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Chapter 4

Shame: The Nastiest Five-Letter Word in the Universe

Most of us don’t spend a lot of time thinking about shame. We know the feeling of embarrassment when we say or do something stupid, but shame is more elusive, not really on our radar screen. There’s a reason for this: shame is so deeply repressed we can’t even access it.

Therein lies the problem: shame is something we don’t talk about. It’s so insidious that we can’t even see it for what it is and rarely bring it up except in a special context such as therapy. And yet shame drives much of our behavior, especially with regard to our sexuality. Its influence is both powerful and harmful, which is why I consider it the nastiest five-letter word in our universe.

The Shame/Pleasure Paradox

If shame is what holds us back from enjoying sex and experiencing pleasure, where exactly does it come from? After all, human beings are designed to experience pleasure. Think about babies. For a short period of time, they do live an orgasmic life. Babies and toddlers freely explore and touch their bodies with wonderment and joy. They love to put their toes in their mouth, coo when they are breastfeeding or drinking from a bottle, touch themselves all over, and freely express pleasure. As we get older, our spontaneous expression of joy lessens as we are compelled by our environment to rein in our pleasure-seeking impulses, especially those that are sexual in nature. Little ones naturally reach for their genitals and are often subtly or overtly reprimanded for doing so.

It’s an odd paradox, given that we have over ten thousand nerve endings in our genitals. It would seem as though our bodies are designed to experience sexual pleasure. Did you know that, inch for inch, your clitoris has as many nerve endings as a man’s penis? Unlike the penis, the clitoris does not serve a specific role in reproduction. The only purpose of the clitoris is for us to experience pleasure. Of course, experiencing pleasure encourages procreation, but a clitoral orgasm does not get you pregnant! Pleasure and orgasm have many health benefits: reducing stress, improving sleep, pain relief, boosting your immune system, and providing a natural antidepressant.

Our bodies are a source of pleasure, and our physiology supports the argument that we are meant to experience pleasure. But when we get older and want to touch ourselves, an element of shame often seeps in, spoiling our experience of bodily pleasure. This paradox creates tension around our sexuality. As you will see, sexual shame comes from a variety of different sources.

Ancient Cultures Were Sex-Positive

If we look at sexuality from a historical perspective, we find that attitudes toward sex in many ancient cultures were actually quite positive. According to Paul Chrystal, author of In Bed with the Ancient Greeks: Sex & Sexuality in Ancient Greece:

…love and sex were inextricably connected with the creation of the Earth, the heavens, and the underworld. Greek myth was a theogony of incest, murder, polygamy, and intermarriage in which eroticism and fertility were elemental; they were there right from the start, demonstrating woman’s essential reproductive role in securing the cosmos, extending the human race, and ensuring the fecundity of nature.” Many ancient religions also worshipped sex. In ancient Hindu temples all over the world, we find statues of Lingams (penises) and Yonis (vulvas) worshipping the God Shiva and Goddess Parvati.2

Yoni Lingam Statute, Siem Riep, Cambodia, Angkor Wat Temple Ruins, 12th Century

It was the Judeo-Christian religion that vilified sex. Adam and Eve were shamed for their nakedness, accused of “original sin” for eating the “forbidden apple” and banished from the Garden of Eden, that paradise wherein pleasure and joy were one’s birthright. We have been paying the price of their banishment and carrying the weight of their shame ever since.

Shame and Your Sexual Blueprint

To understand where our shame comes from, we have to examine our sexual blueprint. Similar to an architectural blueprint that shows all the details of the plumbing, electricity, drywall, windows, and doors that make up a building, you have a sexual blueprint comprised of all the early life experiences that make up your sense of yourself as a sexual being. I call it a blueprint to emphasize the impact of the early experiences that govern your relationship with your own sexuality as well as how you relate to members of the opposite or the same sex. The elements of your sexual blueprint include:

•Messages you received about sex as a child from parents, other adults, and society

•Early childhood sexual exploration with yourself and/or others

•Your first sexual experiences

•Relationships with your mother and father or primary caregiver

•Seminal events that impacted your body image

•Religious ideology or indoctrination

How these messages impact you differs for everyone, but we all experience shame…that is a part of human existence. Let me give you an example of how this plays out. When I was growing up, I had a dog whose name was Lucky. He was a yappy, high-strung, neurotic Yorkshire terrier; we did not have the best relationship. Lucky often barked at and nipped me. He loved to hide under my bed and then growl at me when I tried to get him to come out. When I was nine years old, Lucky started to lick my private parts while I was lying in bed at night. I experienced a lot of pleasure from the sensation of the dog’s tongue on my pussy. I also knew from earlier experiences that I would be punished if my mother caught me. So the pleasure I experienced was colored with fear, anxiety, and shame.

