Sexuality and the Imprint of Shame: What Queer Guys (and Their Therapists) Need to Know — Part 3/3

PART THREE — PROCESSING SHAME

The first step to processing shame (and moving past it) is to identify what activates it for you (see part one). Next, we need to evaluate whether the ways we defend against shame are actually helpful (see part two). Then, we can continue to examine how the imprint of shame permeates our community on a larger scale and get ready to challenge ourselves where we’re implicated.

I would suggest that shame operates in queer men’s communities in the following ways:

1. It interferes with desire and pleasure;
2. It shapes our motivation for partner seeking in how we do it and what we look for; and
3. It fuels HIV stigma.

As a cognitive-behavioural and psychodynamic therapist, I use my understanding of shame to ground my case conceptualizations. That’s a fancy way of saying that examining shame helps me understand my patients more deeply. I use that understanding to develop exploratory questions to facilitate nuanced processing in the consulting room (or, over Zoom). For the most part, I ask about shame without explicitly talking about shame. I will demonstrate each of the ways shame operates through case vignettes followed by exploratory questions for each patient (note: all identifying information has been removed or altered).

Shame and Low Desire

Lucas is a 46-year-old white man born in Ontario. He came out to friends and family over a few years in his early 20s. His primary caregiver was his aunt, and it was important for him to come out to her. When he finally did, she became withdrawn for a period, but eventually said she supported him. She asked that he remember his family values and be cautious about AIDS. It’s been ten years since Lucas came out. Today, he struggles with how people perceive him in his predominantly straight workplace. Both dating and sex are largely on his mind, but they are either seen as too much work or dissatisfying. He uses crystal meth occasionally when he wants to have fun, let loose, and have great sex.

Here are some clinical questions I have for Lucas to help him process the connection between shame and desire:

1. What was the impact of having to hide your sexuality?
2. What messages did your aunt’s initial withdrawal send to you?
3. What aspects of you do you think people perceive as inferior?
4. Have you perhaps paired fear with sex?
5. Do you worry about rejection? When did you first start to anticipate rejection? What did you do, what was your behavior?
6. Who do you get to be and what kind of sex do you get to have when you use meth?”

As a therapist working with Lucas, you might decide to do some psychoeducation about trauma and shame. Perhaps you’ll reference The Velvet Rage and recommend it as a form of bibliotherapy. If you’re working with a person of colour, you may even highlight the common experience of being ashamed of being ashamed[i] in a gay world steeped in white supremacy. Whether you provide education or engage on a systemic level, you’ll appreciate that we must move slowly when processing shame. It’s imperative to make connections between the past and the present, explore internalized messages, and make nuanced meaning of behaviour that other people in your patient’s life might be quick to judge (i.e. drug use). It’s also important to appreciate that for a lot of sexual and gender minorties, anticipating rejection is when our depression or anxiety sets in. It’s adaptive because it protects us by creating necessary emotional distance that allows safe continuity in our social and familial relationships.

You might not be surprised to learn that Lucas wasn’t sure how to answer the first question about the impact of having to hide his sexuality. However, the second question about his aunt’s initial withdrawal surfaced a flurry of emotion. He was able to talk about the anxiety leading up to the big disclosure and the fear right after that he might feel alone forever. It wasn’t much of a stretch to then consider why he felt like coordinating dates and sexual encounters felt like “too much work” — he simply couldn’t tolerate the radio silence between messages. And, of course, drug use became a great way to “short circuit” past the fears of rejection and follow through with the pursuit of connection and sexual gratification.

Shame and Partner-Seeking

Rohit is 25 years old, South Asian and Canadian-born. He grew up in a family and community that held large celebrations when people married and had children. He’s known that he’s not straight for a while, but it’s a difficult reality because he’s always wanted a traditional wedding and family. Rohit worries about what his family and extended relatives will think if they ever find out about his sexuality. Nevertheless, he’s got an online profile and is interested in meeting guys and dating. He’s seeking somebody who “has it together” career-wise and hopes to come out to his family once he’s in a relationship. He experiences a lot of rejection from gay men but maintains his confidence while trying to meet “masc” guys, and those who “take care of themselves.”

Here are some clinical questions I had for Rohit:

1. What is it like for you to go to wedding after wedding knowing you may never have a celebration that looks quite like the ones you attend?
2. What will it say about you (to your peers, your straight family) if you don’t have a traditional family?
3. Will it bring you closer to “normal” in your parents’ eyes to come out while you’re in a relationship?
4. How does the anticipation of rejection from your family and other gay men impact your daily life? (I don’t know many queer and trans folks who don’t have anxiety at least some of the time).
5. How do you compensate for being different? And is there room for self-compassion in your life? Are there moments where you can say that you are enough and you’ve done enough?
6. Would your relationship pressures look different if you had the space to grieve your losses — of who you won’t be, of what you won’t get, of what won’t get celebrated, of the ways you will not be seen?

