Transforming the Shame Triangle
Pre-Interview Page
JESSICA FERN
DAVID COOLEY
Jessica Fern and David Cooley's collaboration is unlike anything else in the mental health space. More than just colleagues and co-authors, they are two people who have shared over twenty-three years of life together, navigating marriage, divorce, and co-parenting. This rich history gives them a uniquely grounded and nuanced perspective on relationships, partnership, and what it actually takes to repair and grow through the hardest moments.
Together they bring a rare combination of clinical depth, lived experience, and hard-won wisdom to one of the most universal yet least talked-about human experiences: shame. Not as an abstract concept, but shame as the invisible force that drives our inner critic, fuels our sense of unworthiness, and keeps us trapped in patterns of avoidance—pulling us away from the lives and relationships we most want.
Drawing on decades of combined personal and professional experience, Jessica and David's latest book—Transforming the Shame Triangle—offers a fresh, empowering, and practical roadmap for working with shame in a whole new way.
Jessica is a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional and integrative therapist whose bestselling book Polysecure sparked a global conversation about attachment and relationships, now translated into five languages. David is the creator of the Restorative Relationship Conversations model—a framework that takes the principles of restorative justice, traditionally used to heal communities after crime, and applies them to the most intimate conflicts we face: the ones with the people we love most.
Trauma, attachment wounds, and external criticism can leave us battling a sense of shame and inadequacy that keeps us from thriving personally and in relationships. In Transforming the Shame Triangle, Jessica and David use a synthesis of Internal Family Systems and Narrative Process to identify three parts they see as the greatest barriers to achieving the life we want—the Inner Critic, Shame, and the Escaper— players in an internalized drama triangle acting as perpetrator, victim, and rescuer.
Step by step, the book guides readers out of self-critique and into self-support—transforming the Shame Triangle into something altogether different: a Self-Love Triangle.
About the Book
Topics Jessica & David Can Speak To:
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What is the Shame Triangle & what is its impact?
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How do we heal Shame at its roots—not just manage it?
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Using parts work (IFS) to heal self-criticism and inner conflict.
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The difference between an adversarial and a restorative approach to relationships.
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Turning conflict into deeper intimacy and connection.
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Attachment, trauma, and how our earliest wounds shape our relationships.
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Co-authoring and co-parenting after divorce—what it really looks like.
Sample Questions for Hosts:
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Why doesn't insight into shame on its own create change.
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How did your own relationship history inform this book?
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What does "restorative" mean in the context of intimate relationships?
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How is parts work different from traditional therapy approaches to shame?
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What does the journey from shame to love actually look like in practice?
