How Shame and Indoctrination Kill Eroticism
I went to a Church of Christ university. Daily chapel attendance was mandatory. There was a curfew. Men's and women's dormitories were separate, and the rules governing contact between them were specific and enforced.
Nobody at that school ever told me sex was evil. That's not how it works. The message was transmitted through structure, through what wasn't discussed, through the elaborate architecture built around preventing something that was never named directly. You don't build walls that carefully around something you think is fine.
I absorbed it completely. And I spent my twenties and most of my thirties carrying a shame about my own desire that I couldn't have identified as shame, because it felt like conscience.
It took years to untangle. Here's what I've come to understand about how this happens and what it costs.
Indoctrination Doesn't Argue — It Structures
The reason religious sexual shame is so durable is that it isn't primarily transmitted through arguments. Arguments can be evaluated and rejected. Indoctrination works differently.
It comes through silence — the topics that produce sudden tension in a room. Through structure — curfews, separations, rules whose existence implies a danger nobody names. Through implication — the sermon about purity that never defines what it's protecting against. Through identity — being told what kind of person you are and what kind of person does that.
A child absorbing this doesn't form a belief they can later examine. They form a nervous system response. By the time you're old enough to think critically about the theology, the conditioning is somatic. It lives in your body, not your beliefs.
This is why so many people who have fully, intellectually left a religious framework still find that their body hasn't. They can articulate a completely different set of values and still feel the physiological contraction when desire arises. The head moved. The body didn't get the message.
What Shame Actually Does to Eroticism
Esther Perel's distinction between sexuality and eroticism is the useful frame here. Sexuality is the biological machinery — drive, arousal, response. Eroticism is what happens when imagination gets involved: fantasy, play, anticipation, meaning, transgression, curiosity.
Shame doesn't primarily damage sexuality. It destroys eroticism.
The machinery keeps working. What gets killed is the imaginative, playful, generative dimension — because every one of those functions requires permission that shame has revoked.
It installs a censor. As I've written about, the internal monitor that evaluates every arising desire before it fully forms. Fantasies get truncated. Territories go unexplored. The erotic imagination — which requires freedom to be generative — is put under permanent supervision.
It splits body from self. Shame produces a specific dissociation: the body does something the person disowns. Arousal happens to you rather than being something you inhabit. That split is the origin of spectatoring — you're watching from outside because you've been taught that the thing happening inside isn't really you.
It makes desire evidence. In a shame framework, wanting isn't neutral. It's proof of something about your character. Which means every arising desire carries a small accusation, and the accumulated weight of thousands of small accusations is exhausting.
It kills play. Eroticism is a form of play — non-serious, non-productive, generative, exploratory. Shame makes everything serious. You cannot play in a room where you're being evaluated.
It prevents self-knowledge. You cannot learn what you actually want if you're shutting down the wanting before it declares itself. Decades can pass without a person developing basic literacy about their own desire, because the censor never let the information through.
The Somatic Layer Is the Hard Part
Here's what I most want people who grew up in these environments to understand: the intellectual work is the easy part, and it isn't sufficient.
I read my way out of the theology in my thirties. I could articulate a fully coherent sex-positive framework. I believed it genuinely. And I still couldn't be fully present in my own body during intimacy, still monitored myself constantly, still carried a contraction I couldn't argue away.
Because the conditioning wasn't installed through argument. It was installed through years of somatic response — the tightening in the chest, the shallow breath, the physical bracing that accompanied any encounter with desire. That's not a belief. It's a pattern, held in tissue and nervous system.
Patterns don't respond to arguments. They respond to practice.
What Actually Undoes It
Everything I've written about somatic work on this blog traces back to this. Here's the short version of what has actually moved things for me:
Breathwork. The Somatica breathwork practice I've documented — the one where my solar plexus started pulsing around day eleven — works directly on the somatic layer where the shame lives. Breath is the most direct available lever on nervous system state, and shame is a nervous system state before it's anything else.
Body awareness practice. The Microcosmic Orbit, body scanning, the deliberate cultivation of internal attention. Shame produces disconnection from the body; the antidote is patient reconnection.
Letting the censor off duty. As my somatic coach told me: don't police your fantasies. Every time a desire arises and is allowed rather than judged, the pattern weakens slightly. This compounds over months.
Being witnessed. Brené Brown's research on shame is unambiguous on this point — shame dissolves in genuine connection and thrives in secrecy. Telling another human being something you've carried in isolation, and having it received without verdict, does something no amount of private processing achieves. This is why the men's work I wrote about matters, and why coaching works when self-help books don't.
Honest conversation with a partner. The Christmas-tree conversation Brittney and I had years ago was the beginning of everything. Saying the unsaid thing out loud, to the person who matters most, and having it received.
Time. This is the unglamorous truth. Decades of conditioning don't clear in a weekend. I'm several years into deliberate work and still finding pockets of it. The trajectory matters more than the arrival.
What's On the Other Side
I'm 47. My erotic life is more alive now than at any previous point, and the primary reason isn't technique or novelty. It's that I'm carrying substantially less shame than I was at 27 or 37.
What returns when shame recedes:
Imagination. The generative, surprising, genuinely mine erotic mind I wrote about in the authorship post. It was always there. It had just been under supervision.
Presence. When you're not monitoring yourself for evidence of wrongdoing, attention becomes available for what's actually happening.
Play. The lightness that shame makes impossible. The ability to be silly, to experiment, to try something and have it not work and laugh about it.
Self-knowledge. Actually knowing what you want, because you finally let yourself find out.
Genuine desire, expressed. Which is, as I've written repeatedly, the thing partners are actually hoping to receive.
If You Grew Up in This
A few things I'd want to say directly.
It wasn't your fault and it isn't a character flaw. You absorbed what you were immersed in. That's what children do. The conditioning is not evidence about you.
Leaving intellectually isn't the same as leaving somatically. If you've done the reading and the thinking and still feel the contraction — that's not failure. That's the correct diagnosis. The work is in the body.
You are not broken. The machinery is fine. What's been suppressed is recoverable, and recovering it is some of the most worthwhile work available in an adult life.
It takes longer than you want it to. And it moves. Both are true.
I still identify as Christian. That's not in tension with any of this — the shame was a cultural inheritance, not a theological necessity, and untangling the two has been part of the work. What I've let go of isn't faith. It's the conviction that my own body was the enemy.
That conviction was never true. It just took me thirty-some years to stop believing it.
Ready to go deeper?
If this resonates, there are two ways to take the next step with Coelle.
Download the Coelle app — Guided audio intimacy sessions designed for couples who are ready to stop performing and start arriving. The presence and embodiment practices work directly on the somatic layer where shame lives. Download Coelle here.
Work with me directly — I offer one-on-one sex and intimacy coaching for individuals and couples, drawing on my background in sport psychology and years of personal somatic work. Untangling inherited shame is some of the most meaningful work I do with clients — and work I've done myself. Book a free discovery call here.
