What is sexual shame?

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Sexual shame is the experience of one's sexuality as fundamentally wrong, dirty, or indicative of something defective about oneself. Dr. Brené Brown at the University of Houston identifies sexual shame as among the most intense and most hidden forms of shame, because sexuality is so close to the core of identity and so thoroughly entwined with vulnerability, bodily existence, and desire. Sexual shame forms through multiple developmental channels: religious messages that frame sexuality as sinful or dangerous; parental messages, both explicit and implicit, that communicate disgust or anxiety about bodies and sexuality; peer shaming during the hyper-vulnerable period of adolescent sexual development; and the specific and devastating shame produced by sexual abuse, in which the body's involuntary physiological responses during abuse become evidence, in the survivor's mind, of complicity. Dr. Brené Brown's research at the University of Houston identifies sexual shame as particularly resistant to healing because it is rarely spoken aloud. The degree of shame attached to sexuality means that most people carry their sexual shame in complete isolation, without the relational antidote that shame requires. The silence perpetuates the shame: unspoken, it remains untested and therefore apparently confirmed. Sexual shame operates at a physiological level. The shame response, which activates many of the same neural circuits as physical pain, can become conditioned to sexual stimuli, creating a nervous system state in which desire and shame are simultaneously activated. This produces the characteristic experience of sexual shame: wanting and simultaneously feeling wrong for wanting, or dissociating from desire entirely as a protection against the shame that accompanies it. Healing sexual shame requires both the external antidote of empathy, being witnessed in sexual truth without judgment, and the internal development of self-compassion toward one's sexual self. Sex therapists including Dr. Marty Klein and researchers including Emily Nagoski at Smith College have documented that healing sexual shame is less about changing what one desires and more about developing a relationship with desire that is not organized around shame.