An Appalachian reflection on shame, survival, and the stories we carry.
By Dr. Brenda Everett, Ph.D., LPC, NCC, ALPS
Unbound Counseling, LLC | Morgantown, West Virginia
Growing up in Appalachia, we know a thing or two about ghost stories.
The kind told on front porches after dark. The kind passed down by grandparents, neighbors, and people who swear they know somebody who saw something out in the woods. We know about old houses, winding roads, family secrets, and stories that somehow get a little bigger every time somebody tells them.
We are storytellers here.
It’s part of our history. Our culture. Our connection to one another.
And I love that about where I come from.
But I’ve been thinking lately about the stories that aren’t so harmless. The ones that follow people long after they’ve left the room. The stories we tell about others. And perhaps more importantly, the stories we’ve come to believe about ourselves.
Because some ghosts aren’t dead.
They’re stories we still believe.
The Stories That Follow Us Home
If you’ve grown up in a small Appalachian community, you probably understand how long a story can live. Somebody makes a mistake at seventeen, and somehow they’re still being introduced by that mistake at forty. A family goes through a difficult season, and generations later, people are still talking about what happened. A child is described as dramatic, difficult, sensitive, lazy, or too much. And somewhere along the way, those descriptions become identities. We don’t always recognize the weight of our words.
Sometimes we’re repeating something we’ve heard so many times that we’ve stopped questioning whether it’s true.
Sometimes we’re telling a story about someone based on who they were twenty years ago, without ever considering who they’ve become.
And sometimes we’re carrying stories about ourselves that were written by people who never really understood us.
That’s the thing about stories.
They can connect us.
They can help us make sense of the world.
But they can also keep us stuck in versions of ourselves and one another that no longer exist.
Our Nervous Systems Carry Stories, Too
One of the things I find most fascinating about being a counselor is how our bodies learn from experiences. Our nervous systems are constantly taking in information.
Is this safe?
Am I welcome here?
Do I belong?
Am I going to be embarrassed, rejected, criticized, or hurt?
Much of this happens without conscious awareness.
Our brains and bodies learn to recognize patterns based on previous experiences. And when something in the present resembles an earlier threat, our stress-response systems may respond before we’ve had much opportunity to think it through. That might look like becoming defensive when someone questions you.
Shutting down during conflict.
Feeling overwhelmed by criticism.
Overexplaining yourself.
Trying desperately to keep everyone happy.
Or feeling an immediate sense of shame when you believe you’ve disappointed someone. These responses aren’t always about what’s happening in that exact moment. Sometimes they’re connected to what our bodies have learned to anticipate.
A child who grew up being criticized may become an adult who hears disappointment in every conversation.
Someone who experienced rejection may become especially alert to changes in another person’s tone of voice.
A person who learned that mistakes led to humiliation may struggle to tolerate being wrong, even when nobody is threatening them.
Our nervous systems don’t literally store stories the way we remember words on a page. But our experiences can shape emotional learning, expectations, and automatic responses.
And those patterns can influence the stories we tell ourselves.
I’m not good enough.
People always leave.
I have to handle everything myself.
If I make a mistake, people won’t respect me.
I’m too much.
Sometimes those beliefs feel so familiar that we mistake them for facts.
Shame Has a Way of Keeping Old Stories Alive
This week, during our Halloween-themed group supervision at Unbound, we explored shame resilience, nervous system responses, and the narratives we carry. Our conversation drew from the work of Brené Brown, Gabor Maté, and trauma-informed approaches to understanding human behavior. One distinction I return to often is the difference between guilt and shame.
Guilt invites us to examine something we’ve done. Shame often convinces us that something is fundamentally wrong with who we are.
There’s a significant difference between:
I made a mistake.
And:
I am a mistake.
One allows room for accountability, learning, and repair. The other can leave us feeling exposed, defective, and disconnected. And shame doesn’t always look like someone sitting quietly with their head down.
Sometimes shame looks like anger. Sometimes it looks like defensiveness. Sometimes it looks like perfectionism, people-pleasing, withdrawal, or needing to be right. Not every defensive reaction is rooted in shame, of course.
But shame can make it harder to remain curious about ourselves and our impact on others. When our sense of worth feels threatened, protecting ourselves can become more urgent than understanding what happened.
This is where nervous system awareness and shame resilience become important.
We can learn to recognize when we’re feeling threatened without automatically treating that feeling as evidence that we’re in danger. We can practice tolerating discomfort. We can become more willing to acknowledge mistakes without turning those mistakes into our entire identity.
And perhaps we can become more compassionate toward other people who are learning to do the same.
Appalachia, Belonging, and the Stories We Inherit
There is something particularly meaningful about exploring these ideas through an Appalachian lens. Many of us were raised with powerful messages about loyalty, family, hard work, resilience, and taking care of our own. Those values have helped communities survive extraordinary hardship. There is tremendous beauty in them.
But sometimes the messages we inherit can become complicated.
Don’t air your dirty laundry.
