Shame

“My libido is strong. I have a high sex drive.” How often are such phrases used to justify inappropriate, disrespectful, and unhealthy sexual behaviour? How often do politicians, actors and other celebrities make the news for unwanted sexual advances? And how often does it happen and not make the news? What is the libido? We […]

Humanity has had a long love affair with secret societies. The Illuminati, the Masons, the Knights Templar, the Order of Sion, the Rosicrucians—the sense of missing out, the frisson of secrecy, the cachet of knowing something others don’t—all this appeals to our sense of mystery. I recently stumbled on The Sect of the Disgraced, an […]

In Patriarchy demands that our relationships are stagnant, I describe how our current human paradigm only survives by locking us into relationships that promise satisfaction but are in fact emotionally and sexually sterile. To achieve this, patriarchy has a mechanism for neutering each successive generation. Puberty shames teens into psychic stagnation. With the onset of […]

A recently unveiled statue of Mary Wollstonecraft has caused outrage by depicting the pioneering feminist writer naked. The statue depicts a nude woman emerging from an amorphous mound of organic matter. The BBC described the statue as “a swirling mingle of female forms.” The problem isn’t the statue. It’s the underlying unconscious shame that precludes our ability […]

I’ve spent years trying to raise my self-esteem. Meditations, affirmations, incantations—all tried and failed. The reason they failed is simple. Low self-esteem is an indicator of the presence of shame. What is self-esteem? Self-esteem, or self-worth, is a phrase that gets bandied about a lot in personal development, emotional healing and spiritual growth circles. Wikipedia […]

As this site deals with awkward topics such as shame, generational trauma and porn addiction, from time to time I receive interesting queries. One such recent query was about the shame of lack of sexual experience. Double-whammy This is an absolutely valid query on an absolutely valid issue. The lack of sexual experience can be […]

I’ve written extensively how unconscious shame inhibits us emotionally, causing significant reductions in our quality of life. Yet that isn’t the full extent of damage that it causes. Here I describe how shame literally sucks life energy out of us. This is a key component of what I call the Patriarchal Operating System, the acquisitive, […]

In What is unconscious shame? I described how all the feminine aspects of our being—our emotions, our feelings about our body and our sexuality—have been pushed down into our unconscious by several millennia of patriarchal culture. In this blog I want to focus on what is perhaps the most significant and difficult part of this […]

On this site I’ve written extensively about unconscious shame. Here I want to connect shame to arrested development. Arrested development is a colloquial term, popularised by the TV show of the same name, for what is technically known as ‘developmental disorder’, where crucial developmental tasks in a child’s life don’t unfold correctly. Arrested development is […]

In What is ancestral trauma? I describe the key psychological wounds that humanity suffered as a result of the drought, desertification and famine that gave rise to patriarchy. Here I want to focus on the fourth of these wounds: humanity’s unconscious slave mentality. I’m not referring to modern slavery, nor to the millions of slaves […]