The war inside: shame, secrecy, and what it’s costing you. I want to write this one carefully. Not because it’s difficult territory for me to hold — this is some of the most important work I do, and I have deep respect for the people who find their way to it — but because I know who reads things like this. I know the man who searches something in an incognito tab at midnight and quickly closes it. I know the person who tells themselves they’re reading this out of general curiosity, or maybe for someone else. I know the man who has already clicked away from three pages because the words were getting too close to something real.

If that’s you — stay. You don’t have to name anything yet. You don’t have to do anything with what you read here. You can just let it land.

What I write below comes from my work — from the men, and the people, who have sat across from me in my practice in Goodwood and online, who have trusted me with some of the most vulnerable and least-spoken parts of their lives. I see patterns in that room that the wider world rarely discusses honestly. It is not a lecture. It is not a diagnosis. It is an honest account of something I witness occasionally — and something that, with the right support, responds remarkably well to care.

What I See in the Room

In my work as a sex therapist and trauma-informed counsellor, I see a particular pattern — and it arrives in many different forms.

He might be in his twenties, newly in a relationship and quietly unsettled by something he cannot name. He might be in his forties, partnered for years, holding a life together that looks from the outside exactly as it should. He might be older, or younger, with children or without, partnered or not, someone who has never touched this territory consciously before or someone who has been circling it quietly for decades. There is no single version of this man, and no single life stage in which this surfaces. What tends to bring him to my door, though, follows a familiar shape — he comes presenting with something that feels adjacent to what is really happening. Low libido. Relationship difficulties. Anxiety without an obvious cause. A vague sense of living at a remove from his own life.

And then — slowly, sometimes in the second session, sometimes much later — something else begins to surface.

He has been engaging sexually or intimately with men. Or he has been aware of an attraction to men — something he feels in his body, or notices in his imagination, or finds himself drawn toward in quiet moments — and has been carrying that awareness with enormous effort for a very long time. Or he simply cannot make sense of feelings he has no words for, and the not-knowing has become its own kind of weight.

He is not — in his own telling — gay. He may not want to be. He may be deeply resistant to any framing that touches that territory. And yet here he is, in a therapy room, because something has stopped working. Something is pressing against the edges of the life he has constructed, and the pressure is becoming impossible to manage quietly.

This is the landscape of internalised shame around attraction to men. And it is far more common than the people living inside it have been led to believe.

A note before we go further: while I write primarily about men in this article — because that is who I most often sit with in this particular territory — this experience is not exclusive to men. People of all genders and identities can carry internalised shame about who they are drawn to, sexually or intimately. If you are reading this and it resonates, regardless of how you identify — this space is for you too.

What Internalised Shame Around Attraction to Men Actually Is

Let’s be precise, because this is often misunderstood.

When sex therapists and sexologist researchers talk about internalised homophobia, they are not simply describing someone who consciously disapproves of same-sex relationships. They are describing something more subtle and more devastating — a process by which a person absorbs the stigmatising attitudes of the culture around them and turns those attitudes on themselves (Shidlo, 1994). It is not a conscious thought of I disapprove of men who are attracted to men. It is something quieter and harder to locate: a private conviction that something is wrong with me. That what I feel is shameful. That a certain part of who I am cannot be allowed to exist.

Herek (2004) describes this as internalised sexual stigma — the absorption of society’s negative evaluation of same-sex attraction into a person’s own sense of self. A man can carry this deeply while simultaneously denying any connection to it. That is not hypocrisy. That is the architecture of shame — and shame, as Brown (2012) makes clear, does not require awareness to operate. It runs underneath. It shapes behaviour, relationships, and self-perception from below the surface, often for decades, without the person ever having a name for what is happening to them.

This is what makes it so hard to reach. You cannot address what you cannot see. And many of the people I work with have been living inside something that has never been named for them — not by their families, not by their culture, and not by themselves.

The World That Built It: Stigma, Silence, and What Gets Internalised

Understanding where this shame comes from requires looking honestly at the world that produced it — because this is never something a person arrives at on their own.

