When You’re Embarrassed by Who You Used to Be

I was sitting on the couch, innocently about to watch a TV show, when I was suddenly embarrassed by who I used to be. A version of me I barely recognize — wounded, messy, out of control — surfaced, and my inner critic went to work. But what if self-abandonment, guilt, imposter syndrome, and shame aren’t proof of unworthiness, but invitations to integration? In this episode, I explore why rejecting your past quietly erodes your present power, why no one arrives at empowerment by default, and how reclaiming the self you’re ashamed of restores dignity. You’re not a fraud — your past self is your ancestor.

Here's what's in the episode:

1. Why feeling embarrassed by who you used to be can undermine your current power, and how self-abandonment disguises itself as “being responsible”
2. How overactive guilt complexes, the inner critic, and imposter feelings keep you small — and why whipping yourself doesn’t make you a good person
3. Practical ways to integrate your past instead of rejecting it, including repair, forgiveness rituals, and learning to trust the goodness and grit it took to get here

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Transcript

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Dilshad 0:03

This is Delicious Dignity, where we cultivate a self so potent, so clear, so vital, so truthful that our life is all the more luscious for it. Let's call ourselves into being, shall we? Hello, lovelies. I wanted to tell you about something strange that happened to me. I was sitting down on my beautiful couch and I was about to turn on a TV show that I watch. It's called Grim, G-R-I-M-M, and it's this supernatural TV show. And yeah, but that's my checkout time where I can just relax and watch a supernatural TV show. It's my favorite thing in the world. Big shout out to Taboo and Penny Dreadful for the two best spirit uh supernatural TV shows ever. Of course, of course, I would be attracted to supernatural TV shows. Of course. But anyway, I was sitting and about to watch the show when a memory popped into my head, and it was a memory of who I used to be when I was much younger, around 18 and 19 years old. And for context, I had just finished recording the Empowered Women Quiet Battles episode, where I talked about all of the problems or the issues that empowered women face that most other people don't face. And it was an episode that I had procrastinated on creating for a very long time because it's so emotionally, politically, spiritually, mentally charged that I didn't want to make it seem like I was dumping a whole lot of things on people that they didn't ask for. Because in my head, I had this belief that people only come to podcasts to be inspired and nothing more. And I shouldn't talk about politics, I shouldn't talk about anything close to feminism or being a feminist or anything like that. And that, of course, is a very limiting belief, and it's so not me. But that thought did pop into my mind before I recorded, I worked on it and it went away. And I did the episode. I was very proud of the episode. And that day, or was it a day after, I can't remember, I sat down and I was watching this TV show, or about to watch this TV show. And the memory that popped up in my head was being around that age in my late teens, and I just had big emotional mood swings at the time. Things that I classified as mood swings at the time, specifically with a guy I was dating at the time. And again, this is very important that I blamed myself for having these big reactions to what my boyfriend at the time was doing. And I had this memory of behaving like that and talking like that and thinking like that and just not being a very mature, empowered woman, which is the exact opposite of the episode I had just recorded. So my mind put this memory in me of not being an empowered woman and how I used to behave when I wasn't an empowered woman, almost as proof of the fact that I might have been a fraud or an imposter for recording the episode on empowered women. Do you see what I'm saying? This is such a good example of how minds work. Minds reach for the familiar, they reach for the past. The Joe Dispenza said, was it Joe Dispenza or Greg Braden? One of them said that your brain is an artifact of the past. All it knows is what has already happened. It does not know what is happening or what will happen. It tries to make predictions based on the past. And based on the past, it's telling me, hey, you might be an imposter, you might be a fraud, because you're talking about empowerment when actually you were not empowered. When the whole point of that episode was to talk about empowerment as a stage that we reach, not a stage that we're inherently born with. I don't think any female on this planet was just born empowered. I don't think any of us, I mean, if you were, you might be in a very small minority. I know there are some tribes that are like that, but most women are not born that way. So the whole point of empowerment is the journey to empowerment and then after empowerment. And so then I processed