Rohit is easy to recognize in so many gay men I’ve met. I even see some of my younger self in him. He’s afraid of being challenged and he’s constructed some assumptions about the world and himself that will undoubtedly cause him pain and lead to more rejection. To be his friend or lover means you’re interacting with his attacking and shame-avoidance defenses constantly. He unconsciously exhausts you to relieve some of the pain he carries within him. As his therapist, it’s so important to not get exhausted the way people in his life have but rather to find an entry point of examining his shame that allows us to dismantle his defenses and create emotional safety to confront and process his grief. The tumolt of Rohit’s current state is explained succinctly by Alan Downs (2005):

Our own internal conflicts prevent us from gaining the emotional clarity needed to maintain a safe and satisfying bond. The situation compounds when two men, both overwhelmed with shame, come together in an intense and explosive expression of passion. — Velvet Rage

One of my goals with Rohit is to encourage him to think more critically about his assumption that being in a relationship will change his life and make coming out easier. Both of those things could absolutely be true. Gay men often do a lot of healing in the structure and stability of a relationship. It can be the first time they don’t feel deficient and can challenge the depths of their own internalized homophobia. However, the assumption that he can influence his parents’ response to his sexual orientation is a fantasy that helps him only by delaying a difficult conversation until he’s more prepared to confidently walk toward uncertainty. He must also appreciate that finding a partner specifically for the purpose of supporting him through coming out (only to re-live their own traumas) might be a lot to ask.

Shame and HIV Stigma

Gavin is a 37-year-old Asian-Canadian gay man who had a tough time growing up. He was relentlessly bullied for the lunches his family packed for him, and for being feminine. His “deficits” were further highlighted when he had to participate in physical education classes, in which he did not excel, and later, when he didn’t get into his university of choice. Gavin’s parents know he’s gay and have a decent relationship with his long-term partner of 20 years. Gavin still feels at times that his parents don’t engage with his partner as much they might if he were married to a woman. Gavin and his partner are in an implied open relationship, which they don’t talk about much. Gavin asks prospective casual partners about their HIV status multiple times before meeting them and believes he will have to end his life if he ever becomes HIV positive.

Here are some clinical questions I had for Gavin:

1. While you were being bullied, did you ever have friends or allies throughout your school years?
2. What were the kinds of supportive things they said or did for you?
3. What messages did you internalize about yourself as an Asian person?
4. How do you feel about being a femme gay man today?
5. Realistically, what would showing acceptance of you entail for your parents? What can you reasonably expect?
6. Is communication in relationships a threat to your sense of stability?
7. What does the gay community teach us about people who are HIV positive?
8. Is there a relationship between fear of HIV and your long-standing fear of failure?

On the outside, it looks like Gavin’s life is pretty good. There’s harmony in his family of origin and he has a long-term partner. He also has opportunities for sex outside his primary relationship. Gavin’s dysthymic presentation can be confusing, not to mention his unwarranted fear connected to HIV. We know that in the age of U=U and PrEP, the anxiety around HIV isn’t about loss of health; rather, it is about what HIV represents to patients like Gavin.

My hope in working with Gavin had been to give him permission to feel sad about the past in a way that no one else in his life has been able to do. I also gave him permission to be sad about dissatisfaction in his relationship while also being grateful to have his partner (he didn’t know about dialectic thinking yet). Once we created space for the imprint of shame on his life and the subsequent grief of feeling like he lost his childhood to bullies and coming-of-age opportunities to date as a gay man, he was able to recognize that he was often rushing toward symbols of stability. And then he felt guilty about seeming ungrateful for those symbols of stability. For example, we identified that his shame subconsciously gets activated every time he visits his parents’ home. It also gets activated when he seeks casual sex. His negative automatic thought was, “I’m a selfish person for wanting more than what I currently have. I should be grateful, not greedy. My selfishness renders me unlovable.”

When it comes to wanting more explicit acceptance from family, I very much relate to Gavin’s longing. However, it’s important to consider that people can love us while also not being able to give us exactly what we want (especially if they don’t understand what we are looking for). We can only have gratitude for their efforts as well as compassion for ourselves as people who want a little more.

Conclusion

We encounter shame in a number of social contexts, particularly around sexuality and sexual identity. If you’re a therapist or a queer man trying to process shame, consider what situations and people activate that shame. Consider how you might see a reflection of yourself in Lucas, Rohit, or Gavin and sit with your anxiety and grief that’s likely rooted in shame. Talk about shame as it shows up in your life. Ask critical questions that help connect the past to the present and dare to risk meaningful connection.

Remember that you cannot “undo” shame by one action: coming out, forming relationships, having sex, or (re)claiming your autonomy. It’s more complex than that and requires ongoing work. Without question shame leaves an imprint on our psyche and its residue stays with us. We protect ourselves against it, but the ways we do this aren’t always helpful for us or our communities.

Shame is painful…but it’s important to talk about. What we really need is self-compassion and authentic engagement with our feelings that are connected to shame — loneliness, shyness, embarrassment, self-consciousness, and inferiority — whenever they show up in our social and sexual lives.

Endnotes

[i] Munt, S. R. (2018). Gay shame in a geopolitical context. Cultural Studies, 33(2), 223–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2018.1430840

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