"I've Done the Work - Why Do I Still Feel Shame?" | Somatic Healing, Nervous System Regulation & Sacred Sisterhood with Becky Aste + Bridget Covill
Aug 18, 2026
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You've regulated. You've journaled. You've done more inner work than most people you know. And yet there's still a quiet place inside that can't fully exhale.
This week, I'm joined by two women who have become true co-laborers in this work with me - Becky Aste, trauma-informed somatic marriage coach, and Bridget Covill, RESET Breathwork facilitator. Together, the three of us are co-hosting our second Wild + Rooted retreat this November, and this conversation is a living example of why we built it: because healing happens relationally, and some layers of this journey simply can't be softened in isolation.
We go deep into where shame hides in high-functioning, self-aware women - the perfectionism, the hyper-achieving, the "I'm fine" exterior - and where it actually lives in the body. Becky shares vulnerably about looking successful on the outside while her marriage was quietly falling apart, and about the grief she's carrying right now. Bridget talks about religious conditioning, learning to trust her body again, and why breathwork is one of the only things that truly quiets the mind. And I share my own adoptee story - the survival patterns that formed before I ever had language, and what it's taken to come home to myself.
Then we tell stories from our first retreat that still give us chills: the northern lights appearing over the beach, a game of tag that brought a 60-year-old woman's childlike self back online, and the night a birth mother, an adoptive mother, and an adoptee ended up side by side at the same dinner table.
If your body leans in at any point during this episode - don't ignore it. Just be curious about it. What arises belongs.
In This Episode, We Explore:
- Why high-functioning, self-aware women still carry a subtle undercurrent of shame - and where it hides
- Shame as a "severed sense of love and belonging" (and how it shows up in perfectionism, control, and people-pleasing)
- Where shame lives in the body - and why noticing it is the beginning of the work
- What breathwork reveals that the mind keeps hidden, and why you don't need a story or explanation for what comes up
- Grief, brain fog, and giving the prefrontal cortex a break
- What happens in a room of women that can't happen on Zoom or in a journal - co-regulation, eye contact, and being truly witnessed
- Sacred sisterhood vs. surface-level friendship - and why so many of us have never experienced the former
- Rupture and repair, in real time, at our own retreat
- Inside Wild + Rooted: what we've created for the woman who's already done the work and senses a deeper layer calling her
About Wild + Rooted:
A 3-day immersive retreat, November 6–8, 2026, at a private home on the Eastern Shore of Delaware. Trauma release breathwork, inner child and parts work, shame-dissolving sessions, art therapy, yoga on the water, at-home massages, and a sacred sisterhood that holds - with pre-retreat preparation and 90 days of integration support afterward. For the woman who's already done the work and wants the deeper layers. Spots are limited, and we're already over halfway full.
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