Free from Shame's Grip + Resiliency with Emma Lyons (part 1)

Ever wonder why years of therapy, mindfulness practices, and self-help books haven't freed you from those persistent feelings of shame and self-doubt? Emma Lyons, trauma-informed healer and founder of the Trauma Matrix, reveals the missing piece: most of us have internalized a narcissistic system of control that operates as our inner critic.

This eye-opening conversation exposes how approximately 80% of Western families qualify as dysfunctional, creating perfect conditions for children to absorb toxic shame messages. Emma shares her personal journey from law school burnout to discovering that the root of her depression and self-sabotage wasn't her own failing but an internalized voice she calls the "inner narcissist." 

Unlike typical therapeutic approaches that suggest befriending your inner critic, Emma offers a revolutionary framework called BREAK that helps you identify this voice as foreign programming rather than your authentic self. She distinguishes between Western individualized shame ("I am bad") and other cultural understandings, revealing how our shame-based culture specifically targets women and marginalized groups.

The conversation illuminates why shame is always about control, never about care, and how it systematically disconnects us from our power and authenticity. Emma's practical BREAK method—Break the trance, Refuse to engage, Expose the lie, Anchor in your body, and Kick it out—provides listeners with immediate tools to reclaim their sovereignty from shame's grip.

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Transcript

Welcoming Resilience Seekers

Speaker 1 0:06

All of us reach a point in time where we are depleted and need to somehow find a way to reignite the fire within. But how do we spark that flame? Welcome to Reignite Resilience, where we will venture into the heart of the human spirit. Resilience where we will venture into the heart of the human spirit. We'll discuss the art of reigniting our passion and strategies to stoke our enthusiasm. And now here are your hosts, natalie Davis and Pamela Cass.

Speaker 2 0:42

Welcome back to another episode of reignite resilience Resilience. I am your co-host, natalie Davis, and I'm so excited to be back with you all, and joining me, of course, is your co-host, pam Kast. Hello Pam, how are you today?

Speaker 3 0:53

I am fabulous. We are joking that it's a holiday week, so it's Tuesday, which is really. Everybody thinks it's a Monday. It feels very much like a Monday, but good news is it's the end of our day and we're already at Wednesday, so there's well, I am like all over the place.

Speaker 2 1:10

I was chatting with one of my girlfriends and she was actually working on Sunday, so I assumed Sunday was Monday, and when I got into Monday I thought it was Tuesday, and now today I'm. I had to continue to leave remind myself it's Tuesday. Today is Tuesday, now. Now it's Tuesday.

Speaker 3 1:26

But you know what? It's going to be a great week. You and I just made dinner plans which we haven't seen each other in person in.

Speaker 2 1:34

I can't even remember oh yeah, I want to say the spring. I bet it was down in December. That is so sad.

Speaker 3 1:42

It's probably it's absolutely ridiculous. It is crazyma, it's absolutely ridiculous. It is crazy. It's September, it's our birthday month and we celebrate the whole month. We're going to get together and have some laughs and reconnect and yeah, and so I know you've got a big hike that you're going to do this weekend. I'm coming off and I'll share with our audience.

Speaker 3 2:02

My son was in a car accident last week and totaled his car, and that's that call you don't ever want to get where. And I was showing a property and I was at a place where I didn't have any cell coverage and so his phone, what his calls, weren't coming through. But he sent me a photo which it didn't come through and I just pressed it to download. It was going about my business, and then I turn it over and it's a picture of, you know, his car and the whole front end gone and I just, you know, had this complete panic attack and you don't realize how out of control you feel in that moment when you can't be there to like you know.

Speaker 3 2:38

And thank goodness, my client knows my son and she's like, oh my gosh, we can go, it's fine. And thank goodness, goodness, you know, he just needs physical therapy. Car can be replaced. He can't be replaced, but you know it's. It's one of those things where you don't ever want to go through it. So it's been quite the the week of roller coaster of emotions and is he okay, like he's doing, okay, he just needs physical therapy.

