New Year, same shame-based business model
A different way to think about ourselves and our healing process in a deeply flawed system
“One should be willing to make mistakes cheerfully. The most perfect analysis cannot prevent error. Sometimes you must go into error; moreover, the moral things in you cannot come out until you give them a chance. The recognition of truth cannot come to daylight till you have given yourself a chance to err. I believe firmly in the role that darkness and error play in life.”
—Jung, C. G.. Introduction to Jungian Psychology : Notes of the Seminar on Analytical Psychology Given In 1925
“Nobody’s right, if everybody’s wrong.”
—Buffalo Springfield. “For What It’s Worth.” Buffalo Springfield, Atco Records, 1966.
The Shame-based business model
Last night I dreamed:
I’m working for the call center/bank. An elderly woman calls in; she has overdrawn her accounts. She is 80+ years old and she and her husband use their money to support their grandchildren. It is easy to see it was just a mistake and I would like to give her back the money ($32x3). But I know I need to tell her no. Later, I call her back and refund the money. I don’t care what happens with that manager.
In reality, I worked for this bank for over a decade; this type of call was a daily occurrence. An error of a few cents could cost a client thousands in overdraft fees. And our official policy was never to refund them, unless it was a bank error. “I’m so sorry,” we’d have to say. “I’m not able to refund those fees.” Sometimes we’d go to our manager, or the branch manager, and try to intercede. “This is how the bank makes money,” we’d be told. “This is how we stay profitable.”
This is one type of shame-based business model: the bank is counting on you to screw up so that it makes money. The implication is that if you overdraw your account— no matter the circumstances— you’ve made a mistake. And mistakes are personal failures that merit punishment in the form of overdraft fees.
Some of our customers would be too ashamed to even ask for the money back. But at $32 per item, and $5 a day (I’m sure these fees have increased since then), they often had no choice. “How am I supposed to pay this??” they’d say. “My social security check doesn’t come in for two weeks and it won’t even cover it!” Sorry, but that’s how it works.
Et tu, yoga?
When I left the bank to buy a yoga studio, I didn’t know much at all about running a business. But one thing I did know was that I never wanted people to feel shamed in doing business with me.
It seems like banking and teaching yoga should be diametrically opposed, but they share an underlying ethos. In a neoliberal economy like mine (I live in the United States), which emphasizes market-based solutions to social and economic life, the individual assumes responsibility for their own success or failure. Any business that provides services to individuals can capitalize on this sense of personal responsibility; shame-based marketing becomes the norm.
Shame-based marketing in the wellness industry is so common we often don’t even recognize it as such. “Look your best for summer,” “Tone up and slim down,” “New Year, New You,” “Be your best self,” “What happens when you do yoga every day for 30 days? (with a list of benefits),” are all messages designed to suggest there is a better version of you available, if you would just purchase these services.
This shame-based messaging is built directly into the programs and services themselves. Results are guaranteed— as long as you follow the protocols exactly. If you fail to achieve optimal health/lose the weight/heal from the trauma, it must be because you didn’t do something right.
On an individual level, this ethos of personal responsibility creates the illusion of agency-- after all, we can all “choose” to “take better care” of ourselves, right?-- while keeping us locked into systems that will never allow us to succeed. It reinforces a self-concept of ourselves as flawed, broken, failures at every step.
When I purchased the yoga studio, I didn’t have a clear understanding of these underlying dynamics. I just knew there were some things that didn’t quite feel right to me. Within yoga classes themselves, I’d become frustrated with teachers telling me how things “should” feel, or that I “should be able to” do a pose in a certain way. If I couldn’t do it, well, clearly that was a personal failure.
That’s why one of the first things I did after completing my initial yoga teacher training was to certify in “Curvy Yoga,” with Anna Guest-Jelley. What an incredible course that was— not only did I learn to make my classes more accessible, but it opened my eyes to how larger patterns of oppression were being replicated in yoga classes, in yoga studios, in marketing.
Nobody’s right, if everybody’s wrong
I’ve spoken to countless other practitioners who also struggled with this: how do we market our services in a way that feels authentic? How can we stay aligned with our sense of personal integrity? How do we express ourselves in a way that values others’ inherent worth, autonomy and dignity?
Social media algorithms reward extreme, fear-based language (“The one thing other coaches get wrong;” or “What your yoga teacher isn’t telling you”). If we want to stand out, if we want to make our viewpoint heard, it can feel like we have to point out where everyone else is wrong so that we can be right.
