Shame is the Mindkiller

The unhealthy consequences of extreme embarrassment

If you've seen the movie adaptations of Dune, or even read the original books, you may be familiar with The Litany Against Fear. It's a mantra the protagonist repeats to help focus his mind in times of peril. It goes like this:

"I must not fear. Fear is the mindkiller. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

I’m grateful the readers of this blog don't have to worry about galactic assassins and mortal dangers. For the vast majority of our lives, the very worst feeling we’re all likely to experience on a regular basis is shame. This is a post about how shame insidiously poisons and inhibits us, but I wanted a hopeful message too, that shame-free spaces are possible, if we elect to curate them ourselves.

Shame is such an everyday fear. It’s both a lingering anxiety about how others see us, and an existential dread that we might be living our life wrong. Within it dwells the terror we might be wasting our precious days. Shame scares us so frequently that fear and shame become synonymous, merging in our minds until they’re practically indistinguishable.

We feel shame whenever we measure ourselves against others, dare to speak up, or feel ourselves judged. We worry we’re not attractive enough, or lack the social credibility that permits us to be heard. Shame silences us, it makes us avoidant rather than outgoing. It is a malign spell that turns us invisible, then makes us weirdly grateful no one can see us.

Yet we can’t just say to ourselves: “I’m going to stop being so silly! From now on I won’t be ashamed any more!” — because that’s not how shame works. It’s not how any fear works. Hence the mantra, as shame must be faced down, just like any other fear.

We must let the feeling of awful embarrassment wash over us, and experience its sting. Only that discomfort proves to ourselves the fear was imaginary, not real. We realise it was a phantom conjured up by our own febrile mind. Once the shame passes and we see ourselves still standing, resolute and unscathed, we gain a little more evidence that we might be stronger than we thought we were.

A quote by Anaïs Nin often rematerialises in my head: “There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

This feels like a message from the operating system of my own mind, like the alerts that pop up to warn a device is running low on memory. In this case, I think my psyche is warning me that it costs energy to suppress emotions, and we only possess the capacity to repress so much.

The cost of suppressing all our fears — whether they stem from anxieties, regrets, or shame — is paid out of a common mental energy budget. When it's all used up, we feel exhausted and dismal, since we must also use the same reserve to generate every positive emotion we feel: love, passion, enthusiasm, and boldness.

That’s why fear is the mindkiller — and why shame is too.

When I think of shame this way, it seems such absurd folly to spend my limited store of precious neurotransmitters on being embarrassed. Nevertheless, I still do. While I don't squander as much of my energy as I used to - and writing in public has helped me enormously - I know I still hide too much of what makes me interesting.

The reason we hesitate to be seen, is we need to feel safe. Worries are like contributions towards an insurance premium, a hedge against uncertainty. We effectively spend our attention on staying excruciatingly alert for things that might possibly lead to us being humiliated and ostracised.

But there is an alternative policy we could invest in, one where our premium went towards self-improvement rather than on continuous vigilance. Instead of waiting for disaster to strike, we could rethink and re-evaluate what scares or embarrasses us. Many of us already do this to some extent, by eroticising shame as naughtiness. We already know what might be mortifying with strangers can also be super hot in the company of a trusted lover.

The unavoidable truth is everything worthwhile in life involves the possibility of failure, and the higher the stakes, the greater the risk of embarrassment. But, with the security of our own insurance, which comes down to truly believing we're good and worthy enough, we can dare to be bolder.

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Shame-Free, By Design

Everything I know about relationships, I can say in a sentence:

Relationships are either safe shame-free bubbles where we can be naked and vulnerable, or they are nothing.

If you can make your intimate relationships shame-free spaces, you've won. Both of you will be so sexually comfortable you'll feel able to reveal your hottest fantasies without ever worrying what reaction you’ll receive.

We can never abolish shame, nor would we ever really want to. Shame is an intrinsic part of our social conditioning. We all know folks who are truly ‘shameless’, and we know how uncomfortably creepy they are to be around.

Some might think they can avoid shame by never risking hurt, but that’s an absolutely terrible strategy. You will steal from yourself any opportunities for life to surprise you, and condemn yourself to a mediocre existence of Prufrockesque banality.

Instead, our aim should be to stop fearing shame. But this is only possible when we become certain our vulnerabilities won’t be weaponised by those who witness them. This is what being shame-free really means, not banishing it completely, but breaking its hold over us.

