I can’t claim to have direct scientific evidence for what I’m about to say —I’m not even sure what direct evidence would look like—but I’ll tell you truly what I think, based on what I know of the science and what I know of women’s experience as they move toward a more profound sexual wellbeing.
I think that letting go of negative meta-emotions—like the feeling underneath the thought, “I shouldn’t be this way” or “I wish my sexuality were different”—requires that your little monitor move through the pit of despair, recognizing that your previous goal state was unattainable—or at least unattainable in the way you expected to attain it.
Our scripts or maps include clear ideas about what the goal, effort, and timelines of our sexuality should be. We should be easily orgasmic, experience spontaneous desire, all of those man-as-default myths. Letting go of those often seems similar to letting go of self-criticism, as I described in chapter 5. We think that if we let go, we’re giving up hope; it feels like failure. This is as true for sex-related goals, like desire style, orgasm, and pleasure, as it is for goals in the rest of life—ending a relationship, deciding not to complete a degree or go to grad school, accepting that your healthy body shape doesn’t match the (unhealthy) cultural ideal.
This is what can make changing your map so difficult. It requires a little journey through the pit of despair, grieving for the map that was wrong and all the places you missed as a result.
Emotions are tunnels: You have to go through the darkness to get to the light at the end. Sometimes that’s fairly easy. Sometimes it hurts like hell.
Sometimes letting go of a particular goal feels like you have to let go of your entire identity.
And when letting go hurts, that’s where nonjudging comes in. how to let go: nonjudging If you’re anxious about your sexuality, or you’re angry with yourself for feeling (or not feeling) a certain way, or you’re ashamed, what you will often do is put that feeling about your sexuality in a box and hide it somewhere deep inside you. And the feeling sits in that box, waiting to complete its cycle. You haven’t gotten rid of it, you’ve just put it on hold.
It’s as if that small part of you is sitting on a roller coaster, stuck at the top of an ascent—eventually it will have to come down. It has to. It has to complete its cycle.
Now suppose that instead of putting it in a box, you’re aware of your feeling about your sexuality and are curious about it, or you’re gently affectionate toward it, as you would be toward a tearful newborn or a sad, shy kitten, or you’re simply neutrally observing from the sidelines of your own internal experience. These kinds of compassionate self-awareness create a context that doesn’t hit the brakes and instead allows your internal state to complete its cycle.
I used to think that it was the awareness of your internal state that mattered, but in study after study, “observation” of internal state is not a 4 significant predictor of wellbeing.No, the best meta-emotion predictor of 5wellbeing is a variable known as “nonjudge.”
People who score low on nonjudge agree with statements like, “I tell myself that I shouldn’t be thinking the way I’m thinking” and “When I have distressing thoughts or images, I judge myself as good or bad, depending on what the thought/image is about.” People who are high on nonjudging say the opposite: When they have distressing thoughts, they simply recognize that that’s what’s happening, without judging themselves as good or bad, right or wrong. In other words, nonjudging allows you to feel what you feel, whether or not it makes sense to you, whether or not it’s comfortable, whether or not it’s what you believe you should be feeling. Nonjudging is neutrally noticing your own internal states.
I’ll illustrate this with my favorite research paper on the subject, a recent small study that looked at the role of mindfulness in people’s 6 experience with generalized anxiety disorder.The researchers measured, among other things, participants’ anxiety symptoms and the degree of interference with daily life these symptoms caused, along with participants’ responses on the Five Factor Mindfulness Questionnaire. Two of the five factors are “observe”—noticing your internal experience—and “nonjudge”—not categorizing your internal experience as either good or bad.
So dig this: Research participants who were less affected by their symptoms did not experience lower frequency or severity of symptoms, nor were they more aware of their internal state—the “observe” factor. Nope.
The people who were less impacted by their symptoms were those who were more nonjudging! In other words, it isn’t the symptoms that predict how much anxiety disrupts a person’s life, it’s how a person feels about those symptoms. It’s not how you feel—it’s not even being aware of how