Main Points
Religious fundamentalism does not just shame men’s sexuality — it severs them from their bodies, emotions, and inner truth.
For many gay and queer men raised within purity culture, desire was equated with danger, leading to lifelong patterns of self-surveillance and disconnection.
This article explores:
- How religious conditioning literally changes how the body holds stress, suppresses desire, and limits emotional expression.
- The exile from Eros: Why suppressing desire drains vitality, creativity, and intimacy.
- The role of shame: How moral conditioning embeds physiological freeze responses that block connection.
- Somatic recovery: Why healing must involve the body — not ideas alone.
- Australian masculinity: How stoicism, mateship, and faith create a double bind of silence and self-control.
- The return to wholeness: Practical, evidence-informed steps for men reclaiming erotic life through awareness, grief, and embodied presence.
You were never meant to choose between soul and body.
The erotic isn’t the threat — it is the doorway home.
How Religious Trauma Disconnects Men From Their Bodies.
I remember the first time I felt desire. It was a visceral punch—his beauty etched into my cellular memory, a moment I still recall after more than fifty years. In that breathless exhalation, I understood shame and fear. I was just a teenager, and all it took was a glance, a fleeting moment, a dream.
For a young gay man growing up in a fundamentalist Christian environment, this fear had a specific name: lust. It was the great, lurking predator of my soul, and my mind was its hunting ground. So began my exile from my own body, my desires, and the vital, life-giving force the ancients called Eros.
Desire was a test. The body, a battleground. To feel was to fail and allow the Devil a foothold.
This is the quiet devastation many of us carry from fundamentalist systems. We may have left the doctrines behind, but the exile remains — the separation from our own bodies, from desire, and from the simple safety of being at home within ourselves.
If this kind of quiet disconnection feels familiar, I explore it further in The Buried Life of Men.
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” — Audre Lorde.
The Neurobiology of Religious Trauma in Men
Trauma, as pioneering somatic psychologist Peter Levine explains, is not held in memory alone; it lodges in the body, in the nervous system (Levine, 2010).
When fundamentalism declares our desire sinful, it creates what researchers now call religious trauma—psychological and spiritual injury caused by prolonged exposure to coercive belief systems (Winell, 2011).
For LGBTQIA+ individuals raised in conservative religious environments, this trauma often manifests through what Meyer (2003) termed minority stress—the compounding impact of stigma, concealment, and internalised shame. Hollier et al. (2022) found that LGBTQIA+ people in Evangelical settings experienced mischaracterisation, erasure, social distancing, and trauma severe enough to produce PTSD symptoms.
“Fundamentalism doesn’t just shame us—it severs us from our internal world, from impulse, from longing, from love itself.”
Australian data deepen the picture: every participant in a 2016–2021 national study on conversion practices reported significant mental-health harm, with most describing suicidal ideation and ongoing problems in intimacy and spirituality (Jones et al., 2022).
Three recurring themes emerged:
- negative spiritual experiences,
- grief over lost community, and
- damage to spiritual self-concept.
What makes religious trauma different from other forms of psychological harm?
Religious trauma fuses three kinds of wounding — identity dissonance, when who you are collides with who you were told to be; moral injury, the shame that comes from betraying your own values under pressure to obey; and spiritual violation, the deep rupture that occurs when sacred authority is used to control rather than liberate.
These injuries often overlap.
- Identity dissonance shows up as confusion about worth and belonging — you know what feels true inside, but fear losing love or acceptance if you live it.
- Moral injury leaves lingering guilt: the sense that you failed God or family simply by being yourself.
- Spiritual violation cuts deepest — it is the misuse of what was meant to be sacred, leaving the soul wary of trust and tenderness.
Together they form a hidden architecture of exile — men still searching for home inside their own skin. These patterns often sit beneath men’s grief responses, which I explore more deeply in Navigating Male Grief in Australia.
Unlike single-event traumas, it often lacks a clear beginning or end. Robinson & Rubin (2016) refer to it as an insidious trauma—a pattern that frames entire moral worlds, embedding shame as a default belief about worthiness and goodness.
How Shame Alters the Nervous System
Fundamentalist masculinity cultivates what Bradshaw (1988) called toxic shame — a sense that one’s core self is defective and must be hidden to remain acceptable.
