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emotional context SEX IN A MONKEY BRAIN
Women ask me questions, and then they tell me their stories. I have a whole mental library full of them—hilarious stories of sex adventures gone awry, sad stories of relationships that couldn’t be healed, awe-inspiring stories of survival and transcendence. Every
single one is a story of discovery.
Merritt’s story is about survival.
“Why should I trust my body?” she said. “My whole adult life, my body has been unreliable and falling apart. When I get stressed, everything just shuts down—I get sick, I get injured, none of my systems work. And that includes sex.”
This made some sense, given her sensitive brakes, but it seemed to me there was more going on.
“It sounds like your body is opting for the ‘freeze’ stress response, where it just shuts down instead of trying to escape or fight,”
I said. “It’s what happens when a person has either long-term, high- intensity stress, or is in the process of healing after trauma. Does either of those sound like you?”
“Both,” Carol and Merritt said together.
“You think stress explains why I have a hard time trusting my
body?” Merritt asked me.
I definitely do.
This chapter is about stress and love and how they affect sexual pleasure.
Trust your body. Listen to it—not to the specific circumstances of the moment but to the deep, primal messages of your evolutionary heritage:
I am at risk/I am safe.
I am broken/I am whole.
I am lost/I am home.
If you’re already awesomely good at that, feel free to skip this chapter.
But if, like most of us, you could use help translating the signals your body is sending, you’ll find this chapter informative. Because it’s not just the
sexual aspects of a context that influence whether you get turned on. It’s all the other emotional aspects, including your preexisting emotional state.
And of all the emotional systems managed by your One Ring, the two that may have the most immediate impact on sexual pleasure are stress and love. Stress is the physiological and neurological process that helps you deal with threats. Love is the physiological and neurological process that pulls you toward your tribe.
Stress underlies worry, anxiety, fear, terror, all the variants of “Run away!” But it also underlies anger—irritation, annoyance, frustration, rage.
And to a great extent it underlies the shutdown that characterizes depression. In the first section of this chapter, I’ll present a view of stress different from those you may have heard before: The key to managing stress (so that it doesn’t mess with your sex life) is not simply “relaxing” or “calming down.” It’s allowing the stress response cycle to complete. Allow it to discharge fully. Let your body move all the way from “I am at risk” to “I am safe.”
In the second part of this chapter, I’ll discuss love. Love, for our purposes, is attachment, the innate biological mechanism that bonds humans together. It underlies passion, romance, and the joy of finding a partner you can connect with. But it also underlies grief, jealousy, and heartbreak. Sometimes it’s joyful, like when you’re falling in love.
Sometimes it’s agonizing, like when you’re breaking up. But always attachment pulls us from “I am broken” to “I am whole.”
And finally, in the third part of this chapter, I’ll talk about the place where stress and attachment and sex overlap—the place where we experience both the passionate, exuberant joy of intense love and also the agony of the worst interpersonal discord. When stress and attachment and sex all activate together in our emotional One Ring, they call, “I am lost,” to motivate us to search and search until we find ourselves in a new place: “I am home.” I’ll describe attachment distress–fueled sex as “sex that advances the plot,” and introduce ways that we can use this dynamic to our advantage.
The goal is to help you recognize how the stress response cycle and the attachment mechanism are integrated in your sexual responsiveness, and to offer strategies for allowing them to enhance sexual pleasure, as well as to provide options when they’re impairing pleasure.