19 | The Shame Addiction: What the Body Hides (Part 2 of 3)
~15 MINS READ
SEXUAL SHAME, PSYCHEDELIC HEALING, AND THE BODY'S SECRET LIFE: WHY THE DESIRE YOU HIDE IS NOT THE PROBLEM, WHAT PSILOCYBIN AND SOMATIC RESEARCH REVEAL ABOUT REPRESSION, AND HOW TO BEGIN RECLAIMING WHAT WAS NEVER WRONG.
In Part 1, I wrote about where shame lives in the body and how it operates like an addiction. I told you that shame is almost always underneath. But I didn't tell you what's underneath shame.
Desire.
Not just sexual desire, although that is the dimension I want to name in this post. Desire in the broadest sense: the wanting to be seen, to be touched, to be known in the body, to be met in the place where you are most alive and most afraid.
Sexual shame is the most hidden thing I encounter in my work. More hidden than grief. More hidden than combat trauma. More hidden than the childhood wounds people arrive prepared to name. Those are painful, but they are speakable. Sexual shame is the one that sits behind the other ones, waiting, and when it finally surfaces, which usually happens not in the first session but in the fourth or the sixth, in the moment when enough trust has been built that the body finally lets the secret rise, the room changes.
What surfaces is rarely what people expect. It is not always an event. Sometimes it is a fantasy. A desire that contradicts who they believe they should be. A pattern they've never named aloud. A memory from childhood that they've carried for decades without telling a single person. The confession is almost always preceded by the same sentence: I've never told anyone this.
If that sentence lives in you, this post is for you.
I'm going to share more of my own story here than I've shared anywhere publicly. I do this not because confession is the point. I do it because sexual shame survives in silence and begins to dissolve in the presence of someone who does not look away. And because the voice that says this part of you is too much, too broken, too dangerous to be seen is not your voice. It was installed. And what was installed can be uninstalled.
“The wound is where the Light enters you.”
Where It Begins: The Silence Before the Wound
Consider what most of us received as sexual education.
For many, the first lesson about desire came not as instruction but as correction. Stop that. Don't touch yourself. That's dirty. At twelve or thirteen, when the body begins speaking a language it has never spoken before, the culture offers almost nothing to help translate. No rite of passage. No elder saying: what's happening to you is sacred, and here is how to hold it.
In nearly every traditional culture on earth, the transition from childhood to sexual maturity was marked by ceremony. Elders offered teachings about the body, about desire, about the responsibility that accompanies the life force moving through you. The Maasai, the Lakota, the Aboriginal Australians, West African communities: each developed rites of passage to guide adolescents through the bewildering threshold between innocence and awareness. Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep described the universal structure: separation from the old identity, a liminal period of instruction and ordeal, and reintegration into the community with a new role and new understanding.
We have almost none of this. A 2025 study in Discover Global Society found that two out of three American young adults reported having no meaningful rite of passage experience during adolescence. Instead, the cultural script tells teenagers that adulthood is proven by forbidden behavior: drinking, sex, and risk. In the absence of guided initiation, young people initiate themselves, often with consequences no one helps them process.
What we offer instead is silence. Or worse: theology dressed as biology. I wrote about my own religious upbringing's role in organizing shame in Beyond Belief. Here I want to name the broader cultural failure.
Consider the absurdity we normalize. A child can watch a man's head explode in a video game before breakfast. They can watch athletes inflict concussions on each other and the crowd will cheer. But a woman breastfeeding in public still makes people uncomfortable. Two men holding hands still draws stares. A couple expressing affection is treated as something to apologize for.
We have built a culture that can tolerate almost unlimited violence but cannot tolerate pleasure.
And then we wonder why people carry shame about the most natural force in their bodies.