This happens because many fundamentalist teachings tie masculine worth to control: control of emotion, control of desire, control of others. A ‘good man’ becomes one who suppresses vulnerability, regulates sexuality, and disciplines his body in the name of holiness.
Over time, this control narrative fractures the individual’s sense of self. Emotion is mistaken for weakness, desire for sin, tenderness for failure. The body — the natural seat of feeling — becomes a source of suspicion.
When a man is rewarded only for mastery and punished for sensitivity, shame becomes a structural issue. It lives beneath behaviour, shaping posture, tone, and even nervous-system response. That is how fundamentalist masculinity breeds toxic shame — not through overt cruelty, but through moral conditioning that equates being human with being wrong.”
Levine’s research suggests that when fight-or-flight responses cannot be initiated, the nervous system enters a state of freeze (Levine, 2010).
For men trained to fear desire, that freeze becomes a chronic condition. Their bodies learn to shut down sensation before consciousness can register it—creating lifelong dissociation.
A practical starting point for noticing these patterns is the 7-Day Inner Compass Guide, which helps men identify where tension, shutdown, or shame shows up in the body.
How does trauma literally get “stored” in the body?
Somatic-sexology research by Thouin-Savard (2021) reveals that unexpressed emotions—shame, guilt, disgust, anger, fear—accumulate as muscular tension and pain, particularly in pelvic tissues.
When trembling and shaking (the body’s natural discharge) are suppressed, the nervous system never receives the signal that the threat has passed. Years later, the body still behaves as if danger is present.
Erotic Disconnection: What Men Lose When Desire is Shamed
The Erotic as Life Force for Men
When I speak of the erotic, I don’t mean just sex. I mean aliveness — the felt sense of being fully present in your body, with nothing to prove and nothing to hide.
Audre Lorde (1978/1984), in her groundbreaking essay Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, defined Eros as “the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony.”
Scholar Caleb Ward (2023) identifies four essential facets of Lorde’s erotic:
- it is about feeling,
- it is a source of knowledge,
- it is power in the face of oppression, and
- it can catalyse action and solidarity across differences.
“Eros is the fire behind art, the courage behind vulnerability, the pulse of intimacy.”
The erotic extends beyond sensuality — it animates the way we cook, create, speak, or serve.
When belief systems tame sexuality, they don’t just control desire — they contaminate the wellspring of life itself. Men become spiritually dehydrated, emotionally stunted, and profoundly alone.
If this sense of being alone resonates, The Grief of Disconnection for Men explores the impact of loneliness and disconnection in men’s lives.
Why is Audre Lorde’s concept of the erotic relevant to men?
While Lorde wrote primarily for women, feminist scholars suggest that men too can reclaim Eros by embracing receptivity, vulnerability, and emotional depth (Rudolph, 2025).
However, traditional notions of masculinity block this access. For men shaped by fundamentalism, the erotic is rarely named sacred — it is feared, repressed, or commodified. In losing that connection, we lose the capacity to feel deeply and meet others authentically.
Mental-Health Impacts of Purity Culture on Men
The psychological toll of religious shame and emotional suppression is both measurable and severe.
Studies show that men exposed to chronic guilt-based or purity-based belief systems exhibit higher rates of anxiety, depressive symptoms, sexual dysfunction, and emotional repression (Leo et al., 2021; Brigden & Hlavka, 2024). These outcomes align with those observed in survivors of other long-term relational traumas, as evidenced by elevated stress markers, reduced heart rate variability, and disrupted sleep regulation (Porges, 2023; Kolacz et al., 2019).
While LGBTQ+ individuals experience additional layers of conflict due to identity incongruence, heterosexual men raised in fundamentalist contexts also display parallel patterns of distress: diminished emotional literacy, relational detachment, compulsive work behaviours, and difficulty with intimacy. These are all recognised by clinicians as expressions of toxic shame and moral injury (Bradshaw, 1988; Seidler et al., 2016).
For queer men, the consequences become even more pronounced. Research on those navigating conflict between faith and sexuality reveals stark outcomes: 68.7% report depressive symptoms and 25% experience suicidal ideation (Subhi & Geelan, 2012). Exposure to sexual orientation change efforts increases suicide risk by 75% and suicide attempts resulting in injury by 88% (Blosnich et al., 2020).
