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