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YOUR SEXUAL SHAME
The Origins of My Shame - Part One
My relationship with my sexual shame started when I discovered masturbation at 12 years old. I was watching some 1980s sexy T&A movie, touching myself in an unconscious manner, when I unexpectedly ejaculated into my shorts. Shocked, I ran to the bathroom thinking I had just urinated on myself. What just happened? Was I going to die? Fast-forward to being at summer camp that same year. It was here where I first learned the joys of deliberate masturbation. Late at night, amidst the snores of my bunkmates, I would create a tent under the sheets and furiously but silently stroke my genitals. The sensation felt so glorious that, in my young mind, I felt like I was communing with god. My body was alive: it felt so good and, then, quickly—ejaculation. I silently destroyed the evidence, fearing that someone might notice. I developed the shame-ridden skill of ninja masturbation. At the time, it never dawned on me perhaps all my bunkmates were doing the same thing because we never talked about it (“Fellas! My masturbation was amazing last night! I learned to do this thing with my finger and then … ”). We were quick to share baseball cards, comic books, girls we had crushes on, or how to hit the fastball. However, we certainly never talked about our nightly self-pleasure because we all knew the unwritten rule about being silent.
Society teaches us to feel intense shame about our sexuality, our bodies, and our desires. We were taught never to speak of it in polite company. Even as adults, I have met very few of the 10,000 students I have taught who felt free to speak of their sex. Even in the most honest of relationships, sex is off the table. We are all taught to hide because what we want is wrong. When I would inquire about why people believed they could not speak proudly of their desire, their answer was usually some version of either “I am too big for them to handle” or “If they knew the truth, they would leave.” Your fear of abandonment—your fear of being alone—trumps your desire to be authentic. The cost of this choice is (a) you never feel fully free with your most intimate partners and (b) your partners never truly know the deepest and sometimes most interesting parts of you. When you are in fear, your vigilance center takes over to protect you, for the truth—the literal baring—of your neck, can be terrifying. Therefore, the process of creating a safe space to allow the truth to arise is the best method to reduce shame.
The Origin of my Shame - Part Two
I’ve done extensive work to discover the origin of my shame. From my early years, I was always an overweight child, often carrying an extra 20 to 30 pounds on my frame. I initially thought my shame about my body started with me. However, in looking more deeply at it, I’ve come up with a hypothesis that it actually started with my maternal grandmother. I believe she had an untreated eating disorder commonly known as Body Dysmorphia. In the Clinical Psychiatry Review, Cororve and Gleaves describe this condition as “a mental disorder characterized by the obsessive idea that some aspect of one's own appearance is severely flawed and warrants exceptional measures to hide or fix it.” Through stories, I believe my grandmother’s shame around her body transferred to my mom, which was then passed down to me.
As I was growing up, I had a natural desire for sweets. It was the 1970s and a wonderful time for all things filled with white sugar and white flour. The words gluten and dairy-free had not hit the mainstream. My desire for sweets deeply impacted my mom’s trigger points: the more junk food I wanted, the more painful my mother’s fear. Since I deeply loved my mother and wanted to stay in connection with her, I tried desperately to shove my desire down to please her. However, my hunger won out and it led to conflict over my eating habits. One of my most painful memories connected to this is watching her sit on the back porch, smoking a cigarette, and trying to figure out what to do with her gluttonous son. After that point, my love for food became fetishized, dangerous, and, most importantly, secretive. I mentally punished my desire, re-characterized it as my enemy, and started my internal war to destroy it while stealthy buying my own sweets so my mom wouldn’t find out. I didn’t know then that these new habits would deeply impact me for many decades to come.
With a lot of therapy and internal work, I have come to a deeper understanding both of my mother’s actions and my reaction to them. I have empathy for a young inexperienced mother on how to handle both her own issues and her son’s at the same time. Furthermore, I now see the connection between my shame around my desire for food and my sexuality. In reconciling the two, I’ve enabled myself to have an open, unHIDDEN dialogue about both with myself and with my intimate friends.
Shame can control you without your knowledge. It is the man on your shoulder directing you to move left or right, towards or away, without you even know he is doing it. Although my shame controlled all aspects of my nature, through the work, I started to become free. In the FURTHER SUPPORT section, I have an exercise which will illuminate your awareness around yours.
A World without Shame
I am fortunate to be able to continue practicing expressing aspects of my shame with my wife, Morgan. For example, I recently revealed to her my past experience with pornography. Never in my entire life had I been honest with anyone about it. The surprised look in her eyes was a bit daunting at first but, as the conversation continued, I sensed her deep approval of my past and felt incredible relief in my system. My revealing of this part of myself brought intense relief in a place I thought I would always keep secret.