Speaker 3 3:00

you know he's banged up, his airbags didn't go off for some reason, which they should have. Yeah, all things considered, the other driver charged with reckless driving because it absolutely turned in front of, and I'm very blessed because dylan used to have a motorcycle and where he was going he always rode his motorcycle tube to save gas money, and he sold it about a month ago, and so if he had been driving his motorcycle it probably, probably would have been different, and so I'm just like this. You know the universe was watching out for him, and so you know, don't ever be mad at people, always check in with people and cherish every single second of every day.

Speaker 2 3:36

A hundred percent. Well, I'm glad that he's okay. I saw that picture and I was like, oh my gosh, that's yeah, and there've been a lot of accidents that like just heading out today there were like three or four accidents as I was just leaving my house today. It's just, it's that time of year or people are just so preoccupied with other things that they're not paying attention. And anyways, pay attention people.

Speaker 3 3:58

That's what we're going to say, it's back in session and the kids are driving again, and some of them are new drivers, so be careful out there.

Speaker 2 4:05

Pay attention Fun times, exactly. Well, I'm glad Dylan is good, we have a guest today and I'm excited. I will just turn it over to you, pam. Why don't you tell our listeners who's joining us? I'm excited to dive into the topic and the conversation because it's something that I think that is on. I'll make that a nice statement. It's something that's been on my radar as I start to uncover or peel back layers of my belief system and realizing that the things that are in that belief system are not necessarily my stuff, and wondering where it came from. So I'm excited to talk about I'm not going to say what we're talking about I'm excited to talk to our guest today, I think this is going to resonate with a lot of people.

Meet Emma Lyons: From Law to Healing

Speaker 3 4:44

So today we have joining us Emma Lyons. She is a trauma-informed healer and founder of the Trauma Matrix, where she helps women break up with the shame voice that's been sabotaging their success, relationships and visibility for years. After studying law and international human rights, emma turned away from a life path that looked good on paper but felt like slow death and spent the next decade deep in the healing world. Despite all the therapy, yoga, mindset work and energy practices, she still found herself stuck in loops of self er burnout and invisibility until she uncovered the deeper truth she internalized a narcissistic system of control, and it was running her from the inside out.

Speaker 3 5:34

Today, emma helps high-functioning, heart-led women dismantle that inner narcissist, the shame voice that humiliates, controls and impersonates them, so they can reclaim clarity, power and nervous system freedom. Wow, that's amazing. I mean I am so excited to go through this topic with you, and so I'm going to hand it over to you, emma, for you to kind of share with us this work, and kind of I'd love to hear I mean, mean, law school what got you into this? Like, what made you go down this, this path?

Speaker 4 6:07

well, that's a great introduction. So great to be here with you, ladies, and yeah, I love the vibe of what you've got going on here. I thought I would do law and human rights law because I thought that would be a great way to help people, but when I started studying it, I found myself really feeling kind of empty inside and I was burning myself out. I was working as well on the side while I was studying and I just realized that it wasn't for me. You know you might be and some people might relate. You're in a job and you just know this is not it. Maybe the money is good, maybe it looks good on paper, but you know that every day at the end of the week you just leave feeling dead. And that was me. I knew that I couldn't be a lawyer because it just felt like a total mismatch, and I knew that I would have just been putting myself up for a lifetime of misery to try to do something that wasn't aligned. So that was it and I was really struggling. I didn't know what my purpose was. So I was like freaking out. I don't know what's my purpose. You know, kind of midlife crisis, but quarter life crisis, and I had been depressed since child. So I found healing work, energy work, yoga, and that really helped me. But when I when I realized I wanted to do this work and put it out there, when I tried to do that, I kept on bumping up against barriers because, you know, being visible was really hard for me and I struggled to with a lot of self-sabotage, procrastination. Even when I did all the things, things wouldn't quite connect for me. So it wasn't until I really uncovered the, the layer that was underneath it, which was the shame that I had been absorbing since I was a child which came from a kind of a narcissistic family system.

