Okay. So, yes, a substantial portion of my friends are either literally KonMari-ing their homes right now, or else riffing on the whole “does X spark joy” question for everything from city snow-removal to gender assignments, so I guess here we are, and the answer to my mother’s question is “Yes, in fact, I probably would jump off that cliff… At least a little bit”.
There’s a story that goes “You have to be getting something out of this in order to keep it going”.
The “this” in question is usually a behaviour pattern or, sometimes, a relationship. It’s generally something that, to anyone outside of your own skull, looks like a seriously detrimental thing that doesn’t make a lot of sense or do you a lot of good.
What you might be “getting” can be a lot of things. It can be “feelings of superiority” or “a metaphorical/literal sugar high” or “reliable access to housing” or “spiritual fulfillment” or “a reminder that I’ve Still Got It” or “affirmation of bonds with my attachment-person” or “reassurance that I am still unworthy of love and belonging and, as such, the world is still functioning as I expect it to and chaos has not recently staged a coup”.
It can be a lot of different things.
So. I know that the behaviours I’m trying to work through and examine via this little blog project of mine are… “not sparking joy”, so to speak. Feelings of shame and anxiety are not making me happy, they’re not facilitating emotional connection or erotic communion with my partners, and they are probably contributing to my lower back and hip pain if recent experiences are anything to go by.
So I have to ask myself: What the heck am I (still) getting out of this crap???
Well, let’s dig into that.
A long time ago, during a situation that was heavily outside of my control, I made a bunch of active choices in order to try and mitigate what I thought was going on.
What I did, actively, was I conditioned myself (more Emily Nagoski here, if you’re wondering) to hit the “breaks” instead of the “gas” – to turn away from, rather than turn towards, my desires – when I felt sexual attraction to my partner.
That was a dumb fucking idea, let me tell you.
But it was the best – wherein “best” means “likely to result in the least… difficult-to-endure kind of emotional pain”[1] – option I had right at that moment. Or at least I thought it was. I didn’t want to be a pest or otherwise put pressure on my partner, I didn’t want to keep experiencing the pain of rejection, so I decided, in a fairly conscious way, that it would be better (or at least more appropriate, behavior-wise) if I just stopped experiencing that desire.
I literally made myself have a avoidance/stress response to my gorgeous, sexy person (combined with a big, old shame response for any desirous feelings that showed up) instead of an interest/curiosity response. (Ha! And then was surprised when it didn’t just go away or auto-reverse or something when it was no-longer required…)
Like I said, it was dumb.
And, in doing so, I did a bunch of damage to myself[2] which I’m now trying to undo.
Because I’m still having those responses. As mentioned in this recent post, I’ve been having a hard time believing that it’s okay, and even encouraged, to have sexually-charged thoughts about my various sweethearts. And, yeah, sure. NRE can, and does, mitigate or override some of those responses. But NRE also doesn’t last forever. Heck, my ovaries and their wonderful, magical hormones are not going to last forever.
I would like to be an erotic, sexual woman long after menopause has done its thing… and I feel like I’m running out of time. I’ll be forty before the year is out. Menopause may still be a fair ways off, but I’d like to instill some better habits, and a more pleasurable, joyful sense of “my normal” before I get there.
So I have to ask myself: What am I getting out of this, if I’m still doing it?
And… I don’t really know?
I mean, probably? I’m probably getting a sense of “avoiding something that will hurt” from still doing this. I’m probably getting some kind if “Phew! Crisis averted!” feeling from still doing this, if only because sitting in my desire, and the uncertainty around it, feels so risky and dangerous and… forbidden.
And, yes. I wrote myself a permission slip to help me allow myself to feel those things, to lean into my desires, to enjoy and explore them as they happen. And, no, I’m not expecting to have a sudden, shocking turn-around on this, I’m expecting it to take practice and time[3].
But if I’m only still doing this because I’m trying to avoid some kind of pain… and it’s hurting me[4] anyway? Then it’s time to release it and let it go.