What I Carried: The Wound I Couldn't Name
In Part 1, I named the childhood sexual trauma that became the most formative shame experience of my life: how, at twelve or thirteen, in the vacuum left by a religious culture that could only say stop to a boy's emerging sexuality, I imposed myself on another child. How the behavior was caught early by an adult who mercifully intervened but did not know how to help me process what had happened. How the incident installed a belief that I was not a boy who had made a mistake, but a boy who was the mistake.
Here I want to go deeper into what that wound did to my sexuality across decades, because this is where shame hid longest and cost the most.
The first time I spoke it publicly was in 2009, at a family constellations retreat in Cyprus facilitated by Stephen Victor. Constellations work is a modality developed by Bert Hellinger that uses the group field to surface unconscious family dynamics, generational patterns, and hidden loyalties that shape our lives without our knowing. In that room, surrounded by strangers who became witnesses, I named the thing I had never named. And something shifted in the body that no amount of private therapy had been able to reach. The shame didn't disappear. But it stopped being a secret. And a secret that is no longer a secret has lost its primary weapon.
But what surfaced in that constellation went far deeper than my own story. As Stephen guided the process, what the field revealed was not just one boy's wound. It was a lineage of sexual trauma stretching back over nine generations. Nine. The number was specific, arrived at not through genealogy but through the felt sense of the field, through the bodies of the representatives standing in the room who began to carry weight they couldn't explain, who wept for people they had never met. The constellation showed that I had not simply inherited this wound. At the level of the family soul, I had taken it on. Chosen, in whatever way a soul chooses before language, to be the one in the line who would face it.
In the years since, members of my family have confirmed what the constellation revealed. My maternal grandmother, a foster child of Lakota ancestry, experienced profound abuse, including sexual abuse. Other relatives have disclosed similar experiences spanning at least several generations of what the family knows and can speak of. What was once an intuition held by a group of strangers in a room in Cyprus became documented family history. The body knew before the records did.
That confirmation changed something fundamental in how I understood my own experience. The shame I had carried since childhood was not just mine. It was ancestral. And the choice I made in that room, to consciously take on the work of ending this cycle within my family line, became the commitment that has organized the rest of my life. Not as martyrdom. As devotion. To my children. To the generations I will never meet. To the ones who came before me and could not do what I am now able to do, because the tools and the containers and the communities did not yet exist.
That experience became the doorway to a longer journey of owning my story, through individual therapy, through ceremony, through relationships brave enough to hold the truth, and through community practices that asked me to show up in the body I actually have rather than the one shame said I deserved.
“In the realm of hungry ghosts, the weights we carry often belong to someone else.”
The Generational Inheritance of Sexual Shame
Sexual shame, like all shame, does not begin with the individual.
Rachel Yehuda's epigenetic research shows us that trauma alters gene expression across generations. But sexual shame also transmits relationally: in what can be spoken and what must remain silent, in how a mother holds or cannot hold a child, in what parts of the body are touched with affection and what parts are treated as though they don't exist. The sexual dimensions of my grandmother's abuse were never spoken of directly in our family. They didn't need to be. The body transmits what the mouth cannot.
What I have come to understand, both through my own lineage and through the families I serve, is that the secrecy itself becomes a second wound. When a family decides that the past must never be spoken of, the shame does not stay contained. It leaks. It distorts. It finds new hosts.
I have seen this pattern repeat with devastating precision. A parent who committed harm in their youth, never given the chance to process it, carries unresolved guilt into middle age. That guilt doesn't produce wisdom. It produces rigidity. And when their grandchildren begin to explore, as children do, that exploration triggers the elder's unprocessed material. The grandparent who was once shamed becomes the one who shames. The cycle turns another revolution. Not because anyone intends harm. Because no one ever stopped to face what was underneath.
When trauma goes unprocessed, it distorts the present. People who cannot face their own pain will, unconsciously, recreate it. They rewrite history, cast themselves as victim or hero, project the perpetrator role onto others, and build elaborate narratives to avoid the simple admission: I was hurt, and I hurt others, and I don't know how to hold both. The dance between victim and perpetrator, when it remains unconscious, becomes seemingly endless. Both parties are survivors. Both are carrying wounds they did not choose. And as long as the conversation stays locked in who was wrong, healing cannot enter the room.
