Telling myself, “I won’t go there”
Oh, but I know that I won’t care
Trying to wash away all the blood I’ve spilled.
This lust is a burden that we both share,
Two sinners can’t atone from a lone prayer
Souls tied, intertwined by our pride and guilt.
There’s darkness in the distance…
From the way that I’ve been living
But I know I can’t resist it.
Oh, I love it and I hate it at the same time.
It was a typical Tuesday driving along a busy dual carriage way, having counselled a stream of young folk from one of the most deprived areas of the South-East. Eyes glazed, mentally bruised…a headache taking a slow hold, but I was embodying that kind of exhaustion where your body aches but your heart is happy. Briefly emerging from autopilot, I changed into a lower gear as I neared home and glanced over in the distance, across fields of silhouetted pylons. The sky was doing that thing where inky blue clouds were nonchalantly moving across the early signs of sunset, completely unaware and unbothered by how stunning it all was to me.
Twilight has always been my favourite time of day.
The contrast between the day’s end and the night’s beginning struck a chord as it always does.
But at that exact time, the song ‘Daylight’ by David Kushner came on the radio, and as I listened to the lyrics, I realised that many of them reminded me of all of the guilt and shame I’ve felt before, living the life that I do, and being the person that I am. But it also reminded me of the pockets of acceptance that I’ve found, and allowed my brain to play with a whole host of themes that I think are prevalent in general life for all human beings, but for people who identify as part of the ENM community in particular.
I’ll be exploring my position as a bisexual, ethically non-monogamous woman here, (and to be honest, I’ll only ever be able to scrape the surface) but hopefully you’ll gain something in my reflections on guilt and shame, whether you’re similar to me or couldn’t be further from it.
Guilt and Shame
We tend to use the words guilt and shame together, and they integrate pretty well into the situations where we start thinking ‘What the fuck am I doing?’ But it’s useful to differentiate between the two so we can unpick what’s going on for us when they arise.
They are both self-conscious emotions that involve negative self-evaluation and reflections, often accompanied by distress resulting from our perceived transgressions or failures. We all experience emotions in response to our environments, but the motivations beneath self-critical emotions such as guilt and shame are distinguishable in the following way:
Guilt suggests a sense of responsibility for our perceived transgressions against a type of moral code, concerning our behaviour, goals, beliefs, traits and value system. Shame, however, is not so much a moral self-evaluation. It’s more concerned with perceived discrepancies between our ideal self, and our actual self.
A simple example of guilt might be that perhaps you ate somebody’s lunch in the office staff room fridge….because you forgot your own lunch, the bagel looked goddamn delicious, and there was nobody sitting around to witness the petty crime. However, you later come to feel guilt because your value system tells you that it’s wrong to take something that isn’t yours; that you should still behave morally even when unobserved; that hunger and impulse doesn’t negate the duty to not eat somebody’s lunch, even if you hate this colleague and they say ‘pacifically’ instead of ‘specifically.’
An example of shame could be that you spent your teenage years reading articles entitled things like “How to Lose 10lb in 2 weeks for that Summer Bod, Hun” or “How to Stop Giving Mediocre Blowjobs and Keep your Man” (looking at you Mizz/ Just Seventeen/ Bliss magazine). As an adult, you now view your ideal self as a Size 6 blonde bombshell with sizzling Summer skin who can suck the soul out of any man, whilst maintaining a top-notch career, a family of ten children, and a two-week rotating meal plan…and you’d do it all in heels. Instead though, you might be a fairly normal woman who enjoys crisps in bobbly pyjamas, might give a decent bit of oral when you feel like it, but who generally forgets to drink water and most of your family meals are called ‘Fridge Surprise.’
Which is totally OK! But we end up feeling shame for being the beautifully messy, flawed humans that we are… because we often receive ridiculous messages about what we should do, or be, and our actual selves end up falling short of an ideal that wasn’t ever authentic or made for us, in the first place.
And that isn’t OK.
Now let’s consider guilt and shame in sexual spaces. According to research conducted by K. W. Sævik and C. Konijnenberg (2023), “sexual desire is of importance to sexual health, functioning, and well-being”, which would suggest that shame shouldn’t really come into it, providing everything is ethical, consensual and respectful. But it can, and does.
I can remember my first experience of sexual shame as a fifteen-year-old. Yes, I’m aware that I was under-age, and that in an ideal world, I would have waited until I was older and wiser to enjoy my first sexual experiences with another person. But I’m all about the honesty, and this is how it went.
