Why Do I Feel Shame About What I Want?
The Pattern
Your body knows what it wants. The wanting arrives. Almost simultaneously, a wave of shame arrives behind it. You cannot name the shame. It is just there. You feel it in your chest, your face, your stomach. You wonder why your body is punishing you for the simple fact of having a preference. Your body is not punishing you. Your body is repeating a lesson it absorbed from a parent, a religion, a culture, a partner, a moment of being shamed for a desire when you were young enough to mistake their shame for the truth about you. The shame is inherited. The wanting is yours.
Origins & Context
Brene Brown's research on shame identifies sexuality as the single most common domain in which shame is inherited from family of origin, religion, and culture. Brown notes that shame about wanting is rarely about the specific desire. It is about the early teaching that desiring at all was a violation of the conditions under which the person was permitted to be loved.
Gabor Mate's writing on the body and authenticity describes the specific somatic suppression of desire as a survival adaptation. The child who learns that her wanting is unwelcome learns to dampen the wanting at the level of physiological signal. The shame is the residue of this suppression, returning every time the desire begins to surface.
Christiane Northrup's clinical work on women's sexuality identifies the inherited shame about female desire as one of the most persistent transgenerational wounds, often carried in the body for multiple generations before someone in the lineage names it and begins to release it.
The shame is inherited. The wanting is yours.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You notice it in the way you cannot say the want out loud. You can think it. You can feel it. You cannot put it into a sentence and offer it to a partner. The sentence dies in your throat. You change the subject. You let the moment pass.
It shows up in the way you read certain books or watch certain scenes and feel a hot wave of embarrassment, even alone, even with no one watching. The body is registering that the content has touched a desire you were not supposed to have, and the shame arrives on cue.
It shows up in the way you have apologized in the middle of intimacy. The sorry comes out without you deciding to say it. You are apologizing for the wanting itself, even though the wanting is the entire point of the moment. The apology is the shame finding the surface.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as Inherited Sexual Shame (Brene Brown), the early teaching that desire itself was a violation of the conditions of love. It is also named as Somatic Suppression of Desire (Gabor Mate), the physiological dampening of wanting as a survival adaptation. Christiane Northrup names the transgenerational version of this Matrilineal Sexual Inheritance.
Related entries in this library: Self-Abandonment, Mother Wound, the Body Keeps the Receipt.
Nikita's Note
The shame is not yours. You inherited it. The wanting is yours. The work is to slowly separate the two, so that the wanting can exist without the shame arriving behind it.
The practice is small and private at first. Write the want down. Just for you. Read it back. Notice the shame and tell it, gently, that it is not the truth about you. The wanting is the truth. The shame is the inheritance. Over time, the wanting becomes speakable, first to yourself, eventually to a partner. The shame thins. The wanting remains.
From the work
The shame is inherited. The wanting is yours.From You Are the Love You Seek by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in You Are the Love You Seek — available on Amazon.