it, and as I was processing it, I was like, oh my God, I have to make an episode about this. This particular trait that a lot of women with high integrity, or just people with high integrity, high self-awareness, and extremely high inner critic and self-criticism. This particular tendency that comes up. We do anything good and beautiful, and it speaks to our true values and our true things that we stand for, that we die for. And then our brain comes in with evidence of why we are not good enough to do those things. And we're embarrassed by it. We even feel guilty for it. And so sometimes the thing happens when we look back on all our progress and we're embarrassed by who we used to be. We, and the only reason for that, by the way, is because we don't recognize who we used to be. It's almost like that person is a completely different person. We don't even recognize them. And the fact that person was us makes it even more embarrassing. So it's almost as if having the growth makes you more embarrassed than if you didn't have the growth. So it's in a way, it's a positive thing if you see it that way, because the only reason why you would be embarrassed is because you can't believe that person was you because you've made so much progress that you don't recognize them. And so we look at these old versions of ourselves, the most wounded, the most unresourced, the most traumatized versions of ourselves imaginable, which is where we came from. And we look at all the mistakes we made, all the decisions we made, all the friendships we made, all the things we said, all the things we did that you cannot even imagine or comprehend saying and doing now. And we look at that and we think, wait a minute, this is not me now. So how could that have been me? And your mind can't grasp that. It's almost as if your brain needs to grow two or three sizes bigger in order to accommodate so much of your complexity and so much of the growth that you have accomplished. And of course, you want to take responsibility and accountability for where you did do things that you may need to ask forgiveness for, or you may need to make repair for. Of course, you want to do those things. And of course, that is the quote unquote right thing to do, arguably. But putting all of that aside, it that's the obvious part, right? The obvious part is yes, I need to ask for forgiveness, or I need to make repair, or I need to make this right. But then there's the not so obvious part of this, which is understanding that who you were did in fact lead to who you are now. And rejecting that part of you, or making it wrong, or stupid, or worthless, or evil, or bad, or not deserving, will actually downgrade your current power because no one comes to this level of empowerment by default. Nobody, very few people do. We only arrive at this great grand stage of empowerment by choice and by consistent choices, that too, and by persistent effort and by grit and by stamina. So we cannot blame the baby for not being an adult. When I was in coaching school and I was being taught to be a life coach, there was this practice called not slapping the baby, which is when you're with a client, you have to encourage them to not slap the baby. This is the innocent version of you who does not know better, who did not know better, who didn't have the resources, who didn't have the time, who didn't have the money, who didn't have the community to bring hurt or to bring yourself to this level of empowerment. And so you cannot slap the baby. That's in of itself a form of self-abuse. And this is not me being frou-frou and telling you to have self-compassion. I am telling you to have compassion, but what I'm telling you to have is also logic. I'm asking you to have logic and understand that all of this is you and was you. And by accepting that, and even by looking into it, it's not gonna make you less powerful and it's not gonna make you a bad person by acknowledging where you came from. It's actually gonna make you A more approachable and relatable to other people. It's gonna make you more compassionate to yourself and to other people, it's gonna bring more love into the world because instead of you participating in the critical, cruel, mean, dehumanizing reactions that we're seeing in the world today, you're choosing to say, I can see this differently, because you can see yourself differently. And if you see yourself from that lens of compassion, it will pour outwards to other people. I became so much better at a coach, as a coach and as an intuitive, once I started being kinder to myself, not being nice to myself, being kind, understanding where I came from, understanding when I need to ask for forgiveness, make repair, and then understanding why I behaved that way. And almost always the reason I behaved in a way that I wasn't proud of is because of a lack of love. Either a lack of love given to me from when I was very young, or a lack of love actively not being given to me, or just a lack of resources that I just didn't have available. I cannot expect a 17 or 18-year-old girl who has three jobs, double major, double