A six-week guided journey
The UnShaming Way Through Trauma
For anyone carrying trauma, with David Bedrick, author of The Unshaming Way
11:00 a.m. Pacific · 2:00 p.m. Eastern · 7:00 p.m. UK
Every session recorded, available within 24 hours.
Want to know exactly what we’ll do together? Watch this.
David walks through the order the steps belong in, the same sequence the six weeks follow.
“You didn’t get to say no. Healing begins when someone finally asks for your consent, and that someone is you.”
A note from David
Most visions of trauma healing point one direction: go into the traumatic moment and feel it. After forty years of this work, I can tell you that is not where healing begins. Before anyone enters their deepest injury, other things must come back online first: the part of you that knows yes, no, and maybe, the part that didn’t consent. The witness who never came or denied and gaslit you. The intelligence of your own dissociation. Your ability to defend yourself. Dealing with the critic who moved inside. The boundaries that were never allowed. Only then does it become safe, and healing, to feel the injury and tell the story, with a witness, this time.
That is the path this course walks, one step at a time, in small doses. You will not be asked to dive into anything. You will be asked, at every step, for your consent. That asking is itself the medicine.
A workable, practice-based, and accessible path to divesting ourselves from shame.Gabor Maté, MD author of The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture
The path
Six Wednesdays, six movements
1
September 16
The Part of You That Gets Asked & The Witness Inquiry
The consent-making function: trauma’s quietest injury is that you didn’t get a choice, your no was overridden. We restore the asking first, including the ethics of how we watch feedback (the body’s signals that say yes, no, slow down) so nothing in this course re-runs the original scene. Then the witness inquiry: who did you tell? Who saw, and how did their seeing, or not-seeing, shape what the injury became?
2
September 23
The Intelligence of Dissociation
Dissociation is not a malfunction; it is the psyche’s way of leaving an unlivable moment. We follow the leaving to where it goes, including the earth as witness, and treat this survival intelligence with the respect it earned.
3
September 30
Conscious Dissociation
Standing back on purpose to reclaim what the freeze locked away: power and compassion. Learning to look at yourself from the outside with care, and to defend the one you see.
4
October 7
The Accuser’s Voice & The Protection Never Allowed
Inner criticism — or, as the oldest tradition named it, the Accuser — is the shaming witness internalized: trauma perpetuated from within, in a voice that only knows the language of the charge. We meet the Accuser, and the direct link to boundaries: when consent froze, protection froze with it. We begin recovering the no that guards you.
5
October 14
Feeling the Injury, Telling the Story (I)
Now, with consent awake, the witness present, and your protections returning, we begin to approach the injury itself, in small doses, with a witness, this time. Movement, voice, and feeling as the body’s own languages.
6
October 21
Feeling the Injury, Telling the Story (II)
Completing the telling. Integrating what was frozen into present life, and glimpsing the teleology of the wound: the gifts that were cooking inside it all along.
A fully somatic path
Four channels, not one
This is a somatic approach, and more of one than most. Much of what is called somatic work uses a single channel of the body: felt sensation. This path works with four.
The feeling bodySensation, the channel most somatic work stops at.
The moving bodyThe push, the shake, the reach that never got to finish.
The voiceThe sound, the groan, the sentence that was never allowed.
The faceThe expression that completes what words cannot.
Trauma froze more than feelings. Healing gets to use everything that froze.
The heart of it
The power of the witness
While perpetrators cause harm, it’s the witness who holds the greatest power in healing. When pain is met with a loving witness, someone who believes, validates, and supports without gaslighting or blame, the wound, though painful, doesn’t freeze into trauma. Healing begins, and shame no longer takes root in the self.
If, however, we don’t have a loving witness, then we internalize a shaming witness, a voice that tells us we are to blame, that we deserved what happened, and that our natural responses are inherently wrong.
This shame and lack of compassionate witnessing is the true root of trauma.
Before you decide
Who this is for
Anyone carrying trauma
Anyone who wants a path through it that does not require diving in over your head: individuals doing their own healing, and also teachers, coaches, healers, and therapists who want to walk the path themselves.
A journey, not a training
This is a guided journey, not a facilitator training. Practitioners: you will learn by walking it, but the course asks nothing of you except your own process.
How it works
The shape of the six weeks
- Six live sessions of 2¼ hours each, on Zoom.
- Guided practices in small doses. The whole method runs on 10% steps, never over your head.
- Every exercise begins with a consent check.
- All sessions recorded, with recordings available within 24 hours. Australia and Asia friends: you are fully provided for.
- Supported by David’s teaching assistants.
Enrollment
Join the journey
If you attended the “Who Did You Tell?” masterclass, you receive $100 off. We have emailed your coupon code. If you did not receive it, write to info@davidbedrick.com and we will send it to you.
In their words
What people say about this work
“Your way of teaching shame is so beautiful, so important and so bone-fucking-true. I feel so blessed to be able to learn and grow with you.”
Emily“Every once a decade or so, I come across a teacher so inspiring, healing so profound, insight so transformative that it instantly becomes a part of my own ‘canon.’”
Steven“David, thank you for such a truly life-altering experience. Even two days later, I don’t fully have words for the depth of what you offered us.”
Samantha“David bears gifts that our world in suffering desperately needs. His way of staying curious and listening deeply to what’s unfolding has shifted so much of the way I understand my own trauma and the collective trauma we are all being asked to face.”
Nilaya Sabnis“David Bedrick has created THE most powerfully compassionate process. And he, himself, is a wizard.”
“This has been life changing! THANK YOU, DAVID!”
“David has a skill for sharing profound knowledge and making it digestible.”
Meet your guide
David Bedrick
David Bedrick, J.D., Dipl. PW, is the founder of the UnShaming Way — a depth-psychology approach built on one conviction: your symptoms, struggles, and survival strategies carry intelligence, not pathology.
He is the author of five books, including The Unshaming Way (North Atlantic Books), now available in eight languages. He has trained hundreds of clinicians and taught thousands of individuals. Before psychology, he practiced law; before law, he survived the home that taught him everything the books later confirmed. That is his deepest credential: he knows both harms — the violence, and the denial of it — from the inside.
His work has appeared in Psychology Today and reaches hundreds of thousands of readers through his essays on trauma, shame, and the witness.
In this astute work, David Bedrick provides a deep investigation of shame, the most debilitating of our mind states, and offers a workable, practice-based, and accessible path to divesting ourselves from it.Gabor Maté, MD
Questions
Before you join
Do I have to share my trauma story?
No. Nothing is required. Every exercise begins by asking your consent, and “no” is honored as trauma work in itself.
Is this therapy?
No, it’s a guided educational journey. It pairs well with therapy and many participants bring what they discover into their own sessions.
What if I can’t attend live?
Recordings within 24 hours, and practices are designed to be done at your own pace.
Is this for professionals?
Professionals are welcome as participants. The professional training version, which is recorded, is available separately.
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Six Wednesdays, beginning September 16
11:00 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. Pacific. Every session recorded.
$495. If you attended the masterclass, your $100 discount comes off with your coupon code.