If you were born and raised, or socialized, as a female, and you’re an entrepreneur, this one is for you. I’m in the middle of a powerful reframe that’s come from synthesizing some concepts from recent EMDR reading, and I hope it helps you self-reflect the way it’s helped me.
There’s a particular struggle I see in entrepreneurs who were assigned female at birth, and it tends to show up right when we start reaching for something more — bigger, bolder, truer to what we’re actually capable of. That reach is the very essence of entrepreneurship. You make your moves. Your business grows. You create the program, write the book, raise your prices, promote the group, say something publicly that matters to you.
And then, maybe, you don’t get it quite right. Someone misunderstands you. Someone doesn’t like what you said. Or maybe nothing bad happens at all — you’re simply more visible than you were before. Either way, shame arrives. We usually call this shame and anxiety “imposter syndrome” and go looking for ways to shore up our self-esteem.
But I don’t think that’s quite what’s happening. What I’m describing isn’t really I’m not good enough. It’s closer to who do I think I am? Am I making this too much about me? Am I taking up too much space? Why do I need this much attention? There’s something in it that feels almost morally suspect about being visible at all.
That’s a different animal than imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is a doubt about competence and legitimacy — the fear that you haven’t really earned this, and eventually people will figure out you don’t know what you’re doing. But what happens when you already know you’re competent? What if the deeper fear was never I’m not good enough to become bigger, but becoming bigger isn’t safe?
The family is often our first system
I recently came across a fascinating way of thinking about shame while preparing to lead a therapist book club on Jim Knipe’s EMDR Toolbox: Theory and Treatment of Complex PTSD and Dissociation. Knipe describes irrational shame as something that can function defensively. One of its jobs is to shut down other affects — particularly interest and excitement.
Before we get to what that means for entrepreneurship, it’s worth asking why a child would ever need a mechanism that shuts down excitement in the first place. Children are profoundly dependent on their caregivers, and when those caregivers are emotionally unreliable, volatile, narcissistic, rejecting, controlling, or otherwise unable to tolerate the child’s full emerging self, the child runs into an impossible problem: I need these people, but being fully myself sometimes threatens my connection to them.
Knipe points to one solution in the relationship between shame and idealization. Within a child’s logic, it’s safer to believe I am bad and my parents are good than to recognize I am a good kid who is dependent on adults who cannot reliably meet my needs. Self-blame offers something the second option doesn’t: an illusion of control. If I’m the problem, then I’m also the fix. I can be quieter. More helpful. Less demanding. More impressive. Less emotional. I can rely on me.
And this is exactly where the trouble starts for entrepreneurs, because the very thing that had you developing new programs or ideas in the first place — the interest, the excitement — is the thing this defense is built to shut down. So you quit. Or, in a more sophisticated version of the same pattern, you keep moving, but you end up staying small while staying very, very busy.
Then patriarchy reinforces the lesson
For children socialized as girls, these lessons don’t stay contained inside the family. We enter a larger culture with remarkably similar expectations, and they tend to arrive in pairs: be agreeable, but have your own opinions. Be attractive, but don’t be vain. Be accomplished, but don’t intimidate anyone. Have boundaries, but don’t be difficult. Be confident, but don’t be arrogant. Lead, but stay likable. Earn money, but don’t care too much about money. Be visible, but don’t seek attention. Have needs, but meet everyone else’s first. And, absolutely, shine — just not in a way that makes anyone uncomfortable.
Not every AFAB person receives these messages the same way. Race, class, disability, sexuality, gender identity, body size, and culture all shape who is even permitted to be visible, angry, ambitious, authoritative, or powerful. But the larger patriarchal lesson is hard to miss either way: your power is safest when it stays palatable to other people. For someone who already learned inside an unsupportive family system that connection depends on self-monitoring, patriarchy doesn’t create that wound from scratch. It just validates it.
And then we become entrepreneurs — which asks us to violate almost all of that training at once. Tell people you’re good at something. Put your name on it. Charge what it’s worth. Talk about your accomplishments. Have an opinion. Promote yourself. Say no. Make decisions other people won’t like. Risk criticism. Take up space. Make money. Become visible. Become powerful. And maybe hardest of all: build something that belongs to you.
Suddenly your nervous system isn’t just dealing with a marketing strategy. It’s dealing with decades of information about what happens when you become too visible, too autonomous, too successful, too opinionated, too hard to control, too much.
