by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
Fixating On Having a Small Penis Only Holds You Back from Your REAL Life
In this article we’re going to talk about something that many men worry about but very few feel comfortable discussing openly: the size of their penis.
This is a little different from the majority of articles on this site but I’m writing it after working with a few guys recently who’ve shared how their limiting beliefs about the size of their penis have held them back in life – often even in situations that have absolutely nothing to do with sex.
This is because the underlying problem isn’t the size of the guy’s penis in itself but the shame that distorts their relationship with this and what it ‘means’ about their place and value in the world.
One of the worst things about shame is that it doesn’t respect your boundaries:
It follows you into the bedroom, the gym, the workplace, your relationships, and even the way you walk down the street until – before you know it – something that should be just one relatively insignificant aspect of your physical existence has become a source of anxiety that seems to colour everything that you experience.
For some men, this might just be an occasional insecurity – for example, they might wish they were bigger, feel self-conscious from time to time, or worry about what a sexual partner might think…for others, though, these fears and doubts about penis size can becomes much more consuming.
When this happens, their racing thoughts become persistent, their behaviour starts revolving around the (mis)perceived problem, and they may avoid relationships, intimacy, or even everyday situations like going to the gym or the swimming pool because of what they believe their body says about them.
There’s a term used to describe a severe preoccupation with penis size and that’s Penile dysmorphic disorder (PDD) and clinically significant cases can fall within the broader diagnosis of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) which involves a persistent distressing preoccupation with perceived physical ‘flaws’.
The important point to note before we get into the nitty-gritty of all this is that we’re talking about a spectrum with ordinary insecurity at one end and potentially debilitating distress at the other – whatever your experience, though, I want to explore this issue through the lens of REALNESS which means looking at how we can embrace reality and acceptance to deal with this wherever you might find yourself on this spectrum (assuming you’re on it which is what I’m doing seeing as you landed on this page).
The aim isn’t to convince you that penis size never matters to anybody or that you should magically stop caring about something that genuinely bothers you but to help you understand where these beliefs come from, question the ‘meaning’ you’ve attached to them, and help you to start developing a healthier relationship with yourself and life.
At the end of the day, you’re considerably more than just one part of your body and it’s time you started living like it.
Let’s dig a little deeper:

Where Does Penis-Size Insecurity Come From?
Before we get too deep into all this, it’s really worth asking a fundamental question which is:
Where does this problem actually begin in the first place?
The simplest answer is that, in many cases, it starts OUTSIDE-IN which simply means that something in the external world gives you an idea about how you ‘should’ look and you then use that idea to judge yourself.
For example:
- Perhaps you see other boys in the changing rooms as a teenager and start comparing yourself to them.
- Perhaps you watch pornography and see performers with freakishly large penises which leads you to assume that what you’re watching represents the ‘norm’.
- Perhaps you absorb cultural narratives about women preferring bigger penises or hear people making jokes about men who don’t measure up and the internalise this as a standard against yourself.
- Etc. etc. etc.
Whatever the original trigger may be, the process often folds in the same recognisable pattern:
1. The Trigger: You encounter a standard that makes you question your penis size.
2. The Interpretation: You decide that being smaller than this standard means you’re inadequate or not as valuable in some way.
3. The Reinforcement: You start comparing yourself with other men, checking or measuring your penis obsessively, seeking reassurance, avoiding intimacy, or withdrawing from situations where you fear being judged.
4. The Underlying Vulnerability: If you’ve already picked up shame somewhere along the line (which most of us do in childhood) then the judgement feels like confirmation of something you secretly fear about yourself: that you’re not good enough as you are.
The important thing to pay attention to here is that that the original trigger and the underlying vulnerability aren’t necessarily the same thing (in other words, if you already have a degree of underlying toxic shame that’s hard to handle then the original trigger will make things seem even worse than they actually are).
In other words, seeing a man with a larger penis might prompt a natural sort of comparison but it doesn’t automatically mean you’ll feel inferior – it’s the SHAME that makes the comparison become much more powerful when you interpret the difference as evidence that something is ‘wrong’ with you (which is what shame is already telling you).
