Authors: Emily Nagoski
But it will grow back. That’s what gardens do.
And you facilitate that growth by allowing the garden to be what it is, in process, rather than what it was or what you wish it were. How?
Self-compassion: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. Patience. Feeling okay with feeling not-okay.
Healing hurts. If you break your leg, there is no stage in the healing process when your leg feels better than it does after it has healed. There is pain and itching and loss of strength. From the moment your leg is broken, it continues to feel bad . . . until, gradually, it starts to feel less bad. It’s appropriate that it hurts.
If you numb physical pain, healing can still happen. Alas, if we try to “numb” emotional pain, we get a break from the pain . . . but the healing is put on pause, too. People who are more evolved than I am can go through emotions like grief and panic without suffering, but for most of us, heart healing doesn’t happen without suffering. Sorry.
I recently worked with a survivor of sexual violence who was early in her healing process. She was by turns angry and despairing and frozen—and she was afraid all the time. Though she had been practicing meditation for a long time, the intensity of her emotions felt too big for her to allow them to move through her; they bottlenecked inside her. She felt panicked and stuck in the pain. She wanted to know what to do with all the feelings, how to fix them. She wanted to know how to stop hurting and how soon the pain would end.
“All I can tell you,” I said, “is that everything you’re experiencing, all the contradictory feelings and all the pain, is a normal part of the healing process. Everyone goes through it differently, and there’s no way to know how long it will last. It sucks for a while, and then gradually it gets better. But I can tell you this for sure: Every single survivor I’ve ever known has found their way through it.”
We sat in silence while she absorbed the idea of not knowing when the pain would end and having to simply trust her body and her heart to heal in their own time. At last she said, “It’s like . . . I’m sitting with a stunned bird in the palm of my hand. If I get tense and try to hurry it, it will just stay frozen. But if I’m still and patient long enough, the bird will wake up and fly away.”
Yes. That.
when partners dismiss!
I see it all the time. People hear me talk about emotion coaching and then tell me about all the ways their partner dismisses their feelings. They ask what they can do about it. I’ve found there are two especially important ground rules for couples when it comes to communicating about sex.
Neither of you chose your feelings—but both of you choose how you feel about those feelings.
One of the most problematic messages in emotion dismissing meta-emotions is that emotional reactions are a choice. Like you’re “choosing” to have responsive desire or “choosing” not to have orgasms with intercourse.
But you don’t choose that stuff. You didn’t choose the brain chemistry you were born with, you didn’t choose the family or the culture you were born into, and you don’t choose what your body does today in response to sexually relevant stimuli.
What you can choose is how you feel about all of that—and so can your partner. And feeling okay with it is what makes the difference. If you’re in a relationship where one partner wants sex more than the other, it is seriously unhelpful if one partner feels that the other is “choosing” their desire level. Remember the chasing dynamic from chapter 7?
What you do choose is compassion—or not. Patience—or not. With both yourself and your partner. When you find yourself stuck in a frustrating argument about sex, ask out loud, “Are we both choosing compassion and patience right now?” (Hint: You can’t make someone be patient any more than you can make someone have an orgasm. You create a great context, and then allow it to happen.)
Feelings aren’t dangerous . . . though they can be used dangerously.
One of the central messages in emotion dismissing meta-emotions is that feelings are inherently dangerous—toxic and hurtful to yourself and the people around you. People may believe this if they grew up in a world where people used feelings to injure or manipulate others—and using your feelings to deliberately hurt people is against the rules. Most important:
You’re not allowed to use your own feelings to injure or manipulate yourself! (Self-compassion!)
Nor are you allowed to use them to injure or manipulate your partner or others—and other people, including your partner, aren’t allowed to use them against you, either.
But feeling your Feels is safe. Being emotionally uncomfortable isn’t inherently dangerous. It’s not even scary—when you trust that allowing the discomfort to move through its cycle will always and inevitably end in feeling better.
Witnessing your partner’s Feels may feel uncomfortable for you; it may activate your desire to Make Your Partner Feel Better or Fix the Problem. That’s normal, that’s okay. Remember that the way to make someone feel better and fix the problem is to allow the person to move all the way through the tunnel, complete the cycle. This is not a stimulus-response kind of problem—like “IF Partner Is Crying, THEN Cheer Partner Up Instantly.” No. If your partner is crying or otherwise having an intense emotional experience, remember it’s
their
sleepy hedgehog, and your job is to listen for what the hedgehog needs while allowing your partner to complete the cycle.
Being afraid of feelings or being angry about them—your own or your partner’s—only increases the fear and anger in your relationship, which makes your sex life worse. Being nonjudging about the feelings creates a space where your partner can complete the cycle and thus get the heck out of the way of your confidence, joy, and ecstasy.
Remember the sleepy hedgehog. It doesn’t help either you or your Feels if you shove them in your partner’s face and say,
“ACCEPT THIS!”
How would you respond if your partner did that to you? Unless you’re a saint of unrivaled patience and tolerance, you would get defensive—and fair enough. Shoving your Feels in your partner’s face is using your feelings as a weapon, and that’s never okay.
There are excellent books about how to listen to your partner and how to manage feelings in a relationship. In chapter 4, I recommended
Love Sense
by Sue Johnson, and to that recommendation I’ll add
What Makes Love Last? How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal
by John Gottman and Nan Silver.
influencing the little monitor part 1: changing your criterion velocity
Now that we’ve identified the biggest barrier to changing meta-emotions—the pit of despair that’s triggered by letting go of the old goal—and we’ve learned the best way through that barrier—nonjudging so you can complete the cycle—let’s get practical.
If you’re dissatisfied with your sexual functioning, there are three targets for “teaching” your monitor: the goal, the amount or kind of effort you invest, and the criterion velocity—your assessment of how effortful it should be to achieve this goal.
