Authors: Emily Nagoski
“You’ve got a sensitive brake,” I said, “and you’ve probably had that brake a lot longer than you’ve had feminist politics.”
One last story:
Merritt and Carol got married not long after their daughter graduated from high school. That kid—a peer sex educator in her high school, of course—organized a bridal shower for her moms that included, among the more pragmatic gifts of garden store gift cards and new towels, a kit from their daughter containing sparkling cider, scented candles, and massage oil, in a pretty basket with a bow.
“I can’t believe my child is giving her parents date night paraphernalia,” Merritt said.
“Oh, puh-lease. It’s not like I’m giving you a dildo and a whip!”
At this Merritt and Carol, both red faced and laughing, tried to send her to the kitchen to do the dishes.
But their daughter continued, “I mean, come on, it’s the twenty-first century. You’re here, you’re queer, you get naked together sometimes because you’re in love with each other. Get used to it.”
Which is exactly what she’s been doing ever since, side by side with Carol.
influencing the little monitor part 3: changing the goal
In chapter 8, I talked about ways to change the goal state to improve orgasm. When you replace the goal of orgasm with the goal of pleasure, you shift your little monitor’s attention to a new and highly accessible target, yet one that may carry a lot of negative meta-feelings for you. That’s normal. If you notice resistance inside yourself to the idea of valuing pleasure over orgasm, just notice it, step to one side, and allow the frustration to transition into grief, as your little monitor lets go of the old goal, and then allow the grief to open the door to pleasure.
In chapter 7, I talked about ways to change the goal to improve sexual desire, too. Letting go of the goal of spontaneous desire and allowing yourself to be responsive or context sensitive satisfies your little monitor and opens up the opportunity of seeking out contexts that maximize your desire style. Again, cultural baggage may cause you to feel attached to the idea that spontaneous desire is better than responsive desire. Notice the urge to hold fast to the ideal of spontaneous desire and allow yourself to move through the tunnel. Anytime judgment of context-sensitive desire emerges inside you, practice noticing the judgment without agreeing or
disagreeing. Just acknowledge it and allow it to move through you and out of you.
I also described changing the goal in terms of nonconcordant arousal, in chapter 6. Concordance isn’t likely to create significant change in your sexual satisfaction. Instead, the goal is to recognize that nonconcordance happens sometimes, use lube if your vaginal secretions aren’t there when you need them, and teach your partner to listen to your words. Again, there are cultural misunderstandings and judgments about nonconcordance, so you may find that you need to release negative meta-emotions around it. It’s the same basic process: Allow those feelings to complete their cycles and release them to create space for the new goal.
9
When I teach about choosing a goal, people sometimes assume that the biggest challenge is choosing the right goal. But that’s actually pretty simple (though not always easy). The right goal is
whatever is true about you right now.
Collapse the distance between your goal state and your present state. The goal is to be just what you are, right now.
“to feel normal”
The challenge in changing the goal is not the what, but the how: How do you let go of the old goal and feel really good about where you are right now?
Take Ms. B. from the beginning of the chapter. What do you think her goal is? Is it pleasure? Connection with her partner? Self-discovery?
From what little we know of her (and from what we know of the way women are socialized around sex), it seems likely that her unconscious goal is to conform to the expected ideal. To have desire come spontaneously, to have orgasms during intercourse. In short, to feel “normal.”
We know by now that there’s no such thing as normal—or rather, that we’re all normal. We’re all made of the same parts as everyone else, organized in a unique way. No two alike.
And yet what most of us want is to feel normal.
(In fact, one of the normal things about your sexuality is to worry
sometimes about whether you’re normal. Yes, being worried about being normal is . . . normal.)
Why is normal the goal? What do people really want when they want to be normal?
I think that to feel normal is to feel that you
belong.
Remember what Camilla said way back in chapter 1: “We’re all just trying to belong somewhere.” We want to know that we are safe within the bounds of shared human experience, that what’s on our map is the same as what is on other people’s maps.
If we find ourselves in a place that we can’t find on our map—that is, if we have an experience for which we have no frame of reference, no script—we feel lost. Unknown territory feels risky, unsafe—remember from chapter 4: “I am lost/I am home.” In unknown territory, we feel, “I am at risk!” Our stress response kicks in and we’re like that Iggy Pop rat: Everything seems like a potential threat.
But then if someone comes along and says, “You’re okay—see, I’ve got this place here on my map. This is definitely part of the territory,” we can relax. We know we’re still at home, safe within bounds. We belong here.
When people ask me, “Am I normal?” they’re asking, “Do I belong?”
The answer is yes. You belong in your body. You belong in the world. You’ve belonged since the day you were born, this is your home. You don’t have to earn it by conforming to some externally imposed sexual standard.
If you change your goal to “wherever I belong,” then you’re always successful because you’re already there.
“this is it”
I have a small comic taped to my office door. It shows an old Buddhist monk sitting next to a young Buddhist monk. The older monk is saying, “Nothing happens next. This is it.”
Being more nerd than nun, I see it as a commentary on the discrepancy-reducing feedback loop and criterion velocity, on the importance of training your little monitor to enjoy the present rather than constantly push toward the future. I remind myself every time I walk into my office, “This is it. Right now.”
What if . . . this is a radical idea, but just go with me: What if you felt that way—“This is it”—about your sexual functioning? What if the sexuality you have right now is the sexuality you get? What if this is it?
When I pose that question, women have a tremendously wide range of responses, from radiantly beaming smiles to sudden waves of sobbing despair.
