7 Ways To Deal With Sexual Shame For Your Desires

Feeling shame for your sexual desires? This guide will give you 7 tactics for identifying the stories behind your shame and allowing you to break free from shame, accept yourself, and be able to flourish in your sexual expression.

What is your deepest fantasy or sexual desire? 

You know, the one that you don’t share with anyone, but you constantly touch yourself thinking about…

The one that you’re so afraid to let anyone know…

How do you feel right now about me asking about it?

For many of you, there might have been some excitement at first and then a giant wave of shame hit you like a semi truck, followed by a dozen thoughts about why you shouldn’t be thinking about that desire or why it shouldn’t turn you on.

Even if you’ve taken the time to discover what turns you on, some of those may frighten you or cause you to think ill thoughts about yourself. Consequently, your sexuality is repressed, unexplored, or stunted in its growth. 

For you to be able to enjoy your sex life to the fullest, and allow others to do so as well, you’ll have to work with that overwhelming emotion: shame.

What is sexual shame?

Shame is an emotion created by other people’s thoughts, beliefs, or actions that cause you to hide or deny your perceived wrongdoing. Shame arises when there is a moral weight on your decisions or behavior that will be exhibited by other people. When you experience shame, you feel isolated from other people as weird or an outcast, and associate your Self with deficiency, defeat, inferiority, unworthiness, self-loathing, and self-deprication. 

Why do you feel shame for your sexual desires?

Simple: someone you admire, respect, care about, or listen to, told you it was wrong.

That “someone” could have been your mother, your family, your religious community, your government, society at large, or any other collective of people.

Every group of people uses collectively agreed upon stories in order to function as a group. Those stories include values, standards, and ways of behaving in order to make that group function and reach the collectively agreed upon goal. 

When someone transgresses those stories, they are told they are “bad” and their behaviors are “wrong” in order to bring them back in line with what is socially acceptable. If this is not done, then the collective stories fall apart and the group can not function as efficiently.

What you end up doing as an individual, is internalizing that story and believing that you - as human being who has value far deeper than how you look or what you do - are now “bad” and your desires are “wrong”.

Then, when you have your desire arise, you thought police yourself. Boom! Bring on the wave of shaaaaaame!

Shame is a far more effective way of getting everyone to behave than having everyone telling everyone else what the rules are all the time.

“But isn’t my desire wrong?”

It depends.

What are your values? What sort of groups do you want to be a part of? What do they value?

This is going to be a stretch for some, but morality is more about what is effective in reality, than what is absolutely right or wrong.

Let’s step outside of the world of sexuality for a moment. 

Would you say Hitler was a “bad” person? Or did he just have some really screwed up stories about how reality worked and what was best for humanity? Read Mein Kampf and you’ll see that guy believed some pretty wild stuff. It’s easy for us to say that, but we could also examine a lot of our own stories and see some of them are just as ludicrous.

What about Ghandi? Would you say he was a “good” person? Or would you say that non-violence was the most effective strategy he had at his disposal given his circumstances? If you read more in depth about Ghandi, you’ll learn he was actually a pretty angry guy and because he didn’t have access to guns, nor people that could use them, non-violence was the way to go. Had he had bazookas and grenades with an army of soldiers who could use them, I’m not so sure he’d been so saintly.

I’m not arguing subjective morality here, where everyone makes up their individual morals and whatever goes. 

I’m saying look at your goal, and are your behaviors helping you reach that goal?

Reality has no goal. Reality has no good or bad. Reality just is. 

Society, however, which is embedded into reality, has a goal, which delineates good or bad.

You are embedded into society. So if you want to pursue society's goal, then you will do what is “good”. If you don’t want to pursue society’s goal, then it doesn’t even matter.

Here’s the kicker: you get to decide which society, or group of people, you want to be in, if any at all!

The even bigger kicker: society doesn’t define who and what you actually are. You’re not unworthy or inferior as a human being because of the choices you make in that society. You’re just more or less effective at reaching whatever that society deems valuable (which is as made up as the society is). 

So please, stop shaming yourself for made up rules given to you by other people.

My experience with sexual shame

As I’ve become more Dominant and explored my sexuality more, I’ve been hit time and time again with shame. 