minor, honors distinction, and a certificate program, maxing out her credits every quarter while working these jobs to have a normal stress response. I cannot expect this immigrant girl who was trying so damn hard to just be the best she can be, not realizing she was stressing herself out and not realizing she was burning the candle at both ends. I cannot expect her to have the nervous system of a normal person, of a person without trauma or without abuse. I cannot expect that. And learning from her now, I realize that in order to be someone with a balanced nervous system, yes, I've got to work on my nervous system, but I also can't stretch myself too thin. Otherwise, I will go out into the world and snap at people or be short with people, not support the people I truly love or make time for them because I'm too busy just trying to survive. There was this other situation, which again, I'm really embarrassed to admit this happened, but it happened and it taught me so much. A number of years ago, I met a guy in this workplace event, and he was just hitting on me, and we were just talking, and enough I was maybe five drinks down. So five old fashions were and still are. I love that cocktail. But back then I was just in my happy zone and I wasn't drinking to get drunk, I was just enjoying the taste of the old fashions. So I was maybe five or six old-fashioned drinks down. And in that state, I kept looking at him and asking him, Are you married? Do you have a girlfriend? I asked maybe four or five times. And each time he was like, No. And then I looked at his wedding finger and he didn't have a band on there, and he didn't. There was no indication for me to think that this guy was in any way hitched or married or had a girlfriend or anything. Yet I kept asking him this question. And again, I was five drinks down, I was kept asking this question, and eventually I did go and sleep with him. Now, a year later, after that, through a newsletter, I find out that he has a wife. And the amount of shame that I felt, because I was like, how could me, me, who I claim to be an intuitive, I claim to be a psychic, how could I have not seen this? And the truth is I did see it. Even when I was so tipsy, even when I was in that state of being in my brain was mush with the alcohol, I still sensed something was off. And I didn't listen. I didn't listen. So now when I look back at that story, instead of feeling such shame, such guilt, such absolute disgust, I, oh my God, the amount of showers I took after I saw that newsletter come out. I must have taken 10 showers in that day. I felt dirty and filthy. And barring all stuff aside about what happened later, that feeling, I kept looking back at myself and thinking, how could I have been so stupid? Why did I do this? Why did I I kept saying all these things? And now when I look back at that same event, I think, wow, I'm such a brilliant intuitive that even when I was five drinks down, I still had intuition that kept being persistent and asking the same question six different ways to get an answer. That even in that state, I was checking his wedding finger. And then I said, Wow, what I thought was me being too much, or it was me being too mistrusting, was actually my intuition coming through. And I will never, ever forget that lesson again. So I can look back at the past and say, Wow, you have been so dumb, so stupid, which is how I used to talk about myself to myself. Or I can look back at my past and say, because of that incident, I learned so much. Did I need that little incident to learn a lot? No, I did not. But now I have so much more faith in my intuition because it happened the way it did. And that growing up and learning how my intuition speaks to me, even in that state of mind, learning how my how sharp my mind is, how sharp my senses are. It gave me a brand new appreciation for who I was. But I can also go the other way and say, wow, you're so dumb, you're so stupid. Which is one version of the truth, I guess. It's the basis version of the truth. That was a dumb thing to do, that was a stupid thing to do. Sure, I can stay at that level. Or I can say, look at what I did with that incident. Look at how far I went with that incident, which is more true than just saying that I was dumb or stupid. Because I learned from it, I grew from it, I became a better intuitive after that. And so, yeah, does that make sense to you? Because I can think of so many incidents just like this where things happened that I am not proud of the decisions I made. I am not proud of the way I saw the situation at the time. I'm not proud of how I reacted. I'm not proud of how deeply sick I felt with every, with a lot of decisions, not just these decisions that I've talked to you about. Or I can say, I know that girl because I've seen that girl in so many other women. I've seen this happen so many times with so many people. And now I know how to cater to them when it does happen. I know that feeling of self-betrayal better than so many other people. I know that feeling of being sick to your stomach with your own behavior better than most