Why you can’t just stop: shame and sexual behaviour
Shame is not simply what happens after the behaviour. It is what powers the loop. The harder a man tries to stop by using shame as a lever, the tighter the loop pulls. This is why willpower alone rarely works, and what changes when compassion enters the picture instead.
Published
Dr Michael Yates, Clinical Psychologist and Psychosexual Specialist
There is a remark I return to often, because it seems to explain more than almost anything else I encounter. We teach children how to manage anger. We teach them, in various ways, about managing sadness. We do not, almost anywhere in our culture, teach them how to manage the emotions that come with being sexual. And yet those emotions, when you actually sit with them, are among the most complex a person can have. Vulnerability. Anxiety. The possibility of rejection. Desire that may or may not be welcome. Excitement that does not quite know what to do with itself. Longing for connection alongside an equally powerful wish to stay safe.
When no one teaches you how to hold those feelings, you learn to manage them another way. Behaviours fill the gap. And those behaviours, over time, can become the thing that brings a man here.
We teach children how to manage anger. How to manage sadness.
We do not, almost anywhere, teach them how to manage the emotions that come with being sexual.
What the model brings to this work
The model at the centre of everything we do here begins from a question most treatment approaches do not ask: not what is wrong with this person, but what is this behaviour doing for them?
That reframe matters enormously. The men who arrive in this work are not broken people who lack discipline. They are people who, often from very early in their lives, have been managing emotional experiences that felt too much, in the only ways available to them. Understanding that, personally and honestly, is the first thing the work tries to achieve.
Each of us carries three inner systems: the alarm, the drive, and the anchor. The alarm keeps us alert to danger. The drive pushes us toward what feels rewarding. The anchor brings us back down, grounds us, and connects us to being safe and cared for.
When the alarm has been switched on for years and the anchor has never had a proper chance to develop, the drive gets pulled in to fill the gap. It becomes the only available way of bringing the alarm back down. Sex, particularly sex that has become urgent and repetitive, often sits exactly there. It does what nothing else has been able to do: it brings temporary relief from an internal state that feels overwhelming. It is not weakness. It is adaptive, in its way. The problem is that it is adaptive in the short term only. Over time, it starts to produce its own consequences, adding new layers of shame to a system already struggling to cope.
Shame is not guilt
Shame is about who we are.
Shame is not guilt, and the difference matters. Guilt is about what we have done. It is uncomfortable, but it points at a behaviour, which means it points toward the possibility of change. Shame is about who we are. It does not point at anything correctable. It lodges in the sense of self, and it sits there.
No child is born with shame. Shame is taught. It comes from the messages we receive, explicit or silent, about which parts of ourselves are acceptable, which are tolerable, and which must be kept hidden. For the men I see, those messages have almost universally included something about sex. Often something about the particular shape of their sexuality. Sometimes that message has been explicit: a direct statement that who they are or what they want is wrong. More often, it has operated through silence. No one spoke about it. No language was available. No models existed. The absence itself became the message.
Where shame enters the sexual life
The men who come through this work arrive with shame that looks very different from one man to the next. A gay man in his thirties whose family were broadly supportive may nonetheless have grown up in a silence about sex between men so total that it shaped how he understood himself. The absence of any narrative is its own kind of message. A straight man in his forties, quietly carrying a set of sexual behaviours for years, may feel that being emotionally open in his marriage is genuinely dangerous, not because of any explicit message, but because what it means to need things from another person has always felt like a threat. A bisexual man navigating both worlds may find that he fits comfortably inside neither of the stories on offer.
What all of these men share is not the content of their shame, but its shape. There is something about this part of me that cannot be seen. And because it cannot be seen, it cannot be managed. It can only be escaped.
That is the foundation for much of what appears in compulsive sexual behaviour. The behaviours are often not primarily about pleasure, though pleasure was usually there in the beginning. They are about escape. About managing an internal state that never quite resolves, using the one thing available that reliably, if temporarily, does the job.
