What Is Sexual Shame in the Context of Religious Trauma?
Sexual shame involves feelings of guilt and regret that center around sexual thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and desires. Sexual shame is a learned response that evolves in a person through judgmental and fearful messages they receive from their culture, religion, family, or other contexts.
Sexual shame from religious trauma can include a variety of emotional responses, including:
- Fear
- Guilt
- Disgust
- Inadequacy
- Confusion
- Sense that one’s desires or body is wrong
How Religious Messages About Purity, Sin, and Desire Can Stay With You
Often, high-control religions emphasize messages around sexual purity that have lasting impacts on people raised in these environments. If you grew up in a restrictive religious environment, you likely heard these strong messages during your formative years, shaping the way you think about sex and shame.
These religious messages include fearful and shame-inducing lessons around maintaining purity, avoiding temptation, protecting virginity, and prizing modesty. Even if you no longer hold onto these values or beliefs around sex, the underlying emotional impact of receiving repeated shaming messages can remain.
Why Shame Can Feel Automatic
Some emotional experiences stick with us more strongly than others, and shame is an emotion that can remain long after the experience is over. Sexually shaming messages are particularly sticky because they tie shame to a normal and inherent part of being human – having sexual thoughts, feelings, and experiences.
It’s human to have sexual desire, but religiously shaming messages around sex train young people to judge these normal parts of growing up. For example, a child or adolescent feeling their first attraction towards another person might immediately feel that they have sinned, which quickly leads to feelings of guilt and shame for having this experience.
What Sexual Shame Can Look Like in Adult Life
Sexual shame can appear in adult life in many ways, both in your relationship with yourself and with your sexual partners. In your relationship with yourself, it can look like feeling disconnected from your body, being unaware of your sexual preferences, and guilt or shame around masturbation.
In your relationship with others, sexual shame can involve guilt after sex, difficulty communicating around what is pleasurable or painful for you, or challenges staying present during sexual intimacy. You may try to avoid feeling this shame by engaging in substance misuse, by trying to avoid sex altogether, or by compulsively engaging in sexual activity.
If you are part of the LGBTQ+ community, shame can feel compounded by harmful messages you may have received about your sexual or gender identity while in a restrictive religious environment. If you have been socialized as female, your shame may be compounded by patriarchal messages around sex, intimacy, and relationships.
How It Can Affect Relationships and Intimacy
Sexual shame can have a significant impact on your relationships and your ability to experience intimacy – both sexual and emotional. When you’re unable to communicate openly about sex, your partner may feel they aren’t able to know you fully. Your shame may lead you to put up a wall that others find challenging and painful to navigate.
Sexual shame can also lead to difficulty setting clear boundaries and advocating for your needs. If you are not fully present in intimate moments due to shame, you may neglect to advocate for yourself, or you might struggle to believe that you have a right to speak up and set limits.
Why Leaving a Religion Does Not Automatically Heal Sexual Shame
If you’ve left a religious environment that perpetuated shaming messages, you’ve taken a brave and necessary step towards healing your relationship to sex and your body. However, some of these shame responses may continue on.
Shame messages live on in our nervous system responses because shame is closely tied to fear. When you were taught to feel shame around sex, your body stored this as a fear memory and, therefore, something to avoid. This is your body doing its job – our bodies are designed to remember fearful experiences so that we can learn to avoid them to keep ourselves safe.
Unfortunately, the restrictive religious environment you spent time in manipulated your fear responses into responding to the normal, human experience of sexual desire with fear and guilt.
The Link Between Sexual Shame, Anxiety, and Self-Criticism
Chronic shame often leads to anxiety and self-criticism due to reinforcing a belief that something is wrong with you. Over time, sexual shame can lead to feelings of self-doubt and self-criticism around your sense of worthiness, sexual desirability, or ability to find acceptance from others.
The anxiety from chronic sexual shame can include intrusive thoughts around sin and morality regarding sexual activity, self-monitoring of your appearance and behavior, and ongoing feelings of being fundamentally flawed.
How Therapy Can Help You Heal From Religious Sexual Shame
Sexual shame can feel like it’s lingering long after you leave a harmful religious environment, but therapy can help you heal and find a way forward. Therapy helps you to name the harmful messages and beliefs that you received, and understand their impact. You’ll work in counseling to rebuild self-trust, reconnect with your body, learn to build greater intimacy with others, and build your own personal set of sexual values untangled from harmful shaming messages.
Working with a therapist can help you develop a kinder, more compassionate inner voice that encourages you to advocate for yourself, prioritize your pleasure, and set limits during harmful or uncomfortable sexual experiences. You’ll learn to embrace all parts of you, and affirm your gender and sexual identity as well as the sexual preferences and relationship styles that work best for you.
What Healing Can Look Like Over Time
Healing from sexual shame may feel like it takes time to see any progress, but you’ll gradually start to see changes. After working through your sexual shame, you may start to notice some of the following:
- Less guilt
- More assertive boundaries
- Increased self-understanding
- Healthier relationship with your sexuality
- More comfort in being present in your body
- Freedom from internalized homophobia or transphobia
- Ability to challenge patriarchal norms around sex and relationships
Support for Healing Religious Trauma and Sexual Shame
If you’re ready to face sexual shame, understand yourself better, and find more self-compassion, working with a religious trauma therapist can offer you the space to explore these goals and more. You’ll work to unlearn the guilt, shame, and confusion that came from your restrictive religious experience, and build a more confident path forward based on your own personal values around sex, intimacy, and self-acceptance.
I’m a licensed professional counselor, and I offer individual therapy for religious trauma and deconstruction, focused on helping you unlearn sexual shame and claim freedom from restrictive religious beliefs. If you’re in Texas, book a call at the link below to explore working with me in therapy.