Speaker 4 7:56

And these narcissistic or dysfunctional families and, by the way, most families are dysfunctional, they've said about 80% of families in the Western world are dysfunctional and these are families where basically you have a lot of unprocessed trauma that gets passed down through the family line and you have different roles. So what happens in these dysfunctional families is the children they get assigned roles, the identities they have to play out. So there's a scapegoat, there's the golden child you might recognize from your own family, like the favorite, the one who's wrong, and the scapegoat basically becomes. And it's often the most sensitive child in the family who gets that role. You basically become the landfill for all the unprocessed shame and guilt and stuff from the family that nobody else wants to deal with. And no, just families tend to be very unmeshed and very unhealthy and very much driven by shame.

Dysfunctional Family Systems Explained

Speaker 4 8:52

So it wasn't until I started to uncover that and the fact that my mom is has a lot of covert narcissistic traits, because the abuse was invisible to me as a child. Since a child I thought it was my fault. I thought it was normal to be suicidal, normal to be depressed, and nobody noticed. Nobody noticed because I was also kind of the invisible one, the exile within my family. So it wasn't until I came to that layer and started working with that deeper shame. Then things really started to come together for me Because before that it was like I was doing all this healing and therapy and all this talking about it, but it's kind of like doing feng shui on the furniture when the house is on fire. You know it's like it might feel kind of better, you might get one second of relief, but the house is on fire. What's the point Exactly?

Speaker 2 9:44

We need to stop the fire first.

Speaker 4 9:46

So it wasn't until I started to really address that and the root cause of this voice that I'd internalized from the toxic family and the shame that had kind of been impressed with me from a narcissistic mother. So from a young child I took on these beliefs and I was like where does it come from they're? They're beliefs similar to someone who's been sexually abused. So I was like what's happened to me? Why am I like? I had beliefs like I'm ugly, I'm stupid, I'm a failure, I'm useless, all that kind of stuff like really, really hardcore, and I was constantly trying to push myself to prove that I was enough and constantly being disappointed. And that was the cycle that I was in until I realized this deeper level and started to taking disconnecting myself from that dysfunctional wifi of my family and really reclaiming my power and disconnecting from this narcissist that I'd internalized, cause I realized that I had been in a, been brought up in a dysfunctional narcissistic picture. The jailer was inside my head. I I call it the inner narcissist. It's often called the inner critic. This because this voice it's exactly like a narcissist, guys. It gaslights you, it makes you quit. That didn't happen. You're being too sensitive. It shames you. It can hype you up and say we're going to be yours, love, bomb you and then pull you down. It ticks all the boxes of a narcissist and also it smacks you across the face and tells you stupid and then it says oh, I'm just trying to keep you safe, I'm just trying to protect you. That's exactly exactly the same toolbox as the narcissist outside. But the interesting thing is, in in therapy speak, we're taught to sit down with this thing, we're taught to empathize with it and send it love. And I was like that is the wrong approach because I have been doing that all my freaking life. And shame is not a normal emotion. Shame is not like anger. There's something underneath it. Shame is bottomless pit of shame and shame is cultural implant. It's not a normal emotion, it's 100% negative. And we're told in the therapy world that there's such a thing as healthy shame, when all shame is super toxic.

Speaker 4 11:59

And shame just because shame is normalized in our culture and it's everywhere. It's kind of the underpinning of our culture, because we come from Judeo-Christian culture. It's like the idea of original sin, this individualized deed I'm bad, I'm a sinner and I have to forgive. That is a double bind that you can never, ever get yourself out of and in the therapy world this is just accepted as a normal standard. But it's totally Eurocentric because in other parts of the world they don't have this type of shame. This type of shame is very much Western, this individualized shame In other parts of the world and also pre-Christian in Ireland, for example, the shame we know about shame in Ireland and guilt.