Don’t make a fuss.
Keep your head down.
Be grateful.
Don’t forget where you came from.
What will people think?
For some families, these sayings represent wisdom and protection. For others, they become expectations that make it difficult to ask for help, establish boundaries, challenge harmful behavior, or tell the truth about painful experiences.
Sometimes resilience gets confused with silence. Sometimes loyalty gets confused with tolerating harm. Sometimes keeping the peace means asking one person to carry the discomfort so everyone else can remain comfortable.
And sometimes we keep repeating stories about people because questioning those stories would require us to reconsider our own role in them.I think we can love where we come from while remaining curious about what we’ve inherited.
We can honor our families and communities without believing every lesson needs to be passed down unchanged. We can appreciate the strength of Appalachian people while also recognizing that strength shouldn’t require endless suffering.
And we can be proud of our stories while asking whether some of them need a different ending.
We Are Always Observing, and Being Observed
Something else we discussed in supervision is how quickly human beings develop interpretations of one another.
We notice facial expressions. Tone of voice. Body language. Who speaks. Who stays quiet. Who seems irritated. Who doesn’t respond to a message. And almost immediately, we begin creating meaning.
She’s upset with me.
He doesn’t respect me.
They think I’m incompetent.
She always makes everything about herself.
Sometimes our interpretations are accurate. Sometimes they’re influenced by previous experiences, our current stress levels, or information we don’t have. And sometimes we become so attached to our interpretation that we stop being curious about the actual person standing in front of us.
This happens in families.
Friendships.
Workplaces.
Schools.
And yes, even among mental health professionals.
We’re human, too.
We bring our own nervous systems, histories, assumptions, and experiences into every relationship.
Being trauma-informed doesn’t mean assuming every behavior is caused by trauma.
It means remaining curious about context while still recognizing the importance of accountability. It means understanding that people have histories without reducing them to those histories. It means recognizing that our interpretation of another person’s behavior is not automatically the whole story.
And it means remembering that while we’re observing others, they’re experiencing and interpreting us, too.
That’s a tremendous responsibility, especially for those of us in leadership, education, healthcare, and helping professions. Because the stories we tell about people can influence how they’re treated. And how they’re treated can influence what they eventually believe about themselves.
Accountability Doesn’t Have to Mean Shame
I think one of the more difficult things we can learn is how to hold two truths at the same time. Someone’s behavior may have hurt us. And that person may be more than the worst thing they’ve done. We may have experienced harm. And we may still have opportunities to examine our own responses.
We can understand why a behavior developed without excusing its impact.
We can offer compassion without abandoning boundaries.
We can acknowledge someone else’s humanity without giving them unlimited access to our lives.
Understanding isn’t the same as excusing. And accountability doesn’t have to require humiliation. In fact, when people can acknowledge mistakes without believing their entire worth is at stake, there may be more room for meaningful repair.
That doesn’t mean everyone will take responsibility.
It doesn’t mean every relationship can or should be repaired.
And it certainly doesn’t mean people who have experienced harm are responsible for making others feel comfortable.
It simply means we can create environments where truth, responsibility, and dignity are allowed to exist together.
Maybe It’s Time to Question the Story
As we move through Halloween, I’ve been thinking about the things that haunt us. Not necessarily ghosts in old houses. But the words someone said years ago that still echo in our minds. The identities we were handed before we were old enough to question them. The mistakes we continue punishing ourselves for. The relationships that taught us to anticipate rejection. The family narratives we’ve carried without realizing how heavy they’ve become. And the stories we continue telling about other people, even when we haven’t known them for years. Maybe healing doesn’t always begin with changing the story. Sometimes it begins with noticing that there is one.
And asking ourselves a few questions.
Where did I learn to believe this about myself?
Is this belief based on what is happening now, or something I experienced before?
Whose voice do I hear when I criticize myself?
Am I allowing someone else to grow beyond the version of them I remember?
What would accountability look like without shame?
What story would I like the next generation to inherit?
We may not be able to change everything that happened to us.
We may not be able to convince others to see us differently. And we certainly can’t control every story someone chooses to tell.
But we can become more intentional about the stories we repeat. The ones we believe. The ones we challenge. And the ones we decide not to pass along.
Some Things Can Be Laid to Rest
I love Appalachian storytelling. I love the history, the humor, the folklore, and the way a good story can make a room full of people feel connected.
I love that we come from a place where stories can outlive the people who first told them.
But I also wonder what might happen if we became a little more careful about which stories we keep alive.
What if we stopped introducing people by their worst season?
What if we allowed our children to become something other than the labels we’ve given them?
What if we became more curious about our own nervous systems before reacting to someone else’s?
What if we could acknowledge harm without turning people into villains, or ourselves into permanent victims?
What if we learned that belonging doesn’t have to require silence?
And what if we finally gave ourselves permission to outgrow the stories that once helped us survive?
We come from a place that knows how to keep a story alive.
Maybe healing is learning which ones deserve to be carried forward.