We live in a culture that still carries significant stigma around men who are attracted to other men. That stigma does not always announce itself loudly. Sometimes it does — in explicit hostility, in religious condemnation, in the casual cruelty of a schoolyard slur that goes unchallenged. But often it is quieter than that. It is the absence of representation. The joke that lands and nobody calls out. The silence in a family where certain things simply do not exist. The unspoken understanding that a man’s worth is tied to a particular kind of desire, a particular kind of relationship, a particular kind of life (Connell, 1995).

Attitudes toward men who experience attraction to other men remain a live site of stigma in many communities, families, workplaces, and religious settings — not only in the past, but now. Research consistently demonstrates that sexual minority men continue to face discrimination, social exclusion, and negative evaluation in ways that have measurable and lasting effects on psychological wellbeing (Hatzenbuehler, 2009; Meyer, 2003). When those attitudes are pervasive enough, early enough, and close enough — they do not stay outside. They get in.

Meyer’s minority stress model (2003) describes the unique, chronic stress experienced by people with same-sex attraction — not only from external discrimination, but from the internalisation of stigma itself, from the vigilance of concealment, from the anticipatory dread of being seen and rejected. What this model captures is that this is not the stress of a single event. It is the accumulating weight of living in a world that consistently communicates: this part of you is not acceptable.

Hatzenbuehler (2009) extended this to show how social environments — families, schools, religious institutions, communities — actively shape the internal psychological experiences of sexual minority individuals. When those environments are hostile, or even simply silent, the developing person is left to make sense of their feelings alone. And what they typically make sense of them as is: something is wrong with me.

Something I want to name clearly: this can happen even in relatively accepting families and environments. The assumption that heterosexuality is default — what researchers call heteronormativity — is pervasive enough that almost no one escapes its reach entirely (Connell, 1995). The question is not whether these messages were received. It is how deeply they have been absorbed, and what has been built around them since.

It Doesn’t Have to Mean What You Fear It Means

Before we go further, I want to say something that I think matters enormously — and that does not get said often enough.

Feeling an attraction to men does not mean you are gay. It does not mean your relationship is a lie. It does not mean your identity has to change, your life has to fall apart, or that you are required to do anything at all with what you feel. Attraction exists on a spectrum, and for many people — more than cultural norms would suggest — it is not neatly located at one end or the other.

Bisexuality and other sexualities are real. Attraction that includes more than one gender is real. A man can be genuinely attracted to women and also genuinely attracted to men — not as a confusion or a failure of commitment, but as an honest expression of how he is. Research consistently shows that bisexuality is significantly more prevalent than it is openly identified, particularly among men, for whom the stigma of acknowledging it tends to be highest (Rust, 2002; Vrangalova & Savin-Williams, 2012). The bisexual part of a person’s experience is often the least permitted, least named, and most privately carried — caught between a heterosexual world that cannot accommodate it and a gay community that sometimes does not fully recognise it either.

And even beyond any label — it is okay to simply feel what you feel. A fantasy is not a betrayal. A thought is not a decision. An attraction that you have never acted on, and may never act on, is still a part of you that deserves to be acknowledged rather than buried. Acknowledging it does not commit you to anything. It simply allows you to stop spending enormous energy on suppression — energy that, as we will come to, has been costing you far more than you may realise.

You are allowed to know what you feel without that knowledge requiring immediate action. That is not a contradiction. That is simply being human.

The Part That Knows, and the Part That Cannot Know

One of the most significant things I notice in working with men around internalised shame is how genuinely fragmented the inner experience can be. This is not about dishonesty. It is about survival.

Often, there is a part that knows. A part that has been aware of an attraction to men for a long time — perhaps since adolescence, perhaps further back than that. A part that has noticed, felt, been moved, been drawn. That part is real. It has a history. It carries something genuine.

And there is another part — usually formed early, usually for very good reason — whose entire function is to make sure the first part does not get too close to the surface. A part that learned, in some environment, that this particular attraction was not safe to know. That the cost of knowing it was too high. That the right move — the protective move — was to seal it off, to redirect it, to keep things functioning (Pachankis, 2007).

These two parts can coexist in a single person for decades without ever being brought into the same room as each other. The part that carries the attraction lives quietly in the background. The part that carries the internalised stigma keeps watch at the door. And the man himself — the larger self that contains both — is often exhausted without quite knowing why.

