Ep 176: When Visibility Feels Unsafe: How to Heal the Fear of Being Seen

There’s a sacred tenderness to the moments we shrink, not because we lack strategy, but because visibility stirs old wounds we never fully processed.

In this raw and revealing episode, Jessica shares the emotional and energetic roots of why showing up online can feel unsafe for so many soul-led entrepreneurs. From early shame to perfectionism, overgiving, and freeze patterns, this is a permission slip to name what’s true beneath the surface.

If visibility has ever felt like a threat instead of a platform…
If you’ve found yourself muting your truth to feel safe…
If you've longed to express your voice without fear of rejection…
This episode is for you.

Inside this episode:

• The childhood moment that planted shame around being seen
• How perfectionism and people-pleasing are trauma responses, not traits
• The nervous system dynamics behind visibility fear (and why it's not mindset)
• Signs you're in a freeze/fawn response when creating content
• What it means to resource your visibility from truth, not pressure

This isn’t a visibility pep talk. It’s a somatic unraveling of the very real reasons your body contracts when it’s time to be seen, and a soft invitation back into emotional safety, authentic self-expression, and embodied leadership.

Sacred Moments & Searchable Topics:

[00:03:10] Childhood shame and the roots of visibility trauma
[00:12:45] How overgiving hides our fear of being seen
[00:23:20] Perfectionism, people-pleasing, and nervous system freeze
[00:35:50] How to know if your visibility patterns are trauma-based
[00:46:15] Creating emotional safety before showing up online