If you beam radiantly at the idea that your sexuality, as it is now, is it,
awesome.
I hope the science in this book will help to expand and enliven your sexual wellbeing.
If you would feel grief, shame, despair, rage, uncertainty, frustration, or fear if the sexuality you have today were it for your sexuality, this is for you:
The day you were born, the world had a choice about what to teach you about your body. It could have taught you to live with confidence and joy inside your body. It could have taught you that your body and your sexuality are beautiful gifts. But instead, the world taught you to feel critical of and dissatisfied with your sexuality and your body. You were taught to value and expect something from your sexuality that does not match what your sexuality actually is. You were told a story about what would happen in your sexual life, and that story was false. You were lied to. I am pissed, on your behalf, at the world for that lie. And I’m working to create a world that doesn’t lie to women about their bodies anymore.
I can’t change the injury that the world inflicted on you, and neither can you.
What you
can
do is heal.
Like your genitals, your sexuality is perfect and beautiful exactly as it is. You are normal. Beautiful. And as long as you’re not experiencing pain, you’re healthy. So when you notice yourself feeling dissatisfied
with your sexuality, when you notice shame or frustration or grief, allow yourself to direct those feelings away from yourself and instead focus the emotions toward the culture that told you the wrong story. Rage not against yourself but against the culture that lied to you. Grieve not for your discrepancy from a fictitious “ideal” that is at best arbitrary and at worst an act of oppression and violence; grieve for the compassionate world you were born deserving . . . and did not get.
The purpose of allowing yourself to feel those Feels is not to change something out in the world. Feel your Feels so that they can discharge, release, and create space for something new inside you. When you allow that grief to move through you, you are letting go of the sexual person you were told you “should be,” a phantom self that has taken up space in your mind for too long. And letting go of that phantom creates spaces for the sexual person you
are.
And when we all practice this, the world does change, person by person.
The sexuality you have right now
is it.
And it’s beautiful, even—especially!—if it’s not what you were taught it should be.
I don’t know if you’re more like Olivia or Camilla or Merritt or Laurie, or nothing at all like any woman I’ve ever met. I don’t know how easily you discover and create contexts that generate pleasure and desire. I don’t know how at home you feel in your sexuality, your own private garden. But I know that you are the gardener. And I know that the more you work
with
the innate characteristics of your garden, the healthier and more abundant it will grow. I know you are beautiful just as you are, fully capable of confident, joyful sex. I know you are normal.
Laurie and Johnny lived happily ever after—or most of the time ever after. Life is complicated and Laurie still has times when she gets sucked into exhaustion and overwhelm, times when her body seems to shut out all potential sources of pleasure. But three things changed permanently.
First, she practiced paying nonjudgmental attention to sensations, which taught her to be as kind and generous with herself as she was with everyone else she loved. She learned to notice and celebrate pleasure and joy, granting herself permission to feel good.
Second, though there wasn’t much she could do to reduce the actual
stressors
in her life, she reduced her
stress
by taking more deliberate effort to decompress and complete the stress response cycles that life activated. She let herself cry. She slowed down her showers, paid attention to the sensation of the water on her skin, and instead of slapping on body lotion like she was greasing a loaf pan, she paid attention to how nice it felt and how healthy her skin was. As she exercised, she visualized her stress as that orange monster in the Bugs Bunny cartoon—the one Bugs gives a manicure—and imagines herself running away from the monster, through her front door, and into Johnny’s arms. She started experiencing the discharge of stress as pleasurable—or at least not a source of suffering.
And finally, she became much gentler with herself when she noticed herself being self-critical about her body or feeling guilty about pleasure. She didn’t say to herself, “Stop it!” She just thought, “Yup. There are the self-critical thoughts again.” She practiced nonjudgment.
Perhaps these three changes would not have lasted as they have if it weren’t for Johnny recognizing the opportunity in all of this.
Once he clicked onto the idea of turning off her offs, he started noticing more and more things he could do to help Laurie let go of the brakes. Sometimes it was a simple thing like doing the dishes and wiping down the kitchen counters. Sometimes it was, “Let’s take a night off of worrying about whether we’re going to have sex and just lie together and talk.” Sometimes it was setting up a date night with plenty of time for her to unwind.
Higher-desire partners might think, “She should just be able to want it as much as I do!” They have negative meta-feelings about their partner’s sexual feelings. But Johnny realized it’s not about just wanting sex, it’s about creating a context—really, it’s about creating a life—that makes space for both people’s needs. He brought a sense of curiosity to the puzzle of turning off the offs. He brought a sense of wonder to the surprising way Laurie’s sexuality can spring and blossom from fallow winter ground. He brought a sense of awe to the ecstatic way her passion overflows the garden walls, under the loving warm rain and sun of the right context.
It’s not how you feel. It’s how you feel about how you feel.
tl;dr
• The most important thing you can do to have a great sex life is to welcome your sexuality as it is, right now—even if it’s not what you wanted or expected it to be.
• Letting go of old, bogus cultural standards requires a grieving process, going through the little monitor’s pit of despair.
• To facilitate that letting go, develop nonjudging “emotion-coaching” meta-emotions. Recognize that feelings are a normal part of life, and when bad things happen, it’s normal to feel angry, fearful, or sad.
• When you give yourself permission to be and feel whatever you are and feel, your body can complete the cycle, move through the tunnel, and come out to the light at the end.
conclusion
YOU ARE THE SECRET INGREDIENT
So what have we learned?