Cass’s (1979) model of sexual identity formation describes this as a nonlinear process involving genuine periods of confusion — states in which a person may be simultaneously aware of same-sex attraction and strongly resistant to any identification with it. What is not allowed to be known cannot be integrated. And what the protecting part is working so hard to prevent from being known is, underneath the defence, simply a part of who this person is.

I sit with men who have maintained this internal arrangement for twenty, thirty years. And what I notice, almost without exception, is a particular quality of exhaustion — the exhaustion of someone who has been holding something apart for a very long time, and whose capacity to keep doing so is beginning to give out.

The Energy Cost of Hiding From Yourself

This is something I want to sit with for a moment, because it is one of the most important things I see in this work — and one of the least talked about.

Keeping a part of yourself hidden takes work. Not dramatic, visible work. The quieter and more constant kind — a low-grade, relentless expenditure of energy that runs in the background of everything a person does. Every moment of vigilance. Every carefully managed response. Every thought redirected before it can become fully formed. Every version of yourself assembled and maintained for a particular context. It adds up, day after day, year after year, in ways that most men have stopped noticing because it has simply become the baseline.

Research on the psychological costs of stigma concealment is consistent on this point: suppressing a significant aspect of identity is not a neutral act (Pachankis, 2007). It demands cognitive resources, emotional regulation, and a level of ongoing self-monitoring that leaves people chronically depleted — less present, less able to access joy, less able to show up fully in their own lives and relationships. Frost and Meyer (2009) found that men who concealed same-sex attraction reported significantly higher levels of psychological distress than those who were able to live more openly — not because openness is without cost, but because concealment extracts its own.

In my practice, this shows up in particular ways. Men who describe a flatness they cannot account for. A tiredness that sleep does not fix. A sense of going through the motions in their own life — present in body, somewhere else in spirit. An inability to fully relax, even in safe contexts, because some part of them is always on guard. A creative or professional life that used to feel alive and now feels hollow. These are not unrelated symptoms. They are, often, the downstream cost of a system working overtime to maintain a division that was never supposed to be permanent.

There is also something more intimate in this cost. The energy that goes into not knowing yourself is energy that cannot go toward knowing the people you love. The part of you that is perpetually busy managing what gets seen is not available for genuine presence. For real intimacy. For the kind of connection that actually nourishes. The hiding does not protect the relationship. It quietly hollows it out, from the inside, over time.

What I want people to hear is this: acknowledging the attraction part — even just privately, even just in this room — does not add to that burden. It begins, very gently, to lift it.

Where the Anger Lives

Here is something I observe with remarkable consistency in this work, and that the research supports clearly: the part that carries internalised shame — when it cannot be felt as shame — tends to surface as anger.

When the pain of carrying an unacknowledged attraction cannot be accessed directly, it gets redirected. Sometimes inward, as depression, self-contempt, or a flat, wordless numbness. Sometimes outward — as hostility toward gay men, toward anything perceived as soft or feminine, toward the very things the person is most frightened of in themselves.

Williamson (2000) describes how internalised shame around same-sex attraction can manifest as explicitly hostile attitudes in men who themselves experience that attraction — a way of relating to the feared desire that requires no acknowledgement. The part that holds the internalised stigma can be fiercely, even aggressively, self-protective in this way. The anger is, in part, a way of not looking.

Adams, Wright and Lohr’s (1996) now-classic study found that men who reported higher levels of homophobia showed significantly greater physiological arousal in response to male homosexual imagery than men who identified as non-homophobic. The disgust and hostility — for many of these men — was arousal in a different register. A way of holding the feeling that the protective part of them had decided could not be named.

At its most harmful, this is where the consequences become serious — for others, not just for the man himself. When anger has no legitimate internal home, when desire has been sufficiently fragmented and disowned, it can find expression in sexual behaviour that is coercive. Behaviour that violates other bodies. Behaviour that causes real harm to real people. This sits at the far end of what unacknowledged desire, shame, and redirected anger can produce — and it deserves to be named honestly, because stepping around it does no one any good. It is not offered here as explanation or excuse. It is offered because the full picture matters, and because understanding how this happens is part of understanding why early, compassionate intervention is so important.