By now, I hope you’re convinced, but if you’re still sceptical, I suspect it’s because you’re still unsure exactly how to stop fearing something you’ve spent your whole life dreading. Then let us be practical — if we want to change something, we must first design a solution.

What if you designed your relationship to be a shame-free space? That is, consciously agreed with your partner that neither of you would use shame to belittle each other.

Of all the relationship fallacies we believe, probably the most damaging is the ideal that if we truly love someone, we’ll love everything about them. But this is profoundly unrealistic. Every relationship is an accommodation of the preferences of two quite distinct individuals. Often they don’t even have a gender in common.

You might think, “No! We might disagree, but I’d never shame my partner!” But everyone does, and often it’s pretty subtle.

For instance, you might suggest your lover dress up in a school uniform, prior to being spanked. Consent is the foundation of sex, so everybody has every right to decline — but how we assert our preferences and express our boundaries has a huge effect on our partner’s continued willingness to suggest new things.

The very worst thing one can do in the bedroom is frown, say “Ew!”, and reject their suggestion as “a bit weird”. Nothing kills intimacy quicker.

If we are going to reject an intimate suggestion, some means of continuing the dialogue is vital. If it’s something you’ve never experienced before, reveal your inexperience, voice your anxieties, and discuss how you might build up gradually together in a way that’s arousing for both of you. If you can explain your concerns, anyone who loves you will never want to distress you.

But most of all: don’t kink-shame. Don’t be the one who tries to take the moral high-ground by claiming to be The One True Arbiter Of What Good Sex Means.

“Don’t yuck on another’s yum” should be a foundational principle of every relationship. In fact, we should all practice being more tolerant, every day, especially when it comes to matters of taste. Do you really have to demonstrate your superior aesthetic taste? To everyone, every time?

Sanctimonious criticism by strangers is a significant reason why so many people never speak up in public. Our shared digital spaces would be so much more welcoming if the cultural norm was: never criticise others to make yourself look good.

Remember what Thumper said in Bambi? “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all". Perhaps that reflected the communitarian ethos of the ‘40s, but later generations became addicted to the buzz of being cruel and judgemental. However, if we’re not careful, disparaging others for a feel-good buzz can become a habit. Then, before you know it, the superiority that comes from believing your opinion matters the most can even seep into the bedroom too.

I am tremendously grateful to all those over the years who chose to be kind rather than cruel. My slow path towards psychological safety has involved witnessing the acceptance of others, and gathering proof that I'm not considered weird or creepy, at least not by the kind of people I want to be around.

It’s so strange to look back on how I felt when I first started posting my stories. I had such irrational fears about being shunned, or even banned and blacklisted. For many years, I hesitated, and turned down my own volume. When I finally did speak loud enough to be heard, it was a tremendous relief to discover others who actually wanted more of what I had to say. Every like I received felt like a vote of acceptance.

We conquer shame not through willpower, but through the evidence of our own eyes, by doing hard things and emerging unscathed.

All shame stems from experiences of rejection. If the most sexually sought-after people on the planet share something in common, it’s not beauty, it’s the confidence to initiate, yet be completely chill with sexual rejection. Few of us possess that level of stoicism, but imagine if you did, that kind of resilience is the ultimate goal.

So foster relationships that provide security and reassurance. Agree that you won’t shame each other explicitly. The more you’re able to dare without fearing that the wrong utterance might cause your whole life to come tumbling down, the bolder you’ll become.

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Yet, why shame often wins

Everybody knows about our primal instincts of fight or flight. When faced with a difficult or dangerous challenge, we feel adrenaline surge inside us, preparing our bodies to confront the threat, or flee.

But think back to all those times when you felt the humiliation of awkwardness, or the realisation you were being challenged — when your heart started to race, you were almost never actually preparing for physical confrontation, were you? Or even about to sprint away to safety.

In reality, we almost always stay in the situation we found so unsettling, and enter a quite different psychological state: we fawn.

The fawn response is about appeasement, not action. When faced with a conflict, instead of fighting or fleeing, we’re far more likely to try to placate the threat, and hope our acquiescence defuses the tension. This might mean agreeing with others, keeping silent, or going out of our way to avoid confrontation.

We’re much more likely to appease if we grew up in unsafe, or emotionally volatile environments. These sad origins teach us that pleasing others is the only plausible way to maintain safety and love. Appeasement is a learned behaviour, where we suppress our own needs to meet others' expectations.

