle after years of sitting across from women who carry it.
There’s a specific kind of shame that doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t crash through the door with a memory attached. It doesn’t come with a flashback or a villain or a story you can tell your therapist in session three.
It just… hums.
Low-grade. Constant. Like tinnitus for your sense of self. You wake up with it. You go to bed with it. And because it doesn’t have a story, you start to believe it must just be you. That you are the source
I want to sit with that for a second, because I think it matters. The women I work with are smart, accomplished, self-aware women who have done years of therapy. Most of them have tried to solve this feeling. They’ve read the books. They can name their attachment style and their Enneagram number and the exact coping mechanism they default to under stress. They’ve done The Work. Capital T, capital W.
And the shame is still there. Humming.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand about sourceless shame, both from my own life and from the hundreds of conversations I’ve had in coaching: it doesn’t come from one moment because it didn’t develop in one moment. It accumulated. Layer by layer. From the air in the house you grew up in. From what was praised and what was met with silence. From the standards your mother held herself to that she never said out loud but you absorbed through your skin anyway.
Nobody sat you down and said “you are not enough.” They didn’t have to. The message was hanging in every space you moved through.
I think about my own version of this a lot. I spent years in the military, then years in grad school, then years building a career that looked like proof of something — proof that I was capable, that I had earned my place, that I was worth taking seriously. And if you’d asked me at any point during that decade whether I felt ashamed, I would have said no. Absolutely not. Look at the resume. Look at the credentials. I’m doing great.
But underneath all that doing, there was a hum. A feeling I couldn’t name that made me work harder, say yes more, need the next achievement before the last one had even cooled. It wasn’t ambition. It was running. I just didn’t have language for what I was running from.
That’s the trap of sourceless shame. It doesn’t feel like shame. It feels like personality. Like drive. Like perfectionism. Like the fact that you’ve never been able to sit still and just… be okay.
When I talk about the Identity Void (that psychological state of being unmoored when you’ve done everything right and it still doesn’t feel like yours) shame is usually what I find underneath it. Not always. But often. The void isn’t empty. It’s full of this humming, sourceless wrongness that you’ve been building on top of for years.
And the reason traditional approaches struggle with it is that most of them need a story to work with.
CBT wants a thought to restructure. Shame like this isn’t a thought. It’s a felt sense. It lives in your chest, your throat, your jaw. It’s pre-verbal. You felt it before you had language for it, which means language-based interventions are trying to reach something that exists below the level of language.
Talk therapy wants a narrative. “Tell me about a time you felt shame.” And you sit there trying to locate a moment, a scene, a memory — and you come up empty. Not because you’re avoidant or in denial. Because there isn’t one moment. There are ten thousand micro-moments, none of them significant enough to make the therapist’s notes, all of them adding up to this.
Even the self-help world struggles with sourceless shame. Affirmations? “I am enough” feels like a lie when your entire nervous system has decades of evidence to the contrary. Journaling? You can write about it until your hand cramps and still not get to the bottom of it because there is no bottom. It’s not a wound with a floor. It’s the air you’ve been breathing.
I had a client say to me once: “It feels like trying to grab fog. I know it’s there. I can feel it on my skin. But every time I try to hold it, my hands are empty.” That’s stuck, because that’s exactly it. You can’t grab fog. You can’t argue with it. You can’t think your way out of it.
So what do you do?
The first thing — and I know this isn’t satisfying, but I’m going to say it because it’s true — is you stop trying to find the source. I know. You want the origin story. You want the moment you can point to and say “there. That’s where it started. That’s why I feel this way.” Because if you can find the source, you can fix it. Right?
But sourceless shame doesn’t work like that. The source isn’t a single event. The source is a system. It’s the family that valued achievement over presence. It’s the culture that told you your worth was conditional on what you produced. It’s pronatalism whispering that your life needs a justification. It’s all of it, happening simultaneously, for years, before you had the developmental capacity to question any of it.
Trying to find “the moment” keeps you in your head. And shame like this doesn’t live in your head. It lives in your body. In the way your shoulders creep up around your ears when someone pays you a genuine compliment. In the way your stomach drops when you have a free afternoon and nothing productive to do. In the tightness in your throat when someone asks “what do you really want?” and you go completely blank.
I’m not being metaphorical. Shame this deep is somatic. It’s stored in your nervous system as a felt sense of wrongness, and it gets activated not by thoughts, but by situations. Stillness activates it. Receiving activates it. Being seen activates it. Pleasure, rest, wanting things for yourself, all of it can trigger the hum, because all of it requires you to exist as a person who matters, and the shame says you don’t.
What I’ve seen actually work, in my own life and in the lives of the women I coach, isn’t a technique. It’s a shift.
It’s moving from “how do I fix this?” to “how do I be with this?”
The women who start to move through sourceless shame are the ones who stop treating it as a problem to solve and start treating it as data. Shame flares when you’re out of alignment, when the gap between who you are and who you’ve been performing gets wide enough that your system sounds the alarm. The hum gets louder in the presence of inauthenticity. It quiets when you do something true.
Over time, if you pay attention, shame starts to function less like a life sentence and more like a compass. A weird, painful, deeply inconvenient compass that you never asked for and can’t return — but a compass nonetheless.
This is part of what I mean when I talk about Identity Integration. The work isn’t to eliminate shame. I don’t think you can eliminate something that was installed this early and this deeply. The work is to change your relationship to it. To stop running from it and start reading it. To notice when the hum gets loud and ask not “what’s wrong with me?” but “what’s happening right now that my system is trying to tell me about?”
That’s a different question. And it leads to a different life.
I’m not going to wrap this up with five steps to heal your sourceless shame. I don’t have them. Nobody does, and anyone who tells you they do is selling something that won’t work.
What I do have is this: the shame you carry is not a verdict on who you are. It’s an artifact of where you’ve been. And the fact that you can feel it and that you can name it as shame even when it has no story means your system is working. It’s trying to get your attention. It’s been trying for years.
So the question isn’t whether the shame will go away. It’s whether you’ll keep building on top of it, or whether you’ll finally stop and look at what’s underneath the foundation.
If you’re sitting with this and recognizing your own hum, I built a free assessment that helps you see where the gap is between who you’ve been performing and who you actually are. It’s called the Self-Trust Assessment, and it’s at caseyjourdan.com. It won’t fix anything. But it’ll name something. And sometimes that’s where the real work begins.
