Annalie Howling will tell you that shame is the hardest emotion in the room to name, and that this is precisely why it runs so much of our lives. Ask a group who is feeling anxious, and every hand goes up, and each person can list what they are anxious about. Ask about shame, and you get silence. She is an elite performance coach, a trauma specialist and certified EMDR practitioner, and the author of the bestselling Unapologetic: Unshackle Your Shame, Reclaim Your Power. In 2026 Spear’s Magazine ranked her among the world’s best life and performance coaches. Over twenty years, she has worked with Hollywood actors, PGA Tour golfers, self-made billionaires, corporate executives and members of the UK Special Forces. So when Catherine asked her to unpack what shame actually is, Annalie did not reach for a definition. She reached for a distinction. Guilt is something you did. Shame is something you believe yourself to be.
A weed, not a feeling
The model Annalie offers reframes almost everything sitting on top of it, and it asks nobody to become a therapist. Picture a weed in the garden. The leaves are guilt and anxiety, the emotions we can name and discuss. Guilt is coulda, woulda, shoulda, and it lives in the past. Anxiety lives in the future, trying to control the uncontrollable by rehearsing every possible scenario before it happens.
Beneath the leaves is the stem, which is the inner critic, or what many of us call imposter syndrome. Its only job is to make sure we are never rejected, and the only method it knows is to keep us inside the comfort zone it patrols. So it makes us perfect, people-pleasing, hyper-vigilant, chameleon-like. Should, in Annalie’s view, should be a swear word. Should is the fuel of the inner critic.
And beneath all of it, always, is the root. Shame. You can trim the leaves with an intervention. You can even get partway down the stem with something you read online. But if you never reach the root, it grows back, in a different form, at a different time.
Shame always begins with “I am”
That is how you recognise it. I am broken. I am unworthy. I am unlovable. I am not enough. Guilt says I did something bad. Shame says I am bad, and it is believed at the core rather than felt on a difficult day.
Annalie is candid that this is not theory for her. She grew up in a violent household where her parents told her she made her father beat her, and her mother colluded and told her it was her fault. She believed it. She internalised it. What followed was decades of people pleasing and performing, accepting scraps in relationships, overworking into burnout, and years of self-harm, all built on the belief that she was bad and therefore deserved none of what she had built.
Nobody is born with shame. It arrives through a significant emotional event, and that event can be far smaller than you would expect. Annalie describes a client whose entire path of self-belief shifted because a head teacher pulled them aside at eight years old and told them they would probably not achieve very much.
The line that releases people
The most freeing moment in the conversation is a piece of science. In a traumatic event, the prefrontal cortex goes offline, and so does Broca’s area, which holds language. The limbic system takes over. Fight, flight, freeze, and the two we rarely discuss: flop and fawn. Crucially, you never get to choose your trauma response. It is selected for you, far faster than cognitive thought can arrive.
Meanwhile, the body is tagging everything: colours, smells, people, storing what it might need later. It is why someone can be floored in a supermarket years afterwards, or why a person who sat with a loved one in a hospice suddenly cannot fly, because airports use the same cleaning products.
Annalie leaves the audience with three golden nuggets:
If self-compassion feels impossible, place someone you love into the memory and watch the scene through them.
Treat a compliment like a gift in a box, because you would never throw it on the floor.
When your inner critic is riding you, imagine it is true and dream into it.
The point is not that the critic disappears. It is that you learn to play with it.
Watch the full conversation on YouTube.
Find Out More About Annalie Howling
🌐 Website: https://annaliehowling.com
📸 Instagram: @annaliehowling
📺 YouTube: @annaliehowling