Whether straight or queer, the story is the same: when desire and emotion are shamed, men lose access to the very mechanisms that regulate well-being. The cost is not only spiritual — it is biological, relational, and generational.
“When you disconnect men from Eros, you disconnect them from life itself.”
Patterns of Emotional Shutdown in Men Raised in Fundamentalism
The cost of erotic exile reveals itself in specific, recognisable patterns:
- Emotional flatness: Joy feels dangerous. Play seems frivolous.
- Fear of intimacy: Connection triggers shutdown or performance.
- Loss of erotic agency: Desire becomes intellectual, not embodied.
- Relationship loneliness: Even partnered, men remain unseen.
- Spiritual dislocation: The body is treated as an enemy, not a temple.
“For decades, I lived as a man fluent in theology but estranged from my own skin.”
Therapists note that when Eros is repressed, we lose the very mechanisms that regulate our nervous system and sustain joy (Levine, 2010). The body becomes foreign ground — a site of vigilance instead of belonging.
Somatic Healing Approaches for Religious Trauma
How Somatic Healing Restores Safety in Men
Healing from religious trauma and erotic disconnection is not about achieving perfection — it’s about returning to wholeness.
Dr Laura E. Anderson (2023), a trauma therapist specialising in religious recovery, reminds us that reclaiming sexual pleasure after purity culture starts with understanding how those beliefs live in the body.
Cognitive awareness is only the first layer. Lasting integration requires somatic work that engages the nervous system directly.
Levine’s Somatic Experiencing® (SE) model offers a validated framework for this.
Rather than reliving trauma, SE gently guides the body to complete incomplete survival responses — trembling, sighing, releasing. This physiological reset restores balance and presence (Payne et al., 2015).
What does “somatic healing” actually look like?
Somatic healing works through body sensations and micro-movements, rather than talk. Levine observed that wild animals naturally tremble and shake in response to a threat, releasing stress hormones.
Humans, trained to suppress expression, lose this innate capacity. SE re-teaches the nervous system to release and regulate via small doses — titration, pendulation, and tracking (Payne et al., 2015).
A Mentoring-Based Approach to Healing Religious Trauma in Men
In my mentoring practice, we don’t start by fixing what is wrong — we begin by listening.
We explore the old beliefs that created the split.
We grieve what was lost in the name of purity.
We reframe desire — not as danger, but as a doorway back to the soul.
“Your body is not your enemy. It’s your oldest prayer.”
Together, we create a steady, grounded space for men to reconnect with their bodies.
This isn’t about performance or liberation for its own sake — it is about returning to a relationship with life that feels honest, embodied, and real.
Evidence-Based Practices for Rebuilding Embodied Life
- Name the Split
Journal the specific messages you were taught about sex and purity.
Ask: What parts of me were exiled in the name of holiness?
- Reframe the Erotic as Sacred
Practise sensual rituals: slow breath, mindful touch, sacred bathing.
Speak to your body as an ally. Practise erotic mindfulness (Thouin-Savard, 2021).
- Grieve the Lost Years
Light a candle for the boy who didn’t know his body was good.
Honour the grief without judgment.
- Work With the Body
Explore somatic therapy, trauma-informed yoga, or breathwork.
Listen to where you hold tension — it is often the body’s way of speaking.
- Reclaim Desire Without Shame
Begin voicing your wants without self-criticism.
Practice small acts of permission: I want. I like. I choose.
- Seek Witnessing, Not Correction
Healing happens through being seen, not fixed.
Hollier et al. (2022) show that affirming spaces are central to trauma recovery.
- Reconnect to Myth and Meaning
Revisit sacred texts that celebrate embodiment — Song of Songs, Rumi, Hafiz.
Let poetry become your new liturgy.
“Your soul remembers how to feel. Your body remembers how to pray. You don’t have to keep them apart.”
Many men begin this phase of the work by completing the 7-Day Inner Compass Guide, which offers seven simple reflections to restore clarity and inner footing.
Australian Masculinity and the Double Bind of Silence
In Australia, the intersection of masculinity and religious trauma carries distinct cultural weight. I unpack this cultural pattern further in Navigating Male Grief in Australia, especially the way silence becomes a default coping strategy for many Australian men.