Here’s a few of the ones I’ve had to address:

• Desire to be dominant - the story I told myself was that it was abusive, manipulative, and toxic leading me to believe I was somehow a monster.
• Desire to have a lot of sex - the story I told myself was that it’s too hedonistic, unreasonable, and could never be satisfied leading me to believe I was somehow too much for other people.
• Desire to have multiple partners - the story I told myself was monogamy was the way its supposed to be and marriage is just what you did, which lead me to believe that I was a terrible husband and partner.
• Desire to sexually objectify - the story I told myself was that is not how you treat a woman, which led me to believe that I was perverted and created a Madonna/whore complex in my head.

Every time I have had to sit down and unravel the story behind it before I could fully and confidently embrace it, and more importantly, myself. 

Tactics for overcoming sexual shame

These concepts apply for all stories, but let's focus specifically on the sexual ones for now. The really simple answer to overcoming your sexual shame is to just stop believing the story. Simple, but really fucking hard.

So we have to chip away this shame from multiple angles until we’re able to see that the story just isn’t as true as we once thought. Here’s some tactics that I used to address my own shame.

Tactic 1: Remove yourself from collective groups where sexual acts are shameful

All of us grew up in a multitude of groups that all had values, sometimes even competing values. At some point in your life, you will have to decide what your own values are irrespective of those groups. When you do, you may discover that you don’t value the same things.

If your sexuality, and the ability to explore and express that freely, is of high value to you, then you will either need to rebel within the groups you're a part of, or just remove yourself from them entirely.

These groups could include:

• Religious communities
• Cities with certain laws, policies, and rules
• Cultures
• Families

Personally, I find it mentally easier to just remove myself. It takes less emotional energy and mental bandwidth. It’s like if you’re trying to lose weight. It’s much easier to just keep the cookies out of the house in the first place, than trying to use mental willpower to keep yourself from eating them.

I realize that some groups are going to feel really hard to remove yourself from though. For example, if religious community is a large part of your identity, it’s going to feel really difficult to leave that. Even more difficult will be your family.

In these cases, you can find ways to set boundaries about what you will or will not show or discuss with them. For example, I’ve told my family I’m non-monogamous, but I’ve not told them I’m kinky. It’s never really relevant to our discussions. If there were a discussion where it was relevant, I’d probably tell them, but I’ve done a lot of work unraveling my identity and dropping stories. You may have not, so you may just wish to keep that private.

‍

At the end of the day though, you have the choice of which groups you interact with, and more importantly, ones you don’t.

Tactic 2: Join collective groups where sexual acts are accepted

With 8 billion people on the planet, I promise there are people that value the same thing as you do. In fact, with 8 billion people on the planet, I guarantee that there is someone into the same kinky, sexual thing as you and unabashedly enjoys it. 

Yes, you may have to do some work to find them. You might even have to move, get a new citizenship, and jump through a dozen other socially constructed hoops in order to be a part of that society, but you can do it.

Luckily for you, when it comes to sexuality, it’s a lot easier than that. 

First off, we live in the age of the internet, where you can find lots of niche groups for whatever your interests are. Reddit and FetLife are going to be your friends here.

What is going to really do a number on your psyche is actually getting together with these people, in the flesh (gasp!), and seeing they are just regular, “normal” people just like you. 

Here’s what I recommend:

• Visit a meetup, class, event or munch (just a kinky meetup) of what your interests are in
• Ask those people what their fantasies, desires, or turn ons are. Trust me, they’ll be happy to share.
• Listen to the stories of these people. Some are pretty wild.
• Attend a play party or event where you’ll get to see other people actually doing what you’re interested in. Expose yourself to wonderful, amazing, upstanding people, doing the “filthiest” things.

What will happen is you’ll start to question your own stories if your desires are truly that terrible if all these wonderful people also have those desires. You’ll see them engage in those desires and still be treated well. You’ll see them getting their ass beat blue on Sunday, and be back out saving lives in the ER on Monday. (Nurses are notoriously kinky.)

Tactic 3: Journaling

Sometimes it’s easier to observe your stories when you get them out of your head on paper. It allows you to look at them more objectively, separating yourself from the thoughts in your head.

What can be helpful is to write out your desires, particularly the ones you are most shameful about. Then, imagine that someone you loved came and told you about those same desires. How would you respond to them? How would you treat them? Do that for yourself.

Tactic 4: Digest your emotions

Even as you engage in some of these other tactics, you’re going to have times when shame still feels so overwhelming, to the point where it’s debilitating. You need to learn to digest this emotion.

Digesting emotions means feeling them fully without resistance, not labeling them as positive or negative, and allowing that emotion to fully go through their cycle. 