Let’s start with changing your criterion velocity.
Plenty of women experience this when they decide to have a baby. They have a goal—a fantastically desirable magnetic pole for their flock to fly toward—and so their interest in sex may skyrocket for a while. But if many months pass without success, they begin to feel frustrated and worried, and then enraged or fearful . . . and then they drop off the criterion velocity cliff, into despair. Realistic expectations can make all the difference—for instance, it’s normal for it to take six months to a year for a couple to get pregnant, and 15 percent of couples don’t conceive within that first year. Adjusting your expectations about how effortful it will be frees you to enjoy the sex you’re having and to open your mind to whether exploring other approaches to parenthood might be a better “kind of effort.”
On the flip side, adjusting your expectations of how normal it is to experience pain can allow you to seek effective help. I had a chance to talk with Caroline Pukall, coauthor, with Andrew Goldstein and Irwin Goldstein, of
When Sex Hurts: A Woman’s Guide to Banishing Sexual Pain.
She pointed out that some women tolerate pain with sex “just because they have this belief that, ‘I guess some pain is to be expected.’ ”
She went on, “There’s something about women bearing pain longer
than they need to,” perhaps in other domains of their life, as well as in sex. They tolerate pain because they think that is their only option, that effective treatments aren’t available (they are!), or that the hassle of seeking treatment isn’t worth the potential benefit (it is!). And medical professionals sometimes reinforce this tendency by not taking pain seriously or assuming that if there is no infection or injury, the pain is “all in her head.”
If women (and their medical providers) had the same criterion velocity about female genital pain that men have about male genital pain, they would never hesitate to seek treatment. The willingness to tolerate greater effort—in this case, pain—is learned. And it can be changed, simply by becoming aware of it and allowing the possibility that it could be different.
Pain is a signal that your body needs help. If you use your own internal experience, rather than culturally imposed criterion velocities, as your most accurate source of knowledge about sex, you’ll be able to hear your body’s signal that it needs help, and you’ll take it seriously.
This is as literal as it gets: It’s not how you feel (pain). It’s how you feel (tolerant or not) about how you feel.
When Little Monitors Should Be Impatient!
This is the kind of story that fills me with righteous anger. A woman in a wheelchair approached me after a public talk and told me that my presentation was the first time she had ever heard that there are effective treatments for vaginismus, chronic tension of the pelvic floor muscle that makes penetration of the vagina either impossible or very painful. Her doctors had never mentioned that her vaginismus might be treatable.
Why didn’t they tell her? Was it because the doctors didn’t know? Was it because they didn’t feel comfortable talking about sex with any twenty-something woman? Was it because it didn’t occur to them that a woman in a wheelchair has just as much right to a satisfying sex life as any other woman? I don’t know. But I can’t help wondering if those doctors would have ignored complaints of sexual dysfunction and pain from a twenty-something man in a wheelchair.
influencing the little monitor part 2: changing the kind of effort
I have a big “Demotivator” poster on the wall in my office, featuring a photo of a penguin waddling away from the camera, and this caption:
LIMITATIONS
Until you spread your wings, you’ll have no idea how far you can walk.
It’s a joke, obviously, but I bought it when I was writing my dissertation because I actually found it highly motivating. Anytime I bumped up against an unexpected challenge, or anytime a challenge turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated, that waddling penguin reminded me that I would find a way around or through it. If I couldn’t get there by flying, I’d get there some by other method, even if I had to walk the whole way.
If there is somewhere you want to go and it turns out your plan for getting there won’t work, that doesn’t mean you can’t go there or that you shouldn’t try; it just means you’ll have to get there some other way. If you would like your sexual wellbeing to be different from how it is now—whether that means repairing some damage or expanding into extraordinary ecstasy—you may just need to change the kind of effort you’re putting into the goal.
If your goal is orgasm during intercourse, it’s helpful to know that only about a quarter of women are reliably orgasmic from penetration alone—that fact can change your criterion velocity—but it’s more helpful to know that clitoral stimulation is often a more effective path to orgasm. To have an orgasm during intercourse, change the kind of effort you’re investing: Add clitoral stimulation. You can do this with your own hand, your partner’s hand, a vibrator, or by grinding your pubic bone against their pubic bone.
If your goal is spontaneous desire, knowing that spontaneous desire is comparatively rare helps change your criterion velocity, but knowing how to create a highly sex-positive context lets you invest the most
effective kind of effort. The best contexts, as we’ve seen, involve turning on all the ons and turning off all the offs. Or, to switch metaphors, dig out the weeds of sex-negative culture from your garden. Go back to your worksheets and see what aspects of your context you might be able to change, to create a context that promotes both
enjoying
and
eagerness.
And practicing the skill of nonjudging is the most fundamental new effort you can invest in improving your sexual functioning. If your family and culture planted things in your garden that you want to dig out and replace with something new, nonjudging is the tool that will allow you to stand quietly in your garden and watch the weeds die, even the weeds you were taught to cherish and nurture. Allow the weeds to die, for the sake of the whole garden.
Merritt is the queen of not doing it the way you expect her to. She began to trust herself not when she could give herself pleasure, but when she could give her partner pleasure. She embraced herself as a sexual woman . . . when she allowed herself
not
to be sexual. She sank down in the light of intense pleasure . . . when she let go of trying to experience pleasure.
“It’s like how your fingers feel when you come in from the cold. It hurts for a while, but then they’re warm.” That’s how she described the experience of letting go of the sexuality she thought she was supposed to have and opening up space for the sexuality she did have. “You’d think a middle-aged lesbian would know better than to accept what the world says about how women’s sexuality works. But letting go of all that is hard.”