Suicide, Silence, and the Costs of Religious Trauma in Men
- 2,419 men died by suicide in 2023 — 75% of all suicides.
- Men aged 55–59 have the highest rate: 30.9 deaths per 100,000.
- Suicide remains the leading cause of death for males 15–44 (ABS, 2024; AIHW, 2024).
How Masculinity Shapes Men’s Help-Seeking Behaviours
A 2025 longitudinal study of 8,214 Australian men found that rigid emotional control norms significantly increased suicidal ideation, while emotional openness predicted higher help-seeking (Benakovic et al., 2025).
This reinforces what mentors and therapists have long observed — men’s avoidance of vulnerability is often a survival script, not stubbornness.
“In Australian culture, mateship means you never burden your mates.
In fundamentalist culture, desire means you’ve failed God.
Together, those messages create men who are profoundly alone in their pain.”
The Double Bind: Purity Culture Meets Australian Masculinity
Australian masculinity, especially in rural settings, prizes self-reliance and stoicism (Seidler et al., 2016; Alston & Kent, 2008). When combined with religious dogma that condemns desire, this produces a double bind: Men are taught neither to feel nor to name what hurts.
According to Life in Mind (2024), over 21% of Australian males experience mental health or substance-related problems annually, yet help-seeking remains stigmatised as “unmasculine.”
How the Nervous System Interprets Safety: Polyvagal Theory and Religious Trauma
Stephen Porges’s Polyvagal Theory (1994, 2024) gives us the missing map for understanding how religious trauma embeds itself in the body.
The theory describes three central autonomic response states:
- Ventral Vagal Complex (VVC): The social engagement system — facial expression, voice tone, and cardiac regulation for connection and safety
- Sympathetic Nervous System: Mobilises fight-or-flight energy for protection
- Dorsal Vagal Complex: The shutdown system — immobilisation, collapse, dissociation
Faulty Neuroception: When Desire Feels Like Danger
Porges calls our subconscious detection of threat neuroception.
Unlike perception, it happens below awareness — a primitive radar that scans for safety or danger.
For men raised in fundamentalist systems, neuroception becomes distorted. The body learns to treat erotic sensations — desire, arousal, pleasure — as danger signals requiring defence.
The result is what Porges terms faulty neuroception: the nervous system misreads safety as threat.
“The body doesn’t distinguish between the shame of desire and the fear of predators. Both trigger the same defensive cascade.”
Research shows that lower vagal tone (reduced heart-rate variability) is linked to poor emotional regulation and increased stress sensitivity (Hage et al., 2017; Kolacz et al., 2019).
For many men, chronic defence states — hypervigilance or numbness — become the default, cutting them off from connection.
Why does talk therapy often fail with religious trauma?
Polyvagal research shows that when we are stuck in survival states, the higher brain areas responsible for language and reasoning literally go offline. As Porges (2024) notes, trauma sits in “the reptilian brain and the nervous system,” predating language.
Safety must first be restored somatically — through breath, rhythm, voice, and co-regulation — before insight can integrate.
“Healing isn’t about fixing what’s broken. It is about restoring what was always meant to be whole.”
Safety and Collaborative Care for Men Recovering from Religious Trauma
Healing from religious trauma is deep work that demands ethical clarity.
Scope of Practice
Mentoring Through the Maze™ supports men who are functioning day-to-day but navigating significant life transitions, grief, or identity change.
Referral to clinical care is essential when clients present with:
- Active suicidal ideation or recent crisis
- Untreated severe mental-health conditions
- Active substance dependence
- Recent sexual trauma requiring specialised therapy
- Relationship violence or safety risks
Collaborative Model
Many men benefit from parallel supports, including therapy for trauma processing, mentoring for practical rebuilding, and community for belonging. Mentoring serves as the bridge between crisis and renewal — a structured, relational, and time-bound process.
What Becomes Possible When Men Reconnect to Erotic Presence
When men reclaim Eros, transformation becomes both measurable and sacred.
- Reclaimed aliveness: Colour and vitality return.
- Intimacy from truth: Presence replaces performance.
- Sensuality as sacred: Desire becomes devotion, not danger.
