Your Shame Thinks It’s Keeping You Safe
Why gay men mistake self-attack for self-protection
The promotion came through on a Tuesday.
Not the “we’ll see” kind. The actual thing. More money. Better title. My boss used words like “exceptional” and “well-deserved.” I thanked him. Smiled. Said the right things.
Then I walked back to my desk and my brain started its work.
They’ll realize they made a mistake. Someone will notice I’m not actually that good. This just means higher expectations I can’t meet. More visibility. More chances to mess it up. I’ll disappoint them and prove I never deserved this in the first place.
Ten minutes. That’s how long the good feeling lasted before shame showed up doing what it does best: running predictions.
Not celebrating my win. Calculating all the ways it would get taken away.
Gay men are brilliant at this particular math. We learned early that good things come with conditions, that acceptance has expiration dates, that showing up fully gets you erased. So shame embedded itself as our forecasting system, always running simulations of rejection before rejection arrives.
We call it being realistic. Shame calls it job security.
Prediction Disguised as Protection
Here’s what shame does that makes it so hard to recognize: it arrives before the threat.
You’re not processing what happened. You’re bracing for what you’re convinced is coming next. The criticism. The abandonment. The moment when whoever’s treating you well finally sees clearly and leaves.
A friend’s text takes three hours to arrive. Shame doesn’t wait. It builds the entire case: He’s pulling away. He’s realized I’m annoying. I texted too much. This is how it starts. Your chest tightens. You scroll back, hunting for the line where you supposedly asked for too much. Never mind that maybe he was just in a meeting. Shame refuses the boring explanation.
The thing is? Sometimes shame’s predictions come true. Not because shame is psychic. But because when you treat every interaction like it’s already doomed, you make it harder for people to stay.
When Self-Criticism Sounds Like Self-Awareness
I watch gay men describe themselves with surgical precision and complete contempt. Listing flaws like they’re reading from a medical chart. Offering preemptive disclaimers about their bodies, their personalities, their worth.
“I know I’m difficult.”“I realize I’m not everyone’s type.”“I probably talk too much.”“My anxiety makes me exhausting to be around.”
They frame it as honesty. Self-awareness. Keeping it real.
It’s not.
It’s shame doing advance work so rejection hurts less when it arrives. The way a compliment feels like a setup, like the opening scene of a queer movie where you already know the sweetness won’t last.
The logic goes: If I name my flaws first, if I beat you to the criticism, if I make myself small enough, maybe I’ll seem less threatening. Maybe you’ll keep me around. Maybe I won’t be blindsided when you leave.
Except the shrinking becomes its own rejection. You do the work of erasure so efficiently that people don’t have to. You perform your own disappearance.
One person I worked with called it “rejecting myself before anyone else gets the chance.” He’d been doing it so long he forgot there was an alternative. His self-criticism felt like integrity. Like seeing himself clearly.
Of course he believed that. How else could he survive himself?
I asked him: If your best friend talked about himself the way you talk about yourself, what would you tell him?
He went quiet. Then: “I’d tell him he’s being cruel for no reason.”
Right. Shame convinces you that cruelty aimed inward is just clear-eyed assessment.
Guilt Makes Amends. Shame Just Bleeds.
There’s a difference worth naming here.
Guilt says: I did something wrong. Shame says: I am something wrong.
Guilt can be resolved. You apologize. You repair. You learn. You move forward.
Shame doesn’t have a resolution. It’s not about action. It’s about existence. You can’t apologize your way out of shame because shame isn’t about what you did. It’s about what you are.
This is why shame shows up in weird places. You’re not even doing anything wrong. You’re just existing as yourself, and shame arrives anyway, whispering that your presence is the problem. The way your throat tightens when someone says your name with too much warmth. Like you don’t deserve the kindness in their voice.
Even the way you move through a room starts to feel like a problem.
For gay men, this gets learned early and embedded deep. You didn’t do anything. You just were. And that was enough to make people uncomfortable, angry, violent. So shame decided your job was to continuously predict and prevent that discomfort.
By the time you’re an adult, you don’t even register it as shame anymore. It’s just... you. Your internal monologue. Your realistic assessment. Your helpful inner voice keeping you from getting too cocky, too comfortable, too visible.
Except helpful voices don’t leave you hollow. Helpful voices don’t make you dread success. Helpful voices don’t convince you that people only tolerate you temporarily.
⚡ Body Check
Close your eyes. Where do you feel shame making its predictions right now? Is it the pressure behind your temples, calculating threats? The tightness in your fingertips, ready to pull back? That metallic taste on the roof of your mouth when you’re bracing for impact? That’s not intuition. That’s your nervous system stuck in forecast mode.