What shame actually does
This is where shame gets particularly interesting, because it doesn’t just say don’t — it has a bodily effect. Knipe’s conceptualization suggests shame can shut down interest and excitement directly. Think about what that means in an entrepreneurial context: the very thing that generated the idea is the thing that goes quiet right when it’s time to show your work to the world.
Suddenly you’re tired. You start procrastinating. You decide the website needs more work. You question the offer. You rewrite the announcement fourteen times. You take another training instead of launching the one you already built. You worry your marketing is manipulative. You wonder if you’re centering yourself too much. And somewhere in there, you lose the excitement that made you want to build the thing at all.
We usually call this self-sabotage. But what if some of it is protection? What if a nervous system that once learned visibility can cost me connection is doing exactly what it learned to do — applying the brakes, right on schedule?
I’ve generally understood shame as the feeling that I’ve violated a moral mandate, mine or someone else’s, and that’s why certain moments of entrepreneurial visibility carry such a strange flavor. It’s not simply I’m afraid this won’t work. It’s heavier than that. Almost filthy. I’m hogging attention. I’m centering myself. I’m becoming too important.
That distinction matters, because if I mistake that feeling for a confidence problem, the solution becomes convincing myself I’m good enough. But I already know I’m good at what I do. So it’s worth asking what’s actually underneath it, and the answer is a little more convoluted than “I learned power is dangerous.” The culture does teach that women in power are morally suspect, but that message alone doesn’t explain the force of the brakes. Instead, the deeper mechanism is that shame itself is a defense, and a strangely useful one: it gives a child who has no real power in her environment a sense of control. If I can make myself smaller, quieter, less demanding, I can manage what feels unmanageable.
Shutting myself down becomes a way of controlling a world I can’t otherwise control. So it’s not just that visibility got labeled dangerous. It’s that shame became the tool a powerless child used to feel like she had some say in whether she stayed connected and safe — and that tool doesn’t retire just because you grew up. If you grew up in a family where your needs, your anger, your separateness, your success, your visibility, or your autonomy threatened connection, and then you entered a culture that spent years telling girls to make themselves smaller for everyone else’s comfort, that combination gave the same old defense a new job to do. Why wouldn’t some part of you reach for the brakes?
That part of you isn’t stupid. Its logic is actually pretty sophisticated: stay small enough, everyone stays close, AND you maintain a semblance of safety through control.
But that’s not who I want to be
I don’t want my work organized around making sure nobody’s ever uncomfortable with my visibility. I REALLY don’t want my shame brakes deciding how much of my creativity makes it out into the world. And I don’t want to reproduce patriarchy inside myself by becoming my own most effective silencer.
That doesn’t mean pursuing power without ever examining how I use it — quite the opposite. I want to become powerful and stay accountable. I want to be visible and stay connected. I want to take up space without believing someone else has to become smaller for me to do it. I want to earn money without confusing wealth with worth. I want to tolerate being misunderstood without abandoning myself just to restore everyone’s approval. I want to be excited about what I’m creating without immediately scanning the room to see whether my excitement has become inconvenient to someone.
So instead of treating any of this as a personal fault or a shortcoming, I’ve started turning back toward the actual training ground — the childhood system where shame first got recruited as a defense, long before it ever showed up wearing a business suit.
Why this is EMDR intensive work
Here’s what I keep coming back to: you can’t think your way out of a defense that was never built by “thinking” in the first place. It was built by a nervous system trying to keep you safe inside a relationship you couldn’t leave. That’s why affirmations, mindset work, and even years of talk therapy can leave this particular shame stubbornly intact — you can know you’re competent and still feel the brakes engage the moment you go to hit publish.
This is exactly the terrain an EMDR intensive is built for. Instead of circling the same insight for months in fifty-minute increments, an intensive gives you the sustained, uninterrupted time to actually go back to where this got wired in — the specific moments, the specific relationships, the specific bargains a much younger version of you struck to stay connected — and process them all the way through, rather than just talking about them. The goal isn’t to analyze the shame. It’s to help your nervous system finally learn what it never got to learn back then: that your fullness, your excitement, your visibility, and your power were never actually the threat.
If any of this landed for you, that’s usually a sign it’s worth looking at directly rather than managing around it forever. I’d love to talk with you about whether an intensive is the right next step.
Love,
Renee