people do. And the fact that I'm here today is because of her. We need to put things in its proper place. The person you used to be is someone that you had to use as a foundation to grow up from. The alternative could be that you just collapsed into this person, but you didn't. You grew up from them and you use them as a foundation to grow up from. You cannot blame yourself for needing the experience you didn't have. So when you when you divorce yourself from who you used to be, when you don't want to look at who you used to be, it's really dishonoring to what she taught you, to what her experiences taught you. And they say this all the time: the things that make you angry, the things that break your heart are the things that your purpose revolves around. There's so many things have broken my heart and angered me, mostly because I was just born a woman in this world. And I have used that to do the work I'm now doing. And like I said, when you tune into what this person has to say to you, what they wanted, what they needed from you, it will almost always boil down to one word, which is love or understanding or compassion. And it's something we have very little love nowadays. We have very little of nowadays, which is love. You're gonna be tempted by social media and by other things to go down on yourself in a negative way. Especially social media can be a great place, but at times it's not such a great place when people use the power of community in evil ways to rip on somebody who they think is not good enough or to hurt you even if you're a creator or influencer. And maybe you get so terrified of this attacking nature of humanity that it makes you not, you never get started on your dreams. You're so afraid of humiliation, especially public humiliation, that you think you don't even deserve to get started on your dreams because of who you used to be. And that is when it becomes super dangerous because you're whipping yourself with every step you take. And that's what needs to be corrected. It's an overactive guilt complex. And maybe we need guilt, maybe we don't. I don't think we do. Especially the people that I cater to, I don't think we need more guilt. But most of us have an overactive guilt complex, and we use the proof of who we used to be to make ourselves small so that we don't get humiliated for who we used to be, so that we don't correct, get corrected for who we used to be. And that's a really good way. Make yourself small so that you can make yourself safe. Maybe we're even scared of hurting people because we have such a deep guilt complex from what we've done or who we used to be. So we instead whip ourselves to keep ourselves in check. So we're trusting the proof of who we were rather than trusting the goodness of who we are today. And this speaks to the negative bias complex, which I talked about in previous episodes, which is just the tendency to recall or notice things that are negative, that are bad, not just in your environment, but also in yourself. Those are the only things you remember. The antidote to that then is to make a list of reasons why you are a good person. And you list out 10 reasons a day. You don't get up until you've listed out 10 reasons a day why you are a good person or why there is goodness in you. And if you find that exercise challenging, good. That means it's hitting somewhere where it needs to hit. And you probably only have to do this for five or 10 days, no more. Just 10 reasons why you're a good person. And this goodness is earned. We had to work hard at this goodness. And instead of trusting this goodness, we trust the most underutilized, under-resourced parts of us as proof of our lack and proof of how our low self-worth is accurate. Instead of looking at the person we've become as proof of our great self-worth. You could have chosen to be stuck where you used to be. You could have chosen to act from the place you used to be. Instead, you used your grit and your determination to get better, be better, and do better. And that takes, it takes grit, it takes gumption. And it's not something you can dishonor and underestimate just because you don't like who you used to be. And this is another variation, like I said, where the feeling of being an imposter or a fraud comes in. This is your inner critic having a field day. But you have to realize the other way to look at this, if it helps you, is to realize that the person you used to be was your ancestor. This is who you came from. They are your ancestor. And that most wounded, unresourced part of you is probably mimicked in the lives of the women who came before her, even. So before that young person that you were, you had a grandmother, you had a mother, you had a great grandmother. And you can find that part of you, the most wounded, unresourced parts of you in those women too. And you can see that in transcending that, in moving past that, you moved past the legacy that you were given and you were created a new legacy for other people to feed from, for other people to grow from, from yourself to feed from, from yourself to grow from. So think of