I had bagged my first boyfriend. We spent time hiding in darkness, holding hands and kissing for hours. I’d first experienced orgasms through masturbation with a vibrating toothbrush when I was 12 years old, so I knew what the tinglings felt like but this was different. With this boy, I had that first deep, low-down ache of wanting another person in my belly, and nothing was going to stop me. We graduated to enjoying oral sex over time and I was on cloud 9, trusting in this boy that our clandestine meetings were private and special. That old chestnut; you’ve probably watched this plot play out in a few American teen romances. Anyway.
Then I went on holiday with my family.
Whilst I was gone, my boyfriend made it his mission to tell every person we knew (and beyond) what I had done with him. In obscene detail. There was shock. There was outrage. There were endless phone calls. I was the nerdy ‘boff’ in school, who never put a foot wrong; did what she was told; was a veritable asexual being in the eyes of my peers. But I had been giving blow jobs to an actual BOY! I was THE GOSSIP. What ensued was weeks, maybe months, of ridicule and barely-concealed insults/ comments about my slutty behaviour. And he was a hero.
This taught me for the first time that sexuality and desire in men and women was viewed very differently; that life could be a bit shitty; that I should be ashamed. And I was. For a very long time.
The good news is that this boy is now a man heading towards middle-age with a terrible job, a patchy beard and a historical restraining order. And I am enjoying a much less shameful ENM life with a lovely husband, a decent career, no beard (yet), and no past transgressions with stalking an intimate partner. Which pleases me.
(I didn’t say I wasn’t petty).
Back to the research after that fascinating segue, it’s clear that teenage girls aren’t the only ones experiencing sexual guilt and shame. K. W. Sævik and C. Konijnenberg emphasise that general shame affects health and relationships, and is related to negative psychological health outcomes and poor mental health (no surprises there). But they also posit that:
“Sexual shame is a specific type of shame that refers to a feeling of disgust or humiliation towards one’s own identity as a sexual being and is composed of three factors: (1) relationship sexual shame, (2) internalized sexual shame, and (3) sexual inferiority.”
They go on to say that the higher levels of self-consciousness that can arise from either or all of these three things can then lead to some maladaptive thoughts, values, attitudes, behaviours and beliefs, including low self-esteem. And if you’ve read my other blog posts (shame on you if you haven’t lol), you’ll be well aware that low self-esteem is not a recipe for a joyful, fulfilled life.
So, if we can concede that sexual shame is a thing…I wonder if, and how, it can manifest in the world of Ethical Non-Monogamy.
It’s true that being ethically non-monogamous is not a cultural or societal norm, at least here in the UK. According to a 2019 YouGov survey (not that I was asked, mind you), 7% of UK adults said that they had been in a consensual non-monogamous relationship at some point in their lives, which is a rise since the 2015 statistics of 2%, but is still quite clearly a low percentage in comparison to monogamous lifestyles. In most circumstances where people are living lives that go heavily against the grain, it is inevitable that there will be guilt and shame attached…somewhere…for someone.
So maybe that isn’t you. Perhaps you’ve never experienced guilt and shame attached to how you live your life as a member of the ENM/ poly club. If that’s the case, I am genuinely proud, and happy for you. You deserve that, truly. Please share your messages with others.
Or maybe you can relate to past experiences with guilt/shame for how you live your life in this relationship dynamic, but have found your place now and can enjoy it for what it is, in an uncomplicated, fulfilled way.
Perhaps you do still experience a certain level of guilt and/or shame as a person considering/ just starting out/ solidly involved in ENM. Or maybe you are not ENM, but are involved in other (legal, safe and consensual) kinks or sexual practices that feel (or have felt) shameful to you. Maybe even aspects of your identity or sexuality are still feeling shameful to you, and you’d like to move beyond that and reach some acceptance in who you are.
Well, as I said….guilt, shame and acceptance are huge topics, and it’s only my intention to cover a tiny fraction of it. I can only share my own experiences with it all, but hopefully you will feel a bit of a connection with me, and with other people who are also friends with this little slice of humanity.
Enough seriousness, for now. Story time.