This is why I speak publicly about my own family's generational sexual trauma. Not to expose anyone. But because when one family breaks the silence, it creates permission for others to begin the conversation they have been avoiding for decades. The shame that organizes a family into secrecy is the same shame that organizes a culture into silence. When you hear someone name what you have been unable to name, something inside you loosens. Not because their story is your story. But because their willingness to be seen reminds you that being seen is survivable.
When two people come together as a couple, they don't just bring their own histories. They bring the unresolved sexual material of their parents and their parents' parents. The initial magnetism of a new relationship, that gravity that feels like destiny, is often the nervous system recognizing a familiar wound. Maté describes this with devastating clarity: we don't choose our partners despite our childhood wounds. We choose them because of them. The attraction is not random. It is the body seeking the precise conditions under which the original wound might finally be addressed.
This is why the magnet can flip. The very quality that drew you to someone, their intensity, their unavailability, their need to be rescued, their capacity to make you feel needed, eventually becomes the thing that repels. The dance of attraction and repulsion is not dysfunction. It is the oldest pattern in nature expressing itself through human intimacy.
Look anywhere in the natural world and you will find this rhythm. In physics, every charged particle exists in relationship to its opposite: attraction and repulsion are not alternatives but phases of the same force. The Taoist symbol of yin and yang does not depict two separate things. It depicts one thing in motion, each pole containing the seed of the other, the boundary between them not a wall but a wave. Prairie voles, one of the few monogamous mammals, bond through oxytocin surges during mating, and neuroscience has shown that separation from a bonded partner triggers the same neural withdrawal patterns as drug addiction. Even at the molecular level, the double helix of DNA is held together by complementary base pairs that attract precisely because they are different.
David Deida, whose work on sexual polarity and spiritual intimacy has shaped my understanding of this dance, describes the dynamic plainly: when the polarity between masculine and feminine energy diminishes, attraction diminishes. When it disappears, the relationship dies. This is not a prescription for rigid gender roles. It is an observation about energy. Every person contains both poles. The question is whether we are conscious enough of the dance to participate in it, rather than being danced by it.
How the Pattern Played Out in My Life
Gabor Maté says we marry our parents' dysfunctions. In my case, I kept choosing deeply wounded women who carried unresolved pain toward men, partners whose resentment of the masculine mirrored something I already believed about myself: that I was dangerous, that my desire was a threat, that I needed to earn safety through constant emotional labor.
I don't say this to blame the women I loved. They were carrying their own generational material, their own sexual wounds, their own survival adaptations. And I was not a passive recipient. I chose them because the shape was familiar. My anxious attachment style, forged in a childhood where belonging was conditional and people disappeared, found a precise fit in avoidant or disorganized partners. The intensity felt like love because my nervous system couldn't tell the difference.
A pattern emerged across relationships: long stretches of committed monogamy, followed by periods of exploration, of multiple partners, of experimenting with polyamory. I don't name this with shame. I name it with honesty. At different seasons I was trying different things with the same underlying question: Is it safe to be fully known? The answer kept coming back: Not yet. And so the search continued.
I once proposed to a partner on MDMA at a festival. The morning after should have been the first clue. (If you are considering a major life decision while your serotonin is doing a victory lap around your prefrontal cortex, I lovingly suggest: wait.) Research published in Nature in 2019 confirmed what my body already knew: MDMA triggers a massive oxytocin release, effectively reopening critical periods for social bonding. The neuroscience of this is remarkable. The same mechanisms that bond mother to infant at birth are activated in adults under MDMA's influence. Two people sharing a medicine experience can form attachment bonds of extraordinary depth, bonds that the rational brain did not fully consent to and the nervous system cannot easily undo.
