CHAPTER 4
Step 1: Getting in the Right Frame of Mind
Opening Up to Your Sexuality
“To find yourself, think for yourself.”
—SOCRATES
Following the steps of intelligent lust requires creating the time and space for quiet contemplation as well as finding the same presence of mind and commitment that we would bring to therapy. Before we begin, there are things we can do to help get us in that right state of mind.
In the practice of psychotherapy, the consultation room plays as important a role as the conversation that occurs within its borders. It guarantees the patient a safe, neutral space for thoughts and feelings to be untangled, experienced, and expressed. Its walls delineate a boundary within which the focus is solely on the patient without any distractions or interruptions. The room creates a womblike feeling that satisfies a deep primal need in us. In it, thoughts and feelings can grow, be confined, or kept secret. Things can be discussed in this room that cannot be approached anywhere else.
Finding a space free of distractions, equivalent to the privacy and purpose of a therapy room, improves our sense of comfort and safety as we open our minds to following the steps of intelligent lust. A neutral place, absent of personal history, prevents contaminating the experience with negative associations or memories. It’s where we can think out loud all that we have grown accustomed to keeping silent, in the hope that we might understand ourselves and come to terms with our desires.
Designate a place to use—a garden, park bench, beach, backyard deck, front porch, or even the back seat of a car—to navigate the exercises. Keep a notebook or diary handy to record your experience. As you make progress, some exercises will require a completely private place away from public spaces. Scout one out before you begin.
1. TRUST IN YOUR TRUE DESIRES
Most of us have some sense of what turns us on, though we may not have put it into words or actual images. We know the kinds of experiences that excite us—the type of bodies that attract us, what style of kissing arouses us, where we like to be touched. But few of us know why we have chosen these preferences and how elegantly they serve us.
Have faith in the healing power of your desires. Keep this mantra in mind. Our fantasies are antidotes that have meaning and purpose. Whether it’s a wish to be dominated like Emily, or to be tenderly made love to like Jason, our sexual fantasies convert painful, confusing, or unresolved feelings from the past into manageable and pleasurable ones in the present. We use them to transform helplessness into power, loneliness into emotional attachment, inadequacy into competence, weakness into strength. If properly understood, we can use them to find energy and direction to reconcile old conflicts and satisfy unfulfilled needs. Honor them as you would a friend.
2. GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION TO EXPLORE
All our lives we have been learning about sex. Our earliest experiences as children inform us about intimacy, trust, gender, and power. Much of this we learn by observing how our parents treated each other as well as how we ourselves were treated. Some of us grew up with parents who acted as if sex didn’t exist, ignoring our childhood questions and curiosities as if it were better not to think about sex. Others had parents who didn’t feel good about themselves sexually. We read in their attitudes signs of fear, shame, or disgust. All of these experiences shape our feelings about what is responsible, right, or appropriate sexually, sometimes leading to some pretty rigid definitions.
The process of exploring sex should fall within the normal developmental struggle to define ourselves as we move from adolescence into adulthood. But because sex is considered so taboo, only in those rare families in which we are openly encouraged to consider it do we engage in what should be a healthy investigation.
In many families, the indoctrination into the “correct” way to think about sex can be so subtle and alienating that we never examine what is actually true for ourselves. Instead, our attitude toward sex is based on what we are taught and how we are expected to behave around it.
Yet even experts vary on what a definition of healthy sex should be. Why should we then accept someone else’s ideas about sex before we identify and understand our own desires and ideals? Instead we should dig deep into our souls and psyches and examine what we truly feel about sex even at the risk of feeling disloyal to our families or churches like Erica and Sam. Following the steps of intelligent lust requires giving ourselves permission to be different.
3. BE COMPASSIONATE TOWARD YOURSELF
Compassion is the ability to feel another person’s distress along with the desire to relieve it. We learn about it when our parents show their deep concern toward us during moments of upset or pain, validating our feelings by reflecting them back to us in words. We also observe it in how our parents behave toward each another as well as toward themselves. If our parents act with kindness and gentleness during times of upset, we will eventually come to internalize that modeling, and compassion will become part of our emotional repertoire.
If in the process of identifying our sexual desires, we discover that our most powerful fantasies are in conflict with our self-image, this conflict may lead to feeling confused and distressed. A patient who is the CEO of a large corporation, for instance, had great difficulty reconciling his role as leader with the fact that he desired to be dominated in bed. His discovery initially led to feelings of embarrassment and shame.
When such surprises occur, we must suspend all self-judgments, tone down the moralism, draw from our reservoir of compassion, and direct it toward ourselves. Life is full of contradictions and paradoxes, which, with maturity, we learn to accept. To become whole we must fully embrace and integrate all parts of ourselves and our desires, however contradictory, dark, or difficult they may appear.