Speaker 4 12:45

But before the Christian, the church came over, women were actually could actually be leaders. There wasn't this I'm bad because I'm me shame. It was like this honor system you have to stay with the collective and you're shamed because of what you did and you couldn't come back in the fold. But the really corrosive thing about the Western concept of shame, this individualized shame, is that you can never get out of it. It's like you are just bad and that's the way it is. There's no getting away from that.

Understanding the Inner Narcissist

Speaker 4 13:14

And in the Far East they have different type of shame again as well, that kind of honor code of shame. They don't have this individualized shame that we have here and all shame is super corrosive and if you look at how it's used, you'll see that it's always, always and without exception, always used as a way to control people, and often it's disguised as I want to help them, I'm caring for them, but it's always, always about control. If there's a child here and the child is screaming and I shame them, that's to protect my comfort. That's not about the child. I'm looking after me. That's what shame is. And then I'll say, oh, I'm caring for you, I'm looking after you.

Speaker 4 13:55

It's a lie, it's not true. Shame is always, always about control, and we're kind of gaslit into believing that we need a little bit of shame in order to be a good person. And it's just not true, because shame shuts down empathy. And it's just not true, because shame shuts down empathy. What we need is more empathy to be a good person, not less. And shame has been shown to actually shut down our ability to empathize with other people. So, yeah, that was a pretty long introduction.

Speaker 2 14:22

There's so much that I want to unpack. Go ahead, Pam. My mind has gone 100 miles an hour in every direction.

Speaker 3 14:31

I want to go back to the where you talked about a covert narcissist. Yes, that one kind of stuck with me and I love. How do you recognize somebody that's a covert narcissist? Because there might be several people listening to this that are like, gosh, was my mom or my dad a covert narcissist? I'd love to hear a little bit about that.

Speaker 4 14:50

Well, it's actually quite common. They're also known as vulnerable narcissists and we know. The narcissists that are quite famous are the grandiose ones, like your Donald Trumps and the really obvious people I'm so great. But there's also another type. The covert narcissists are like oh poor me, I'm so poor, I'm so sad, everything needs to happen. And it's very self-centered. But it shows up very different. It's still all about me, I have to be the center, but it shows up as a bit more vulnerable and it's more kind of underhand, less obvious to the outsider or even to people inside the system, because it's more like guilting and shaming manipulation. For example, my mother when I was in Mexico years ago, she insisted that I phone her every day and she said if I don't do it it's because I don't love her. And obviously phoning every day was not about my safety, it was about her anxiety, soothing her anxiety.

Speaker 4 15:47

So you'll get that kind of manipulation. You'll get the kind of triangulation I talked about, these narcissists using the techniques. Triangulation is one where they get someone else to phone you and pass on their message and the inner narcissist does the same thing. It's like look at you and look at Pam over there. She's doing so great and you're just a big failure. So our inner narcissist, that inner critical voice, it uses these same tools. She's doing so great and you're just a big failure. That's, that's another, that's that. So our our inner narcissist, that inner critical voice, it uses these same tools and it can show up really covert, like my mother, for example, very manipulative but very difficult to see, and on obvious, very self-centered, but it just shows up different. If that yeah.

Speaker 3 16:28

And you said it was related to trauma. So a narcissist could be created through trauma.

Speaker 4 16:35

Yeah, definitely. I mean there is some discussion about this in the therapeutic world. I think there's definitely some evidence that a lot of it can stem from trauma. My mother, for example. She was brought up by a malignant, narcissist woman and she was actually quite sadistic. You know, she would get my uncle, she would say she'd sexually abuse my uncle and she would also get him to like, say very cruel things to other children and get a kind of kick out of it, which is like super weird for an adult to do. And the narcissist in your head it can also become very malignant. I don't know about you guys, but I've had those things where my voice was like you might as well not be here. That's when the voice metastasizes into something malignant because we've been giving it so much rope and performing for it for so many years. It gets stronger and stronger.

