Can Making A Home Help Heal Our Childhood Shame?

This is the 50th episode of How To Renovate! When I started the podcast, back in February 2024, the idea was to focus on short informative episodes about the renovation process. And although I’ve mainly stuck to that, I’ve also found so much joy in interviewing some incredible people and exploring just how much our homes mean to us.

Our homes are powerful, they can either support our needs, daily lives and our well-being, or they do not.
Home is more than just four walls, it’s what happens inside. This episode was quite a difficult one for me. I decided to turn off the video and just reflect and talk freely as if I was having a coffee with a close friend, about what home means to me. As many of our lovely listeners know by now, I grew up in Cape Town, South Africa during the apartheid era and this means that I have many complicated feelings of what home means, especially home as a country. What our feelings of home are, how those feelings are formed during childhood, and the related shame that often comes with that, is a subject that has always fascinated me, and in this episode I explore my own.

This week’s episode is deeply personal. I’ve opened up about something I’ve never fully shared before—the shame I carried growing up under apartheid in South Africa, and how that experience shaped my relationship with home.

But, as adults, when we finally get to create our own spaces, we often don’t realise how much of our childhood we’re still carrying with us—and how making our own homes can help to heal that shame. For me, it’s been taking the feeling of not belonging that has roots that stretch far back, across continents and decades, and with quiet rebellion and intentional creation, turning that into what people who looked like me weren’t allowed to have, into the home I’ve built today.

So join me inside to explore how home can be a space for reclaiming worth, safety, and identity. I speak about ways we can begin to heal childhood shame through the way we design and care for our homes—by prioritising self-expression, comfort, security, and making space for connection and joy.

Whether or not you’ve experienced trauma or displacement, I truly believe we all carry pieces of our past into the homes we create.

If this resonates with you in any way, grab that coffee and hit play.

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Tash SouthApril 1, 2025