calm, attentive, and warmly attuned to the other person. In the very best relationships, we’re allowed to experience all forms of stress—anger, fear, shutdown—and receive the loving presence of our partner sitting still and quiet through the storm.
Every culture has rules about how much of which kinds of emotion are appropriate in what circumstances. But our culture has constructed a social world where there is almost nowhere that we can connect with others while experiencing the full range of our emotional intensity. For a lot of us, there are times when we more readily share a loving presence through spiritual practice or with our pets than with our partners, who are mired in their own stress. God and your dog never judge or blame you for having Feels—but neither of them can make love with you.
Sex is an attachment behavior. When your attachment is threatened or when you and your partner share a stressor, sex can be a powerful, pleasurable way to connect in the face of the “I’m lost” signals, so that you can find your way home. Together. But this feels pleasurable only if you can give each other time and space for Feels.
If all of this sounds impossible in your relationship, don’t worry, chapter
9 will help with that.
the water of life
I am at risk/I am safe.
I am broken/I am whole.
I am lost/I am home.
As you progress through these biological processes, your mental state changes, and that, in turn, changes whether and how your brain responds to contexts as sexually relevant or to sensations as sexually pleasurable.
Stress hits the brake for about 80 percent of people, but it activates the accelerator for others—people vary. But for everyone, stress changes the context in which you experience sexual response, which changes your perception of sexual sensations.
The key to managing stress so that it doesn’t interfere with sexual pleasure is learning to complete the cycle—unlock freeze, escape the predator, conquer the enemy. Celebrate, like glitter settling in a snow globe.
Sex is an attachment behavior, reinforcing the social bond between adults. Sometimes it takes the form of passionate, joyful sex between people who are falling in love with each other. Sometimes it takes the form of desperate, grasping sex between people whose attachment is threatened.
Counterintuitively, when attachment is at its most secure and stable—when your relationship is all satisfaction and no worry or “plot”—it can take a backseat in your sexual arousability.
Stress and love (in the form of attachment) can be companions to sex.
Sex strengthens bonds between partners, helps each partner feel safe, cherished, and supported in a world where we are not always safe, where sometimes our only shield from chaos and terror is our chosen family.
Women tell me their stories, and I keep those stories in a mental library. One shelf in that library is overflowing: the one that holds stories of sexual violence. Like all the rest, these are awe-inspiring stories of discovery, but they are the darkest stories, revealing just how viciously indifferent the world can be to women’s sexual autonomy.
Merritt’s is one of those. The one-sentence version: She was a leader of the campus gay-straight alliance, out and proud, and he, she would later learn, bet his friends that he could “turn her.”
It’s sickening, I know. I wish no one had stories like this to tell.
But it happens.
During the assault, her body went into survival mode—she froze.
And until she learned about the brakes stress response, she hadn’t understood why she didn’t fight or run or kick the guy in the balls. She has struggled to trust her body ever since, and her body has struggled to operate healthfully without her trust.
When a person experiences trauma, it’s like someone snuck into the garden and ripped out all the plants she had been cultivating with such care and attention. There is rage. There is grief for the garden as it was. And there is fear that it will never grow back.
But it will grow back. That’s what gardens do.
Merritt was into the garden metaphor. She stopped me in the street one day, phone in hand, to say, “I was thinking about the garden, and I had to read you this thing my partner found!”
She read:
The water of life is here.
I’m drinking it. But I had to come 33this long way to know it!
“ ‘The water of life,’ ” she enthused. “It’s this Rumi poem about a guy who loses everything and goes on a quest and he’s like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz, he had the power all along. And you know what the water of life is?”
“Tell me.” (This was nowhere near the weirdest thing anyone had ever stopped me in the street to tell me.) 34She said, “Love is the water of life!”
I think that’s right. If women’s sexuality is a garden, I think of love as the rain and stress as the sun, drawing the garden upward, nourishing and challenging at once. It wouldn’t do to have too much of either, but in the right balance, the garden thrives.
Some plants want lots of water, some want less; some gardens are shady, while others are full of bright sun all day. Olivia, with her sensitive accelerator, has a sunny garden full of plants that delight in the sun—she’s practically a desert, with Joshua trees and blackfoot daisies thriving under a hot, cloudless sky. But even for her, too much of a good thing can cause her garden to wilt and fade. Camilla, by contrast, with her relatively insensitive accelerator, has a montane forest of broadleaf ferns and mosses that require less light and more time to grow lush.
Meanwhile, Merritt’s sensitive brake makes her garden wilt in the mildest drought, and Laurie’s garden feels like it’s been subjected to global warming, stripped of its native climate faster than she and her plants can adapt, and she fears the whole garden is dying. And she’s afraid that if she loses her garden, she might lose her partner.
Listening to and respecting the fundamental messages that your body is trying to send you—“I am at risk,” “I am broken,” “I am lost”—is essential to creating the right context for sexual pleasure to thrive. Allowing time and space for your body to move all the way through the cycle, to discharge stress and to connect wholly with your partner, is an essential part of creating a context that grants maximum access to pleasure.
Western culture does not make this easy; it builds walls of shame and doubt between us and our essential selves, between “at risk” and “safe,” between “broken” and “whole,” between “lost” and “home.”
In the garden metaphor, the cultural messages about women’s sexuality are very often the weeds, encroaching in ways no one chose but that
everyone has to manage.
And that’s what chapter 5 is about. tl;dr
• Stress reduces sexual interest in 80–90 percent of people and reduces sexual pleasure in everyone—even the 10–20 percent of people for whom it increases interest. The way to deal with stress is to allow your body to complete the stress response cycle. Complete the worksheet on this page to figure out what works for you. • Trauma survivors’ brains sometimes learn to treat “sexually relevant” stimuli as threats, so that whenever the accelerator is activated, the brake is hit, too. Practicing mindfulness is an evidence-based strategy for decoupling the brakes and accelerator. • In the right context, sex can attach us emotionally to new partners or reinforce emotional bonds in unstable relationships. In other words, sex and love are closely linked in our brains— but only in the right context. • Sex that brings you closer to your partner “advances the plot,” as opposed to gratuitous sex, for no reason other than that you can. To have more and better sex, give yourself a compelling reason to have sex, something important to move toward.
coping with stress
My three top stressors:
1.
2.
3.
How I can tell I’m stressed: Physical Signs of Stress (e.g.,Emotional Signs of Stress (e.g.,Cognitive Signs of Stress (e.g., digestive upset, jaw tension, etc.)tearful, easily frustrated, etc.)distracted, unfocused, etc.)
When I’m feeling stressed, overwhelmed, or exhausted, here’s what helps:
Choose one (for now) of the things you just identified and think about what it would take to increase your access to it. Suppose you decided you wanted to use this stress management strategy more. What are some challenges you might face?
What are some things you might do to minimize those barriers, if you decided to try using this stress management strategy more?
On a scale of 0–10, how IMPORTANT is it to you to increase your access to this stress management strategy? _______ What makes it that important, rather than a little lessWhat could potentially happen that would make it MORE important?important?
On a scale of 0–10, how CONFIDENT do you feel that, if you decided to increase your access to this stress management strategy, you could?
What makes you that confident, rather than a littleWhat could potentially happen that would make you feel less confident?MORE confident?
Given all of that, what’s one thing you will do TODAY that can move you just one step closer to being able to use this stress management strategy more?