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to Resource with Jessica Reed. This is the podcast for visionary entrepreneurs who are here to build a thriving business and luminous life, fully resourced from the inside out. Here we unlock the magic of inner alignment, emotional mastery, and energetic strategies, so you can lead with clarity, confidence, and ease. This is your space to shed what no longer serves you, embody your highest potential, and expand into the next evolution of your business and soul's work. You are meant for more, and it all starts here. I have been journaling about something that I haven't really said out loud before, not in the depth of what I'm gonna talk about it today. Something that has been living in my body for a really long time, and only now am I starting to actually feel safe enough to speak about it. Only now am I starting to feel ready to deal with it. Only now as I've gotten quiet enough. Have I actually even been able to see that this seemingly insignificant thing has actually so deeply impacted me. So when I was around, I think I was eight or nine, it was about year five. There were some girls at school who were my friends. Okay. We were a group of friends and I remember them suddenly turning on me. I don't remember the buildup. I don't remember the why of it, but there is one moment, one day that I can still see like a live movie playing out in front of me. I was in the school playground. There was this concrete thing behind us. I remember seeing their faces. I remember them seeing them following me while I was trying to walk away, and I remember the words that they were saying. They were making fun of my surname. Read, they were saying things like Jessica Reed likes to read. I can't even really exactly remember, but what I do remember is that they were making fun of who I was. Something that I actually had no control over. Something that I was just born into, something that wasn't even, not that anything's worthy of making fun of, but something that shouldn't have been made fun of. It's such a simple name. There is nothing strange about it. But in that moment, what it felt like was all of me was being exposed, mocks rejected because in that moment, and obviously there was some sort of platform for this already there for me, but this moment really cemented for me that it wasn't safe to be me. Something clicked in my nervous system. It is not safe to be seen as myself. I became almost embarrassed of the name that I had, and I remember this feeling following me for so long throughout my teenage years, and I'm gonna tell you in a moment how it's impacted me and my business. So welcome back to Resource. This is the space where we name what's true beneath the strategy. My name is Jessica Reed, and I say that today with confidence in today's episode is a tender one for me. It is a story I haven't really shared before about the 9-year-old version of me who learnt to hide who she truly was so that she wasn't made fun of, and how she quietly built the foundations of the business that I'm running now. And I came to this exploration through journaling, something around my parenting. I wasn't looking for, why don't I wanna be visible? Why you know what's going on? I wasn't looking for anything in my business. I was looking for, what is it about something in particular that my 9-year-old had said to me that absolutely activated my whole nervous system. And then I realized, this is it. This is what it's connected to, and that then led me down this pathway into my business. If visibility feels unsafe or exposing for you, then this is the episode to settle into. I'm gonna share a little bit more of my story. I'm gonna offer some soft reframes, and I'm gonna give you two invitations to move forward. Okay? This moment in the playground. This for me, as we are just chatting about now, it wasn't just a childhood memory. This actually laid a foundation, or as I said, maybe built on a foundation that was possibly already there. But this one stung. This one caused a core belief that really took root in me. I am not good enough. I can't be seen for who I am. There is something embarrassing about me. And I carried that into high school. I deemed myself down. I assumed that people just didn't like me. It wasn't true, but I assumed it. I second guessed how I dressed. I second guessed what I said. I second guessed who I sat with. I edited myself constantly, so it is no surprise then that when I started this business and didn't lead with a personal brand name. I chose a brand and a logo that I got to hide behind. And I also told myself at the time that's the professional choice. And I didn't really know much different, you, you start a business, you just, you create a business name, you get a logo. I never really thought about, I did actually think about being personal brand, but there was no way I was going to embrace that the, it seems like I was making the best strategic choice, but underneath this choice. I was actually carrying shame around who I am. And over the years, personal branding started to call me forward And I go deeper into this branding story when I teach in. Business Foundations program where you are deciding as to whether to be a business brand or a personal brand. This personal brand, it started to call me forward and it felt exciting, but it also felt terrifying because suddenly my name Jessica Read wasn't hidden anymore. And that little girl inside of me, and it's actually so interesting watching it all play out from the other side of this. That little girl inside of me, the one who was mocked for a name, she was still scared. And so 9-year-old had essentially been making this visibility decision in my business. And maybe your story isn't exactly like mine, but I know you have a version of it. Maybe it wasn't your name. Maybe it was your laugh or your accent, your ambition, your softness, your too muchness, your not enoughness. But maybe now when it is time for you to show up online or share something real, doesn't feel just like a post. It feels like it's a risk, like your holding your breath and just waiting to be judged, waiting to be made fun of. So I wanna say this to you with so much love. Okay. That way of feeling. It doesn't have to define you forever, and you're not just being overdramatic. Your nervous system has decided that visibility isn't safe, that being you essentially isn't safe. And I think that's where so many of us, you'll hear me talk, particularly in my Ascension Academy program where we go deep into this, you'll hear me talk about different layers of visibility and that authentic visibility layer. Being seen for who I truly am, being really confident in who I am being seen. For my core beliefs, for even my name, that's something I really had to work hard on. So often we talk about visibility like it's a to-do list. We're just gonna post more, record another reel. We're gonna show our face on our stories. We're gonna be consistent with it. If your nervous system has learned that exposure is going to lead to pain, of course you're gonna resist it. The visibility, it's not just about marketing, but it's actually about memory. Body lived memory, it's about safety, and if your body says no, then that is not you failing, not you being not good enough to do this work. Not you having something inherently wrong with you because this person can talk about their wounds and this person can't show their face on social media, but it's just your body's wisdom doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing. Okay. So I want you to really sit with this space of acceptance and maybe there is something that you need to explore, something that you need to start finding safety in. Maybe there, like me is a 9-year-old, a 5-year-old, a 4-year-old, a child, a inner child who is making decisions in your business based on their lived past experience, based on beliefs that they have started living their life by. To protect themselves from an open wound. I did not realize until I started journaling just how much of an open wound this event was for me. And if this stirred something up in you, and maybe you're a little bit newer to my world, then I would love to invite you into the Resilient Entrepreneur. It is a private podcast series. It is completely free. You will begin to build emotional resilience in your business. By detaching your worth from your outcomes by building a CEO mindset by learning how to turn your challenges into strengths. So this link is in the show notes for you. That is your next step if you are ready to go deeper, if you are ready to find the belief or the experience that is quietly bottlenecking your business. Then I would love to invite you into an embodied business mapping session together. In these sessions, we will trace a thread. We will bring safety to the place where your system is stuck. We will do that through techniques such as EFT, hypnotherapy, other energetic modalities, and then we will create you a very aligned action step forward for your business. That is now rooted in the new belief that you feel safe holding, moving forward with. Okay. Those sessions are limited because they require direct energy and capacity from me, but you can book it below and have a one-off session with me. It is the only way to work one-on-one with me outside of my ongoing mentorship, so that 9-year-old version of me. She was so brave and so is yours. And if you are finding it hard to be seen, then don't let you believe. Don't let yourself believe that means that you're weak or that you know it's wrong for you to feel exposed. You are just doing the sacred work of becoming visible on your own terms. And honestly, I am right here with you. So I will see you next week on Resourced. Thank you so much for joining me, and pop over as always to Instagram and say hi, and tell me what landed from this episode with you. Bye for now. Thank you for tuning into resource with Jessica Reed. If today's episode spoke to you, I'd love for you to share it with another soul led entrepreneur who is also ready to rise. Make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and stay connected because when you are deeply resourced, you become unstoppable. Until next time, my friend, stay resourced. Stay radiant and trust in the magic that is you.