4. CONFRONT THE CONSEQUENCES OF CHANGE
All change has its consequences. But sometimes the price of change seems greater than the cost of remaining the same. When it comes to sex, it may feel safer to maintain the status quo than to delve too deeply into our thoughts and fantasies for fear of what we might discover about ourselves or what others might find out about us. If our desires stray too much from convention, we imagine the worst: We will be punished for our “sins,” attacked for our “selfishness,” or labeled crazy for our “kinkiness.” We may even preempt others from criticizing us by diminishing ourselves first, a process that lowers self-esteem.
Instead, we can choose to act courageously, acknowledge the discomfort that comes with change, and still move forward. By confronting our fears, we have the potential to discover not only many truths about ourselves, our relationships, and our partners, but also a passion for life itself.
5. COMMIT TO MAINTAINING OPENNESS AND ACCEPTANCE
The first four steps of intelligent lust should be done independently even if we are in a committed relationship and our partner is also reading this book. We need the privacy to sort through what we really feel, think, and believe in relation to sex before we share our discoveries. There are often vagaries to our thoughts at first. It may take time for them to solidify and for us to feel certain and secure with what we believe is true. It’s best to not share prematurely and wait until we reach step 5 to initiate that process. You will find instructions for engaging in such conversations in that chapter.
Still, following the steps of intelligent lust together will require a commitment from both parties to maintain openness, honesty, and acceptance regardless of the outcome. That you must agree to from the start. Acknowledging our most intimate desires to ourselves is difficult enough, but disclosing them to a partner can be terrifying. If, over a period of time, a partner has experienced us in a particular way sexually, new revelations can elicit reactions ranging from excitement to horror. A patient whose husband described her as sexually uptight revealed to him in therapy that she had a secret desire to dress and act like a slut. He told her the idea was extremely sexually arousing. But in a similar case, a wife’s fantasy of wearing sexy lingerie instead aroused her husband’s disgust and, as a result, her own shame and embarrassment.
Hearing about a partner’s fantasies when it involves a third person can feel especially threatening and in some cases torturous. Feelings of jealousy, betrayal, or suspicion generally grow out of deeper feelings of inadequacy in which we fear that we’re not interesting or sexy enough to hold the attention of a partner.
But as we begin to understand our partner’s relationship and family history and its connection to their desires, most of us develop a more generous perspective. We find value in building a truthful, trusting, and authentic relationship as a replacement for feelings of inadequacy, jealousy, and insecurity and recognize the extraordinary gift of being invited into our partner’s inner world and sharing in its many truths.
6. ACCEPT AND HONOR YOUR TRUE DESIRES
Our fantasies and desires remain relatively constant throughout our lives because the unmet needs from which they originate often go unsatisfied or the underlying conflicts remain unresolved. Many women focus their sexual attention on the desires of their partners and simply don’t know or place value on their own. Satisfying them is random and infrequent. If we treat our desires as secondary, suppressing, denying, or holding them as secret, they will influence us in subversive ways, possibly manifesting in illness, addictions, depression, acting out, and other negative symptoms.
By accepting and honoring our true desires, we take responsibility for their gratification and create the opportunity for them to truly serve their healing purpose.
IT’S NOT SO BLACK AND WHITE: LEON
When Leon was just a toddler, his father was recruited to head the engineering division of a large auto manufacturer. The family left the small Louisiana town where their roots went back generations and headed to the suburbs of Detroit, the flourishing automobile capital of America. Leon’s mother quickly found a job as a high school social studies teacher for which she had trained at Louisiana State University. It was an exciting change for his parents, but for Leon, who was wrenched from the arms of his loving grandmother who looked after him every day while his parents worked, it was a profoundly difficult adjustment. When they arrived in Detroit, the family immediately began their jobs and Leon was left in the care of Lucy, a Jamaican nanny, whose employment was arranged by the auto company. Much to his parents’ surprise and delight, Leon bonded with his new caretaker, who was gifted with kindness and warmth. She embraced Leon as if he were her own, providing him daily love and affection as his grandmother had.
Lucy remained with the family after Leon entered school. When his sister Jean arrived, Lucy took care of her as well. Over time, she became integrated into family life, participating in nearly everything they did as if she were a family member. Feelings of warmth and affection were shared by everyone. Still, to those outside the family she was considered the “help,” and more than a few tongues wagged about how close the “negro girl” was to family. “It isn’t good for the children,” they said. “They should take care of their own.” At the time there were strong racial tensions in Detroit, particularly in the auto industry, where the highest-level executives like Leon’s father tended to be white when most on the assembly lines were African American. But everyone in the family, including Lucy, was happy and doing well, so it was easy for them all to turn a blind eye to the social criticism.
