Capitalism in the Body: How Systems Shape Shame
We often think of capitalism as a system that lives outside of us - economic, political, structural. It lives within us, too. It lives in the muscles that tighten when we think we’re not doing enough. In the shallow breath we take when comparing ourselves to someone else’s productivity. In the self-talk that echoes with not-good-enoughs and should-be-betters. In the physical and emotional exhaustion that comes with overworking to simply survive.
Capitalism is not just a structure we participate in - it’s something we’re conditioned to embody.
As a therapist and human who works closely with folx navigating shame, burnout, recovery, and the aftermath of trauma, I see the fingerprints of capitalism all over the human experience. And I feel it in myself, too.
While the internalized narratives of capitalism affect many, arguably all, they don’t land in a vacuum - our positionality shapes the severity and expression. For BIPOC, queer, disabled, working-class, or immigrant communities, the stakes of noncompliance are often higher. The ‘not enough’ script is racialized, gendered, and classed.
It's a system that whispers (and sometimes screams) that your worth is what you produce. That rest is laziness. That failure is moral. That asking for help is weakness. These narratives aren’t just ideas—they land in the body.
Let’s talk about how.
Capitalism Tells You to Hustle - Your Body Knows Better
Our nervous systems are innately tuned to our environments - evolutionarily wired to keep us safe and connected. Under capitalism, survival isn’t just about food or shelter - it’s about performance, status, and relentless productivity. This creates a constant stress response in the body as we a forced to work harder just to be seen as “enough.”
Capitalism teaches urgency. It rewards overextension. It normalizes dissociation from our needs.
Clients often show up with tight jaws, clenched fists, stomachs that haven’t relaxed in years. Chronic pain, anxiety, insomnia - not as individual pathology, but as natural responses to unnatural expectations. We internalize the demand to be constantly doing, even when our bodies are begging for rest and recovery. And when we can’t keep up? The system doesn’t say, “This is too much.” and explore avenues for repair. It taunts and says, “You’re not enough.”
Hustle Culture Is Just Dissociation in a Blazer
We often romanticize high-functioning survival as success. What if that’s just trauma wearing a calendar?
The roots of hustle culture can be traced to colonial extraction and industrial labor systems - structures that dehumanized the body in service of production, that told many their only access to life, to community, to fresh air, was through labor. In hustle culture, dissociation becomes the norm. Tuning out hunger cues, working through sickness, ignoring grief, sidelining joy, growing distant from community members. The body becomes a machine. And if you can't keep up, the shame loop kicks in. We say we're burned out. But often what we mean is: I'm so disconnected from myself, I don’t even know what I need anymore. We are conditioned to believe that our need is to work more, earn more, produce more.
Capitalism doesn't just demand labor - it demands we detach from the parts of ourselves that ask for gentleness, presence, and pause. Productivity is rewarded, even when it's fueled by collapse.
Shame as a Tool of Control
There are a lot of opinions on what shame is, how it functions, and how to shed it. Nkem Ndefo, MSN, CNM, RN spoke about shame in a way that resonated deeply with me in a somatic, liberation-centered training. Nkem shared that shame is a survival instinct meant to protect us from isolation - it sends signals through our nervous system that tells us “Shhh.. be quiet. If you feel that, if you talk about that, the people around you will abandon you.” Exile is the greatest disadvantage we can experience as humans. Shame tells us that certain parts of us aren’t worthy of love and care - it tells us that certain parts of us will be rejected. Shame tells us to be silent. Ironically, the most surefire way to combat shame is through connection - vulnerable, raw, unapologetic, authentic, intentional connection.
Shame isolates. It convinces us that we are the only ones failing. The only ones behind. The only ones not getting it right. This keeps us alone, striving, and ashamed —exactly where capitalism thrives.
Capitalism feeds on shame. It needs it, because shame keeps us working with our heads down. If I believe that rest makes me lazy, I won’t rest. If I believe that needing support means I’ve failed, I won’t ask for help. If I believe that my body is wrong, I’ll keep spending - on diets, supplements, fitness apps, productivity hacks, self-care workbooks, etc.
Shame creates consumers. It keeps us isolated, mistrusting, self-monitoring. It turns community into competition and wellness into a commodity.
And for those of us healing from trauma, these messages are particularly insidious. Capitalism feeds on trauma - it exploits the fear of scarcity, the hunger for approval, the craving to feel worthy. It mirrors and magnifies our most painful inner narratives, reinforcing them with messaging, metrics, and meritocracy.
Healing as Resistance
When we reconnect with our bodies, when we slow down, when we feel - we disrupt the system. This is why rest is radical. Why softness is political. Why connection is medicine.
To feel your feet on the ground.
To breathe into your belly.
To name your worth without a résumé or accolades attached.
These aren’t luxuries. They’re acts of rebellion.
And yes - healing in a capitalist system still happens within that system. It’s possible to make micro-resistances in our daily lives. It’s possible
To unlearn urgency.
To listen to the body's cues instead of the clock or the deadline.
To trade shame for curiosity.
To build community over isolation.
To choose collaboration over competition.
To replace performance check-ins with raw emotional check-ins.
We start by noticing: Where have I internalized these systems? What parts of my body believe I must earn love, safety, or rest? What narratives live in me that I didn’t choose and keep repeating?
From there, we begin the slow, sacred work of unraveling. Even those of us seeking healing or doing 'the work' can unconsciously recreate these systems—in our calendars, our expectations of others, our urgency to “fix” ourselves.
From Self-Improvement to Self-Trust
Capitalism wants you in a loop of optimization: better, faster, more successful, more emotionally regulated, more "healed." The self-help industry is a billion-dollar branch of the same tree.
Healing isn't a checklist. It’s not a TED Talk or a morning routine or a perfectly color-coded calendar. True healing often looks like being with what is rather than constantly striving toward what we are told should be or could be.
The move from self-improvement to self-trust is a radical one. It means choosing presence over perfection. It means listening to your body over listening to your inner critic. It means saying: I am allowed to be as I am. My value is not conditional. It means trusting in the fact that you are inherently worthy of the things you crave regardless of how much you produced in the day.
Trust isn’t built through critique - it’s built through compassion. Slowly. Somatically. Over time.
Pleasure as Reclamation
If capitalism disconnects us from the body, then pleasure reconnects us.
Adrienne Maree Brown said it best - “Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy. Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom.”
Joy, pleasure, and play aren’t luxuries we may one day get to taste - they’re our sacred rights. They're what make us human, and they are often the first things sacrificed when we’re in survival mode. Pleasure reminds the body that it's safe, that there's room to feel, that being alive is more than checking things off a list that seems to never end.
Under capitalism, pleasure is often commodified: earned, bought, guilt-ridden. Reclaiming everyday, accessible, felt pleasure - sun on your skin, music that moves your bones, the taste of something delicious, laughter with people who witness you, anger channeled within community - is deeply reparative.
Pleasure isn’t a reward for finishing your work. It’s part of what helps us remember who we are beyond what we do for a paycheck.
Capitalism lives in the body - the brain, the nervous system, the function - and so does resistance. So does healing - gentle, slow, community-driven, somatic healing. It begins right here in the breath you just took, within the curiosity that races through your mind, in your own self-reflection, in your own processes of shedding shame.