I would love to see a world of acceptance regardless of gender, sexual orientation, desires, body type, and more. I think we’ll always have a caste system of what’s acceptable and what’s not and, inside that system, shame will always be present. However, I do believe we can make it better for ourselves, our children, and our intimate loves. We can make changes, small and large, for their truth to be received and rewarded. By creating dialogues like the one above, you can help these parts of yourself that you dislike escape years of misery, fear, and loneliness by acknowledging that they are actually so, so beautiful. Remind them that comparison to anyone is a losing game and that our self-love and acceptance is paramount to our happiness.
INVESTIGATE
The second step of your journey is to use all of your available resources to deeply understand what is occurring around you. We live in an information-rich world where millions of resources are one click away. In this section, I will build on the concepts of the previous section to download more data on why we live hidden in today’s society.
9
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Men’s Stoic Faces
I once ran production for a workshop that was called What 10 Women Want You to Know. It was led by smart and sexy women sitting together in front of a group of men, discussing a wide range of topics. The goal was to educate the men on how to relate to a new crop of modern, powerful women. My role in the back of the house was to ensure that the teachers and the students had everything they needed to be comfortable sitting in the room. My personal challenge was to pay attention—to watch the proceedings of the course but not be impacted by the material. This was no simple task, as the information was very triggering for any man. I watched these 20 men take in viewpoint after viewpoint, intense exercise after exercise, without a complaint. While there was some lively debate, the men were quiet and demure, and rarely allowed their faces to show any emotion. Without any overt cues of issues or discomfort, the instructors continued to teach the course and pound their audience with the truth. As the course ended, the men gave their thanks and gathered their things to leave. We felt we had provided a meaningful experience to our students. As they exited our center, they gathered together and, within 10 minutes, a fist fight broke out between two of the participants. We rushed to the front to break it up and sent them on their way. We were surprised, but chalked it up to a strange, isolated incident.
Six weeks later, we ran the course again and I sat in the back of the room in the same role. I watched with interest, as I felt we were providing a similar experience t
o this new group of participants. The women delivered amazing content and the group of men smiled, again showing little emotion throughout the workshop. Afterwards, as I was talking with one of the instructors in the kitchen, one of the participants came in to say goodbye. I sensed something was off. A moment later, the man dropped to his knees and attempted to bite the thigh of the instructor. We were able to restrain him before he made contact and quickly escorted him off the property.
We then realized the concepts taught in the class were way beyond what these men were able to handle. The truth was too intense. Although they had looked placid or even happy, their systems were in overwhelm. We quickly changed the course to be called The Ignited Man and changed the format to have men teach the bulk of the material with women coming in for a shorter Q&A period towards the end of the class. While we delivered the same intense information, it resulted with the men bonding without violence.
Being Hexed
Since that class, I’ve never taken men at their face value (pun intended). You are taught from birth to take on all you can take, work your ass off, and then collapse on the floor from exhaustion. You say “bring it on” to the world even when you’re out of your range. You don’t slow down because it would show weakness. The problem is that you are often walking around hiding and suppressing your feelings.
This is what I call being hexed. I define it as an external confirmation of your self-doubt. Imagine you walk out to the garage and say to yourself, for the 100th time, “I’m going to clean this baby out today.” It’s a fine cool day, your schedule is clear, so you march into the house and announce to your wife your intention for the day. Clothes changed, you head back and start your process. About two hours later, you notice the place is still a mess and the work you have done has amounted to very little progress. There is a personal sense of failure brewing. Then you spy a pile of old car magazines and sit down to sort them into piles. An hour later, as you are deep in your reading, your wife walks by and teases innocently, “How’s it going, honey? Hard at work?”
Shocked and feeling slightly guilty at being caught at reading, you turn to her with a snide look at your face and say sharply: “I’M DOING THE BEST I CAN!”
Her face screws into a puzzled look and she turns back into the house. You feel righteous anger at her inquiry. You think to yourself:
What was she doing?
Was she getting shit done today?
Why was she badgering me?
Why can’t she mind her own business?
This is the definition of being hexed. Your wife was just connecting with you, but you have a negative judgment about your own progress. You knew that you had made a goal to clean out the garage and were avoiding this task. This was your doubt and your self-anger; your wife was in the unlucky role of naming it.
People get hexed about many things. One of the most potent is when we don’t know something that someone else does. In terms of the class for men, putting guys in a semicircle all competing for the women’s approval was a ripe opportunity for being seriously hexed. Men don’t want to seem weak, so they pretend that everything is okay. It takes powerful awareness to know there are often feelings rumbling underneath the surface.