Emily Nagoski – as linked in that video, above – talks about how “confidence” and “joy” are the two keys to getting the kind of sex you want, and defines “Joy” specifically as “loving what’s true”.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha talks about a sort of radical self-compassion where you treat your traumatized, constantly-pain-carrying, femme body as being worthy as-is, of pleasure and desire and fulfillment.
A major goal of this whole project is to get myself into the habit of noticing things that feel good, in particular things that feel arousing or sexually pleasurable, even if I’m not limiting my “notice pleasure” lists to that. My hope is that, by doing this (and various other things) I’ll develop some shame-resilience and be better-equipped to deal with the discomfort and vulnerability that comes with opening myself up to desire & desiring, and also that I’ll actually give myself some practice feeling my way through “Oh, this feels good. It’s okay to want, and pursue, more of that thing that feels good”. Right?
That’s the plan, anyway.
So. While I’m not sure there are ways to love what’s true about my own decision to mess myself up fairly badly here… Are there ways to love what’s true otherwise? (Seriously, kids? I googled “how to write an affirmation” for this one):
I am feeling my way into, and through, my sexual desires and the emotional wobbles I have around them, and I love that about myself.
I am learning to be comfortable with, and in, my desires, and I love that about myself.
I am acting on my attractions to my gorgeous, sexy romantic partners, and I love that about myself.
~*~
Notice Pleasure: My fingers working my scalp while washing my hair. Kisses along my back and shoulders. Fingernails light along my ribs. Foot massages.
Cheers,
Ms Syren.
[1] Which is a very, very odd way to define “best”, but here we are.
[2] And, probably, at least some damage to my partner and to that relationship.
[3] Which is not to say that I’m not also kind of getting my hopes up here, but hopefully not for naught, you know? I’m trying to take a balanced approach to this stuff. Here’s hoping it works.
[4] Not just me, either, but one of my partners made a point of explicitly telling me, the other day, that I can be doing this important self-work just because I want to have fun, fulfilling, intimate, playful, ecstatic sexual experiences – that I deserve that, in and of myself – and that I don’t have to justify doing the work, or committing the time, energy, and attention to it, by viewing it through the lens of “wanting to be a better lover” for/to other people. So we’re going to focus on the “me” part of that equation for this one. Okay? Okay. 🙂
Tag Archive: intimacy
I’m writing this post early. A little bit because I’d like to create a bit of a backlog, in case I have a busy week or something, and in part because I want to keep the momentum going a little longer before I let myself slow down. In this particular case, though, it’s also because I’m writing about something that’s harder for me to talk about and I want to get it written while I’ve… while I’ve kind of got the guts to do it?
I feel pretty messed up around this. It’s one of the reasons why it’s been so long since I wrote porn, tbh. Just because so much of what went into my stories had its jumping off point somewhere in my own fantasy life.
But here it is: I’ve spent a lot of years feeling like I’m doing something wrong – like “committing a violation” levels of wrong – by fantasizing about my partners.
To pick an easy, fairly innocuous example: If I have a partner who’s not super into deep kissing, I feel like I’m doing something wrong, bad, unwanted by imagining making out with them.
Even just writing down that “I think about making out with my partner, despite knowing they wouldn’t be into it if I tried to initiate that in real life” feels like I’m confessing to a horrible thing that should get me thrown out of my community or similar.
And I don’t really have a metric for sorting out when that feeling is accurate or not.
Like, part of me is actively worried that I’m condoning, and/or confessing to, rape or sexual assault when I talk about wanting to fantasize about my partners’ bodies.
And part of me is… pretty sure I’m not? But, like… not entirely.
So talking about this feels very dangerous.
But, none the less, here we go.
Okay.
So I’m trying to give myself permission to fantasize about my partners.
And, you guys, it is not easy.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha talks – I think in “Gonna Get My Girl Body Back: This Is A Work In Progress” (in Brazen Femme) – about “In my dreams, I was free”, about being able to fantasize about awesome, wonderful sex before ever being able to stay in-body long enough or well enough to experience it for real.