that part of you, that most wounded, traumatized part that you're ashamed of as being your ancestor, as being a symbol, or as being the mirror to all the women that came before you. And that is who you really worked on, transcended, and moved from. And that is what they really mean by healing your lineage. Very often when I'm stuck on a project or stuck for ideas, I look to my past selves and I ask my nine year old version, my 12 year old version, what do you want? What do you need to hear? What kind of support do you would you like? And very often that gives me the input I need. To talk to a client a particular way, to do a podcast episode, to help a friend. Because she's an ancestor, because that young girl that I'm talking to knew better. She saw everything. She saw better, she knew better. She just couldn't behave better. And part of the reason is because she saw too much and she knew too much. And it was overwhelming. You only know what your life was like when you were younger and why you behaved the ways you did. Doesn't excuse the behavior, doesn't make the behavior any more noble, but it does have something to do with your purpose and who you are and where you're going. So when you experience something like I did, where you know you're just sitting on a couch, you're just doing your going about your day, and all of a sudden these memories come up. Do what I did. Pause everything you're doing. Don't continue, don't just push it away. Because this is a cry for integration. It's a cry that says, Don't abandon me. So don't self-abandon yourself. Don't abandon yourself. Pause and it only takes two minutes. So there's no reason to not do this. Okay. Don't abandon yourself. Pay attention. Okay, I just had this memory. What did I just do? Or what am I about to do that is challenging this memory that I have? So if I behaved badly with a friend and now maybe I gave advice to another friend about how to treat your friends better, maybe that memory popped up in direct opposition to this experience I just had today. That could be a thing. So realize where that memory has come up for integration and tie it to a current experience that you are feeling or that you're going through or that you're doing. And all you need to say is, okay, this is who I used to be, and this is who I have become, and this is the person I am becoming. And what that does is that it creates the narrative in your mind that this is one long journey. You're not living life in a compartment style living. It's your past, your present, and your future. And if this thought comes up that says, I should have known better, I should have done better, if you could have, you would have. Trust me, honey. If you could have, you would have. You did the best you could with what you had at the time. Now, obviously, is this episode and everything I'm saying for people who intentionally get some sort of sick pleasure out of hurting people? And that's who you think I'm talking to. Obviously, I'm not talking to that person. I'm not talking to psychopaths or sociopaths here. I'm talking to people who have a heart, they have integrity, they want the best for themselves and other people, and yet they behave in ways that they otherwise regret. That's who I'm talking to. Okay. If you had known better, you would have done better. And of course, the other thing is if it helps you make repair directly with the person or directly with the situation or with yourself, or make repair indirectly. Maybe you hurt a friend when you were younger, and maybe now you volunteered an animal shelter. And maybe those two things don't connect in your mind, but they do connect. You're trying to make right with the world when you cannot make it right directly. Maybe that friend passed away, maybe that friend is living too far away, whatever. You don't know. I don't know why that you might choose to not do it directly, but you can also do it indirectly. Making repair doesn't always have to be direct if you're not ready for that. Another exercise you can do is to write down 10 things you forgive yourself for every day for two minutes a day for 10 days. I forgive myself for blank, even though I can't forgive it. And that's an honest statement. Sometimes we can forgive ourselves for something, but we can choose to forgive it anyway, or we can start the process of forgiveness. So, for example, for me, I forgive myself for having big emotions that I couldn't handle and for reacting from that place. I forgive myself for that. I understand why I did it. I forgive myself even when, even in times when I can't forgive it. I forgive myself for ignoring my intuition and acting in direct contradiction with my intuition, even though I feel super ashamed that I did it, even though I can't forgive it. I understand why I did it and I can move forward. I forgive myself for, and you just write it 10 times however you want to write it. There's no real formula for it. But the process of forgiveness is not about blame. It's the opposite. It's about freedom from an overactive guilt complex. You put guilt where it needs to be, not in terms of