Self-love is the fastest way to break through sexual shame.

It is the solution and salvation for much of the sexual shame you may encounter today. Learning about your body and learning to love yourself more is your best weapon against feeling shame. Sexual shame is so rampant in the lives of so many people and if you are uncomfortable with sexuality or parents are not comfortable with sexuality, then you are going to have sexual shame.

Sexual shame stifles all the core creative energy, the core sexual energy, the core life-force energy, and really is the energy that often leads people into suicide when they feel covered in shame. When you watch people sort of releasing themselves from shame, you watch them release themselves into life, and into life force and into life energy, and into sexual pleasure, and into really being able to honor themselves and make Honoring Choices for themselves in so many areas of their life… Sexuality only being one of those areas. So it really is this place of a real division, whether they’re living in so many ways, or whether they’re dying in so many ways.

Reading the operational definition of sexual shame in black and white can really help in understanding and assisting in a profound shift towards healing sexual shame.

“Sexual shame is a visceral feeling of humiliation and disgust toward one’s own body, and identity as a sexual being and a belief of being abnormal, inferior and unworthy. This feeling can be internalized, but it also manifests in interpersonal relationships, having a negative impact on trust, communication, and physical and emotional intimacy. “

That goes on to say:

“There is also a fear and uncertainty related to one’s power or right to make decisions…. Including safety decisions related to sexual encounters, along with an internalized judgment toward one’s own sexual desire”.

As you are developing your curiosity, you’re curious about your body, of course, and that curiosity begins to emerge before you’re even a year old and you discover your genitals, which is one of the primary pleasure areas of your body. If your parents or your caregivers are not comfortable with that, you’re going to begin to get in trouble about that and it will be the beginning of being shamed for your natural curiosity, but you’re getting in trouble.

So that’s not going to make any sense to you and so whenever we get in trouble for a natural curiosity, a natural thing that’s happening, the only meaning we can make of that is that, something is wrong with us, our person, our personhood.

This happens hundreds and hundreds of times as we’re developing and growing, so it becomes a deeply seated understanding about us that something is profoundly wrong with us and it gets deeply tied into religion…. Western religion!

So the way that this plays out and the way that we see it most is that you can have a young person, a young woman in particular, who feels confident in every area of her life until she gets ready to go out, and then she’ll put down many shots of hard liquor because she’s not sure that she can keep herself safe, or that she has the right to keep herself safe and you don’t have to come from a religious background for us to see this.

In Peggy Orenstein’s 2017 book called “Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape”, she interviewed 80 girls 15 to 22 and they described that they were confident in themselves until they got ready to go out and they just didn’t know that they were allowed to keep themselves safe and say, ‘Stop’! Or ‘I don’t want to’.

So this is how rampant sexual shame is and there are few other core ways that we damage people’s ability to attach and create strong bonds of intimacy than here with sexual shame.

So how do we rise above this shame? How do we drop it? How do we move away? How do we break through it? Dr. Tina has developed an evidence-based model for healing sexual shame and it is called Healing the Mess – The Model for Erasing Sexual Shame, M-E-S-S.

There are 4 areas and it’s not linear, it’s circular, it’s kind of peeling things away because shame can get so deep inside you so you have to work it out of you by unraveling things. The first thing for so many people is to separate myth from reality and that is what I call its Frame, Name, Claim, and Aim”.

Frame is itself a scaffolding or a frame of sex education. Find out what is true about the brilliance of your body, and how it really operates. Because it is magnificent and wonderful and you need to understand it because we’re given so much mythology about how it really operates and about gender and anatomy and physiology and all kinds of things and we have wonderful resources out there.

So learn about your body, and the body of the people that you’re attracted to, and how relationships go and intimacy goes and all of those kinds of things, and come to appreciate body and pleasure, and how you, in particular, are put together, and that kind of leads to name…

Come to know your story, and find a tribe of people that are safe and compassionate and empathic to tell your story to and starting to tell your story, it’s so liberating.

Claim, is starting to claim your body, knowing we are good, our bodies are good, and they are not meant to all look the same. They are meant to look different. We are a cornucopia of beauty, and our bodies are supposed to be different and we need to change this idea.

Beauty is not one thing. We have to work so hard at that. So we have to gather around and say, “You are beautiful, I love this about you and I love this about you and we have to work hard with that”.

Claiming our bodies is about learning to stand in front of the mirror every day until we can start saying this is beautiful. This is beautiful, and I am not going to wait until I am dying to say I appreciate this body and how things carry me in the world, how it allowed me to love and hold and be in the world in a way that I can appreciate my life. I am going to start doing this now…. Today, now.

So, that’s Frame, Name, Claim, and as we do those three things diligently, mindfully every day, we begin to Aim that’s really writing a new legacy. We’re aiming for a new future, a new sexual legacy that leaves shame behind and as we do that, we actually write a new future for ourselves and any child that is related to us. We don’t pass this forward anymore. They no longer carry shame, because they grow up continuing to be like they are as children, where their bodies are good.

On raising kids with a healthy model of sexuality – there’s no such thing as starting too soon. In fact, start when you’re pregnant by just pretending that you’re talking to your child already because what you want to get to is the point that you’re so comfortable that when the time comes, you’ve been talking about it so much that your shame is gone”. Because that’s the part we want to get to, we want to get to where it’s as simple as talking about spaghetti and brushing your teeth and putting your boots on and your coat on – it’s just so natural because this is a part of our body, it’s part of the human experience and as we’re able to talk about it like that, like this is a good part of our life and part of our body and, that the child will be able to see it as also part of that too.

Keep having these conversations all the time at appropriate ages as your child is growing up. You would want to know, what is the natural curiosity for a child, every age and stage. You want to be armed with knowledge, be their sex educator, you want to be their resource person. Research shows that if kids get age-appropriate sex education, across their lifespan, from their parents, they’re going to get involved with sex later than normal, they’re going to get involved later, they’re going to make safer sexual choices that are more respectful to them. They’re going to have a better sex life when they are older. So the best guarantee that your child is going to want to stay connected to you through their youth is to become a good sex educator because if they can talk to you about sexuality, they can talk to you about anything.

It’s really that continuous work with consciousness and awareness and knowing that this shame is not ours. It’s not ours to keep…. It has been put on us. “Shame is the fear of disconnection” and one of our primal needs is for connection and sex is probably the most intimate, powerful way for connection. There is no better way to feel connected, than in that intimate relationship, and by holding our stories away, because we are afraid to share them because of shame, that’s exactly what hinders our ability to get rid of it.

So by sharing our stories, by putting it out there and seeing that we are still loved, and even maybe more because we come vulnerable, and we share our humanity and our most inner treasures with others and that is really what sets the freedom. That’s what creates the freedom from shame.

How does shame play a part in your life or how have you overcome your own sexual shame? Please share your truth in the comments below.

Listen to the Podcast:

How to Love Yourself eBook: Seven Spiritual Keys for Transformation 👈 #Selflove

If you feel called to heal your sexual wounds or shame, grab your copy of the Healing Sexual Wounds Summit here

FREE Sexual Healing Playbook 👈 #SexualHealing

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This blog was written from the I Rise Sexual Healing Summit session with Dr Tina.

Dr Tina Schermer Sellers is a therapist, sex educator, speaker, author, mother, and wife. She has Ph.D. in clinical sexology and does formal research on the effect of sexual shame on couples’ intimacy, writes a blog, has an online community called Thank God for Sex. She speaks regularly throughout the year around the country, published a couple of books, and established the Northwest Institute on Intimacy in order to encourage all therapists who treat couples to become proficient at improving intimacy and sexuality in the people they serve.