Begin

Four small steps tonight: a five-question baseline called Daylight — our own baseline, not a diagnosis — two careful safety questions — please answer them honestly; neither changes your access — and your shame log, set up and ready. No skills yet. Just the starting line.

Welcome

I'm Iris. I want to name something you may already be carrying into this screen: a moment — maybe recent, maybe old — you've never told anyone. Not because it was nothing. Because some part of you decided that showing it would prove something worse than the moment itself.

The distinction this whole program rests on

Guilt says: I did something bad. It points at an act, and an act can be repaired. Shame says: I am bad. It doesn't point at anything you could fix — it's a verdict on you, and a verdict like that has nowhere to go except into hiding.

So shame tells you to hide, and hiding is the one thing that keeps it alive. Guilt, done right, fixes something and then lets go. We're going to learn to tell them apart — and bring what needs daylight into it, gently, at your pace.

This is DBT for shame and guilt. If you've done Valid with me, you already have the ground this stands on. If you haven't, you don't need it — we'll build what's needed, right here.

How the six weeks work

• Six weeks, in a fixed order: tell shame and guilt apart, name what's actually there, repair the guilt that's earned it, bring the shame that isn't into daylight — then work the old, harder versions, and keep the practice for good.
• The engine is a sixty-second shame log. Each time something fires, you name the trigger, call it shame or guilt yourself, rate the intensity, and note whether you hid it or brought it out — and if you did, what the intensity dropped to.
• That last field is the quiet part. Most people expect sharing something shameful to feel worse. Your own log is about to show you, in your own numbers, that it almost never does — and hiding almost never helps.
• Every week we read your log together — how often you shared instead of hid, which domains keep showing up — and set the next small, deliberate step from them. Your record, your pace.

Before anything else

Two careful questions — please answer them honestly. Shame is very often carried alongside real, hard history: I need to be plain that this program works present-day shame patterns only, never the origin story. If what you're carrying is active trauma, Steady Ground is built for that work, and I'll point you there. And if punishing yourself has ever included hurting yourself, a crisis-resources card stays pinned for the whole program — skills practice is not crisis care.

Then: the five-question Daylight baseline — our starting line, not a diagnosis — and your shame log, ready for whatever comes up next.

One thing about me, since we'll be spending six weeks together: I speak quietly. Please don't mistake that for uncertainty. Everything I tell you here, I'll mean exactly.