Speaker 2 18:22

Emma, you mentioned that 80% of households in our part of the world, here in the US, are dysfunctional households in some way, shape or form. I mean that's huge. When we talk about like it's one out of every five households, then is what we're talking about, or no? No, that's not right. Four out of every five. The other way, one out of every five is not.

Speaker 4 18:44

Yes, it makes a lot of sense because there's so much trauma there and our parents' generation, they didn't deal with it. They didn't have therapy, they didn't have all the information that we have now. And even therapy talking about it doesn't necessarily resolve it, because you and I know about, about this. You can really intellectualize things you can understand. You can write a book about your trauma, you can explain it in the Freudian method and the Jungian method and you're still stuck in that freaking trauma. So it can, intellectualizing can be a way for us to escape feeling those feelings and processing, yeah absolutely it can be a huge avoiding way and and you're just rehashing it all the time.

Speaker 4 19:24

Sometimes in therapy that obviously depends on the therapist and obviously it's important to be aware, but that's only step one. Then you've got to do the releasing and the rewiring of yourself for to come out of survival mode and actually receive. And this is the underlying problem. You know why women struggle? Because women, collectively, we have been scapegoated as a collective by our culture. If you think about it, women sexuality is dirty, smelly over there, women aren't as good as men. And then you also have the groups like the ethnic groups, like the African Americans. You know they've also been scapegoated as well. So if you've been scapegoated personally in your family and you're also a member of these groups that have also been scapegoated, or you have that double whammy of trauma.

Speaker 4 20:13

So this I'm not saying this is easy, but there is a way that you can get out and you can unhook yourself from this shame culture, because it is everywhere. Ladies, we're swimming in shame and it's so normalized. Even when you have people like Brene Brown saying that we need a little bit of shame to not be a psychopath. It just seems like a massive blind spot to me when shame is so, so incredibly toxic, but it just shows you the extent to which shame has been normalized in our culture, because it's absolutely everywhere. But it's always about control. If you look, even when you're shaming someone or watching some shame happening or shaming yourself in your head, it's always about control. It's never, ever about care.

Speaker 3 20:57

And I feel like, with social media and with everything, it's just become so easy today and so much more, and I would say even more so since COVID, because I think a lot of people gravitated towards social media as a form of connection, because they lost that physical connection at the work and everything else, and it's like, oh, I need something. And now you've got this outlet that I think, yeah, it's probably. Do you see an uptick in it or do you just think that it's kind of just stayed steady?

Speaker 4 21:31

Well, yeah, I mean, shame is definitely huge. You have the keyboard warriors, it's very easy to shame someone from behind your computer. And this is the thing. Like I mentioned before, shame it's not a normal emotion, it's not like anger or sadness, something that you need to process or sit with. The shame is indigestible. It's such a low vibration, it's just like above death. Really, it's indigestible, it's not something that we can digest and process.

The BREAK Framework for Freedom

Speaker 4 21:58

So we do one of two things we find someone to project that shame onto the next scapegoat. And this is what scape some scapegoats do. They find another scapegoat. So some scapegoats go on to have their own kids and scapegoat them so they don't have to feel all their shame. And you see that with women. You know, this is why women pull each other down, because we we have, we're carrying all this collective shame. And what do we do with it? Oh, she's got a big ass, she's got so many wrinkles. You know, we criticize other women because we project our shame onto them, because we can't digest it. Or you can internalize it and self-destruct, which is the path I was on until I woke up and started to disconnect from this inner narcissist.

Speaker 2 22:43

Emma, it's so interesting, like when you talk about just the shame that women feel, and before we started recording I shared that, like just starting to uncover some of the beliefs that I had or that were implanted and ingrained in me just with my upbringing, and I think it's the same Pam and I we probably had the same. It's, you know, when you're a young girl and you're, it starts at such a young age, right, like what we're expected to do, how we're supposed to show up and behave when we're younger, and then, as we go through puberty, like the fact that we need to hide the fact that we're going through this change of becoming a woman that our body is physically changing to this menopausal stage of life.