When Leon was fourteen, the family’s bliss came to a tragic end. On the way home from the company Christmas party, a drunk driver lost control of his car, crossed the highway divider, and hit their car head-on. Leon’s parents died instantly.
Upon hearing the news, the extended family acted urgently. Worried about the children, the relatives made the decision to bring them back to Louisiana to live with their grandmother.
After the funeral, Leon and his sister were quickly gathered up and sent south. Perhaps because family members didn’t know how close Lucy and the children had grown, or maybe as a result of Southern prejudice, Leon and his sister were not given the opportunity to say good-bye to Lucy.
Leon had a very difficult time adjusting to life back in the South. He was grieving not only the loss of his parents, but also the loss of his beloved Lucy. Already a shy teenager, he withdrew further into the solitary world of books, and despite his grandmother’s many attempts to encourage Leon to participate socially with friends and family, he remained “a loner” throughout his remaining teenage years.
When Leon came to see me shortly after his thirty-fifth birthday, his grandmother had recently died. He subsequently had spiraled into a depression from which he could not find his way out. We spent several months talking about his past, reliving his life before and after the tragedy, his feelings about his grandmother, his parents, and, of course, Lucy. Within the safety of my consultation room, Leon gradually allowed himself to grieve. When he finally let go, it seemed as if his tears would never end. But at last they did. He wrote to Lucy, whom he learned now had her own children. They began a warm correspondence.
After his major depression lifted, Leon raised another concern. He was forty and had never had a substantial relationship with a woman. While he understood now that he had been depressed since adolescence and that his depression had influenced all of his relationships, he had become comfortable enough with me to reveal a secret he had kept hidden from everyone.
Confused and ashamed, his head bowed when he spoke, Leon told me that he compulsively fantasized about sexual relations with “black girls.” When I asked him specifically what he meant, he said, “The only time I can get off is thinking about having sex with a black woman and I am her master. I have been thinking about this for as long as I can remember.”
I asked him why he thought that was a problem.
“It’s the whole white master thing. It feels wrong. It just doesn’t seem right. I know somehow the whole sordid thing is related to Lucy. How couldn’t it be? She was probably the most important person in my childhood. It feels totally creepy.”
I asked him if it was Lucy he imagined in his fantasies.
“Hell no,” he said, “but it’s close enough. I’ve tried to make myself stop thinking about black girls, but I can’t stop the thoughts. It feels like an obsession, the more I try not to think about it, the more I do.”
“What do you actually feel?” I asked.
“I’m ashamed. I’m trying not to think of it as incestuous. But Lucy was a mother-figure. And beyond that—the whole white/black thing is nuts. I grew up in the South where there was a black/white fetish. It’s just wrong!” he said again. “I’m disgusted with myself. When I do have sex with black women, I feel guilty and ashamed after. But I am just not into white girls—no attraction at all. I’m sure that’s why I’ve never had a relationship.”
His feelings seemed so intense that I felt before I could guide him through the steps of intelligent lust, which I believed would enormously benefit him, I would have to help him get in the right state of mind—to get him ready for the emotional journey and what he might discover. He said he felt as if his fetish loomed as large as his grief did.
I explained that for many years he had been quietly mourning, which left little energy or inclination for much else. His work had provided some distraction and relief from the droning of his grief, but it kept him isolated. I told him now that he was feeling less depressed, our goal in therapy would be to understand what motivated his desires and how he could use them to feel more satisfied in his life both sexually and otherwise—perhaps even heal old wounds. I suggested we build his interest and energy back slowly.
Before we began, I recommended that he choose a quiet place, free of any distractions, that he could use to engage in conversation with himself, journal writing, and quiet contemplation. He had come to New York to further his career as a computer programmer, making his home in a small suburb just outside the city on Long Island, where he had, by then, grown to feel quite comfortable. He chose the public library of this town as his private space in which to do the exercises. He explained that he had spent many fond hours in libraries during his childhood: “They allowed me the solitude and solace I needed.”
I asked him to start his journal by writing all the reasons that he felt ashamed or guilty of his sexual desires. I suggested he push himself to think of at least five. Start each sentence with, “I feel ashamed or guilty about…” When he finished, I recommended he re-read what he wrote twice and then, at the top of the list, title it with the statement, “Self-Defeating Thoughts.” I further suggested that he refer to the list frequently when we later followed through the steps.