I also see the anger that turns entirely inward — the grinding, quiet self-contempt that follows an unwanted sexual encounter, the shame spiral that drives a man further into isolation, the relentless internal critic running commentary on his own inadequacy. Van der Kolk (2014) writes about how the body stores what the mind cannot yet process. In these men, I see that clearly — a chronic, low-grade activation that the person no longer even registers as distress. It is simply how he feels. It is simply the way things are.

Acting Out: When the Pressure Finds Another Way

This is the part of this work that is hardest to discuss honestly. And for that reason, it is probably the most important. When attraction has been suppressed, shamed, and sealed away for long enough — it finds ways out. Not usually the ways a person would consciously choose. Not usually in ways that align with their values, their self-concept, or the life they have built. But it finds ways regardless.

To illustrate this, consider a fictitious but familiar scenario  — a composite that reflects patterns I see regularly in this work, not any single individual.

Mark is in his mid-thirties. Married, two children, a career he has worked hard to build. He comes to therapy presenting with what he describes as “stress” and a problem he cannot quite put into words. He is articulate, measured, clearly used to managing himself well. It takes several sessions before the edges of what he has actually come about begin to show.

For a number of years, Mark has been seeking out sexual contact with men. Not through any community or connection — anonymously, through apps, in windows of time that leave no trace. A work trip. A late evening. He deletes everything afterwards. Each time, the encounter is followed by a period of intense shame and self-disgust, a firm private resolution that it will not happen again, and — inevitably, within weeks — the beginning of the same cycle. He has never told his wife. He has never, he says, thought of himself as someone who is attracted to men. In his own words, offered quietly in session: it’s like something takes over. I’m not really there. And then afterwards I hate myself.

What Mark is describing is not unusual. It is, in fact, recognisable in pattern across many of the men who find their way to this kind of work — and across a body of clinical and research literature that helps explain why it happens the way it does.

Carnes (2001) describes compulsive sexual behaviour as driven by unmet psychological need and emotional dysregulation — not by desire in any integrated sense, but by the pressure that builds when a part of a person has never been given a legitimate place. The acting-out part is not the whole story. It is the part that found the only exit available.

The research on men who have sex with men (MSM) — a behavioural category that includes many men who do not identify as gay or bisexual — makes the link between concealment, shame, and risk explicit. Stokes and McKirnan (1997) found that men with high levels of internalised stigma were significantly more likely to engage in sexual risk behaviours than those with lower stigma. When intimacy or sexuality must be hidden, it cannot be approached with care. When the part that holds the attraction is operating in secret, there is no conversation about safety, no planning, no capacity to bring real consideration into the encounter (Ross et al., 2013).

Wolitski et al. (2001) found that nondisclosure of same-sex sexual behaviour — rooted in shame and stigma — was directly associated with higher rates of unprotected sex among MSM, with measurable consequences for everyone involved. The men in these situations are not careless. They are people under enormous internal pressure, doing what pressure does — finding the path of least resistance, regardless of cost.

The acting-out behaviour is a signal — pointing toward something that has never been given a legitimate place to exist. But that does not make it without consequence. In relational terms, it carries the weight of dishonesty — a partner who does not know cannot consent, cannot protect themself, cannot make informed choices about their own life. And internally, each cycle of acting out and suppressing deepens the fragmentation — widening the gap between the self a man presents to the world and the self that finds these exits in secret. That gap has its own cost. It erodes integrity quietly, over time, in ways that compound long after any single encounter is forgotten.

Responding to the behaviour with judgment alone — self-directed or otherwise — only drives it further underground. What it is actually calling for is something more difficult and more useful: curiosity about what it is signalling, honesty about the harm it is causing, and the kind of professional support that can hold both without flinching.

When the Body Is There but the Self Is Not: Sex as Dissociation

There is something I have not yet named about the quality of these sexual encounters — and it matters enormously, both clinically and for understanding how a man can genuinely not recognise what is happening to him.