To make matters worse for yourself, once you start behaving as though the (mis)perceived flaw is some kind of a threat to your happiness and ability to feel ‘safe’ within yourself and your own life life, then you can inadvertently reinforce the belief that there’s something to actually be worried about (because you start acting in an unreal way which eventually gets you unreal results from life which you interpret as more ‘evidence’ that there actually is something wrong with you).
In other words, this new obsession with having a small penis affects the way that you behave and distracts you from your actual life and reinforces your negative beliefs that keep you from it in the first place:
- You avoid intimacy so you never get the opportunity to discover that a partner might accept you exactly as you are.
- You repeatedly measure yourself and so you keep your attention fixed on the very thing you’re trying to stop worrying about.
- You seek reassurance and feel better briefly only to find yourself needing reassurance all over again (because you’re only dealing with the symptoms of your emotional problem and not the fundamental problem which is a lack of acceptance of yourself).
The end result is that your mind becomes trapped in a loop that you can’t get out of but it’s not your ‘small’ penis that’s really bothering you:
The meaning you’ve attached to having a ‘small’ penis is the actual source of your problem(s).
The truth of the matter is that if you’d never encountered these external comparisons or picked up the idea that penis size somehow determines something important about your worth as a human being then you’d be way more likely to accept your body as it is (not the kind of ‘acceptance’ that becomes an excuse but just an acceptance of where you actually stand in reality so you can stand on that foundation and keep building something REAL).
If you didn’t have a distorted view of things then your penis would be just like any other part of your body – i.e. just another ‘part’ of the whole package that makes you whatever it is that you are. The problem begins when you turn a physical characteristic into a verdict on your identity or self-image and this is where we need to talk about shame.
Shame: The Real Problem Beneath the Surface
In the context of REALNESS, shame is the belief that “I’m not good enough as I am“:
It’s arises because of a disconnection from the truth because you picked up judgement instead of acceptance and so instead of embracing the whole of yourself as a human being with strengths, weaknesses, limitations and possibilities, you start treating your existence as something that needs to be justified because you think that some fragments of your wholeness are more important than they really are (for whatever reason).
Shame essentially makes you believe that you have to become something else before you’re allowed to feel ‘good’ about being yourself which just leads to an endless state of inner friction in the Void.
Most of us develop shame-driven beliefs about ourselves (and our bodies) during adolescence which is when we’re particularly vulnerable to comparison and desperate to understand where we ‘fit’ into the world:
If you’ve already picked up shame through family dynamics, bullying, rejection, or other difficult formative experiences then you’re more likely to interpret differences between yourself and others as evidence that there’s something ‘wrong’ with you and this reinforces the disconnection from your real self that shame has left you with.
In relation to what we’re talking about in this article, penis size can then become a convenient target for existing shame because it allows the mind (in the service of the ego) to find ‘evidence’ that we’re truly not “good enough as we are” (which is what the shame has been trying to convince us of.
Shame isn’t an accurate assessment of reality, though, because it’s a disconnection from the truth and therefore actually a DISTORTION of reality:
The literal size of your penis might be a physical fact that can be measured or whatever but the conclusion that this somehow makes you fundamentally inadequate or worth ‘less‘ than others overall is just an interpretation.
Your problems around your penis size aren’t caused by the ‘fact’ but because you started believing the interpretations that you added to the facts because of your underlying shame and this is why it’s possible for people to spend years trying to compensate for something that was never proof of their inadequacy in the first place.
The INTERPRETATION of what your penis size ‘means’ is what causes you to perhaps avoid intimacy, obsessively measure yourself, seek reassurance, or withdraw from relationships before anybody has the opportunity to reject you – it may even cause you to carry insecurity into situations where your penis has absolutely no relevance whatsoever.
That’s how powerful an unexamined belief can become – especially when you treat unreal interpretations of reality as the final word about you as a whole.