When he returned, he read the list to me. It included, “I feel guilty about being a racist. I am ashamed that I am out of control of my thoughts and feelings. I feel guilty that I’m not sexually attracted to white women. I feel guilty about being disloyal to my white Southern family for being attracted to black girls. I feel ashamed that I treat black women as sexual objects.”
We talked in depth about his guilt and shame over the next few sessions, particularly about his disloyalty to his “white” family. I reminded him that his fetish, like all desires, had a specific meaning and purpose, and that we would soon discover the true significance when we embarked on the next few steps of intelligent lust. I asked him to think of his attraction as an act of loyalty to his parents, rather than betrayal. When he looked confused, I explained.
“Your parents didn’t share the prejudices that other members of your ‘white’ family and community may have harbored. As you told me yourself, they fully embraced Lucy and she them. They came to love and trust each other despite the racial barriers that prevailed at the time.” I further explained that regardless of their middle-class existence, his parents were unconventional in their values and that real loyalty to them would mean following in their footsteps. I suggested that he return to his favorite place in the library and write on the next page of his notebook the following mantra:
“I am willing to break convention and explore my personal truth.”
I suggested he could best honor his parents by giving himself permission to be different. To be himself as his parents had done. I told him to re-read this sentence regularly over the course of the week. I further recommended that he practice acting more compassionately toward himself by trying to not judge himself or imagine how others would judge him. “Moralism gets in the way of discovering the truth,” I added.
In the next session, Leon told me he was feeling more relaxed. He said that although he still didn’t understand the reason for his preference, he did feel a little less guilty about having it. He had even masturbated without trying to stop his thoughts and concluded, for the first time, without feeling ashamed.
I told him this was an important sign—it meant that he was nearly ready to explore the deeper meaning of his fantasies and desires. I asked him what he felt the consequences might be if he stopped suppressing them as he had done until recently and allowed them to fully prosper.
He answered that while “it was great to allow myself to go there,” saying that he “felt free,” he was afraid of where his desire and fantasies would lead. “I’m afraid I might fall in love with a black woman and that that could only lead to sorrow,” he said.
We discussed his fears at length, after which I told him I understood them, but that I was certain he would feel less fearful when he fully understood the purpose of his desire.
I had already formed some notions about the relationship of his desires to his past. Perhaps his anger with Lucy for not having rescued him after he had been taken away had been unconsciously eroticized. He could express his anger in his fantasies by imagining himself as a brutal master. But before we explored those deeper connections, I wanted to be certain that he was in the right frame of mind.
To handle his fear, I suggested that he try to stay in the present, especially when he felt afraid—to be observant of his feelings as they occurred, but to do his best to not “future trip,” that is, to stop himself from imagining the worst possible outcomes. Our immediate goal was to look at the truth about his desires and discover the underlying conflict from which they originated and the unmet need they serve to satisfy. Staying present to that truth would help him not to worry about the future or the relationships it might bring.
I asked him if he could commit to staying open and honest.
When he said he would do his best, I suggested that he go back to his place at the library and write in his journal about all the ways that sex could be good for him. I told him that I believed his true desires were his allies and I hoped he would have faith in their healing power.
When he returned, he said, “When we first started talking about this, the list would have been a very short list. But I came up with at least ten reasons why sex could be enjoyable.”
I said with a conspiratorial smile, “Ten is a short list. When we are done following the steps of intelligent lust, which you now seem ready to start, the list will fill at least a few pages.”
He smiled beatifically.
ALYSSA’S THOUGHTS
Compassion
The concept of acting with compassion toward ourselves is one of the most important ideas presented in this book. Along the path to self-discovery, there are sometimes bumps in the road that will require patience and kindness toward ourselves to navigate.
Compassion is much more than an emotion. It’s a world view. That is, it’s a way of relating to the world that’s based on awareness, understanding, acceptance, and action. Living life from a place of compassion not only fosters self-care, but also carefulness in our behavior toward others.
Forming a Support Group
Despite the deeply personal examination involved in following the steps of intelligent lust, sometimes the support of a group can make the process go more smoothly and give it greater focus. I liken the experience to the process I went through learning yoga. Using a book or video at home was extremely helpful, but I sometimes got distracted, busy, or uncertain about whether I was doing the positions correctly. But I benefitted as much by taking a class that provided me with the structure and guidance I needed until the movements gradually became more natural to achieve. Plus it kept me in line by requiring regular accountability. And, when things got difficult, my classmates acted like cheerleaders, holding me to my commitment to advance.
With that analogy in mind, consider getting a group of friends together to read Your Brain on Sex and follow the steps with each other. The support, encouragement, and shared experience among group members will make the journey seem less lonely as well as continually challenge us to stay true to ourselves.