For many of the men I work with, the sexual contact with other men does not feel — in the moment — like desire. It does not feel like connection. It does not feel, in any conscious sense, like a choice. It feels more like a kind of leaving. The body engages. The self goes somewhere else. And afterwards, there is often a sense of returning from somewhere that cannot quite be named — followed swiftly by shame, and a resolve to ensure it never happens again.

What I am describing is dissociation. And for men carrying deep internalised shame around their attraction, it is a far more common feature of these experiences than is generally understood.

Dissociation is the mind’s way of distancing itself from what it cannot bear to be present for (van der Kolk, 2014). It is a well-documented response to trauma and overwhelming shame — a splitting of the self from the body, the present from the felt. And critically, research now shows a direct empirical link between internalised sexual stigma and dissociative symptoms in men. Nardelli et al. (2019), in a study of gay men measuring internalised sexual stigma alongside established dissociation scales, found that dissociative symptomatology was positively associated with internalised stigma across all its dimensions — particularly, and tellingly, the sexuality dimension. The more shame a man carries about his sexuality specifically, the more he tends to split from it.

Jerome et al. (2016), in a study of 711 MSM, found that dissociation related to traumatic stress was independently associated with more frequent and difficult-to-control sexual thoughts and urges — even after accounting for other psychological factors. Dissociation was not incidental to sexual compulsivity in these men. It was one of its primary psychological contexts.

This helps explain something important: the sex is often not serving desire. It is serving numbing. Bancroft and Vukadinovic (2004) describe sexual behaviour as sometimes functioning as a distraction from negative affect — a way of escaping painful internal states rather than moving toward genuine connection. For a man who carries a part that is deeply ashamed of what he feels, sex becomes a way of temporarily dissolving that feeling rather than inhabiting it. Not pleasure. Not intimacy. Relief. An exit from the internal pressure — however briefly, and at whatever cost.

This is why the encounters often carry such a particular emotional signature. Men describe them to me as feeling compelled rather than chosen. Automated rather than intentional. Like watching from a slight distance rather than being fully inside the experience. The part that carries the attraction finds an exit. The rest of the self — the part that has organised an entire identity around not having these feelings — is simply not present for it.

And this dissociative quality does not stay neatly contained in the sexual encounter itself. Research on MSM with histories of trauma has found that dissociation mediates the relationship between traumatic stress and unprotected sexual behaviour — meaning that the same psychological splitting that makes an encounter feel tolerable is the same mechanism that makes careful, self-protective decision-making difficult (Starks et al., 2022). When the self is not fully present, it cannot negotiate. It cannot assess risk. It cannot bring care into the moment. The body is there. The person is not.

What I want to say clearly to anyone who recognises this in themselves: the fact that it felt like it happened to you, rather than something you chose, is not a rationalisation. It may be a very accurate description of your psychological state at the time. That does not mean the behaviour carries no consequences — it does, and those deserve to be taken seriously. But it means that shame and willpower are not the tools for addressing this. They never were. What is actually needed is the careful, patient work of helping the self — all of it — become present enough to make different choices from a different place.

The Part That Doesn’t Know It Knows

One of the most clinically significant features of internalised shame around attraction to men is how completely it can operate outside conscious awareness.

I work with men who have been engaging sexually with men for years — sometimes decades — who have genuinely not connected that behaviour to any sense of attraction or desire. Not because they are being dishonest. Because the part of them that holds the internalised stigma has been working — effectively, faithfully, exhaustingly — to keep that connection from being made.

Pachankis (2007) describes how concealing a stigmatised part of the self produces not just external secrecy but internal fragmentation — a learned capacity to keep separate the things that, if brought together, would require a fundamental revision of a person’s self-concept. This does not feel, from the inside, like deliberate deception. It feels like separate compartments. A part of life that exists somewhere else. That does not connect to the main story. That can be set aside once it is over.

Consider Mark again — the fictitious composite introduced earlier. By the time he came to therapy, he had been living with this pattern for the better part of a decade. And yet when asked, in one of our early sessions, whether he experienced attraction to men, his answer was immediate and certain: no. Absolutely not. The encounters existed somewhere in his inner world, but in a sealed compartment entirely separate from anything he would call desire. He described them — haltingly, with obvious discomfort — as something closer to a compulsion. A malfunction. Static on a line that was otherwise clear. He had constructed an explanation for the behaviour that required no examination of what the behaviour might mean, and that explanation had held, more or less intact, for years.