The Absurdity of Penis Size (When You Take Away the Stories)
Here’s a thought experiment to show you how these interpretations can actually be pretty absurd:
Imagine you lived in a world where people didn’t care about penis size in any way, shape, or form – instead, society had decided that the size of your nose is what determines your masculinity, attractiveness, and general value as a human being:
In the back of the newspaper or in some of the darker corners of the internet, you stumble across adverts promoting nose enlargement, you go to the gym and have to listen to other men comparing nose sizes in the changing rooms; pornography now features men with enormous noses blowing fiercely into handkerchief and people make jokes on TV shows and in movies about men with “micro-noses” who can’t quite measure up.
In this world, you’d have millions of men walking around feeling inadequate because their noses weren’t big enough and they’d picked up the external standard that this somehow ‘means’ something:
Some would avoid relationships, others would spend their lives obsessing over their measurements, many would believe they couldn’t be confident, successful, or genuinely masculine until they’d somehow ‘fixed’ their noses, and everybody would accept this as perfectly reasonable because the entire culture had agreed that noses were incredibly important.
Would this cultural agreement mean that noses actually were the defining characteristic of a man?
Nope.
Although it might seem absurd, the same basic mechanism is operating when you become consumed by penis size:
The body part changes in our imaginary world but the structure of the problem remains the same:
An external standard becomes an internal judgement and that judgement becomes a source of suffering.
I should probably point out that penis size and nose size aren’t identical in every respect because sex has a particular significance in human relationships and anatomy can definitely influence sexual experiences:
The point, though, is that the ‘meaning’ you attach to a physical characteristic isn’t the same thing as the characteristic itself and your penis is just a part of your body as a whole – not a measurement of your soul, your masculinity, your potential or your value in the world.
The stories surrounding it aren’t the same as the truth itself and – once once you start separating the two – then you create room to breathe and get some real perspective.
But Doesn’t Penis Size Matter?
If we want to be real about all this then we need to be honest so let’s say a few things that need to be said:
The truth is that some people absolutely do have preferences regarding penis size which means that a larger penis may be desirable to certain partners and size can influence particular sexual experiences.
Also true, though, is that a larger penis isn’t automatically better for everybody and so size alone doesn’t determine sexual satisfaction (a related thought here is that just not everybody is compatible around personality types, not everybody is compatible to the body types and features they’re attracted to etc.).
No matter how ‘big’ or ‘small’ a man’s penis there are all kinds of other factors like comfort, communication, arousal, compatibility, emotional connection, and understanding what a partner enjoys that can all make a difference when it comes to having a successful relationship (or fling or whatever it is that people are up to).
There are also many ways to give and receive sexual pleasure that don’t depend on penetration or penis size in any way, shape, or form.
Finally, from a reproductive perspective, a smaller-than-average penis can still function perfectly well and so penis size alone doesn’t determine fertility.
So, yeah, there may be advantages or disadvantages associated with different physical characteristics in particular contexts but here’s where we need to distinguish between something ‘GOOD’ and something ‘ULTIMATE’:
In this context many of the ‘good’ things in life are desirable, useful or advantageous but if we treat them as the ‘ULTIMATE’ thing then we end up misperceiving whatever it is as somehow becoming the thing determines that quality of our lives above everything else.
Treating ‘good’ things (like sex, money, power, or whatever else) as being ULTIAMTE is one of the most common mistakes people make in life because it causes them to take something that might be very ‘good’ indeed but then turn it into something they believe they absolutely MUST have to be happy, accepted or complete.
When that happens, they create unnecessary friction between themselves and reality which means that – instead of working with the life they actually have – they end up resenting their lives based on the type of life they imagine they should have.
A big penis might be something you’d prefer to have and you could sure make it’s a ‘good’ thing to have in the world we live in but it’s still NOT the ultimate thing that determines whether you can have a meaningful relationship, enjoy sex, build something worthwhile, or feel at home in your own skin.
The only real ultimate is your relationship with life itself and so the ultimate question, from the perspective of REALNESS, is this:
“What kind of relationship are you building with life itself?“
At the end of the day, nothing can stop you from cultivating a healthier, more truthful, and more fulfilling relationship with life regardless of your penis size.
In fact, you could have one of the biggest penises ever known and still be miserable if you’re disconnected from yourself, dependent on external approval, and constantly searching for the next thing that will finally make you feel ‘good’ enough.