In my dreams, so to speak, I catch myself reaching and I yank myself back hard.
I’ve spent a lot of years slapping my own metaphorical hand away from even considering that I might want to try X activity with Y partner, to the point that I have weird physiological reactions when I try to lean into those thoughts now.
A case-in-point is that I spent maybe two seconds thinking about kissing a partner’s breasts, before I ran away from the thought. I felt a current in my upper arms and upper chest, something that was at once giddy-excited and terribly nervous.
Two seconds, and suddenly I was all up in my chest, shallow-breathing and anxious. I tried to do my little root chakra exercise this morning, and I had to do anxiety-calming exercises before I could even start. I had to work hard to get back into my body-below-the-under-arms even intermittently. Feeling my feet was a challenge, and I still have to wiggle my toes – two hours later – to remind myself that they’re there. My whole body is cold and my feet, when I feel them, are painful blocks of ice.
For two seconds of letting myself contemplate something good.
I think I actually hate this? Not the work of trying to get my own girl body back, so to speak. That feels hopeful and like a really worthwhile task. But just… How the heck am I supposed to be able to engage sexually with my partners in a way that’s joyful and authentic and connected and all that other good stuff that I want, if I can’t even think about it without just… impaling myself on the three of swords, basically. All that shame. All that heartache. All that weirdly literal freezing.
Barbara Carrellas and Dawn Serra and a whole bunch of other people in the Sex Therapy World do a thing where they get their clients (or their readers, or their Summit participants) to write themselves permission slips.
My partners are consistently telling me (and sometimes, but not always, showing me – which I admit works a little better on me) that I “have permission”. To touch them or want them or initiate things with them.
But I don’t have that permission from myself.
So. The goal and the plan: I want to lean into those fantasies. I want to stay with the thought and let myself “dream myself free”, little by little. And so I’m Doing The Thing – even though I feel silly doing it – and writing myself a literal permission slip. Can’t hurt. It might even help.
Here goes:
~*~
I hereby grant myself permission to fantasize about my partners, to imagine sexual interactions with them in detail, not just intellectualized, but every sight, every sound, every touch, every smell, every taste, every breath, every flutter. I have permission to dream these beautiful interactions into being, any time I want to.
Granted this day, March 4th, 2019, by my own holy, worthy self.
~*~
Notice Pleasure: The part of that feeling in my chest that was giddy-excitement. The though of her perfect skin, the soft-sold shape of her nipple under my tongue. Sinking my teeth into her shoulders. The shudder-gasp of her breath.
I was reading Charlie Glickman’s blog earlier today and I came across a couple of posts, particularly this one, on the notion of shame and how it’s intertwined with distancing. As in: the act of distancing causes feelings of shame, but feelings of shame also cause acts of withdrawal.
I mean, it’s kind of a no-brainer when you think about it. People pulling away from you (rejection, distancing, whatever) makes you feel ashamed, and feeling ashamed makes you want to withdraw (or, for that matter, result in people being disinclined to hang out with you and your self-loathing, as the case may be). I realize that there’s a huge “duh” factor to this.
BUT
How does this relate to things like Healthy Relationships and the dance of coming together, moving apart that is basically a requirement if you want your relationship (friendship, romance, whatever) to not become seriously messed up?
Basically, I’m one of Those People who had to make a concerted effort and Do Research in order to get a decent understanding of what Boundaries are and why they are a Good Thing to have. But it never occurred to me that the normal shifts into, and (more to the point) out of, heightened states of intimacy might result in the same feelings of shame and withdrawal as acts/fears of rejection do.
I couldn’t help thinking that this explains a lot about me, and about how rotten and defensive I feel when I’m coming down after a really intimate experience. Like the crash after a big social weekend or an intense S/M scene, for example.
Has anyone else picked up on this?
– TTFN,
– Ms Syren
syrens 