The process for digesting shame:

• When shame arises; pause.
• Bring awareness to the sensation of shame in your body
• Breathe. Sit with the sensation as fully as possible. Don’t resist it, don’t force it. Sit with it.
• Take as long as necessary to feel the sensation until it dissipates.

You’ll notice that during this process we did not stop and ask why the shame is occurring. First off, we don’t have control over when emotions arise, so even if we did know, we are not going to stop that emotion from happening in that moment. Second, if you start asking why while trying to digest the emotion, your mind often clings on to the mental stories and loops, intensifying the emotion and not allowing it to pass. Instead, use journaling as the time to examine your stories and the “why’s” behind the emotion. Then use the digestion process to work through the shame.

The more you digest shame, the more you’ll recognize that feeling this emotion isn’t bad. It doesn’t kill you. So even if you feel shame again in the future, and you will, it doesn’t have to keep you from doing what you want. You’ll be ok.

Tactic 5: Exposure

When you reach a level that you would be comfortable starting to explore some of the desires you previously had a lot of shame around, I recommend starting small and mild and progressively getting more wild. Each time you expose yourself to your desire, you have the opportunity to work with the shame that arises. You also get to discover that just because you have these desires, doesn’t mean you’re a shitty human. You’ll still be you on the other side.

Now some desires you may wish to never act out or fully explore, which is completely acceptable. For the ones you do though, take it step by step with a trusted partner. After each time you explore your desire, speak with them and get reassurance that they don’t think differently of you for having that desire. Spend some time journaling about the shame that arose, and then time digesting that emotion.

Tactic 6: Sexual Disclosure

A tactic that I have shared in how to discover your turn ons and how to communicate your turn ons is a sexual disclosure. These conversations can help you articulate your desires and understand the underlying psychological and emotional triggers. By understanding this, you are able to integrate these themes into your consensual sexual activities in a healthy and empowering way while addressing any shame that has occurred during the process.

How to do a Sexual Disclosure:

• Set up a time (preferably an hour or more) with someone who you trust enough that what you tell them will stay with them AND they will not judge you for what you say
• Disclose ALL past sexual partners & experience with them.
• Disclose desires, kinks, & turn ons.
• Disclose any shame or guilt you feel around past partners, experiences, or turn ons.

Warning: this process is intense and deep emotional work. Which is why it’s imperative that it is done in a safe, non judgmental container with someone who you can trust will keep what you share confidential and encourage your vulnerability such as a coach or therapist. If you don’t have someone who immediately comes to mind, I’d be happy to support you in this process. 

Tactic 7: Stop praising yourself for “good” things and punishing yourself for “bad” things

This really is the next level, advanced tactic but it will change how you treat yourself and surprisingly, how you treat others.

Many people look outside themselves for praise and punishment. They wait for others to validate their actions, and when they receive that validation, they will apply that judgment to themselves.

Some people move beyond the external validation, and start seeking internal validation. However, we already know that internally, they are running stories in their head given to them by society. So every time they do the socially accepted or revered action, they give themselves praise. When they do something socially unacceptable, they shame and punish themselves.

Select people are able to quit shaming and punishing themselves. However, they still seek the validation and praise of doing the “good” thing.

Here’s the hard pill to swallow: every time you praise yourself for the good things you’re doing, you’re continuing to reinforce the binary structure in your mind. If there is a “good” then there is its opposite somewhere that is “bad”. Because that “bad” exists, you’ll never truly escape the shame of it.

I’m not saying that you can’t ever tell yourself, “good job”. What I am saying is that when you do, you can’t let your actions define the value of who you are. You can’t believe that when you do something “good” that you are now of higher value than other people. You got a raise, you went and worked out, you volunteered, you did something for someone else… Those things don’t make you a better human being than others. Because if they did, then the opposite is true as well, that every time you do something “bad”, you’re now of lower value than other people. You got laid off, you didn’t work out, you did something for yourself… you engaged in a taboo sexual act… you’re now all the sudden a terrible human being.

Sometimes this is hard to wrap your head around. Personally, I had to start by not judging other people first. I had to stop thinking I was better than other people. I had to learn that just because I was skillful in some capacity, more capable in some domain, I was not better as a person than they were. What ended up happening was I also no longer put other people above me, or said another way, I no longer shamed myself for not following their values or being as skilled as them in achieving some socially constructed goal. I stopped caring whether I gained a compliment or criticism. They held no weight for me.

As a result of this work, you're far more accepting of others, loving, and kind. You're more open-minded. All that energy you can point both outward and inward. A significant step towards accepting yourself.