There's a public record with my name on it.
A ban. A bankruptcy. Decisions I made that had real consequences for real people.
For years, I couldn't decide whether to run from that record or wear it on my forehead as punishment. Both instincts — the running and the flagellating — were shame doing what shame does. Shame doesn't want you to get better. It wants you to hide, or it wants you to destroy yourself proving you're sorry.
Neither of those is recovery. Neither of those is integration. Neither of those actually pays anything back.
This is what I've learned from sitting with it.
Healthy shame is brief. The other kind is identity.
Healthy shame is short. It says: that was off, fix it. Then it dissolves.
What most people call shame — the kind that hangs around for years and runs the show — isn't shame anymore. It's a story. It's an identity. It's the quiet conviction that you ARE the worst thing you've ever done, in present tense, forever.
When I read my name on the ASIC register, the pull was always to collapse into "that's who I am now." But ASIC didn't ban me as a person. ASIC banned me from a specific role for a specific period. The register documents a decision. It doesn't document a soul.
That distinction took me a long time to find.
Running doesn't work
The first instinct after a public fall is to hide. New industry. New city. Don't say the word "insurance" out loud. Don't put it on a CV. Pretend it didn't happen and hope nobody Googles you.
The problem with running is that the thing you're running from is inside the runner. You can change jurisdictions; you can't change archives. Every job you take, every relationship you build, every piece of work you put your name on becomes a place where the secret could land.
The energy required to maintain the cover-up is the energy that should be going into the rebuild.
I tried running. It made things worse. The thing about a hidden ban is that it can be Googled in 90 seconds. The hiring manager already knows. Your "first impression" is always second.
Punishment doesn't work either
The opposite instinct is just as broken: turn the ban into a hair shirt. Apologise constantly. Lead with it. Mention it three sentences into every conversation. Wear it as evidence of how sorry you are.
That's not accountability. That's performance.
It's almost always a way of pre-empting other people's judgment — getting in first so it stings less when they say it. People can smell performed remorse from a long way off. It makes them uncomfortable. It also makes everything you do afterwards feel like compensation rather than contribution. Nothing you build can ever be just the thing it is. It always has to be evidence.
That's exhausting. And it doesn't actually heal anything.
What integration looks like
There's a third option, and it's the one I'm working at now.
You acknowledge the record. You don't lead with it. You don't hide from it. When it's relevant, you name it cleanly: yes, there's a ban on the ASIC register from 2017. Here's what happened, here's what I learned, here's what I'm doing now. No drama. No flinching. No grovel.
Then you let the present do the heavy lifting. The work you do today. The people you support today. The way you show up today.
None of that erases the record. That's not what it's for. The record stays. But the record stops being the loudest thing in the room.
This is what recovery taught me, and what counselling study is teaching me again from a different angle: integration is not erasure. The fall is part of the story. It's just no longer the centre of gravity.
The register isn't going away. Neither am I.
The ASIC register is going to outlive my career. So is the bankruptcy. So is the search result that pops up when someone types my name into Google.
What's changed is what I do with it.
I host a podcast about exactly this — not by accident. I'm studying counselling because lived experience is part of the qualification, not despite it. I'm building businesses with my name on them on purpose. None of that is reckless. All of that is on the other side of a long, quiet, honest fight with what shame wanted me to do instead.
If you're carrying something similar — a public record, a professional collapse, a name that doesn't feel like yours anymore — the work isn't to make it go away.
The work is to stop letting it tell you who you are.
What you did isn't who you are.
It's just one of the things you've learned the hard way.
Tony Bailey is in recovery, studying counselling at Torrens University, and hosts the podcast Fall From Grace — honest conversations about losing it all and rebuilding from the ground up.