I have shared medicine experiences with partners several times over the years. Each time, the bonding was profound, the connection felt genuinely sacred. And each time a relationship ended, the separation was devastating, disproportionate to the length of the relationship itself, because what was being severed was not just emotional attachment. It was a neurochemical bond formed at a depth the conscious mind had not negotiated.
I share this as a cautionary offering, not a prohibition. Some committed couples I know use periodic ceremony to deepen their partnership, and the results are remarkable. But the operative word is committed. If the foundation is not stable, medicine will not stabilize it. It will amplify whatever is already present, including the fault lines. My recommendation for couples considering shared ceremony: wait at least a year of committed relationship before sharing a medicine experience together. Build the container before you open the floodgates. Establish consent, boundaries, and agreements before any substances are involved. And if sexual energy arises during a session, as it sometimes does, decide beforehandhow you want to hold it. The medicine will not make those decisions for you.
“When eros is denied its sacred context, it does not disappear...it descends into compulsion.”
The Cycle of Numbing
When intimacy with a partner became unavailable, whether through conflict, withdrawal, or long stretches where one of us shut down, pornography became the channel for energy that had nowhere else to go. I want to be honest about this mechanism because I know how common it is and how rarely it is spoken of without shame.
The cycle worked like this: disconnection from my partner, resentment building, turning to a screen for the intimacy the body was craving, and then shame for having done so, which deepened the disconnection. It was not about the pornography itself. It was about the gap between who I believed myself to be and what I did with my pain.
What confused me for years was this: with partners who accepted the pornography without judgment, something still felt wrong. And with partners who responded with betrayal and disgust, the shame deepened but the pattern intensified. Neither acceptance nor rejection addressed the root. The root was a twelve-year-old boy who was never taught that the energy moving through him was not dangerous. It was life.
At times I expressed to partners what I experienced as mental infidelity, the pull of fantasy toward others, the wandering attention, the erotic imagination that didn't stop at the boundary of monogamy, because honesty felt more important than comfort. In some relationships this transparency was received with grace. In others it was received as betrayal equal to the act itself. I still believe honesty was the right choice, even when it cost me, because the alternative, the secret life, is where shame does its most corrosive work.
There were long stretches of abstinence from pornography, seasons where the cycle seemed broken, followed by returns. Like peeling layers of an onion, each round went deeper. Clinical research on compulsive sexual behavior confirms this pattern: recovery is rarely linear. The healing happens in spirals, each cycle confronting an older layer of the wound.
The most honest thing I can say about this process is that it took decades, and it is not finished. What changed was not the disappearance of the pattern but the growth of a compassionate observer within me who could witness it without collapsing into the belief that the pattern was the whole of who I am.
What I See in the People I Serve
In my work as a psychedelic guide and integration coach, sexual shame surfaces in patterns that are both subtle and profound. A man who has never told anyone about a childhood experience with another boy and has carried for thirty years the terror that it means something definitive about his orientation. A woman who has fantasies about another woman and feels unable to speak them to her partner, not because the desire feels wrong, but because the risk of being judged feels unbearable. A person who came out years ago and still cannot relax in their own body when arousal moves through them.
I also sit with men who, as adolescents, tried on their mother’s clothing or followed a curiosity that did not fit the roles they were handed. What might have been exploration became evidence, in their minds, that something was broken. The response they received, ridicule, silence, religious alarm, froze the moment in place. Decades later they are not only carrying shame, they are struggling to forgive themselves for being a child in a body coming online. The people we believe love us most are often the ones whose judgment we fear most. Parents. Partners. Faith communities. Losing their approval does not feel like disagreement. It feels like exile.
Even when someone identifies as queer, fluid, or polyamorous, even when they are already questioning inherited scripts, the nervous system may still brace. Openness of identity is not the same as safety in the body. Many are seeking liberation, but what they are really seeking is a pathway toward integration. What we currently offer culturally does not work. So people experiment. They test edges. They search for a way to live in their desire without fragmenting themselves.