Compassion Feels Naive When Shame Feels Wise
Here’s the trap: shame’s been protecting you so long that self-compassion feels dangerous.
When I suggest to someone that maybe they could speak to themselves with less contempt, the response is almost always: “But I need to stay realistic. If I’m too easy on myself, I’ll get lazy. Complacent. I’ll stop trying.”
Translation: If I don’t keep predicting disaster, disaster will catch me off guard.
That’s the contract shame writes for you.
Shame has convinced you that its forecasts are keeping you safe. That the constant self-monitoring, the preemptive self-rejection, the treating yourself like a problem to be managed are all strategies preventing worse pain later.
But what if shame’s predictions aren’t protecting you? What if they’re just draining you?
Watch what happens in your body when you try gentle self-talk. When you attempt treating yourself with the grace you’d extend a friend. There’s often this immediate resistance. This sense of: That’s not realistic. That’s delusional. That’s setting myself up for disappointment.
That resistance? That’s shame defending its territory. Shame knows that if you stop believing its forecasts, its power weakens. So it frames compassion as stupidity. Kindness as weakness. Self-acceptance as dangerous naivete.
The Difference Between Wisdom and Fortune-Telling
Real assessment of risk is useful. Reading situations accurately, recognizing patterns, protecting yourself when threats are genuine. That’s wisdom.
Shame doesn’t do that. Shame invents catastrophes, then insists you’re the only one smart enough to see them coming.
Real risk assessment: This person has shown they’re unreliable. I’ll proceed with caution.
Shame’s forecast: This person seems nice now but everyone eventually leaves so I should prepare for that inevitability and maybe distance myself first.
See the difference? One responds to evidence. The other responds to possibility. One protects you from documented threats. The other protects you from imagined future pain by creating actual present pain.
Resilience isn’t about removing shame entirely. It’s about learning to recognize when shame is making predictions based on old data. When it’s running simulations that no longer match your current life.
That promotion? Maybe you earned it. Maybe your boss meant what he said. Maybe you’re allowed to feel proud without immediately predicting its revocation.
That text from your friend? Maybe he was just busy. Maybe not everything is evidence of abandonment in progress. Maybe people can love you without you having to shrink yourself into something that doesn’t threaten them.
What We Mistake for Resilience
The gay men who seem most resilient are often the ones whose shame is working overtime.
They’re not falling apart. They’re high-functioning. Successful. Put-together. They manage their shame so efficiently that it looks like strength.
But it’s costing them. In the energy required to continuously predict and prevent rejection. In relationships kept at arm’s length because intimacy means risk. In achievements that feel hollow because shame immediately discounts them.
Real resilience isn’t shame operating smoothly. It’s shame losing its grip on your ribs.
It’s the moment when good news lands and you let it land. When someone compliments you and you don’t immediately build the case for why they’re wrong. When you make a mistake and respond with “I’ll do better” instead of “See? Proof I’m fundamentally defective.”
That’s not naive. That’s trusting present evidence more than shame’s catastrophic forecasts.
Some days you won’t manage it. Shame’s voice will be louder, more convincing, more insistent that it’s the only thing standing between you and devastation. Those days, maybe the best you can do is notice. Oh. Shame’s doing its weather prediction thing again. Running those disaster simulations.
You don’t have to believe it. You can let it run its program while you make choices based on what’s actually happening rather than what shame says is inevitable.
That’s the work. Not eliminating shame. Recognizing it. Not letting its forecasts dictate your present. Trusting that you can handle actual rejection if it comes without needing to reject yourself first as preparation.
Maybe shame will still whisper its forecasts tomorrow morning when you walk into your new office with your new title. Maybe it’ll run the same ten-minute loop: excitement, then prediction, then dread.
But maybe, this time, you let yourself have fifteen minutes before you believe it.
Where is shame predicting disaster right now in your life? What would shift if you treated that prediction as one possibility rather than an inevitability?
Until next week,
Gino 💙
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All client examples in this piece are composites drawn from years of clinical work with gay men. Details have been altered to protect confidentiality. No single story represents an individual person.
This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not replace therapy, diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.
When I figured out that I am not my thoughts, that I don’t have to believe everything I think… it gave me distance and perspective, and everything became a choice of narratives. 💕
Making room for shame became a daily ritual through my teenage life as I realised more and more that who I am is at odds with the grip of religious and familial expectation. I was so busy with reciting scripture that promised "healing" from my gayness I didn't see the insidiousness of shame taking residence in my jaw, my neck, my spine.