Using Radical Honesty to Heal Body Shame
This is Jakob and I am a Radical Honesty Trainer living in Germany.
I want to talk about shame, particularly the shame we feel about our bodies.
In the many workshops that I attended as a Trainer and as a participant, I have met many people who, like me, feel shame about parts of their body.
Many of us like our hands and our eyes and that’s about it. With the rest of ourselves, we’re often not so happy.
We create firm beliefs that parts of our bodies are ugly, strange, and unlikable. Our minds are endlessly creative in coming up with reasons about what is wrong with our bodies.
And we try to hide these parts as best as we can. The only people we might show our shamed body parts to are our intimate partners and doctors.
That is especially true about genital shame. Only a few things can cause pain, anxiety and worry like feeling ashamed of your own genitals. I speak from ten years of personal, painful experience.
Shame breeds in darkness
The cure to shame is to bring light into the dark, secret place we created.
And by light, I mean talking about it, in detail, while being fully present and feeling the waves of sensations move through your body. Being with our shameful experiences fully, especially in a supportive group, is what allows those trapped experiences to come and go.
Each time we have the courage to describe our shame out loud and experience it as thoughts and bodily sensations, the less we have to organize our lives in avoidance of it.
The following part might be challenging for you to read. Maybe you can personally relate and maybe not. If you can't directly relate, I invite you to replace the word "penis" with the part of your body that you feel most ashamed off.
My Story
"It's so little..." she said after stroking my penis.
That was the first feedback I ever received about my penis. I was 16 then.
Around the same time I realized that my foreskin behaves differently than the foreskin of other boys. It was too tight and it hurt when I tried to pull it back.
On top of that, I had many white pimply spots on my scrotum.
I was convinced that my dick was small, weird, and ugly.
Watching porn everyday and comparing myself to giant, circumcised, "perfect" dicks confirmed my beliefs. And I made sure that nobody knew how I felt about any of this.
It took me over ten years to realize that there is nothing wrong with my penis.
Sex, Circumcision, and Porn
Between the age of 16 to 24, I had a couple of rare intimate/sexual encounters. Most of the time I felt extremely tense in those moments and I was either high or drunk or both.
In those situations, I either lost my erection or didn't get an erection at all when things moved from innocent cuddling into sexual tension.
Eventually, when I got circumcised, I thought I would feel better but I only felt a little bit better about my penis.The foreskin issue was solved but the scar left behind from the procedure gave me a new reason to think of my dick as ugly.
Over the years, I continued to watch more porn. I started to watch rougher stuff and got scared and excited by women getting humiliated.
In stark contrast to what I watched everyday was my desperate longing for intimate, loving body contact. I vividly remember how I was lying in my bed every night, feeling unbelievably lonely, praying to God for someone to hold me and cuddle me.
Change Begins
The first major change occurred when I met my first girlfriend at age 24.
We both had never had sex before.
We both were scared of sex.
We both were scared of being naked in front of each other.
We both really wanted to feel intimacy and do all that scary stuff together.
Over the course of 6 months we took many little steps until we eventually had sex with each other. I can't tell you how thankful I am for this whole experience. To have my first sexual encounter happen in such a loving, gentle, and intimate way was incredible.
My Introduction to Radical Honesty
The relationship eventually ended and I had kept many of my thoughts secret: my fantasies, my worries, my porn consumption, my attractions to other women and much more.
That changed drastically when I got introduced to Radical Honesty.
I spoke to everyone about sex all the time. I spoke about my worries and fears. I spoke about everything I was ashamed about. I spoke about porn (and documented the first weeks of quitting porn on Youtube). I went to multiple 8-Day workshops where we did naked work and talked openly about sex and our bodies.
I started to feel the courage to speak about whatever was inside of me and I started to feel okay about my body and my penis.
I started to feel the courage to speak about whatever was inside of me. By doing that I allowed other people to relate to me—to the real me.
Strangely, those people didn't run away thinking I'm weird, perverted and strange!
Instead, they gave me two gifts: I was listened to with compassion and I got to hear them sharing about what is truly going with them. Their bodies, their shame, their desires.
In these many conversations of heart-to-heart sharing, I started to feel okay about my body and my penis.
Radically Honest Sex
After a whole year of talking about sex and my shame, I was ready to experience sex again and explore myself deeply in it.
Luckily, I met an incredible woman. The most out-of-my-league, sensual, feminine, smart and funny woman I could ever imagine!
I was drawn to her like a magnet and by some grace of the universe she felt the same about me.
"It's beautiful!" was her first feedback about my penis.
That was right after I shared with her that I'm very nervous about receiving a blowjob from her and that I'm insecure about the size, looks, smell and taste of my penis. I was certain that I had "killed the mood" by saying all that.
Well, I didn't kill the mood.
Instead it lead to a moment of connection and vulnerability ... and an incredible blowjob.
Today I often feel great about my dick. The size (which I now describe as "upper middle class") is perfect in my opinion. The scar is pretty badass. And the pimples are very few and only bother me a little, sometimes.
I was able to shine light into the darkness of where my shame had grown so much over the years. My light source was talking about my body and sex openly and in-the-moment. Over and over and over again. Until there was no shadow left for shame to breed in.
Which shamed (body) part of you is shrouded in darkness and yearns for light?
-Jakob Eichhorn
Jakob Eichhorn is a former Radical Honesty Trainer living in Germany. You can find more about Jakob here.