This is where forgiveness quietly enters the work. Not the forced version. Not the moral command. The deeper process I wrote about in Stop Trying to Forgive: What Psilocybin and Grief Teach About Letting Go. In that piece, I explore how real forgiveness is less about excusing and more about releasing what the body has been gripping for years. Sexual shame is often fused with unresolved grief and self condemnation. Healing is not about deciding who you are. It is about creating enough internal safety that you no longer collapse under your own truth.
Underneath every variation of this story is the same longing. To be seen without being made wrong. To be honest without losing belonging. Coming out is rarely a single moment. It is a season of integration. And what I am witnessing more and more is not simply sexual liberation, but the deeper liberation of the nervous system, the moment the body begins to trust that it is allowed to be whole.
The Body Reclaimed
Years ago, I attended a retreat with the International School of Temple Arts (ISTA) in Nicaragua. ISTA is an organization that works at the intersection of sexuality, shamanism, and spirituality. I should say directly: ISTA is an imperfect institution. Like many organizations working in the charged territory of sexuality and power, it has faced legitimate criticism about boundary violations and accountability. I name it because the experience I had there was genuinely transformative, and because honest reckoning with imperfect containers is part of the work. No institution is the teaching. The teaching lives in what happens between the people in the room.
In that room, in front of more than thirty of us, we were invited to stand naked in front of the group and share our most vulnerable truths about how we relate to our bodies, our pleasure, our desires, and our shame.
I remember the anxiety of standing there, feeling the exposure of being seen without armor. And then a quieter voice: Why am I ashamed of this body? This body that has survived everything I've asked of it. This body that has carried me through combat, through ceremony, through the birth of my children. Why have I been treating it as the enemy?
Something cracked open that day that I hadn't known was still sealed. I began to love parts of myself that I didn't realize I still judged. The belly I'd been holding in. The scars I'd been narrating as failures. The desire I'd been editing to make presentable.
This was not the first time I'd done this kind of work. I had been practicing with shamanic tantra, becoming more comfortable in my own skin at festivals, hot springs, in various groups where the body was welcome as it is. But ISTA offered something the other experiences hadn't: a structured, witnessed, communal practice of naming what we hide. The group wasn't there to fix anyone. It was there to not look away. And that, as I keep learning, is the medicine.
“Sexual energy is the creative energy of the universe. When you learn to cultivate it, it becomes the power that heals and transforms you.”
The Sacred Force
I want to speak directly to what sexuality actually is, beneath the shame, because I think we have forgotten.
Sexuality is the creative force. It is the same energy that drives the seed to break through soil, the same current that pulls the tide, the same impulse that moves a painter's hand or a poet's pen. In 2010, I began training with Mantak Chia in London, a Taoist master who has spent decades teaching what the ancient lineages always knew: that sexual energy, jing, is the foundational life force. In Chia's framework, jing doesn't merely serve reproduction. When cultivated rather than squandered, it transforms into chi (vital energy) and shen (spiritual energy), becoming the fuel for creativity, vitality, and awakening. His bestselling works, Taoist Secrets of Love and The Multi-Orgasmic Man, were among the first to bring these practices to Western audiences. For me, training with Chia was the beginning of understanding that the energy I had spent decades suppressing and shaming was not a problem to manage. It was a resource to cultivate.
David Deida's work extended this insight into the relational dimension. Where Chia teaches the individual cultivation of sexual energy, Deida teaches what happens when that energy meets another person. His book Finding God Through Sex articulates what I had felt but could not name: that the erotic encounter, fully entered, is not separate from the spiritual encounter. It is the spiritual encounter in its most embodied form.
The experience of connecting with another person in full presence, of dissolving for a moment the boundary between self and other, is one of the most beautiful things available in the human experience. The thrill of the dance. The play. The belonging. The return to a sense of coming home in another's body. The release of tension that the body has been holding for days or decades. Or actually creating little humans, which has been, without question, the most meaningful and lovely experience of my life.