Where the shame actually lives
It is important to be clear about where the problem lives. It is not located solely inside any individual man as a personal failing. It is located in the systems: in the silencing, in the absence of any adequate emotional language around sex in most of the cultures these men have grown up in.
In gay and bisexual men, that failure has often been catastrophic. Men who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s received extraordinarily powerful messages about what gay sexuality meant. Those messages were not subtle. They were delivered by law, by church, by playground, by media. Even men who did not consciously experience severe discrimination absorbed those messages. The alarm inside them registered them, because they were genuinely threatening. The anchor, which depends on connection and on feeling held by others, was often not accessible. Vulnerability felt exposing in a way that had real social consequences.
For younger gay and bisexual men today, the picture is different but not resolved. The explicit messages are mostly gone, in the UK at least. What remains is a gay cultural space that has, understandably and in many ways admirably, organised itself around confidence, sexual openness, and the celebration of pleasure. There is a great deal that is genuinely life-giving in that culture. There is also a particular kind of pressure inside it. The man who is struggling, who is not in control, who is finding the scene more painful than joyful, can find it very hard to find a space to talk about that. It is not a conversation that is encouraged.
For straight men, shame operates differently but is no less real. The dominant story for many men is that sex is achievement, that multiple partners constitute status, that expressing emotional need in the context of sex can be seen as a turn off, or even a sign of weakness. These messages encourage men to build sexual lives that are, as the work eventually reveals, hedonistic but disconnected: pleasure-rich and emotion-poor. When the emotional weight of a long relationship begins to ask something different of them, many men find they have no language and no template for what is being asked.
Religious and identity-based shame
Religion adds a further layer for a significant number of the men who come here. For men from conservative Muslim, Catholic, evangelical Christian, or Orthodox Jewish backgrounds, the frameworks they were raised in may define their sexuality in terms that leave almost no room for an integrated, non-shaming sexual identity. The conflict between what the community expects and what the man actually experiences is not resolved by leaving the faith. For many men, the community, the family structure, the social world are inseparable from the religious framing, and leaving one means losing all of them.
For men whose racial or ethnic identity intersects with sexual shame, the picture is further complicated. Racialised men within gay or broader sexual communities can find themselves navigating fetishisation alongside exclusion, drawn into certain kinds of encounters as the only available route to connection, and then shamed for it by a broader culture that does not see the dynamics at play.
What happens in the work
We begin with the three inner systems. Men learn to map their own experience using that framework: where the alarm has been switched on chronically, how the drive has been compensating, and what the anchor, which many of them have never consciously accessed, might actually feel like. This is not an abstract exercise. It is the foundation for everything that follows.
In the second half of the programme, men sit more directly with shame. That means naming where it came from. Not to blame anyone, and not to perform a kind of therapy that collapses into grievance, but to understand, as an adult with the benefit of perspective, what was actually happening in the environments where the shame was learned. Once a man can see that shame was taught, that it came from specific messages in specific contexts, he begins to have a different relationship with it. It does not vanish. But it stops being simply who he is, and starts being something that happened to him.
Alongside that, men here work with the inner critic. The voice that arrives after a sexual behaviour and delivers its verdict. What I am trying to do is not silence that voice, because that is not how minds work. I am trying to give men a different kind of response to it. One that acknowledges the distress without amplifying the shame. One that comes from the anchor rather than from an alarm doubled back on itself.
Why the group matters
The group is not incidental to the work on shame. It is central to it.
Shame thrives on isolation.
Shame thrives on isolation. It runs on the belief that this thing I carry is uniquely mine. Sitting in a room with other men who are carrying something similar, and who name it out loud, dismantles that belief in a way no one-to-one work quite can. The recognition is not intellectual. It is felt, in the body. It changes what shame can do.
The men who go through this work often describe it in almost identical terms. Not that shame has disappeared, but that its hold has loosened. That there is more room around it. That the voice that used to deliver a verdict now has other voices to answer to. That is what the group makes possible, and it is why the work is built the way it is.
Questions men often ask
What is the relationship between shame and compulsive sexual behaviour?