The Orgy
It was Halloween 2022. Swingers’ Christmas. My husband and I were dressed perfectly in the style of Dia de los Muertos; Day of the Dead. Which is fitting because we had just endured a whole spooky extravaganza day out with our 6 year old son to compensate for the fact that we were dropping him off at Grandad’s for a night in a sex club. My parental integrity that day was already dead. Also, the mask I was wearing was doing wonders for the fact that I felt nervous and embarrassed to be celebrating Halloween amidst various people fucking…in my mid-thirties, whilst wearing fishnets and a black lace bodysuit. Who even was I?! (Hello teenage shame, it’s been a while).
Cut to later in the night. The drinks were flowing. The music was incredible. The people we had met up with were amazing, sexy and fun. We were soon invited upstairs to a hotel room as a group… of thirteen. And what do you know, I found all of these people attractive and was positively excited at the prospect of my first orgy. (Even now, writing the word orgy has some shame attached to it for me. Damn you societal standards). In that room, it’s safe to say that I had one of the most liberated sexual experiences of my life to date. There were fishnets cast atop an oak dresser, hands trailing on hot skin in the darkness, bodies writhing around on the bed… and oddly, the doll from What We Do in the Shadows, but my point is that it was the closest I’ve ever been to manifesting an “I have no care in the world” attitude. It was intoxicating. The end.
Except not The End. I woke up with the biggest case of The Shames that I have ever felt in my life, and spent the next couple of weeks feeling sick at What I Had Done.
I was disgusting. I was a slut. I shouldn’t have… it was wrong…it was bad.
I was bad.
From a therapy perspective, I can clearly see what was going on here. I had become an adult victim of what 1940’s Person-Centred psychotherapist Carl Rogers referred to as Conditions of Worth and Introjected Values (I have hyperlinked these terms in case you’re feeling like you wanna live a little and get all academic). Put simply, I had taken the countless experiences as a child/ teenager, in which I received messages about how a girl should be/ behave in order to be worthy, or of value, or ‘good’…and internalised these messages by adopting what society (or my parents/ peers) thought was ‘right’.
Instead of listening to what was right for me.
Consequently, when I threw myself into a raging orgy in my thirties (and thoroughly enjoyed myself no less), these old, out-dated beliefs about what I should or shouldn’t be doing as a woman, came back in full force, and my immediate reaction was to feel shame.
Now, I can rationalise until I’m blue in the face and say that we always practice safe-sex; that we felt safe and happy with these people; that everything was above-board and consensual; that we were able to enjoy a completely liberated, fun, sexy experience as an ethically non-monogamous couple. That it brought us closer. That we’ll have the best stories to tell in the Care Home as hopeful octogenarians. But at the time, all I felt was misplaced guilt…deep shame…and very little acceptance for who I was.
So here it’s clear to see that sometimes, these conditions of worth and introjected values, coupled with our often-skewed ideas of what our ideal self should be, are very difficult systems to break down. And feeling shame, just because someone/ something else told us we should feel it, is no way to live.
But that’s not to say that a healthy level of shame and guilt can’t be an excellent guidance tool, that we can use to truly listen to what feels right for us, as individuals.
For instance, once I was painfully aware of where this shame and guilt was coming from, and could recognise that it was from messages and values received from peers, parents, and society growing up, rather than from my own, unique belief system…I could begin to unpick the shame, and listen to what it was teaching me… what it was reminding me.
It reminded me that I am a good friend; a lover; a wife; a mother; a listener; a helper; an intuitive, intelligent, loving bisexual woman…who just happens to enjoy the occasional sexual experience that might lie beyond the societal norm. And it taught me that without the cloying pressure of shame, I actually very much prefer smaller, more intimate encounters and relationships with people I deeply care about. And all of that is valid. And acceptable….to me.
A final word
Time and time again, I’ll come back to one of my deepest inspirations for many things, but on this occasion, healing from shame: Brené Brown.
And with that, I hope to leave you with something to anchor yourself when you are swimming in the mire of shame, just for being who you are, and living an authentic life.
Brown encourages us to do the following things to begin to heal from shame:
- Accept yourself unconditionally. You’re enough right now.
- Reject the idea that to be “enough,” you need to adhere to societal norms or the expectations of others.
- Abandon the idea that you need to work for your worthiness. You are worthy for who you are, not what you do.
- Believe that you’re worthy of love and belonging.
And if you don’t believe that yet…don’t stop working on that until your dying breath.
Failing that, try an orgy. I’ve heard they’re pretty good.
Beyond the Pineapple 
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