Shame tries to make sexuality small: a problem to manage, a drive to contain, an appetite to apologize for. Sexuality is not small. It is enormous. It is the force that creates life itself.
Some of my most impactful ceremony experiences have involved intensely erotic visions mixed with death, with mutilated bodies, with images of simultaneous creation and destruction. The first time this happened, the confusion was overwhelming. How could arousal and horror exist in the same moment? My guide suggested that what I was experiencing was creative energy attempting to move through me, and that the distortion arose from years of that energy being blocked by shame. When the dam breaks, the water doesn't come out clean. It comes out with everything that was trapped behind it.
He was right. The creative energy I carried back from that session became the seed of a new venture. The erotic force, once freed from the shame that had imprisoned it, became generative in the broadest sense. This is what the esoteric traditions have always taught: sexual energy is not separate from spiritual energy. It is spiritual energy in its most embodied form.
The Boundaries That Protect the Work
I need to speak to something essential here, because the territory of sexuality and ceremony is where the most harm has been done in this field.
In my practice, the conversation about sexuality happens before a single milligram of psilocybin is consumed. I name it upfront, clearly, because psychedelic journeys often bring buried material to the surface, and that includes things like sexual shame, arousal, confusion, memories, and sensations tied to past experiences. These can arise even when sexuality isn't the focus of the session. If a client doesn't know this is possible, they get blindsided. And then shame arrives before the healing can.
So I say it plainly in the preparation conversation: If those things come up during our work, you're not doing anything wrong. These are often very natural parts of the healing process. That single sentence, spoken before the session, changes the entire container.
What I've learned from advanced facilitator trainings is that pleasure and shame require parallel but distinct responses from the guide. When erotic energy surfaces, the guide's role is to normalize it, create safety for the client to feel it, and support its integration, while holding a clear boundary: This is your erotic energy, for your aliveness. We are not working on our connection. We are working on your erotic energy. That reframe matters enormously, because it returns ownership of the experience to the person having it.
When shame surfaces alongside the erotic, the protocol shifts: interrupt the shame spiral, create safety to explore what's arising, and help the client differentiate between old stories and present-moment truth. Is this shame about now, or about then? That question, offered gently during integration, can unlock decades of material.
In Oregon's regulated psilocybin framework, the boundary around touch is explicit: no sexual touch from facilitator to client, from client to facilitator, or from client to self during the session. If self-touch occurs, the client is gently and respectfully redirected with care, not shame, to support them in staying grounded in the therapeutic frame. These boundaries serve practical, ethical, legal, and therapeutic purposes simultaneously: they prevent confusion under the influence of psychedelics, protect against power imbalances, and support safe integration of material without re-traumatization.
I name all of this because it has been violated in the field, by guides who crossed lines with vulnerable clients, causing deep harm and damaging trust in the broader community. Every boundary violation by a practitioner makes it harder for the next person to seek help. The safety of this work depends on the integrity of the people doing it. I take that seriously. The people I serve deserve a space where all parts of them are welcome, including their sexuality, and where that welcome is held with respect, care, and clinical integrity.
Where I Am Now
The sacrament alone is not enough. The real work happens in integration: in the conversations after, in the relationships that can hold the truth, in the community practices where the body is welcome as it is. This is why I facilitate ongoing integration circles, why I offer group containers, why I believe that sexual shame, like all shame, heals in relationship, not in isolation.
I am currently in a season of conscious abstinence. After a painful separation, I made the choice to go inward. Not as punishment. As conservation. I have learned that I take on the energy of those I engage with sexually, and I don't wish to take on energy that isn't mine right now. My body, after a lifetime of seeking validation through intimacy, is learning a different language. One that sounds like: You are enough without someone else's body confirming it.
