Authors: Emily Nagoski
In Chamberlin’s practice, she said, the question is, “How do we work with the organic intelligence of the body to heal? Instead of managing what comes up from the body, we work with it, trusting its purpose and direction, while holding a very particular, healing framework. The result is that physiological stress can change and release.” This is good news, since so many roadblocks in our sexual relationships are symptoms of unprocessed physiological stress. When we release the old, incomplete stress responses, we make space for new movement where we once felt stuck.
And when you find the stuckness, simply grant it kind, patient, gentle attention. The stuckness will change in the warmth of your attention, it will melt like snow under the sun. Let it. Emotions are physiological cascades that want to complete their cycles, and they will complete those cycles when you allow them to; they want to be travelers, not residents. They want to move on. Let them. You may tremble or shake or cry or curl up in a ball. You may notice your body doing these things without your volition. Your body knows what to do, and it will do it as long as you sit calmly with it, as you would sit calmly beside a sick or grieving child.
Sideways: Mindfulness.
Perhaps the gentlest approach is the most indirect. Without ever addressing the trauma directly, you can simply begin practicing mindfulness, and gradually the trauma will work its way out, like shrapnel from an old wound. There are spectacular books on the practice of mindfulness. One of my favorites is
The Mindful Way through Depression
by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and Jon Kabat-Zinn. Don’t let the “through depression” part throw you; it’s a practical guide to managing any uncomfortable emotional experience.
Here’s the short version of how to practice mindfuless:
1. Start with two minutes. For two minutes a day, direct your attention to your breath: the way the air comes into your body and your chest and belly expand, and the way the breath leaves your body and your chest and belly deflate.
2. The first thing that will happen is your mind will wander to something else. That’s normal. That’s healthy. That’s actually the point. Notice that your mind wandered, let those extraneous thoughts go—you can return to them as soon as the two minutes are up—and allow your attention to return to your breath.
3. Noticing that your mind wandered and then returning your attention to your breath is the real work of mindfulness. It’s not so much about paying attention to your breath as it is about noticing what you’re paying attention to without judgment, and making a choice about whether you want to pay attention to it. What you’re “mindful” of is both your breath
and
your attention to your breath. By practicing this skill of noticing what you’re paying attention to, you are teaching yourself to be in control of your brain, so that your brain is not in control of you.
This regular two-minute practice will gradually result in periodic moments throughout the day when you notice what you’re paying attention to and then decide if that’s what you want to pay attention to right now, or if you want to pay attention to something else.
What
you pay attention to matters less than
how
you pay attention.
This is a sideways strategy for weeding trauma out of your garden. It’s a way of simply noticing a weed and then deciding if you want to water it or not, pull it or not, fertilize it or not. The weed of trauma will gradually disappear as long as at least half the time you choose not to
nurture it. And the more you choose to withdraw your protection from the trauma, the faster it will wither and die.
Mindfulness is good for everyone and everything. It is to your mind what exercise and green vegetables are to your body. If you change only one thing in your life as a result of reading this book, make it this daily two-minute practice. The practice grants the opportunity to “cultivate deep respect for emotions,” differentiating their causes from their effects and granting you choice over how you manage them.
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origin of love
Aristophanes, in Plato’s
Symposium
—and for those of you who very understandably just fell asleep, replace that with the song “The Origin of Love” from John Cameron Mitchell’s
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
—offers this parable about why humans love:
Human beings used to be round, with two faces, four arms, four legs, and two sets of genitals. Some of us were two men, some were two women, and some were a man and a woman. But the gods wanted to have more control over us, so Zeus cut us in half with a bolt of lightning, and from that moment, we were susceptible to a suffering that slices, as Hedwig sings it, “a straight line/down through the heart.”
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Love, according to the parable, is the pursuit of our own wholeness. We wander the earth in search of our lost half. And when two halves find each other, as Aristophanes says,
“the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another.”
This isn’t actually why we fall in love, but it’s closer than you might think. Why we fall in love is attachment, which is sort of a biological pursuit of wholeness.
Attachment is the evolutionarily adaptive emotional mechanism that bonds infants and adult caregivers. I think human childbirth readily fits the description of pain that feels like you’re being separated from a part of yourself. And then, as Christopher Hitchens puts it, when you’re a parent, “your heart is running around inside someone else’s body.”
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Babies attach, too, always seeking closeness with the adults who care for them. From birth, attachment is the pursuit of our own wholeness—being kept safe, and keeping safe that part of ourselves that lives in someone else’s body. Attachment is love.
When we reach adolescence, our attachment mechanism gets co-opted from parental attachment to peer attachment, in romantic relationships. There are certain attachment behaviors we engage in that innately activate the attachment mechanism, whether between infant and caregiver or between two adults falling in love: eye contact, smiling, face stroking, hugging, that kind of thing. But with the shift at adolescence, sexual behavior is added to the repertoire of attachment behaviors.
Brain imaging research has found that the mesolimbic systems (
eagerness/enjoying/expecting
from chapter 3) during a nondistressed experience of parental attachment are extremely similar to the experience of romantic attachment—and they’re especially heavy on the
enjoying
activation, rather than
eagerness
activation.
