Raised on Shame

What if healing is not about finally arriving at happily ever after, but learning how to live happily as we go? In this episode of Raised on Shame , Kimberly talks with Paul Schulte about religious trauma, shame, identity, grief, EMDR, and the importance of doing our own work. Paul reflects on growing up gay in a deeply religious family, coming of age during the AIDS crisis, and the ways unprocess...

What if shame itself isn’t actually the problem? In this episode of Raised on Shame , Kimberly sits down with psychotherapist, writer, and researcher Dr. Judith Pilla, author of How Shame Runs the World , for a conversation that challenges some of our most common assumptions about shame. Dr. Pilla argues that shame, in and of itself, is simply an emotion. The real question is how humans use it. To...

Season 2 of Raised on Shame begins with a question: Who told us what happily ever after was supposed to look like? This season, we’re deconstructing happily ever after and the stories we inherit about love, marriage, divorce, family, faith, identity, and what a “good life” is supposed to be. And to start that conversation, Kimberly sits down with two returning guests: her daughters. Together, they...

Season Two of Raised on Shame is here. This season, we're Deconstructing Happily Ever After and questioning the stories we inherited about love, marriage, family, faith, identity, and what a good life is supposed to look like. What happens when the life you were taught to want no longer fits? What becomes possible when you realize you're allowed to write your own story? And this season, I...

There Are No Wrong Answers Consent, God, and ASMR: Raised on Shame, Kids Edition Season One Finale In this special Mother’s Day season finale of Raised on Shame, Kimberly sits down with her daughters for tea, questions, giggles, and an unscripted conversation about God, love, shame, consent, death, boundaries, curiosity, and the questions adults are sometimes afraid to answer. Together, they explo...

In this episode, Kimberly Wilder, LMHC sits down with filmmaker and storyteller Candace Young for a deeply personal conversation about faith, identity, and the stories that shape us. What happens when two people grow up with completely different experiences of Christianity and still choose to sit at the same table and talk about it? Kimberly Wilder, LMHC shares her experience of growing up in a hi...

In this episode of Raised on Shame , we explore the role of community in healing. This conversation centers on a truth that often gets overlooked in trauma work: healing does not happen in isolation. While many of us have learned to cope, survive, and even function on our own, those adaptations often come at the cost of connection. We talk about what happens when shame is carried alone, how trauma...

I wasn’t raised by television. But I learned how to live from it. In this episode, I introduce myself through the shows that shaped me, because for a long time, they were my only access to the world outside the one I grew up in. Raised in a controlled environment, I wasn’t just watching TV. I was studying it. Learning relationships, desire, identity, and belonging from fragments. And trying to bui...

Religious Trauma, Spiritual Abuse, and Rebuilding Self-Trust @wilder_tally | info@wildertally.com | www.wildertally.com Raised on Shame is a podcast about religious trauma, deconstruction, shame based faith systems, and learning to trust yourself again after leaving high control religion. Gaslighting is often used as a buzzword, but clinically it has a specific meaning. Gaslighting is a form of ps...

Episode 5: Healthy Relationships After Deconstruction @wilder_tally | info@wildertally.com | www.wildertally.com Raised on Shame is a podcast about religious trauma, shame based faith systems, and learning to trust yourself again after deconstruction. Relationships can feel complicated for many reasons. After religious trauma or leaving high control faith communities, connection can feel especiall...

Leaving a harmful system doesn’t always bring immediate relief. Sometimes it brings grief - quiet, complicated, and hard to name. Especially when what was lost wasn’t just belief, but community, certainty, identity, and belonging. In this episode of Raised on Shame , we talk about ambiguous loss - the kind of grief that doesn’t have a clear ending or social permission to exist. We explore why leav...

Many of us were taught-explicitly or quietly-that our bodies could not be trusted. Whether through purity culture, dieting, or both, the message was often the same: control your body, monitor your impulses, and override what you feel. In this episode of Raised on Shame, we explore how purity culture and diet culture fracture body awareness in remarkably similar ways. Through a trauma-informed lens...

Many of us were taught to look outside ourselves for answers—to seek approval, guidance, or certainty from authority, faith, or fear. Over time, this can make it hard to know the difference between intuition, discernment, and a trauma-driven threat response. In this episode of Raised on Shame , we explore how trauma and shame-based systems can rewire intuition, often training people out of trustin...

Shame is something many of us feel but were never taught to name. In this opening episode, Kimberly explores what shame actually is, how it differs from guilt, and how it takes root in silence, control, and conditional belonging, especially within faith-based and high-control systems. Through reflection, nervous-system awareness, and poetry, this episode invites listeners to begin noticing shame w...

First episode releases January 13, 2026 Raised on Shame is a trauma-informed podcast about unlearning the beliefs that kept us silent, disconnected, and small, especially those rooted in faith, purity culture, and high-control systems. Hosted by licensed therapist and EMDR-certified clinician Kimberly Wilder, the show explores shame, attachment, identity, and healing through grounded conversation,...