The problem isn’t necessarily what you have or don’t have – it’s what you believe having or not having it ‘means’.
Would a Great Man Still Be Great If He Had a Small Penis?
Here’s another thought experiment that can help here:
Think about a man you genuinely admire – perhaps he’s a great leader, a warrior, an artist, an entrepreneur, or somebody who’s overcome extraordinary adversity.
Now, imagine that this particular man has achieved everything you admire him for but you somehow discovered that he had a small penis the whole time.
Would it suddenly invalidate everything he’d achieved? Would his courage disappear?
Would his integrity evaporate? Would his contribution to the world become meaningless?
I’m pretty confident we can file that away as “Absolutely not”.
Now, I suppose you could argue argue that he’d never have developed the confidence to achieve those things if he’d been insecure about his penis – perhaps, but notice that this argument still makes penis size the ultimate factor and assumes that a particular insecurity must determine the entire direction of somebody’s life when it doesn’t.
People can develop confidence while carrying insecurities all the time because confidence isn’t about ‘thinking’ your way into feeling good but about training yourself to take ACTION.
This is why people can pursue meaningful goals without feeling ‘perfect’ and can learn to stop allowing one perceived limitation to dictate what they believe is possible overall (again: any time you treat a good thing as the ultimate or a little ‘part’ as the whole then it just leads to misery).
Eventually, as long as they keep moving forward and learning by doing then they can discover that the things they once thought disqualified them from life were never disqualifications at all – they were just outdated beliefs picked up from the outside-in.
Here’s a more personal version of the above thought experiment:
“What would I still respect about myself if I stopped using penis size as a measure of my worth?“
- What personal qualities that you’re genuinely proud of would remain?
- What have you already overcome in life?
- What do the people who genuinely care about you value about who you really are?
- What could you contribute to the world if you weren’t spending so much energy worrying about this one thing?
Don’t turn this into another exercise in trying to prove that you’re secretly brilliant or something like that (even though you might be) – simply use it as a way of recognising and ACCEPTING that your identity is much bigger than the characteristic you’ve been fixating on.
A man isn’t ‘great’ because he has the perfect body but because of how he lives, his personal qualities and values, how he treats people, what he contributes, and the degree to which he embodies his real values.
Your penis is one thing about you – not the whole of you who you are and what makes you REAL.
What Are You Really Looking For?
Let’s go a little deeper and see what might really going on beneath the hood:
If you believe you need a bigger penis, ask yourself why – as in, literally, what do you imagine having one would give you?
For example:
- Perhaps you’d feel more attractive.
- Perhaps you’d worry less about being rejected.
- Perhaps you’d feel more masculine, more sexually capable or more confident approaching women.
- Perhaps you imagine you’d finally be able to relax because you wouldn’t have to wonder whether somebody was judging you.
- Etc. etc. etc.
These are understandable desires and there’s definitely nothing ‘wrong’ wanting and need intimacy, acceptance, confidence or enjoyable sex but look carefully at what’s happening
You might not actually be seeking a different physical characteristic as much as you’re seeking something you believe that characteristic will ‘win‘ for you from other people.
Sometimes, there are things that we feel tempted to chase when we believe we need external validation to feel whole like approval, appreciation, validation, being ‘seen’, or [anything else you can think of] and a lot of the time this is what people are truly seeking when they wish they had a bigger penis.
One of the problems with this approach to things is that if you make your self-acceptance dependent on other people’s reactions then you’ll always be vulnerable to the next judgement, comparison or perceived rejection.
This problem will remain if you suddenly change the thing you’re insecure about (getting a bigger penis, in this case) because the underlying pattern of unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ will just move onto the next ‘thing’:
Today it’s your penis but tomorrow it’s your height, your hair, your bank balance, or the fact that some bloke on Instagram appears to have a better life than you – in other words, the target of your focus and fixation changes but the underlying shame (disconnection from your real self) remains.
All of this brings us to another useful question to ask yourself which is this:
“What need am I trying to meet through the belief that I need a bigger penis?”
