I didn’t expect shame to surface here—not in this chapter of my life, not in the very work that has brought me closer to wholeness than ever before. But the body is so wise.
As my practice naturally evolves toward intimacy integration—helping people develop trust and safety in their own bodies, and a new relationship to pleasure, sacred sexuality, and spirituality—I’ve been feeling more connected, more alive, more me. And yet, just beneath that expansion, something unexpected surfaced. A visceral sensation in my gut. A nauseous nagging.
As I sat with it longer, I recognized the pulsing of shame—old, buried, and suddenly illuminated. It wasn’t the sharp, external kind that comes from being judged by others. It was subtle, almost woven into the fascial structure within my body. Who do you think you are, guiding others to embody what you’re still learning to? And as I traced its threads, I saw that this shame wasn’t mine alone. It was familial. Collective. Social. A residue of the world’s discomfort with bodies like mine—fluid, androgynous, uncontained by binary or norm.
Shame is a freeze response—hypoarousal in nervous system terms. I feel it in my lower stomach as heavy or dense, metallic, and dull. The thing about shame is that it doesn’t arise in isolation. It’s a social emotion, born in response to an external gaze, to the stories and structures that tell us what is pure, good, or acceptable. We learn it early and we learn it deeply, until it becomes part of the way we hold ourselves, the way we move, the way we love.
Social Architecture
As I began to trace the roots of that quiet shame, I found myself circling back—not to something psychological or private, but to something broader. Shame is not born in a vacuum. It’s constructed in our conditioning, rule by rule.
My somatic coach recently shared a study published by the American Psychological Association, in which researchers examined disgust through the lens of purity culture. They found that feelings of disgust—especially moral disgust—often arise when people perceive something as “impure or threatening to social order.” It turns out, disgust is not just a visceral reaction; it’s a moralized one.
Purity culture forces us to subscribe to which bodies are acceptable. Which desires are legitimate. Which expressions of love belong inside the sacred circle, and which must be cast out to preserve it. It’s the psychological offspring of patriarchy and religious moralism, shaped by colonialism and the myth of control.
Disgust operates from the outside—you are unclean, you are deviant—while shame enforces from the inside, compelling us to self-regulate, to shrink, to conform before anyone else has to say a word. Over time, these messages become internalized so deeply that we mistake them for our own voice.
And why shouldn’t they—when the anatomical term for the female external genitalia, the pudendum, comes from the Latin phrase pudenda membra, or “parts to be ashamed of.” In some other languages, the word for labia translates to “shame lips.” I wish I were making this up.
When I feel through that lens, my experience begins to make a painful kind of sense. My shame isn’t proof of my brokenness; it’s proof of my socialization. It’s evidence of the invisible contracts I inherited—the ones that still try to dictate how I should inhabit my body, express my desire, or define my gender.
Perhaps the real impurity isn’t queerness, but the fear of aliveness itself.
The Roots of Internalized Shame
When I stopped to trace shame back through my own life, its early echoes are unmistakable. They live in the voice of my biological mother, who told me at thirteen that “no man would ever love me.” That I was “disgusting” when I came out as gay six years later. I recall the sharpness of the word as I drove the car. It landed in my body—a tightening in my throat, a collapse in my chest. In that moment, I got the distinct feeling that my mother was right about me all along—I was unlovable for who I truly was.
It didn’t start or stop there. Other family members echoed the same rejection, sometimes through words, sometimes through silence. The message was clear: queerness was a betrayal of family, of faith, of the natural order itself.
Later, in college, I took a psychology course called Deviant Behavior. Homosexuality had not yet been removed from the DSM. There I was, the only newly-out queer student, sitting in a classroom absorbing the word deviant as it was used to describe people like me. I wanted to disappear, but I couldn’t look away. The word stung like salt being ground into a fresh cut, and I think I spent the rest of the class in a blank, dissociated haze.
That class taught me more than the professor intended. I began to see how institutions encode shame into language, how academia, religion, and culture conspire to define normalcy by exclusion.
Over time, those messages shape our nervous systems. We learn to anticipate rejection before it happens. We edit our gestures, our voices, our desires—not because anyone told us to, but because the body remembers what it takes to survive. The pattern becomes so familiar that we stop noticing it’s there.
As I begin to help others cultivate safety and pleasure in their own bodies, I realize how deeply those old patterns still live in mine. My shame is not only emotional—it’s somatic, a residue of all the times my body had been told it was wrong. And yet, as I uncover those layers, what I find beneath them isn’t sin or sickness. It’s aliveness. Queerness is not deviance, but freedom embodied.
Seeing the Deeper Truth Clearly
The paradox is this: the shame only surfaced because I was ready to be free of it. My growing intimacy with my body, my gender, and my sexuality made it impossible for the old lies to stay hidden.
I used to think healing meant becoming clean—scrubbed of the past, uncontaminated, and virtuous. Now I see that it’s the very opposite. Healing is what happens when the wounded, impure, and silenced parts are welcomed home.
Once we see shame clearly in ourselves, it’s impossible to ignore it in the world. Queer people are not marginalized because we are in the minority, or because we are less-than. We’re marginalized because we are free—free in ways that terrify those who have been taught that life must be constrained.
Freedom, in its simplest form, is confronting. It exposes the limits of others’ imagination, their fears, and the parts of themselves they’ve learned to suppress. When a culture prizes purity, obedience, or rigid gender and sexual norms, anyone who lives outside those boxes becomes a threat. Our very aliveness—our bodies, our desires, our identities—is a mirror. It reflects the repression, the shame, and the fear that others have learned to carry.
This is why hatred often masquerades as moral concern. It’s not just fear of difference—it is fear of embodiment itself. “I don’t feel free, so no one else should be able to,” is the unspoken credo. And in that fear, societies try to cage, constrain, and punish, perpetuating cycles of shame that hurt us all.
Understanding this changes the frame. Our struggle is not merely personal or political—it is profoundly cultural. When we claim our freedom, we do more than heal ourselves. We become living proof that it is possible to exist beyond shame, to move through the world unshackled by the expectations of others. We model a different possibility: that the body, desire, and identity can be whole, honored, and free.
Transmuting Shame into Liberation
Shame is a shadow to be recognized, welcomed, and invited into the light. When I allow myself to feel it fully, to trace its roots in my body, I can see that it’s been carrying messages that were never mine at a soul level.
As I cultivate intimacy in my work, guiding others toward trust, safety, and pleasure, I’m also practicing liberation. Each breath I take during meditation or yoga with my hands on my heart, each bind during a Shibari session, every time I walk bare-chested on the beach, becomes a reclamation: my body, my gender, my sexual identity are not wrong; they are whole, integrated, vibrant, alive, and entirely mine. I belong to no one but myself.
The freedom to inhabit our bodies fully, to express our desires without apology, to live authentically—this is contagious. It challenges repression, disrupts rigid norms, and invites others to remember their own aliveness.
What would it feel like to inhabit your own freedom—fully, unapologetically, without fear? Invite breath into the lower core of your being. Feel it there. Let yourself be alive.
