Wes Woodland

When Shame Does Not Feel Like Shame

Most people imagine shame as something obvious. A feeling that arrives loudly, with a sense that something about you is wrong or embarrassing or somehow less acceptable than other people. But shame is often much quieter than that. It does not always announce itself as self-hatred. Sometimes it shows up as a habit, a joke, an assumption, or a way of moving through the world that feels completely reasonable until you look back and realise it was doing far more work than you understood at the time.

For many LGBTQIA+ people, shame can sit underneath the way we think about ourselves without us recognising it as shame at all. It can shape the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we can expect from other people, and how much space we are allowed to take up. It can influence how we present ourselves, what we hide, what we soften, and what we try to make easier for other people to accept. In that sense, shame is not always a feeling we notice directly. Sometimes it becomes the lens through which we interpret ourselves.

How It Showed Up For Me

Before therapy, I do not think I would have said I was ashamed of being gay. If anything, I would have said I had accepted it. But looking back, I can see that shame was still there, just in a more subtle form. I felt different from straight men, but I also felt different from gay men. I had this sense that my whole personality was somehow tied up with being gay, not purposefully, but almost as if that was the only explanation I had for myself.

I would look at my sensitivity, my empathy, my emotional awareness, and quietly attribute all of it to being gay. Not in a celebratory way, either, but in a way that suggested those qualities were inseparable from my sexuality. I was not just a sensitive person. I was sensitive because I was gay. I was not just empathic. I was empathic because I was gay. And underneath that was another assumption, one that I did not really have language for at the time: if I was gay, then maybe I could not also be a “real man.”

That is one of the ways shame can operate. It can make perfectly ordinary parts of ourselves feel loaded with meaning. What is actually just a personality trait starts to feel like evidence. Evidence that we are different, evidence that we do not quite fit, and that we need to keep checking ourselves against some invisible standard.

The Stories Shame Writes

I think one of the most interesting things about shame is that it does not just make us feel bad. It writes stories about us. And because those stories often begin early, they can become so familiar that we stop questioning them (sidenote: this is what internalisation is).

For me, that story was something like: I am different, and the reason I am different is because I’m gay. That difference then became the explanation for all kinds of things. It was the reason I felt sensitive, the reason I felt camp, the reason I did not feel quite at ease in spaces that felt more masculine or more heterosexual, and it was the reason I sometimes held myself back before anyone else had the chance to reject me.

I think that is why covert shame can be so hard to spot; because it does not necessarily sound irrational from the inside. In fact, it often sounds like common sense. If the world gives you repeated messages that gay is somehow aligned with feminine, and feminine is treated as lesser, then it makes sense that you might start to absorb those messages in a way that feels completely natural. You may not consciously think, “I am ashamed.” You may simply think, “This is just how things are.”

What It Looked Like in My Behaviour

Even now, shame can still show up for me in small, familiar ways. One of them is humour. I still sometimes make self-deprecating jokes about being gay because I know it will make people laugh. One part of that is about connection, another part of it is about getting ahead of someone else’s judgement, and still another part of it is about signalling that I do not fit  a certain stereotype about gay men—that I’m “one of the good ones” (whatever that means).

Therapy has made me more aware that even a joke can carry something underneath it. If I keep casting myself as the “good one,” then I am also quietly reinforcing the idea that there are “bad ones.” If I laugh at myself first, I might feel safer, but I may also be shrinking myself in the process. That does not mean I can never joke about being gay. It just means I am more aware now of what is happening psychologically when I do.

I have also noticed shame in the way I have sometimes approached the world more generally. I still occasionally assume I will not belong somewhere because of my sexuality. I might not even realise I am doing it until I feel the familiar pull to hold back, to monitor myself, to test the waters before fully arriving. And yet, more often than not, when I do actually test that assumption, I find that nobody particularly cares. It’s often just my projection. That does not make the fear unreal. It just means the fear is not always describing reality very accurately.

Reclaiming What Was Never the Problem

Therapy involved a lot of critically examining those beliefs and dismantling them. One of the biggest shifts for me was realising that my more “feminine” qualities had never been the problem. I had always been nurturing, caring, empathic, and sensitive. Those qualities did not appear simply because I was gay. They were already there. The only that thing eventually changed was my relationship to them. Now I no longer see those qualities as something to be ashamed of. In fact, I think we need them. As a counsellor, I need the nurturing, emotionally attuned aspects of myself. I need the part that can hold someone carefully and stay present with what is painful or uncertain. But I also need the more traditionally “masculine” aspects: the drive, the structure, the capacity to motivate and to help things move forward. To me, good therapy involves both. Human beings need both. The people I work with need both.

That is part of why the phrase “I’m just me, and I also happen to be gay” feels so important to me now. It sounds simple, but it represents a much bigger shift. It means I no longer experience my sexuality as the explanation for everything I am. It is part of me, but it is not the whole story. I am not an idea of gayness dressed up as a person. I am a person who happens to be gay.

So Here’s What I Notice in the Therapy Room

I see similar patterns in the LGBTQIA+ clients I work with. Shame is not always spoken aloud, but it often reveals itself indirectly. Sometimes it comes through in a deep reluctance to be different, as if difference itself feels dangerous. Sometimes it shows up in not asking for support or not believing one’s needs deserve to be met. Sometimes it appears in a quiet desire to squeeze into heteronormative society, even when that attempt is painful and impossible to sustain. Sometimes it shows up in subtle judgement of other queer people. Sometimes it looks like perfectionism, as though being excellent enough might somehow make the rest of it easier to swallow.

None of this surprises me. It actually makes sense. If you have spent years receiving messages, directly or indirectly, that who you are is a problem, then of course you might learn to manage yourself carefully. Of course you might try to become easier to understand, easier to accept, easier to place. Shame often asks us to become smaller, cleaner, less noticeable. Therapy can help people notice when they have been complying with that request for so long that it has started to feel like personality.

Learning to Notice the Story

I do not think shame ever disappears completely. I think it is too systemic for that. We live in societies that still sort people into acceptable and unacceptable, normal and not normal, visible and invisible. So I do not think the aim is to eliminate shame as though that were possible. I think the aim is to notice it sooner, to recognise when it is speaking, and to become a little less willing to let it define us.

That has certainly been true in my own life. I still sometimes act on shame. I still sometimes feel the pull to hide a part of myself or to protect myself by making a joke first. But it happens far less than it used to, and when it does happen, I am quicker to spot it. I can hold myself accountable. I can ask whether I want to keep feeding the shame or whether I want to break open and shine a light on it.

That, to me, is where the work becomes meaningful. Not in pretending shame was never there, and not in expecting ourselves to be perfectly free of it, but in learning how to relate to it differently. To see it for what it is. To question the stories it wrote before we knew better. And, slowly, to come back to the simpler truth that we are allowed to be ourselves.

A Different Way of Belonging

For LGBTQIA+ people, that can take courage. Sometimes it means testing assumptions we have carried for years. Sometimes it means discovering that the fear in our minds is bigger than the reality in front of us. Sometimes it means allowing ourselves to belong without first proving we deserve to.

That is one of the reasons I do this work. Because I know how powerful it can be when shame stops being invisible and starts becoming something we can name. And because I know that when we begin to see ourselves more clearly, we also begin to live with a little more freedom.

If you want to explore these themes further and find out more about how I support LGBTQIA+ people, please refer to my LGBTQIA+ counselling support page. And if you feel ready, you are welcome to book a free consultation so we can talk things through and see whether it feels like a good fit.