• Negative feelings are a choice, something you could select in the morning like part of your outfit. Because they’re a choice, negative emotions may be punished—even if there is no overt misbehavior. • “Get over it,” “Be grateful for all the good things,” or “C’mon, give me a smile, honey!” • Your sadness, anger, and fear are signs of failure—either your own or your family’s.
In other words, emotion coaching teaches you that feelings are tunnels, and you can allow yourself to go through the darkness to get to the light.
Emotion dismissing, on the other hand, teaches you that feelings aren’t a tunnel, they’re a cave . . . with a river of cyanide . . . and a thousand rats . . . in the dark. Where you’ll be trapped forever. So whatever you do, KEEP OUT.
Lots of families use both styles, depending on the context or the specific emotion. And bear in mind that emotion dismissing is often lovingly intended. “Don’t cry, honey,” seems like a thoroughly benevolent sentiment, motivated by a desire to help someone who is suffering to feel better. But underneath “Don’t cry, honey,” is a subtle hint that the feelings are unwelcome. That you’re making other people uncomfortable. That it would be easier for everyone if you just didn’t feel that, so please stop.
But uncomfortable feelings happen. They are the normal, healthy response to negative life events. When you experience an injustice, anger happens. When you experience a loss, sadness happens. When you experience obstacles in your progress toward a goal, frustration happens.
When you experience a threat, fear happens. And even if you only anticipate any of these things, you may very well experience the emotion, and it will be just as uncomfortable as if the thing were actually happening.
Things that happen also end. Every single time, as long as you don’t slam on the brakes to stop yourself from going through the tunnel. nonjudging: tips for beginners If you got lucky and had a family that taught you how to go through the tunnel, that’s great! You can apply the same skill to your sexual well-being.
If your family was more like mine, then you might need some tips for learning to walk through the tunnel, when, as far as your brain is concerned, you’re just going deeper and deeper into the cave. Here are three ways to think about nonjudging that I’ve seen women use effectively: • Remember that feelings are biological cycles with a beginning, a middle, and an end, built in. You believed me when I said it earlier, right? When we got chased by a lion? And the kid came out from under anesthesia? Feeling an emotion won’t get you trapped forever in that emotion; on the contrary, it will allow you to move through it, like a tunnel. It might not be fun, but it’s not dangerous. Your body knows how to do it. All you have to do is allow it.
• Some people find it helpful to think about allowing feelings in the same way they allow themselves to pee and poop. It’s built into the system. You don’t tell yourself you shouldn’t have to pee, you just wait for an appropriate time and place. And if your need to pee is urgent, you seek out an appropriate context. Same goes for feelings. They’re a natural part of being human, built into our biology. Cultural rules mean we can’t just feel our feeling anywhere we want, but we can find an appropriate time and place. • The flock metaphor from chapter 8: Nonjudging is allowing the birds in the flock to fly away from a predator. Sometimes people are afraid that if they let those birds fly away, they’ll fly away from the predator forever. But that’s not how the system works. Once the birds have escaped from the predator (or noticed spontaneously that there is no predator after all), they’ll transition back to flying toward the magnetic pole along with their neighbors. But if you don’t allow them to fly away—if you say to yourself, “I shouldn’t have that feeling,” and slam on the brake—that’s like trying to cage the birds who are trying to escape. And how will those birds react? They’ll freak out, batter themselves against the bars, desperate to escape both the predator and the cage. Allow them to escape and trust that they’ll rejoin the flock.
Finally, a suggestion: Start small. Most mindfulness or other meditation training starts with paying attention to something simple, like your breath or eating a raisin. The smell and taste of a raisin are straightforward and nonthreatening, compared to the sensation of anger or shame or grief.
Learning to notice how a raisin smells, tastes, and feels in your mouth builds a platform on which you can begin to experience more complicated and difficult sensations with the same attentive neutrality—nonjudging.
What says, “You are awesome in bed!” more clearly than your partner’s orgasm?
Your partner not being able to stop themselves from having an orgasm—especially if that partner has a slightly stubborn accelerator.
Camilla thought through the “If I make you a pizza and you only eat one slice, how does that make me feel?” problem logically and came to a smart conclusion: They made a rule against her having orgasm.
They could do anything else they wanted, but Camilla wasn’t allowed to have any orgasms. It’s a reverse psychology trick that you’d never expect to work in real life—“You don’t want to have an orgasm?
Fine. You’re not allowed to have an orgasm!”—but it actually does.
The rule did two things. First, it genuinely took away performance pressure from Camilla and frustrated expectations from Henry. They could both relax and forget about it, which made them both feel better.
It had another impact, too. Henry had already shifted the way he thought about foreplay and was thinking of their entire relationship as