This need could be anything but here are some examples:
- If the answer is confidence then start exploring what confidence looks like in your actual life and then acting accordingly.
- If it’s intimacy then learn to build intimacy over time by getting out of your comfort zone.
- If it’s acceptance then practise accepting yourself first and foremost so you can develop relationships in which acceptance can grow.
- If it’s sexual satisfaction then learn about sex, communication and your partner’s preferences rather than assuming that one measurement determines everything.
- Etc. etc. etc.
You don’t have to pretend your desires don’t exist but you do need to stop making your relationship with yourself dependent on fulfilling them in one particular way.
That’s how you free yourself from being in the prison of ‘Small Penis Syndrome’ (which is really just the collective symptoms of thinking penis size ‘means’ something that it never can).

If you want to understand yourself and start developing unconditional self-acceptance then check out my controversial book: Shadow Life: Freedom From Bullshit in an Unreal World
The AAA Model: Three Steps Towards Realness
You can start changing your relationship with yourself when it comes to all this ‘stuff’ by using the AAA model I use in my coaching containers with clients: Awareness, Acceptance and Action.
These three stages give you a practical way to begin dismantling the beliefs that have been running your life and holding you back from your own realness.
1. Awareness: Deconstruct the Ego
The first step is to become aware of the stories you’re telling yourself:
Your ego, in this context, is the collection of beliefs, identities, and reactive defensive strategies you’ve developed to try to feel safe, significant, and acceptable despite whatever unresolved shame, guilt, and/or trauma you’re dealing with (the Unholy Trinity).
When your ego tells you that your penis somehow makes you inadequate then don’t automatically accept that judgement as the truth and train yourself to start questioning it.
Try this exercise:
Take a piece of paper and complete the following sentences:
- I believe having a small penis means that I am…
- I imagine women will think…
- I’m afraid that other men will…
- If I accepted my body as it is, I worry that…
- I believe having a bigger penis would finally allow me to…
- The first time I remember worrying about my penis size was…
- When I compare myself with other men, I usually…
- When I feel insecure, I try to make myself feel better by…
Don’t censor your answers and just be real with yourself (obviously, you don’t have to share what you write with anybody else unless you choose to) and you might uncover fears about rejection, humiliation, masculinity, intimacy or being seen as less valuable than other men.
Then ask yourself another question:
“Where did I learn to believe all this?“
Was it pornography? Bullying? A comment somebody made years ago? An assumption you’ve never properly questioned?
Next, identify which part of the four-stage pattern of Trigger, Interpretation, Reinforcement, and Underlying Vulnerability you’re caught in:
Are you responding to a trigger? Treating a comparison as proof of inadequacy? Reinforcing the belief through constantly judging yourself or through some kind of avoidance? Discovering that an older sense of shame is giving the whole thing its emotional charge?
Finally, separate observable facts from the interpretations you’ve attached to them – for example, “My penis is smaller than the average reported measurement” is a factual claim that can be assessed but “Therefore, I’m inadequate as a man” is a judgement that doesn’t logically follow.
You don’t have to believe every thought that enters your head and Awareness gives you the opportunity to stop treating an old and unreal story as an unquestionable truth.
2. Acceptance: Integrate the Shadow
Acceptance doesn’t mean pretending you’re thrilled about every aspect of your body if you’re not – it just means allowing reality to be what it is without turning it into a reason to reject yourself.
The shadow self contains the aspects of ourselves we struggle to acknowledge or accept which, in this case, might include your fear of being sexually inadequate, your desire to be admired, your envy of other men, or your vulnerability around rejection in general (or a whole bunch of other things – again, we’re all different even if the fundamental principles are the same).
The way forward and into realness is always to give up trying to suppress these feelings and to bring them into the light – for example, you might say to yourself:
“I’m afraid somebody will judge me. I want to be attractive. I don’t want to feel inadequate and I’m struggling to accept this part of my body”,
Notice that you can acknowledge and the accept all of these things without concluding that there’s something fundamentally ‘wrong’ with you.
You can have an insecurity without becoming the insecurity.
Try this exercise:
Write a short letter to the part of yourself that feels ashamed of your penis.