This is not unusual. It is not denial in the simple sense — as though the truth were sitting in plain sight and being deliberately avoided. It is something more structurally complex: an internal arrangement in which the part that knows and the part that manages have never been allowed to meet.

What these men do not need is confrontation. Telling someone what their behaviour means before the protective part of them has enough safety to hear it does not help. It triggers defences that have been decades in the making. What creates actual movement is the slow, careful building of a space in which it becomes safe enough for the part that knows to begin, gently, to be known. That is work. It cannot be rushed. And it cannot happen without a therapeutic relationship that is genuinely free of judgment, shame and stigma.

The Relationship. The Distance. The Cost to Everyone.

This is where the story reaches the people closest to these men. And it deserves both honesty and great care.

The majority of men navigating this territory are in heterosexual relationships. Their partners, in most cases, know nothing specific — though many describe a persistent, unlocatable sense that something is not quite right. A quality of absence. A distance with no clear source.

Something important needs to be named here — and I want to name it with care, because it is the kind of statement that can land as an attack when it is not intended as one.

A partner who has not been told the truth cannot meaningfully consent to the relationship they are actually in.

That is not a small thing. It carries real consequences — relational, emotional, physical, and sexual. A partner who does not know cannot make informed choices about their own life, their own body, or their own risk.

I recognise that part of you may resist this framing. The part that has worked so hard to hold everything together — to protect the relationship, to keep the damage contained, to ensure that nobody gets hurt — may read the word consent and feel accused rather than understood. That response makes sense. It is worth sitting with, rather than arguing against. Because when that protective part is ready to look honestly at what this is actually pointing toward, what it tends to find is not blame. It finds the real, human cost of a situation that nobody in it chose freely — and the recognition that only honesty has any real chance of changing it.

When a man is engaging in sexual contact with men outside a relationship his partner believes to be monogamous — and when that contact is unprotected — the risk does not stay with him. It reaches the other partner. Research examining STI and HIV transmission has consistently found that women partnered with men who have undisclosed same-sex sexual contact face elevated health risks they have no way of protecting themselves from, because they have not been given accurate information (Dunkle et al., 2010). This is a matter of ethical significance, relational honesty, and real public health concern.

I hold this without judgment of the men involved — because the research on why disclosure is so rare is illuminating. Schrimshaw et al. (2018) conducted in-depth interviews with 203 behaviourally bisexual men who had not disclosed their same-sex behaviour to their female partners, and found that non-disclosure was overwhelmingly driven by anticipated stigma — fear of negative emotional reactions, fear of profound and irreversible changes in their relationships, and the belief that partners, family, and friends held deeply negative attitudes toward same-sex attraction. It was not, as is often assumed, uncertainty about identity. It was the anticipation of loss. For men in this situation, honesty feels like the end of everything. And so they stay silent, and the silence accumulates, and the relationship continues on a foundation neither person fully understands.

But the cost of that silence is not only ethical. It is profoundly personal. Real intimacy — the kind that sustains a relationship over time — requires the capacity to be genuinely known (Johnson, 2008). When a significant part of a person’s inner life is sealed off not just from their partner but from themselves, intimacy becomes performance. Something that looks like connection from the outside and feels, from the inside, like a careful approximation of it. The gap between those two things — maintained over years — is one of the loneliest places I encounter in my work.

I hold enormous compassion for both people in these situations. For the man who has never had a space to understand himself. For the partner carrying confusion and hurt that may not even have a clear source. Both deserve care. Both deserve truth. And that truth — as painful as it is — is where healing has to begin.

The Partner Who Is Also Carrying Something

I want to say something directly to the partner reading this — because sometimes it is the partner who finds their way here first.

If you are with a man and something has felt wrong for longer than you can name, you are not imagining it. That persistent sense of distance. The conversations that never quite reach him. The intimacy that happens and yet leaves you feeling further away. The quiet, accumulating suspicion that you are somehow not enough — or that there is something you cannot see and cannot fix — without knowing what it is. That is a real experience. And it deserves to be taken seriously.

