the same basic process: Allow those feelings to complete their cycles and 9release them to create space for the new goal.
When I teach about choosing a goal, people sometimes assume that the biggest challenge is choosing the right goal. But that’s actually pretty simple (though not always easy). The right goal is whatever is true about you right now. Collapse the distance between your goal state and your present state. The goal is to be just what you are, right now.
“to feel normal”
The challenge in changing the goal is not the what, but the how: How do you let go of the old goal and feel really good about where you are right now?
Take Ms. B. from the beginning of the chapter. What do you think her goal is? Is it pleasure? Connection with her partner? Self-discovery?
From what little we know of her (and from what we know of the way women are socialized around sex), it seems likely that her unconscious goal is to conform to the expected ideal. To have desire come spontaneously, to have orgasms during intercourse. In short, to feel “normal.”
We know by now that there’s no such thing as normal—or rather, that we’re all normal. We’re all made of the same parts as everyone else, organized in a unique way. No two alike.
And yet what most of us want is to feel normal. (In fact, one of the normal things about your sexuality is to worry sometimes about whether you’re normal. Yes, being worried about being normal is . . . normal.) Why is normal the goal? What do people really want when they want to be normal?
I think that to feel normal is to feel that you belong. Remember what Camilla said way back in chapter 1: “We’re all just trying to belong somewhere.” We want to know that we are safe within the bounds of shared human experience, that what’s on our map is the same as what is on other people’s maps.
If we find ourselves in a place that we can’t find on our map—that is, if we have an experience for which we have no frame of reference, no script —we feel lost. Unknown territory feels risky, unsafe—remember from chapter 4: “I am lost/I am home.” In unknown territory, we feel, “I am at risk!” Our stress response kicks in and we’re like that Iggy Pop rat: Everything seems like a potential threat.