Don’t lecture it or tell it to stop being ridiculous – just treat it as a ‘part’ of you that’s been trying, however unhelpfully, to protect you from rejection or some other difficult emotion you fear facing.
Acknowledge what it’s afraid of, recognise how much energy you’ve spent trying to avoid humiliation, and then remind yourself that you don’t need to achieve perfection to deserve intimacy, respect, or to live a meaningful life.
Acceptance begins when you stop making your right to exist comfortably in your own skin conditional on becoming somebody else or having something that you can’t have.
3. Action: Trust Yourself and Life
Awareness helps you see through the story, Acceptance helps you stop fighting yourself and life, and Action allows you to build a life that isn’t organised around your insecurity (which is great new because if you put real in then you’re most likely to get real out).
This is where you start doing things differently and making actual behavioural changes:
- If you’ve been avoiding intimacy then it’s time to begin working towards relationships built on honesty, mutuality, and genuine connection.
You don’t have to rush into situations that overwhelm you but you can start taking manageable steps rather than allowing fear to make every decision. - If you’re constantly comparing yourself with men in pornography then it’s time to reconsider how much time you spend consuming material that reinforces unrealistic expectations and makes you miserable.
- If you’re repeatedly measuring your penis or asking for reassurance then it’s time to notice whether these behaviours actually settle your anxiety or simply keep it unnecessarily alive.
- If you’ve been postponing meaningful goals because you don’t feel confident enough then it’s time to ask yourself what one practical step you could take today.
Start taking it.
Try this exercise:
Identify one thing you’ve been avoiding because of your penis-size insecurity – for example, dating, initiating a conversation, pursuing a relationship, or simply being more present during intimacy.
Break whatever it is into manageable steps and take the obvious first step without making your success dependent on feeling completely confident first.
You might still feel anxious and that’s totally okay (and normal) – the goal isn’t to eliminate every uncomfortable feeling before you actually allow yourself to live your life but to learn that you can live meaningfully without allowing those feelings to dictate everything you do.
Check out this article about emotional release to go deeper into this topic: Emotional Release: Stop Carrying Yesterday Into Today
Trust isn’t the belief that nothing ‘bad’ will happen but the willingness to participate in life without demanding that every uncertainty be resolved beforehand and this is a much stronger foundation for confidence than obsessing over a measurement.

The Final Word: Take Your Penis Off the Pedestal and Put Your Life On It
Ultimately, everything we’ve covered in this article comes back to a simple principle:
Your penis is one part of your body which means it isn’t the whole of who you are or everything you have to offer.
Any time you treat a fragment as being the whole in life then you run into problems:
If you’ve spent years believing that its size determines your masculinity, attractiveness or value, then I understand that changing this belief might not happen overnight because these ideas can become deeply ingrained, especially when they’ve been reinforced by shame, comparison, and fear of rejection.
What you definitely can start to do right now, though, is to begin to to question these unhelpful beliefs:
You can recognise where they came from, accept the feelings you’ve been trying to resist, and start taking action based on what matters to you rather than what you’re afraid other people might think.
You can also stop treating external approval as the price of admission to your own life and begin to discover that the freedom you’ve been looking for was never entirely dependent on changing your body but rests upon changing your relationship with it.
This isn’t about tricking yourself or deluding yourself but about accepting reality:
REALNESS means learning to meet life as it actually is rather than spending your existence fighting an imaginary version of how things should be.
It also means recognising that you can have preferences without making them prerequisites for happiness:
You can acknowledge your limitations without turning them into your identity and you can want to improve something without deciding that you’re unacceptable until you do.
At the end of the day, you can have insecurities (like most of us do) and still be a man who still builds relationships, pursues meaningful goals, enjoys intimacy, and contributes something valuable to the world.
Your penis doesn’t have to become bigger for your world to become bigger so take it off the pedestal and put your real life on it instead.
You deserve to find out what becomes possible when you stop letting one fragment of yourself stand in the way of the whole.
Stay real out there,

P.S. If it’s time to let go of unhelpful and unreal beliefs about yourself so you can show up and live your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get back in the zone.