I find this is especially true in left-leaning, liberal spaces, where we are brutally quick to cancel each other— making ourselves look and feel more virtuous in the process. In this version of fear and shame-based marketing, we’re shaming each other, or just “that other liberal who isn’t being as liberal as I am,” in order to garner more followers, more sign-ups, more recognition.
Timothy Snyder (author of On Tyranny and On Freedom), says of the political left:
“(T)oo many of us, too much of the time are trying to make ourselves 100% right by showing that someone else is not right. And that, you know, that drains a lot of our time and energy.”
From The Archive Project: Timothy Snyder in Conversation, Nov 11, 2025
Scrolling through social media (even Substack!) can feel like a room full of people screaming about how wrong everyone else is. Like the Buffalo Springfield song— “Nobody’s right, if everybody’s wrong.”
There’s got to be another way.
Jung’s de-pathologizing approach
Our culture is sick. The mental and physical health systems in my country (the US) are almost laughably bad— except that there’s nothing funny about people dying due to lack of care. And each of us, regardless of health, socioeconomic status, etc., is left to feel we are responsible for our own wellbeing: an impossible task.
This preys on a natural developmental human process: when a child is faced with environmental failure, it does not blame the system or the caregiver for the failure— the child blames itself. When our culture tells us that we are the problem; that anxiety, depression, psoriasis, whatever, is due to our own flawed self-care, we react with reflexive, internalized shame.
In contrast to this approach, Jung believed that all symptomology is a natural attempt at healing; that each of us is always trying to achieve not just homeostasis, but healing and growth. We’re anxious, we’re depressed, we have a skin condition because something in our body/psyche is trying to communicate a problem so that we can address it. This strength-based approach aligns with the Tibetan Buddhist teaching that each of us is inherently good; that even our most egregious mistakes are just misguided attempts to find our way back to the state of wholeness that is our birthright.
Our current approach to wellness isn’t working. Recognizing that our systems of care aren’t supporting us, we’re trying to treat ourselves; outsourcing care to hacks we learn from TikTok videos and ChatGPT. .
But we don’t have to believe what the system tells us: that we are the problem; that we are to blame for our failure to thrive. What would change for each of us if we could recognize ourselves as human beings doing our best in a flawed system? If we didn’t feel, on some level, a sense of shame around our bodies, our symptoms, our less-than-optimal health? If we could learn to connect to our own embodied wisdom, rather than trying (over and over again) to impose someone else’s on it?
From shame-based to strength-based marketing
For my fellow helping practitioners— perhaps this is how we transition from a shame-based business model to a strengths-based one. If we can accept, with humility, that we don’t necessarily know what’s best for our clients, but that we can empower them to find that in themselves; if we can use our own expertise in service of the organic process of their own individuation process; if we can trust that the agency, means, and manner of their healing (mistakes included!) is determined by their psyche, not ours— maybe we could actually relax a little bit and stop efforting so damn hard.
Acknowledging our clients’ agency and innate wholeness doesn’t mean that the burden of the healing is on them alone. In fact, our relational support is essential. And, in this model, it’s incumbent on us to acknowledge the challenges and shortcomings of help the larger ecosystem of culture that can create external obstacles and internal complexes.
It also means that we need to address our own complexes— money, inferiority, savior, etc.— which contribute to the web of shame-based marketing we find ourselves in. Can we trust that it’s enough to be grounded in our own integrity, and that following the breadcrumb-trail of our own individuation is the best way to support others in their process? That’s the question.
Returning to that dream of my overdrawn customer— there was a moment in that dream where I “knew” the “right” thing to do was to deny her the refund. This represents the ways in which it can “feel right” to do what our culture wants us to do, rather than what we know is right for us. When I woke up from the dream, I felt a lingering sense of relief that I’d followed my own inner guidance, rather than the system’s rules.
Of course, I don’t always get this right. Mistakes are an important part of the process, after all. As Jung said (above), “The recognition of truth cannot come to daylight till you have given yourself a chance to err.” But I know that as a consumer, when I’m presented with messaging and marketing that feels supportive and grounded, rather than shame-based, urgent, or wrong-making, I breathe a little easier. I feel more at ease in my body and empowered to make decisions.
What a brilliant antidote to that shame-based marketing.