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Not long ago, a friend was traveling and decided to get a haircut at the airport during his layover.<\/p>\n
He lives in Los Angeles with his husband, so when the new barber asked him whether he was single or had a wife, he didn\u2019t stop to tell him he\u2019s gay. <\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t that he felt unsafe or worried he could be harmed. He told me it felt easier in the moment to not disrupt the flow of the barber\u2019s heteronormative assumption. <\/p>\n
He left feeling disappointed in himself, though, and wondered why, after all this time, it can still sometimes feel easier to hide. <\/p>\n
As a means of honoring himself and confronting shame<\/a>\u2019s lie, he went back to the barbershop after he left and said, \u201cI just wanted to tell you that I\u2019m gay and didn\u2019t say anything before, but I\u2019m happily married and have a loving husband at home in LA.\u201d <\/p>\n In my clinical work with clients, I often hear some version of, \u201cI’ve done the work, I’ve come out, I’m successful, and yet I still feel like something’s missing.\u201d<\/p>\n While visibility and progress have increased, the inner work of healing shame, internalized homophobia, and spiritual disconnection remains largely unaddressed.<\/p>\n In fact, acknowledging internalized homophobia carries stigma<\/a>. For gay men, admitting any form of internalized shame can feel like a betrayal of the community, as if by acknowledging it, we’re giving credence to the very homophobia we’ve fought to survive.<\/p>\n Due to stigma, fear<\/a> of judgment, and a more nuanced dynamic known as protective silence<\/em>\u2014a pressure to safeguard our image by avoiding narratives that might be seen as \u201cairing our dirty laundry\u201d\u2014many gay men learn to suppress their pain for the sake of collective pride. This can create an inner conflict between honoring our personal experience and staying loyal to the community\u2019s image, where speaking about internalized homophobia feels like exposing a personal failure rather than a shared wound.<\/p>\n As I began exploring my own incongruence and feelings of unworthiness, I never found anything that addressed self-worth<\/a>, shame, and spirituality<\/a> specifically for gay men. What I learned in my own healing, and what I’ve witnessed in my clients’, is worthiness doesn’t come from fixing external problems. It comes from understanding and embracing who we are at our core. Not just intellectually, but spiritually. <\/p>\n Internalized homophobia doesn’t only affect how we consciously and unconsciously see ourselves. It impacts how we relate to each other as gay men, including our friendships, romantic relationships<\/a>, sex lives, and coping strategies.<\/p>\n When shame is chronic and internalized, it can lead us to project our unhealed and unconscious<\/a> shame onto others, specifically other gay men. Because we’ve disconnected and disowned parts of ourselves we identify as shameful, we might judge each other for being too feminine, too sexual<\/a>, or too much\u2014when in reality, we\u2019re uncomfortable seeing a part of ourselves reflected back that we haven\u2019t made peace with yet.<\/p>\n Shame can become contagious among gay men, bouncing from one person to the next, disguised as standards or taste or “preference.” But underneath, it’s a defense mechanism<\/a>.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to distinguish between healthy shame, which keeps us connected to empathy and conscience<\/a>, and toxic shame that says, \u201cThere\u2019s something wrong with who you are.\u201d<\/p>\n Toxic shame is the spiritual core of internalized homophobia. It\u2019s also why many of us, especially those raised in religious households, become shame-prone. If we were taught our existence was sinful, we learned more than fear of punishment<\/a>. We internalized a belief that we were fundamentally broken, or worse, that we could go to hell. <\/p>\n Coming out doesn’t erase this kind of identity<\/a>-based trauma<\/a>. Unhealed wounds live inside our nervous system<\/a> until we’re willing to meet them with compassion and curiosity rather than avoidance.<\/p>\n As a therapist, I talk with clients about how trauma is passed down generationally. If your father had an addiction<\/a> and it hurt you, it wasn\u2019t your fault. But healing from the pain it caused and how it impacts your life is your responsibility. If we don\u2019t tend to our wounds, we pass them on. The same is true for shame. We may consciously or unconsciously internalize it, but we also have the power to stop passing it on.<\/p>\n For many gay men, our freedom lies in being able to acknowledge how our past still informs our present. Our past lives in our present, and when we choose to transform the present, we make peace with the past.<\/p>\n If I were to ask you where your own sense of worth comes from, whether it’s from an achievement, an external marker of success, or something inherent within you, what would you say?<\/p>\n In my forthcoming book, Becoming Worthy: A Gay Man’s Guide to Healing Shame and Loving Himself<\/em> (Bloomsbury, 2027), I explore all of this, including loneliness<\/a>, religious trauma, body dissatisfaction, and something rarely addressed in books for gay men, our relationship with money.<\/p>\n If any of this resonates, or you have a story of your own you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you. You can find me on Instagram<\/a> at @aroadtriptolove, or subscribe below for future posts. <\/p>\n To find a therapist, please visit the <\/em>Psychology Today Therapy Directory<\/em><\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Not long ago, a friend was traveling and decided to get a haircut at the airport during his layover. He lives in Los Angeles with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":71921,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2611],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-headlines","wpcat-2611-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/71921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Discovering Self-Worth Beyond External Validation <\/h2>\n
Differentiating Between Healthy and Toxic Shame <\/h2>\n
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