I exercise. I dance. I walk in nature. I meditate, sometimes pulling the energy up my spine in practices I first learned from Mantak Chia, channeling jing into chi through the microcosmic orbit. I commune with something I can only call God, not the punishing God of my childhood but the presence I see in all things. And I remain open to future partnership, but from a different place now. Not from the hungry ghost who needs another body to feel real. From the man who has learned, slowly and imperfectly, that the life force is already moving through him.
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
How to Start
Name the specific thing. Not "I have some shame around sex." The actual memory, desire, or pattern. To one person you trust. Shame generalizes. Specificity shrinks the territory it controls.
Feel it in the body. Sexual shame almost always lives in the belly, the throat, or the pelvic floor. The bracing is not a weakness. It is information.
Question the origin. Whose voice is this? Most sexual shame is inherited. When you can see the installation, it loosens its grip.
Find a container. A therapist, a group, a community where the body is welcome. Sexual shame cannot heal in isolation. It needs witnesses who do not look away. Resources that have been meaningful in my own journey include the work of Mantak Chia, David Deida, Gabor Maté, and the practice of family constellations.
If this post may support someone you know, I'd be grateful if you shared it. Not because my story needs an audience. Because somewhere, right now, a family is sitting around a table with a silence between them that everyone can feel and no one will name. And sometimes all it takes to break that silence is the knowledge that someone else went first.
And if you're carrying something in this territory that you've never said out loud, let's talk. Not because I have answers. Because I have been in the room where the unspeakable was spoken, and I watched what happened next. What happened next was not destruction. It was the beginning of something that generations before us could not begin because no one showed them it was possible.
My deepest wish for this writing is not that you agree with it. It is that something in it opens a door you have been standing in front of for a long time. A door to more honesty in your own life. More realness in your family. More willingness to face what has been hidden, not with judgment, but with the kind of fierce, humble care that says: We deserve better than secrecy. Our children deserve better. And we can start now.
In Part 3, I'll share what the research and the people I serve are teaching me about how shame actually heals, not through understanding, but through new experience at the level of the body.
From my Heart to yours,
Yeshua Adonai
Psychedelic Guide
aboutyeshua.com
Yeshua is a traveling psychedelic guide currently based in Phoenix, Arizona. USMC combat veteran, former diplomat, and serial social entrepreneur devoted to mental health innovation, he has spent decades exploring contemplative traditions worldwide and learning to trust his own experience along the way.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Because it is culturally manufactured. Most societies treat the body as suspect and desire as something to manage. Add the near-total absence of meaningful rites of passage, correction rather than education about sexuality, and epigenetic evidence that trauma transmits across generations, and you have a population of adults carrying shame about the most natural energy in their bodies.
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They can create conditions where the body experiences itself without judgment. But the psychedelic experience alone is not the healing. Integration is. Without a skilled guide, a clear container, and explicit conversations about boundaries beforehand, psychedelic work with sexual material can retraumatize rather than heal. Part 3 of this series will explore this in depth.
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It often installs a core belief that the child's nature is fundamentally wrong, organizing the nervous system around shame and shaping partner selection and intimacy patterns for decades. Gabor Maté's work on partner selection illuminates how we unconsciously choose relationships that confirm the original wound.
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Someone who names sexuality directly in preparation, discusses touch boundaries before any substance is consumed, normalizes the possibility that erotic energy may arise, and maintains absolute boundaries. Ask about trauma-informed training and ongoing supervision.
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Yes. Sexual energy is life force energy. When defenses soften, the full spectrum of human energy surfaces. A prepared guide normalizes this beforehand, holds clear boundaries during, and supports integration afterward.
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Profoundly. MDMA triggers oxytocin release, the same system governing mother-infant bonding. Research in Nature showed MDMA reopens critical-period learning for social bonding. You can form attachment-level bonds your conscious mind did not fully choose. My recommendation: wait at least a year of committed relationship before shared ceremony.