- Body as home: Sensation becomes guidance, not threat.
- Embodied spirituality: Wholeness and holiness reunite.
This isn’t about indulgence — it is about soul reclamation.
The Invitation to Return
“The erotic was never the threat. It was always the invitation.”
You were never meant to live split in two — spiritual on one side, human on the other.
You can release the shame that kept you divided. You can let your desire, your grief, and your breath belong in the same body again.
Your capacity for connection hasn’t disappeared. It is still there — quieter, perhaps, but waiting. This is not about chasing pleasure. It is about coming back to presence.
Your body, your soul, your story — they were never meant to be enemies.
If you want a grounded place to begin this work, start with the 7-Day Inner Compass Guide — a seven-step reflection designed to help men return to centre.
Key Takeaways
- Religious trauma embeds shame at the nervous-system level.
- Erotic disconnection is both psychological and physiological.
- Somatic work restores regulation where talk alone cannot.
- Australian masculine norms compound silence and self-exile.
- Reclaiming Eros reconnects men to vitality, presence, and purpose.
Recommended Reading
For further reflection and related themes across men’s grief, embodiment, and identity loss:
From Mentoring Through the Maze™
- Navigating Male Grief in Australia – How men process grief through silence, duty, and identity roles.
- Reclaiming Life After Rejection – Finding inner belonging after exclusion or loss of faith.
- The Buried Life of Men – Why men lose connection to their inner world and how to return.
- The Grief of Disconnection for Men – explores the impact of loneliness and disconnection in men’s lives.
- The 7-Day Inner Compass Guide – A practical self-reflection tool for grounding and realignment.
- Leaving Fundamentalism: Why It Breaks Men Before It Frees Them – explores the impact of leaving fundamentalism on a man’s identity and how to create a new identity grounded in our own truth and values.
External Resources
Levine, P. A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness.
Lorde, A. (1984). Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.
Porges, S. W. (2024). Polyvagal Perspectives: Interventions, Practices, and Strategies.
Anderson, L. E. (2023). Healing from Religious Trauma Includes Reclaiming Sexual Pleasure.
Winell, M. (2011). Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion.
FAQs
Why does religious trauma affect the body so deeply?
Because faith-based shame does not just alter beliefs — it conditions the nervous system. When desire and danger become neurologically linked, the body responds to normal feelings of attraction as if they were threats.
The result is chronic tension, fatigue, and emotional flatness until the system is retrained to feel safe again.
How does the concept of the erotic differ from sexuality?
The erotic, as Audre Lorde described, is not limited to sex. It is the life-force energy that fuels connection, creativity, and a sense of meaning. When men reclaim Eros, they rediscover presence — the ability to feel alive in ordinary acts, such as breathing, cooking, touching, creating, or loving.
What does somatic recovery look like in practical terms?
It begins with awareness — noticing how the body contracts, numbs, or braces against feeling.
Then, through guided or self-led regulation practices (such as breath, grounding, mindful touch, and movement), the nervous system relearns safety.
Over time, sensation and emotion become allies instead of threats.
How can men raised in purity culture rebuild trust in their bodies?
By shifting the focus from control to curiosity.
Start small — sensing breath in the belly, warmth in the chest, the texture of fabric on skin.
Replace moral judgment with attention. In mentoring and somatic work, safety grows through repetition, not revelation.
Can religious trauma and sexuality ever truly be reconciled?
Yes — not by erasing the past, but by integrating it.
When men reframe their spiritual wounds as survival adaptations, shame loses its power.
The goal isn’t to “go back” but to move forward with understanding, where body and soul coexist without hierarchy.
How does Australian masculinity complicate healing from religious trauma?
Australian male culture prizes stoicism and mateship — admirable in moderation but suffocating when linked with purity-based restraint.
For men raised under both codes, emotional expression feels like disloyalty, and sensuality feels like sin. Healing requires re-learning that strength includes openness, not denial.
About the Author
David Kernohan is the founder of Mentoring Through the Maze, a Perth-based practice that supports men aged 35–55 through grief, identity loss, and life transitions.
His work bridges professional insight with lived experience, positioning mentoring as the vital space between crisis support and therapy. This structured, masculine-honouring approach helps men find their centre, rebuild identity, and reconnect with their soul.
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