Men are taught there are only specific places where emotions can be shown. You can cry at funerals, births, some sad movies (usually involving an animal), and when your favorite team loses the championship. You can let your emotions out when you are intoxicated or pushed to your edge, but it is harder to simply shed a tear or smile deeply at everyday life. Men who are emotional tend to be feminized and allow themselves to be insulted by other “manly” men. The men in the What 10 Women Want You to Know classes were in a constant state of being hexed. What if just one of them had raised his hand and bravely said, “I’m feeling anxious right now and I’m not sure why ...”? The whole class would have benefited. It could have created a dialogue of vulnerability and authenticity. Because men do not feel safe to tell the truth (especially in a group of other men in front of 10 very sexy women), they will withhold it to their detriment.
We all suffer from what I call terminal uniqueness—the belief that we’re the only one with a specific condition. Since we’re the only ones with this issue, we compare ourselves to other men’s optimized social media profiles and isolate even further.
However, here’s my viewpoint: You are not alone.
Every man I’ve ever met has some fear, some secret, that he is not willing to speak about. The key to having an unHIDDEN life is taking the first step by inhaling deeply, dialing up your courage, and speaking it out loud.
My Relationship with Emotions
I was a child in the 70s, raised by two very different beings who I called my parents. My mother was a therapist—empathetic and very open about her feelings. In high school, my friends would go to her for advice before their own parents because they could feel her warmth and her open acceptance for who they really were. My father was the disciplinarian, strong in his viewpoints on how to raise a son and determined to instill in me a sense of strength and toughness. My mom would want to pick me up from school while my dad believed it was okay for me to walk the mile home in the New York cold. I felt the depth of these disparate viewpoints of my primary caregivers.
I have memories of being an outspoken child with a creative and slightly aggressive energy. I remember being chastised by my teacher for being too loud and having too much energy. I can recall hundreds of instances of my father restraining me and saying, “Calm … down ….” I trained myself to be a dutiful and well behaved boy. I learned to be quiet and dismiss the emotions churning inside. I learned to watch how adults responded to my outbursts and felt the negative consequences for these parts of myself leaking out. I started to restrain these impulses to stay in good favor with my parents and avoid punishment. I learned to intuitively pick up on when I was going too far and would reel myself back in.
As I progressed through puberty into my mid-teens, I discovered I was holding a great deal of anger inside. Fueled by the music and teenage rebellion movies of the 80s, I started to express these emotions in toxic ways, as I didn’t yet have the acumen to deal with them any other way. As I graduated high school and moved through college, I morphed back into that man of control. I learned to push down my emotions and blend in with the rest of my classmates. I became someone who my peers could come to in their time of need because they knew I would be a steady place to hold them in their feelings. I didn’t have room for myself but wanted to be a nice guy who was liked rather than an authentic one. I succeeded in creating a powerful façade for myself.
Society’s belief system holds that men are more disconnected from their emotions than women. While I’ve encountered some men in my tenure who were intimately connected, the stereotype has been proven true to me countless times.
I am an example of a boy who was raised to trust logic over my emotions. In my formative years, we were regularly tested for our Intelligence Quotient (IQ). The higher the score, the more intelligent we were deemed and the higher propensity we had for success in life. For those who did not have high IQs, their best bet was to get ahead based on physical skills, musical talent, or street smarts. However, if you had a median IQ with limited physical prowess, the chance of your advancement was viewed as unlikely and you carried the social stigma of normality.
These stereotypes were true in my home. I often think of my upbringing as a casualty of war between my parent’s differing opinions of how to raise their first-born son. My mother, my primary caretaker, wanted to raise a sensitive boy who could empathize and connect to his emotions. My father, a more pragmatic man, cared more about my success, discipline, and results than how I felt about my life. I took elements of each and created a somewhat awkward composite. I was driven academically and socially, but also had an unbalanced relationship with my emotions. I was overly cautious with girls my age, to the point of being more maternal than masculine.
I had more women friends than romantic
interests and rued the fact that I was unattractive. When I entered into my own personal self-development at the age of 29, I had not progressed far past these original belief systems. I was still a caretaker, a white knight with aspects of chauvinism and misogyny coursing through my system. During my first five years of deep personal work, I was appalled to discover some inner viewpoints I had that were not very nice:
Women are weak and lazy.
I am smarter than women.
Women need me to survive.
Since I produce, I am better.
Feelings are nice but not as valuable as making money.
I had no idea the extent of elitism, privilege, and chauvinism my father, the locker rooms, movies, and society had instilled in me. I thought women were always complaining—talking about issues and feelings that didn’t interest me. Still, I was the solid rock that women could come to in the height of their feminine storms.
The second five years enabled me to unlock these views, replace them with new viewpoints, and optimize my relationship with my emotions. For the last eight years, I have been educating men on how to connect and engage with their emotions for optimal effect. I have learned that women are used to riding bigger waves than men. Instead of trying to learn to ride them ourselves, we have condemned women for their chaotic nature.
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