Speaker 2 23:20

It's like don't talk about menopause, that's you know, that's kind of frowned upon. Don't talk about the wrinkles. You should cover them up Like it's just this constant, this entire journey, constant shaming, exactly so much shaming of women.

Speaker 4 23:32

You know, it's really, really obvious. Once you see, you can't unsee it. And once you see this narcissism that's prevalent in our culture, you can't unsee it either. Are the narcissists that we internalize and, like I said, it's everywhere it fractals out. You see the same kind of kind of triangulation the scapegoat, the, the victim, and the the victimizer, the the autocrat you see it everywhere culturally.

Speaker 4 23:57

You see it between countries. You see the golden child and and how they scapegoat people, you know, to pass on that unprocessed trauma. So it's absolutely everywhere and it's really, really dangerous. This is why genocide is happening. You know, this is unprocessed shame, unprocessed trauma. You find another victim to pass it on to and we have got to break that cycle and we can do it individually because, god knows, it's not going to happen from the top down, it's got to happen from the bottom up, yeah, yeah, well, and you've done that work because you've created a framework to kind of break the cycle.

Speaker 2 24:34

Talk to us a little bit about your framework that you've created exactly it's called break.

Speaker 4 24:39

Okay. So b-r-e-a-k. Right. So check this out, because you know, shame comes it like. You feel it in your body. It's like, oh, you're going to be late, you're stupid or whatever it says, right? So b is the first one. You've got to break the trance. Recognize that this is not your voice, it's a spell and you don't negotiate your way out of a spell. It's a pattern, it's a trance that you've been under. So catch it, interrupt it, just name it. This is the trance and that disrupts the robot instantly. That automatically takes it away. And also, I have to say once you recognize that that thing is not you because we talk about it as if it's me it's not you, it's not you, it's a parasite. So recognizing that has really helped me and also the women that I work with. So break that trance.

Speaker 4 25:26

Then you go on to R. You want to refuse to engage with it, right? So, dr Ramani, who's an expert in narcissists out there in the world, she talks about deep things not to do don't defend, don't engage, don't explain and don't personal. Don't explain and don't personalize. Don't do any of that. Don't try to argue with this voice, because that just gives it what's called narcissistic supply. You just say not today. Not today, bitch, not mine, it ain't happening.

Speaker 4 25:55

Then you go on to E, which is expose the lie. So call out the shame-based programming. The voice is telling me, or it's telling me, that I need to shrink, that I'm no good. Recognize that. This is about control, that thing that narcissist is trying to control you. It's not your story, it's intergenerational trauma and speaking the truth disarms it because it's not true. It's absolutely full of lies, just like the narcissist outside. It's all about trying to control you.

Closing Thoughts and Next Steps

Speaker 4 26:24

Then you want to A anchor it in your body. So come back to your body, feel your breath, because when shame comes, it attacks you, it takes you out of your body. So you've got to come back to your body, feel your breath, plant your feet, say your name, the year and just remind your nervous system I'm safe now, I'm sovereign and I'm here. And then K kick it out. So shake it off, stomp it out, say it out loud, this is not mine and reject it. That's it. You just say no to it because it has no power unless you dance for it or unless you argue with it, just like the narcissist out there when you argue for it or perform for it or do what it says. It's just taking your energy, taking all your life force and getting stronger and stronger. So our job is to break that pattern, and you can do it with this PREAK framework.

Speaker 1 27:18

Thank you for joining us today on the Reignite Resilience podcast. We hope you had some aha moments and learned a few new real life ideas. To fuel the flames of passion, please subscribe on your favorite streaming platform, like or download your favorite episodes and, of course, share with your friends and family. We look forward to seeing you again next time on Reignite Resilience.