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At the same time, attachment is why we experience “heartbreak.” As infants, our lives literally depend on our adult caregivers coming when we need them. As adults, that’s no longer true, but our bodies don’t know it. Our bodies are pretty sure that if our attachment object doesn’t come back, we’ll die.
So yeah, love feels good—“I am whole.”
Except when it hurts like you’re dying—“I am broken.”
Because: attachment.
the science of falling in love
In practice, humans build important social connections with multiple people, and our sense of wholeness emerges both from our own inner
sense of wholeness and from our connection with our friends and family, as well as with our partner. But there is the particular experience of “falling in love” or “bonding” with one specific person that typifies what our culture has come to consider “love.” If you’ve ever had a kid or fallen in love, you’ll recognize the narrative of attachment, the series of behavioral markers that characterize the attachment process.
Proximity Seeking.
You feel connected to the other person, so that it feels good to be around them (
enjoying
) and you want (
eagerness
) to be close as much as possible. Most parents have experienced proximity seeking in the form of little toddler fingers under the bathroom door, while you try to have thirty seconds in a row of alone-time as you pee. In romantic relationships, proximity can take the form of Twitter, texting, phone calls, and email, as well as walking past their locker six times every day to see if they are there, or leaving work early to get home sooner.
Safe haven.
When things go wrong in your life, you want to tell your attachment object all about it; you seek out that person for support. In adult relationships, it’s the phone call to your partner after a long, hard day at work. When your stress response is activated, your attachment mechanism says, “Soothe your stress by connecting with your attachment object.” This is the “tend and befriend” dynamic, which I’ll talk about more later.
Separation Distress.
When the person goes away, you feel pain—you miss that person. For adults, it’s the aching loneliness while your partner is away at a conference. It’s okay for a while . . . and then it’s too much, too long, too far.
Secure Base.
Wherever that person is, that’s your emotional home. Any adult who has come home from a business trip and fallen onto the couch next to a partner, to hold hands and make eye contact while talking about what happened while they were separated, has experienced this.
A real-life example: My sister Amelia’s husband is a high school music teacher, and every other year he accompanies his choir to Europe for a week or two. And every year during that time, she sits around
feeling what she identifies as “homesick,” even though she’s the one at home. Because he is her emotional home, her secure base. So she experiences separation distress.
Amelia’s favorite book is
Jane Eyre.
Mr. Rochester, the hero of that story, expresses attachment and separation distress when he says to Jane:
“I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel [the Irish Sea], and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.”
attachment and sex: the dark side
Mr. Rochester’s words hint at the place where attachment and stress overlap: distressed relationships.
In the previous chapter I mentioned John Gottman’s stories from women in abusive relationships, who said that some of the best sex followed immediately after acts of violence, and Isabel in
What Do Women Want?
, who craved sex with a commitment-phobic ex but lacked desire for her awesome current boyfriend. Both of these puzzles make perfect sense when we understand attachment-driven sex
when the attachment is threatened
.
Attachment is about survival; relationships are about survival. When they are threatened, we do whatever it takes to hold on to them, because there are no higher stakes than our connection with our attachment objects.
I’ll illustrate this idea with some of the darkest and most disturbing science I’ve ever read—it’s disturbing precisely because it shows us how powerfully attachment affects the emotional wellbeing of mammals like us. In Harry Harlow’s series of “monster mother” studies, conducted in
the middle of the twentieth century, his research team invented mechanical “mothers,” to which infant rhesus monkeys attached. Once the infants were emotionally attached to the monster mothers, the mechanical devices shook the infants, spiked them, or jetted cold air onto them, to force the babies away.
And what did the infant monkeys do when their “mothers” treated them badly, shook them off, rejected them?
They ran back to their mothers.
In an episode of the radio show
This American Life
, Deborah Blum, author of a biography of Harlow,
Love at Goon Park
, puts it this way:
The [rhesus monkey] babies came back and they did everything they could to make those mothers love them again. And they cooed, and they stroked, and they’d groom, and they’d flirt, and exactly what human babies do with their moms. And they would abandon their friends. They had to fix this relationship. It was so important to them.
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Of course they did. When we feel distressed, our attachment object is our safe haven. Even—or perhaps especially—if our attachment object is the source of our distress.
And just as the baby rhesus monkeys used attachment behaviors to repair their relationships with their monster mothers, women in unstable relationships may use sex as an attachment behavior to build or repair the attachment. So what Isabel “wanted,” to answer Bergner’s titular question, was proximity with her attachment object, in the face of separation anxiety. The hormones dopamine and oxytocin were having their wicked way with her
eagerness
system, pushing her toward the attachment object who would never commit to her and who therefore chronically activated her attachment system’s need for safe haven.
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This is the dark side of pairing stress and attachment: the “I am lost” feeling, which motivates us to stabilize our connection with our attachment object—“I am home.” Therapist and author Sue Johnson calls this “solace sex,” sex that’s motivated by your desire to prove that you are loved.
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