David Bedrick, JD, Dipl. PW, is an author, teacher, and the founder of the UnShaming Way. He grew up in a home marked by his father's physical and verbal rage and a mother who coped through denial—an early and formative introduction to the etiology of shame, and to the hunger for a different way of witnessing.

When he began working with people at 30, he kept encountering the same wound: not just what had happened to people, but how they had learned to speak about themselves afterward. The self-blame. The inner critic. The quiet conviction that their pain was their own fault. Over the 40 years since—now at 70, still teaching, still learning—he developed UnShaming: a rigorous, compassionate approach that treats trauma, shame, and emotional difficulty not as pathology, but as intelligence waiting to be understood.

David is the founder of the Santa Fe Institute for Shame-Based Studies, where he trains therapists, coaches, and healers worldwide. A graduate of the Process Work Institute, he studied directly under Arnold Mindell and served as adjunct faculty there for over 15 years. He writes for Psychology Today and is the author of five books, including The Unshaming Way (North Atlantic Books, 2024), which Gabor Maté called "a deep investigation of shame, the most debilitating of our mind states." He holds a JD from Lewis and Clark Law School, graduating first in his class.