you feel. It’s how you feel about how you feel. And people who feel nonjudging about their feelings do better.
The body of research specifically measuring nonjudging in relation to sexual functioning is small but growing. In a tiny study of sensorimotor sex therapy, women in the treatment group reported that the therapy helped them to feel less like they “should” be experiencing something in particular 7 and more able to be gentle and forgiving with themselves.(Sound like anything from, oh, say, chapter 5? Remember self-compassion?) Though the study was too small to find statistically significant results, the qualitative findings are encouraging, and they reinforce the idea that it’s not awareness of your sexuality that matters, it’s how you feel about what you
are aware of. nonjudging = “emotion coaching”
I’ve said it more than once: Emotions are tunnels. You have to go all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end. And if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other, you’ll get where you want to go. Some of us know how to go through the tunnel because we grew up in families that taught us how. Some of us know how to go through the tunnel because we learned that skill later in life. And some of us haven’t had a chance to learn that skill yet. But we can always learn, by becoming our own emotion coaches.
In Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child, psychologist John Gottman describes four different approaches a parent can take in responding to a child’s feelings: emotion coaching, dismissing, disapproving, and laissez- faire. I’ll refer to the last three (less supportive) approaches together as
8emotion dismissing.
Emotion coaching teaches you that • You can recognize lower-intensity emotions so that you can manage them before they escalate. • Negative emotions are a natural response to negative life events. Because negative life events are sometimes inevitable, so are negative emotions. • Because negative emotions are a normal part of life, they are discussed, given names, and empathized with. • “It’s normal that sometimes it feels hard,” “When you feel bad, we love you just as much as when you feel good,” and “You cry all you need to, honey.” • Your sadness, anger, and fear are signs of being human.
Emotion dismissing, on the other hand, teaches you that • You should ignore subtle or lower-intensity emotions—they’re irrelevant. • Negative emotions are toxic, dangerous to yourself and the people around you.