What I see in partners navigating this territory is pain that is often compounded by a particular form of isolation: the feeling that what they are going through does not fit any recognised category of loss. Buxton (2006), one of the foremost researchers on the experiences of heterosexual partners of gay and bisexual men, describes disclosure as typically triggering crises of identity, self-worth, and belief — common responses including shock, self-blame, sexual rejection, and profound isolation, with most partners coping entirely alone. Research consistently finds that partners in this situation receive less support than almost any other group navigating relationship breakdown, in part because the circumstances are so rarely acknowledged or understood (Buxton, 2006).

And here is something I want to name carefully: partners often carry their own internalised stigma about what they find themselves in. The same cultural attitudes about same-sex attraction that shaped their partner’s shame can now feel impossibly close to home. Who do you tell? How do you explain it? What does it mean about your relationship, your desirability, your judgment? The stigma that was always out there — directed at gay and bisexual men, at relationships like this one — is now inside your own story, and it brings with it shame that most partners have no framework for.

The research on women whose husbands’ same-sex attractions emerge describes a particularly painful and common thought: if I had been more, he would not have needed this (Buxton, 2006). That thought is not the truth. It is the internationalised logic of a culture that frames heterosexual desire as something a woman earns or fails to earn — applied, cruelly, to a situation it was never designed to explain. A man’s attraction to men has nothing to do with the adequacy of the woman beside him. Nothing. But in the absence of honest conversation, and in a culture that has little compassionate language for this, self-blame tends to fill the space where understanding should be.

Higgins et al. (2019), in an Australian study of mixed-orientation marriages, describe the stigma these relationships attract from multiple directions — from families, religious communities, and sometimes from both straight and LGBTQ+ communities simultaneously — leaving partners of both orientations feeling that their experience is uniquely unspeakable and uniquely unsupported.

If you are this partner — whether you have had a disclosure, suspect something, or are simply sitting with a feeling you cannot name — you deserve support that is specifically for you. Not support that centres entirely on your partner’s journey, or that asks you to manage your response around his. Support that holds your pain, your confusion, your grief, and your questions as real and worthy in their own right.

I work with partners in this situation, as well as with couples navigating this territory together. You do not have to figure this out alone.

There Are More Options Than You Think

One of the things that keeps people most stuck in this territory is the belief that acknowledging the attraction part means everything falls apart. That there are only two positions available: total concealment, or total upheaval. That is not true. And I think it is important to say so directly.

It is also worth naming something that often goes unspoken: internalised shame around same-sex attraction does not only exist in heterosexual relationships. Men in same-sex relationships can carry it too — sometimes deeply. A man who has built a life with another man may still hold an internalised part that is ashamed of who he is, that absorbed the cultural messaging around same-sex attraction long before he understood it as external rather than true. The relationship context does not inoculate anyone against what was learned long before they arrived in it. This work is relevant across all relationship structures, all orientations, and all the ways people have arranged their intimate lives.

For some people, acknowledgement leads to a different kind of conversation with a partner — one that is honest, and difficult, and that the relationship is ultimately stronger for having had. For some, it leads toward a clearer sense of self — an understanding of bisexuality, or another sexual identity — and a relationship that finds new shape around that truth, sometimes with the same partner, with honesty and renegotiated terms. Ethical non-monogamy — relationship structures built on transparency, consent, and mutual agreement rather than secrecy — is a real option for some couples, and one that allows the attraction part to be acknowledged without the relationship needing to end (Barker & Langdridge, 2010). It is not the right path for everyone. But it exists, and it deserves to be named without shame.

For others, the work is simply about learning to live honestly with a part of themselves that has never had space before — not necessarily changing anything external, but ending the internal war. A person can be genuinely attracted to men, be in a committed relationship of any kind, and choose not to act on that attraction — not from shame or suppression, but from a place of genuine clarity and self-knowledge. That is a fundamentally different experience from hiding. One is a conscious, integrated choice. The other is an exhausting performance with no end in sight.

