One more example: A student sat on the couch in my office and described how her desire for sex had vanished in the course of her otherwise very happy two-year relationship. She had always experienced spontaneous desire in her (uniformly bad) previous relationships. We gradually figured out that the instability of her bad relationships had fueled her use of sex as an attachment behavior, as I described in chapter 4, and so now, in a stable, trusting relationship, her desire was behaving very differently.
“So what do I do if my desire for sex is only spontaneous in bad relationships?” she asked.
“What you do,” I said, “is you start loving responsive desire. Figure out what contexts give you a fantastic relationship and hot sex. Context-free spontaneous desire is just the man-as-default standard, and screw that.
Don’t use somebody else’s standard to measure the quality of your sex life.”
Which is when I saw the transformation happen in her head.
“That makes so much sense! Oh my God, I want to tell the whole world !” she said.
“Me, too!” I answered. “That’s why I’m writing a book!” And then I emailed her a draft of this chapter.
Because in this chapter, I tell you how. I’ll start by describing how your feelings about your feelings—your meta-emotions—influence your sexual functioning: It’s the little monitor in your brain again. I’ll talk about the sexual “map” in your brain, which the little monitor is using to guide her opinions, but which has been drawn according to the cultural messages I described in chapter 5, so it’s often totally unreliable. I’ll describe the obstacles to changing your little monitor’s opinions, and then I’ll take you step by step through the challenging—but richly rewarding—process of changing your meta-emotions in order to create a sexual connection with yourself and your partner that overflows with abundance and joy.
I aspire for us all to be like that little old lady peacefully enjoying her sexy hallucinations. If Gertie can learn to welcome her erotic life with her hallucinatory gentleman caller, surely we all can embrace our sexuality as it is, and thus make it the best it can be, regardless of how it differs from what
we were taught it “should” be. can’t get no . . .
Meta-emotions are how you feel about how you feel, and they go back to the little monitor in your brain who has an opinion about how much
progress you should be making as you move toward a goal. That opinion is the “meta” part. It’s how you feel about what you’re experiencing.
When you experience your sexuality in the way your monitor expects, she feels good. Satisfied. When you experience your sexuality in a way that creates a discrepancy between your experience and the monitor’s expectations, the monitor gradually becomes frustrated . . . and then angry.
Eventually she pushes you off an emotional cliff into the pit of despair, as she gives up and decides you can’t achieve your goal state.
Suppose you’re not reliably orgasmic from intercourse. That’s normal.
Because you’ve read chapter 8, you know a lot about other strategies for having orgasms, especially from clitoral stimulation. And when you feel good about your body as it is, it’s easy to start trying out new strategies.
But what if you feel frustrated about your lack of orgasms with intercourse? Or ashamed? Or sad? Or judgmental? Will that make it easier or more difficult to try out new strategies and find success?
Feeling okay about how you feel—even when it’s not what you expected—is the key to extraordinary sex.
As we saw in chapter 7, there are three ways you can develop more positive meta-emotions. You can ask yourself: • Is this the right goal for me? • Am I putting in the right amount of the right kind of effort? • Are my expectations of how much effort this particular goal requires realistic?
We’ve seen these strategies in action throughout the book: In this chapter, when Dr. Sacks tells Gertie that her hallucinations seem like a good idea, her goal state changes, so that the gap between her present state and her goal state closes. She is already where and what she wants to be. With no discrepancy, there can be no negative meta-feelings, only satisfaction and delight. So her little monitor is well satisfied. And in chapter 5, when Laurie decided to stop trying to want sex with Johnny and just allowed herself not to, she too closed the gap between where she was and where she wanted to be, which opened the door to affection without performance demand.
In chapter 8, when Olivia meditated her way to an extended orgasm, she was practicing being present as she was, rather than pushing forward to some goal. She kept the same goal—ecstasy—but she changed the kind of effort she was investing. And in chapter 7, when Merritt, instead of trying on the aspirational identity of a woman who loves sex, embraced the identity of a woman who did not want sex, she was changing her