The problem is fawning isn’t just a temporary reaction, it can become a long-term and deeply ingrained pattern of behaviour. Threats trigger a shutdown of emotions, true desires are hidden, and individuals isolate themselves. We fawn to avoid conflict, hoping we can somehow keep everyone else happy.

Our fawn response is deeply tied to shame, because when we fawn, we’re essentially saying, “I’m not enough as I am. I’m embarrassed about who I am. I need to be what others want me to be.”

Perhaps this sounds familiar?

This is why when we shame someone, even inadvertently, we’re inflicting damage that is extremely difficult to repair. Outwardly you might not even notice, but inwardly, their fawn response has already been triggered. Unseen, their mind may already be boiling with embarrassment.

Perhaps you’ve also noticed that when we’re shamed, we always turn the blame inwards. Instead of challenging whoever shamed us, we despair of being not attractive enough, or lament our failure to reach the sky-high criteria we believe to be necessary to be loveable.

When it comes to sex, we are ashamed of our sexual preferences not because they’re too filthy for civilised minds to comprehend, but because revealing our most deeply held secrets exposes us at last to the cold judgement of others.

Shame is an aversion to rejection. We fear the loss of love that a negative judgement entails.

Shame may be the symptom we feel, but judgement with consequences is what we’re really afraid of — others might hate us, they might even leave us.

Shame has an awful corrosive effect. Over time, you might lose touch with who you truly are by spending so much energy becoming what others expect. In the western world we’re privileged to live in societies that are extraordinarily permissive, yet shame is the reason so many repress rather than explore their sexuality, and why so many end up feeling like they’ve living a lie.

Appeasement is a kind of debt. The appearance of stoic calm today, repaid in continuous instalments of anxiety and self-doubt tomorrow. Our loss of Self contributes to a depressive malaise, an awful feeling that we’re no longer living life on our own terms.

Shame is silently ruining so many lives, holding us back from daring adventures, and all the peak life experiences we could enjoy. Worst still, once we made fawning a habit, we became complicit in our own subjugation. Before we can break free, we must first notice our chains, we must realise when we’re fawning, and resolve to react differently — with deliberate indifference, preferably.

Practice speaking up, and reclaim your right to your own voice. Start small, perhaps by expressing your true thoughts and feelings anonymously. I started writing, privately at first, but I knew it was psychologically essential to get the words outside my head. By putting what embarrassed me into words, I was able to reduce its corrosive power. Over time, I found a recipe that transmuted it into gold.

Accept that your desires are valid, and you don't need the permission of others to hold them. To prioritise your own needs you’ll have to build up your own resilience capital. It’s like Fuck You Money, if you had a few million dollars (or followers), I suspect you’d care far less about what others thought of you. Accumulate whatever validates you, the more you possess the easier shame will pass through you, just like the litany promises.

Of course, if we were indifferent enough to ignore any insults to our ego, there’d be no need to ever fight, or flee, or fawn at all. But we feel rejection more keenly from those closest to us, which is why it’s so vital to build relationships where we can feel truly safe. Those we permit behind our strong walls should know to tread softly, just as Yeats once wrote, lest they tread on our dreams.

Eventually, you’ll come to realise that all sexual shame is dodgy software that was installed inside your mind by others to tame you — and you can choose to delete this foreign code. Does sexual shame really serve you any purpose at all? If not, why not overwrite it, and upgrade to a better and more authentic version of you?

Being kinky is like Harry Potter discovering there's a secret parallel world of magic and wizardry — except it's a world of blushes, pains, and spanking games. Stepping into any unfamiliar world is scary, since we feel like beginners again, embarrassed by our naivety and ineptness. Adventure awaits, but it’s a test of character too.

If there was some kind of magic balm that made us impervious to shame and guilt - I reckon it would be the best selling product in the entire world. But we do not need to rely on magic, it’s enough to be aware of the shadow of shame and design our lives in ways that mitigate it. Let’s recap the key principles:

1. Choose relationships (both home and at work) where you won’t be shamed

2. Do small acts of embarrassment, and collect evidence that no harm results

3. Accumulate validation so the judgements of others matter less and less

Overcoming shame, the Mindkiller, the instinct to appease, is your very own heroic journey. It’s about rediscovering your true self after years of pretending to be someone else for others. Like any heroic journey, the path ahead will be challenging, involving many years of struggle — but the ultimate reward is a life where you pursue your own desires, free at last from the compromises of fear.

Good luck, adventurer!