When Shame is Your First Lesson about Sex

This article is included as one of the chapters in the e-book, Good Sex: What Three Conversations about Sex Revealed about Shame, Intimacy and Reconnection after Sex, based on Tim Tedder’s interviews with Jocelyn Silva, Linda Landon, and Xanet Pailet. Download the entire e-book for free.

Linda was about two years old when she walked into the bathroom and discovered her mother standing undressed. At that height, her eyes landed at hip level. She saw something she had no name for, and she did what any curious toddler does—she reached out to touch it. Her mother slapped her hand away and called her a bad girl.

She remembers the words. But when she tells the story now, it’s not the words that mattered most. What stayed was her mother's face. Absolute disgust. That was the harsh lesson, delivered in a few seconds to a child who had not yet learned to tie her shoes.

Xanet was in first grade when she and her best friend were caught playing doctor. She was shamed for it, and then she was never allowed to be alone with her friend again. Think about what that arrangement communicates to a seven-year-old. Not simply don't do that again, but you can’t be trusted not to do that bad thing, so bad that the adults restructured your friendship around it.

Soon after, she had an experience with the family dog that she describes with the same mix of curiosity and dread, and by then the pattern was set. Pleasure and anxiety had been twisted together so tightly that for decades she could not feel one without the other.

My own moment came in grade school, before puberty, before I had any concept of sex at all. Some friends and I had wandered over to a nearby school playground, and I was swinging on the monkey bars when I felt a tingle between my legs that felt good. It was something completely new, without a framework. I wasn't embarrassed. I remember asking my friends whether it happened to them too, but they had no idea what I was talking about. I went home genuinely curious about how to make it happen again, and I was in my room trying to figure that out when my mother opened the door.

I don't remember what she said, but I remember her shock, then the door closing, and then nothing. The lesson I learned was this: whatever that was, you will have to explore it secretly. No one should ever know.

Notice the similarities in these stories. They involve parents who, by every normal measure, loved their child. But each of them also includes a severe judgment, followed by silence. The message of “bad” was delivered and then sealed by the fact that it wasn’t mentioned again. The children were left to interpret the sternness and silence in the only way they could: something must be wrong with me.

Jocelyn's story has no single scene like these, and hers may be the most common version of all. She was raised in a deeply conservative Catholic home and educated in Catholic schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade. She was an altar server, a lector, and at sixteen she wanted to be a nun. She was also, in her own description, a very sexual person. In her world, there was no compatibility between these desires.

The implications were clear: her curiosities were wrong, her thoughts were wrong, her body's ordinary signals were wrong, and the destination for people who were wrong in these ways was hell, which she named as her biggest childhood fear.

By high school, Jocelyn and her boyfriend, who intended to become a priest, had worked out a system: they would explore the forbidden, then pray a rosary, and make sure they got to confession that week.

It's almost funny until you consider what it cost. She had learned, well before adulthood, that she had to hide parts of herself. So she developed the skill that made survival possible: she lied because she had received the message that honesty would end in rejection. Lying became so ordinary that she stopped noticing she was doing it.

Notice how the effect spreads? Sexual shame does not limit itself to the sexual part of a person. It teaches a more general lesson about the consequences of telling the truth about yourself.

Four unrelated childhoods, four different stories, one identical conclusion: this part of me is not okay. What's striking is not the sameness of the conclusion but the wild variety of what we each did with it.

I took it inward and hid it. Everything about my sexuality went underground and stayed there, which meant that by the time I was married and finally permitted to want what I wanted, I had no idea how to adequately express it. I had spent too many years learning that this subject should be avoided, and a wedding ceremony does not undo that kind of training. So I didn't speak. My silence morphed into critical judgment that eventually became unspoken resentment.

Jocelyn went the opposite direction, and at first it looked like freedom. She had sex for the first time at eighteen, described it as the skies parting and the angels singing, and concluded that everyone who had warned her had been lying. She left the church, became an atheist, and swung from one extreme to its mirror image. But the shame didn't leave; it just put on a new disguise. She was still hiding, still leading a double life. As she puts it, she went from being ashamed of being sexual to being ashamed of being a liar and a cheater.

Linda's body made the decision for her. She was sensual, embodied, alive to touch, able to give pleasure and able to receive it up to a point. And then at the moment of greatest vulnerability, her body would simply refuse. She would be present and aroused right up until penetration, and then, in her words, everything would shut down and say no. She had relationships, some of them long, and she had intercourse. What she did not have was pleasure. Sex was obligatory. It was just okay. She lived that way until she was fifty.

Xanet drew the most devastating conclusion available: she must be broken. She married a man who knew sex was difficult for her, and they assumed it would improve. But it never did. Twenty-six years in what became a sexless marriage, sleeping in separate rooms. No cuddling, no hand-holding, and, by her own account, no conversation about any of it. Not one. Twenty-six years of two people carefully not mentioning the thing that was defining their life together.

Maybe you're reading this thinking that none of it applies because you have no negative childhood sex stories. If so, consider Jocelyn again. Sometimes there’s no dramatic scene, only a household where certain questions were met with a shift in attitude, where a child avoided asking about normal curiosities. Even without an event, lessons were learned.

If you’re raising children right now, give them a better experience. Start teaching them a healthy perspective of sex early, from the moment they’re verbal. Not the act, but the vocabulary: real words for real body parts, then honest explanations of the changes coming, then frank conversation about what sex is and what it means. The goal is not a single birds-and-bees talk, but a conversation that stays open, and a child who knows that curious questions will be clearly answered.