whipping yourself and stopping yourself from doing something just because of who you used to be. That is not productive. That is not honoring. That's just you thinking that you're a good person just because you whip yourself hard every day. That's not how it works. I forgive myself for being too naive. I forgive myself for thinking that I needed to be 100% a perfect intuitive in order for me to serve my clients. I forgive myself for thinking that I should have done better, even though I know I could not have done better. I forgive myself for thinking that I was naive, even though it had nothing to do with naivety. It just had to do with the lack of experience. I forgive myself for being hard on myself. You get my point? You can do this just 10 statements every day for 10 days just to get that ick off you. And it really does help get the ick off you. And so at the end of the day, the question is can you dare to see yourself as a good person in spite of and despite everything that you were? Can you dare to see yourself as good? Can you give yourself the dignity of being a human being instead of expecting perfectionism the second you were born? Hey, let me grow and become a fully empowered, incredible human being, like I'm 40 years old, at the ripe old age of four seconds old. Can I forgive myself for having that expectation? Can I dare to see that I have a journey? I am a human living, I am a human being, I'm not a human whipping. Now, if another person decides to remind you of who you used to be and uses that as a way to hurt you or put you down or make you feel badly about the work you're currently doing or about the decisions you're currently making, then make repair with that person best you can, if that's the person you hurt. But don't you dare let it stop you from pursuing your dreams and from doing what you want in the world. Don't let that stop you. And you can silently say a prayer to yourself. Thank you for reminding me of who I used to be so that I can fully admire and appreciate who I've become today. Thank you for reminding me of my grit, my stamina, my gumption, my absolute insistence on doing better and on being better every single day of my life. Thank you for reminding me of who I used to be, so maybe I can make an Instagram video and talk to people who are feeling the same way. Thank you for reminding me of who I used to be. Maybe I can make a product or a service or support people who used to be like me. Maybe you saying what you said to me reminded me of my purpose. Maybe it reminded me of a place I need to pay attention to. Maybe it was my sign. And so that is the way you handle it when it comes to you. And this is just, of course, one of many examples. Allow yourself to be human for crying out loud. Allow your own humanity, please and thank you. Also, I should say admitting your shame to someone, to someone close and someone you can trust is also a good way to get that ick off you, that grip that your past experiences have had on you. Because when you admit your shame to someone who is safe and you see that it's really not a big deal because you'll look, you'll see it in their eyes. They're not really judging you. And yeah, so I would, even if that safe person is your therapist or your coach or your mentor, that's good enough. You don't have to admit it to your friends if you don't want to. Do this in a safe way that actually honors you. Ah, okay. Getting off my soapbox now, lovelies. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a five-star review. And even a written review would be lovely because it helps me see what is resonating, what is not resonating, and then continuing this show. Please also consider subscribing to the show because those are metrics I can use to get sponsors for the show, sponsors that help you with discounts, and sponsors that help me to help keep the show financially running. And the people that I am looking to sponsor me are some of the best products and the best people and the best companies I've ever had the pleasure of working with, ever had the pleasure of using their products. So I'm really excited to potentially start that journey with this podcast. And of course, as usual, if there are specific topics that you want me to cover, please let me know over at Delicious Dignity or Dilshad at Dilshadmetta.com, which is my email. Because what that does is that it tells me what topics you would like me to cover, which in turn lets me serve you better. And likely if you have a question or ask about something, probably other people do as well. And of course, another free and easy way you can support the show is to share it with your friends. Especially this episode is for a friend who you know is just in a shame or a guilt spiral, and you can send this episode to them to help realign them with who they are and recenter them in who they are. Okay, my lovelies. I was gonna come up with this huge blessing, but at the end of the day, just these words were enough. May you dignify yourself. That's it. May you dignify yourself. May you dignify yourself. Okay, my lovelies. Until next time. Bye bye.