And for some, the attraction part is something that has only ever lived in fantasy or imagination — never acted on, perhaps never intended to be. That, too, is real and worthy of acknowledgement. A fantasy is not a betrayal. A thought is not a commitment. You do not have to have done anything, or intend to do anything, for what you feel to deserve a place in your own inner life. Acknowledging it simply means you stop spending your energy fighting a part of yourself that is not going anywhere — and start having a different, more honest relationship with it instead.

There is no single right answer here. There are only honest ones.

This Is Not Moral Failure. It Is the Cost of Surviving in a World That Was Not Built for You.

I want to hold the full picture, because it matters.

The men I am describing are not, in the main, bad people doing bad things. They are people who learned — in environments that made it unsafe to be who they were — to survive as best they could. They built lives around what was possible. They suppressed what was not permitted. The protecting part of them did its job, faithfully and at great cost, because at some point that protection was genuinely needed.

Meyer’s minority stress research (2003) is unambiguous: the elevated rates of depression, anxiety, suicidality, substance use, and risk-taking behaviour in people with same-sex attraction are not caused by that attraction. They are the consequence of what society does to people who experience it — particularly when those people have absorbed society’s verdict as their own. Herek et al. (2009) found that internalised sexual stigma was a significant predictor of psychological distress, independent of external discrimination. The part of a man that has turned its own shame against the attraction part can cause more suffering, over a lifetime, than anything that came from outside.

Attraction is simply part of how we’re wired as humans. You’re allowed to notice what you feel, and with the right support you can decide what to do with those feelings in a way that fits your life.

This is a trauma lens. It is the lens I bring to every person who sits with me in this work. Not excusing. Not minimising the impact on others. But understanding — genuinely, clinically, humanly — how a person arrives where they are. Because without that understanding, nothing changes.

What Is Actually Possible

I want to be honest about what healing looks like here, because it is rarely what people expect.

It is not a dramatic revelation. It is not a single session after which everything becomes clear. For people working through internalised shame around same-sex attraction, it is a slow, nonlinear, sometimes tender process of allowing different parts of themselves to be brought into the same room — and discovering, incrementally, that the meeting is survivable. That the attraction part does not need to be feared. That the protecting part can be thanked for its service and gently invited to loosen its grip. That the part carrying the shame did not choose that shame — and that shame is not the truth of who this person is.

It involves grief. For the years spent inside a version of life that could not hold the full picture. For what the concealment has cost — in intimacy, in aliveness, in presence. That grief is real, and it deserves to be felt.

It may involve, eventually, more honest conversations — with a partner, with a trusted person, with oneself. It may involve examining what kind of life is now possible, and what needs to shift for that life to be lived with integrity. For some people, that means significant external change. For others, it means something quieter and more internal — simply coming to know themselves more honestly, and finding that the knowing, by itself, brings relief.

What I can say with confidence — from years of sitting with people in this territory — is that what they find on the other side of internalised shame is not what they feared. It is not the destruction of everything. It is, slowly and imperfectly, the beginning of a relationship with themselves that is honest enough to be the foundation of something real.

I have seen it happen. I know it is possible. And I believe it is worth working toward.

Working With Me

I am a counsellor and sex therapist working from my practice in Goodwood, Adelaide — five minutes from the city — and online for clients across Australia and internationally.

This work — the intersection of attraction, shame, trauma, identity, and relationship — is not something I approach around the edges. It is central to what I do. I do not flinch from this material. I do not judge the people who bring it. I have deep respect for anyone who finds their way to a room where something this significant can finally be looked at with care. Everyone is welcome here —  you do not need to arrive knowing what to say, or what you are, or what any of it means. You just need to show up.

I’ll take it from there.

To book your first session with me, click here.

This article looks at the lived experience of carrying same-sex attraction in silence. If you want to understand what’s happening underneath that silence — the psychology, neuroscience, and relational impact of internalised shame — I’ve written a companion piece that explores internalised homophobia in depth.

For immediate crisis support, please contact Lifeline on 13 11 14, or text 0477 13 11 14. For LGBTQIA+ specific support: Rainbow Door 1800 729 367 (10am–6pm) or QLife 1800 184 527 (3pm–midnight). If your mental health emergency is life-threatening, call 000.

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