Shame is not simply a consequence of compulsive sexual behaviour. It is one of its primary drivers. Understanding that distinction is one of the most important things we try to establish early in the work, because it changes everything about how the pattern is understood and how it can be addressed. The experience of shame, the felt sense of being fundamentally wrong, defective, or unacceptable, switches on the alarm inside us in exactly the same way that physical danger does. That alarm then searches for a way to bring itself down. Sexual behaviour, particularly in contexts that feel affirming or that temporarily dissolve the shame, is one of the most powerful and immediately available ways of settling that state. The relief is real. But the behaviour also generates its own shame in the aftermath, and that shame switches the alarm on again, which reaches for the same solution. The loop runs not despite the shame but because of it, and attempts to use more shame as a tool for stopping the behaviour tend to make things worse rather than better.
Is shame the same as guilt?
No, and the distinction matters. Guilt is about what you did. It is connected to a specific action and it contains an implicit prompt toward repair, the sense that something can be put right. Shame is about who you are. It attaches not to behaviour but to the self, producing the sense that the problem is not something you did but something you are. That distinction is significant because guilt, in appropriate measure, can be a useful signal. Shame, in the way it operates in compulsive sexual behaviour, is almost never useful. It does not motivate change. It switches on the alarm, which drives more of the behaviour that produced it. Understanding that the inner critic is generating shame rather than useful accountability is one of the foundational shifts the programme tries to produce.
Where does sexual shame come from?
It comes from many sources, and they vary between individuals. For gay and bisexual men, shame about sexuality itself is one of the most consistent roots, the messages absorbed, often very early in life, that same-sex desire is wrong, abnormal or something to be managed. For straight men, it tends to operate more through the gap between the behaviour and the self-image, the sense of not being the kind of man who does this, of a private reality that contradicts the public self. For men from religious or culturally conservative backgrounds, the shame often carries explicit moral content: the sense that what they are doing places them outside the framework of the community or the faith that provides meaning. For many men, it is a combination of several of these sources, accumulated over years, that becomes the internal atmosphere within which the compulsive behaviour develops and maintains itself.
Why doesn't trying harder to stop work when shame is involved?
Because trying harder to stop is itself a stress response, and it generates more shame when it fails, which it often does, because the underlying driver of the behaviour has not been addressed. The man who resolves to stop, stops for a period, and then finds himself in the pattern again, experiences the failure of the resolution as additional evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with him. The shame intensifies. The alarm switches on. The behaviour is reached for again. The harder the trying, the more material the failure provides for the shame narrative, and the tighter the loop becomes. What actually interrupts the loop is not more effort but a different approach: understanding what the behaviour has been doing, building genuine alternatives, and changing the relationship to the shame itself.
Can shame be treated directly?
Yes, and this is the heart of the model the programme is built on. The compassion-focused approach was developed specifically for shame-based experiences, and it works not by arguing with the shame or suppressing it but by developing a different internal response to it. The compassionate self, the internal capacity to meet difficulty with warmth, understanding and non-judgment rather than with attack, is what changes the relationship to shame. Not eliminating it, which is neither possible nor the goal, but changing what happens when it appears. Over time, as the compassionate response becomes more established and more accessible, the shame loses some of its power to drive automatic behaviour. The loop does not disappear overnight. But it begins to loosen.
Why does trying to stop sometimes make it worse?
Because the attempt to stop, when it fails, as it often does in the early stages without adequate support, generates exactly the internal conditions that drive more of the behaviour. The resolution fails. The inner critic delivers its verdict. The shame switches on the alarm. The alarm reaches for the most available way of settling it. And the most available way is the behaviour that the man has just promised himself he will stop. This is not a loop that willpower can break on its own, because willpower operates at the level of conscious intention while the loop operates at a much deeper level. What actually shifts it is a different approach altogether, one that changes what the behaviour is being asked to do in the first place.
If shame is what has kept the cycle running, this is what the programme was built for.
A six-month group therapy programme for men whose sex lives have started to feel out of control. Available across the UK.
See how the programme works