Fast-forward eighteen years. Is there any wonder that I was really uncomfortable with oral sex and could never relax enough to experience it as pleasurable? Not until I slowly brought this memory to consciousness in my forties and shared it with a group of people in a workshop was I finally able to heal my shame and begin enjoying oral sex. Interestingly, when I shared my shame story through tears and shaking during that workshop, another woman shared that she’d been sexually aroused as a child by rubbing against her cat! What a relief! For decades, I thought there was something wrong with me; that I was broken, sexually deranged, or maybe even into bestiality.

The most important lesson I learned from the workshop is that the only way to normalize the conversation about sex is to normalize the conversation about shame. There are many ways to do that, but writing about it, talking about it, and sharing our experience with others are powerful first steps toward healing shame. Later on in this chapter you will get to explore your own sexual blueprint, but for now let’s look at some other real-life examples of how our sexual shame impacts our sexuality.

Body Shame: Jessica’s Story

Jessica came to see me because she was uncomfortable touching herself and was not able to have an orgasm. She grew up in a fairly open and sex-positive environment within her family. Jessica was a tomboy and loved playing with the neighborhood boys. For years, on warm summer days, she ran around topless, just like her friends did. She loved the freedom of being bare-chested and feeling the air on her skin. Her parents were totally fine with this, and Jessica continued to experience her freedom. But when Jessica turned ten, with budding breasts, things changed.

It was a beautiful, warm summer day, and like always, Jessica ran outside the house without a shirt on to play basketball with the boys. Her mother, who had been running errands, pulled onto the street, took one look at Jessica and her budding breasts, stopped the car, and demanded that she go inside the house and “put a shirt on right this second.” Jessica’s body shame was exacerbated in middle school when a teacher told her that she needed to “sit like a lady” and keep her legs closed.

In middle school Jessica gained a lot of weight, probably to hide herself from her own body. The disconnection from her body increased when she was later shamed for being “fat” by her aunts and uncles. It was carried over to her adult life as an inability to enjoy touching and appreciating her own body. Over time, Jessica was able to accept that the shame and negative image she had about her body were from her childhood, had no basis in fact, and no longer served her. As she began connecting with her own feminine self, she became more loving and compassionate to herself and her body. Eventually she was able to enjoy touching and pleasuring herself and experienced her first orgasm.

Delayed Ejaculation Shame: Jeff’s Story

Jeff came to see me after a nasty divorce. He was afraid of being intimate with women and was particularly concerned about delayed ejaculation, meaning he could get fully aroused but not come. When I asked Jeff about his first sexual experience, he told me this story.

I was seventeen when I lost my virginity. I was one of the last of my group of friends and felt a lot of peer pressure to get laid. There was this girl, Jackie, who had a lot of experience and came on to me at a party. I wasn’t attracted to her, but she put her hand on my cock when we were dancing, and I felt excited. She took me into a back bedroom and we fucked. It went on for about a half an hour, and while it felt really good, I couldn’t come. Jackie made fun of me and even told her girlfriends about it. I felt like all her friends looked at me in a different way after that. Like I was not a real man.

And thus, shame became a cornerstone of Jeff’s sexual blueprint. Jeff repeated this pattern when he started dating after the divorce. He’d agree to have sex with a woman when he really wasn’t that turned on and didn’t feel connected. Then, when he couldn’t ejaculate, he’d think himself inadequate and feel deeply ashamed. Once Jeff learned to relax during sex and developed stronger boundaries so he could say “no” to women he was not attracted to, he was able to enjoy making love, and his problem with delayed ejaculation went away.

My own sexual shame runs fairly deep in my blueprint and was etched into my sense of myself at a fairly early age. As a young child, I was pretty sexual and often played doctor with my friends. One day I was over at my best friend Josephine’s house. We were two bubbly first-graders pretending we were doctors and exploring each other’s vaginas. This was one of our favorite games. When Josephine’s mother walked into the room, her face turned bright red. She scolded us, immediately called my mother to tell her what had happened, and demanded she come pick me up right away. My mother, who never showed any connection to her own sexuality, couldn’t even talk to me except to say it was a “bad thing” that I could never do again. After that incident, Josephine’s mother would not let us have play dates anymore. At the end of first grade, Josephine and her family moved away. I was heartbroken to lose my friend and believed it was my fault she had to move away. Thus began the association between my vagina and painful disappointment.