Sep 11, 2026 · 33 min · 9 segments
You promised yourself you'd stop. You didn't. And then you took that as proof of something about you. But what if the porn and masturbation weren’t the whole story? What if they were the strategy…
Lisa EthersonGuest
Michelle FishlerHost
I think all of the men that I've spoken to have said that if they were given the choice, if they felt better in themselves, they would always choose porn and sex, which is interesting.
So the idea of performance anxiety, actually, I don't think we have performance anxiety.
And what we're anxious about is the shame that we're going to feel when something goes horribly wrong.
When you say it's the shame anxiety, how would somebody look within themselves to know, hmm, maybe that is what it is?
It would look exactly the same as if someone said you're experiencing performance anxiety.
The difference is that we're not having conversations about shame, but we're having lots of conversations about performance.
People don't want to necessarily think about shame, but actually when you really look at what's going on, that can be a lot more helpful than this idea of performance and needing to be better and bigger.
If we look at, well, actually, what you're fearful of is the feeling that you're going to have, this feeling of devastation, this feeling of failure, this feeling of disappointment, this feeling of, if I do this, I'm going to be abandoned.
And shame is there, if we look at it from a developmental perspective, shame is part of our attachment system.
So what shame does is if we have what I call an attachment injury, this moment of disconnection in childhood between ourselves and our caregiver, shame comes up with that protective response to tell us that we're bad so that we can strive to be good.
So if you think about getting back to the adult relationship and watching porn and masturbation, the idea of the attachment injury that might happen between our adult partner can feel just as devastating as what it does between ourselves as a child and our caregivers.
And I'm very conscious that I haven't given you a very lovely, succinct definition of shame because it's actually really
I think all of the men that I've spoken to have said that if they were given the choice, if they felt better in themselves, they would always choose porn and sex, which is interesting.
So the idea of performance anxiety, actually, I don't think we have performance anxiety.
And what we're anxious about is the shame that we're going to feel when something goes horribly wrong.
When you say it's the shame anxiety, how would somebody look within themselves to know, hmm, maybe that is what it is?
It would look exactly the same as if someone said you're experiencing performance anxiety.
The difference is that we're not having conversations about shame, but we're having lots of conversations about performance.
People don't want to necessarily think about shame, but actually when you really look at what's going on, that can be a lot more helpful than this idea of performance and needing to be better and bigger.
If we look at, well, actually, what you're fearful of is the feeling that you're going to have, this feeling of devastation, this feeling of failure, this feeling of disappointment, this feeling of, if I do this, I'm going to be abandoned.
And shame is there, if we look at it from a developmental perspective, shame is part of our attachment system.
So what shame does is if we have what I call an attachment injury, this moment of disconnection in childhood between ourselves and our caregiver, shame comes up with that protective response to tell us that we're bad so that we can strive to be good.
So if you think about getting back to the adult relationship and watching porn and masturbation, the idea of the attachment injury that might happen between our adult partner can feel just as devastating as what it does between ourselves as a child and our caregivers.
And I'm very conscious that I haven't given you a very lovely, succinct definition of shame because it's actually really
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