Individuals with the Love-Sexuality Survival Style are highly energetic, attractive, and successful. They are the doers and the winners of the world, the sports heroes, cheerleaders, top actors and actresses, the people who often become the icons of our collective consciousness. However, regardless of how attractive or accomplished they appear, they rarely live up to their own high expectations: on one hand, they seem full of confidence but on the other, they feel they are only as good as their last performance. Since they base their self-worth on looks and performance, their self-esteem is conditional; underneath their beautiful exterior they feel highly flawed.
This high-energy survival style develops around the issue of heartbreak, the result of unacknowledged or rejected loving feelings, particularly from the opposite-sex parent. Because of their early heartbreak around loving, maintaining a consistent love relationship as adults is challenging for them. Their developmental challenge is to integrate an open and loving heart with a vital sexuality.
Though all human beings are hardwired to be loving and sexual, individuals who have significant developmental trauma in earlier stages of development do not move fully into this fifth stage of development. For example:
• Connection types, who have difficulty with close contact with other human beings, continue to struggle with this basic conflict and therefore cannot truly engage the more mature demands of an adult love relationship. They tend to be impersonal and disconnected, and their sexuality in particular can be depersonalized.
• Attunement types, who are fixated on getting nurturing and nourishment, view love and sexuality through the prism of that “younger” need fulfillment.
• Trust types, with their need to dominate and control, are incapable of a mutual, healthy love relationship.
• Autonomy types, whose concern is to avoid domination and control by others, and who have difficulty being authentic and setting boundaries, see love relationships as traps wherein they lose their freedom and independence.
There are two important time periods in the development of the Love-Sexuality Survival Style: four to six years of age and the onset of puberty at roughly twelve to fifteen. In young children love and sexuality are integrated, and love for the parent is a whole-body experience. Difficulties surface between four and six years of age when parents reject, shame, or punish the child’s emerging sexual expression and curiosity. These parents may encourage heart expressions but recoil at nascent expressions of sexuality. This reaction forces children to split off their sexuality from their expressions of love.
Essentially, individuals with the Love-Sexuality Survival Style experience rejection or wounding during the periods of sexual awakening. At puberty, the parents’ attitude toward sexuality and how they handle their adolescents’ changing bodies contributes significantly to the development of this survival style. The adolescent’s sexual awakening may be completely ignored or met with open rejection, disdain, or disapproval. Fathers of pubescent girls often have difficulty handling their daughter’s changing body and transition into womanhood, and some even become jealous of their increasing interest in boys. How a father handles this transitional time can determine a young girl’s sense of herself as a woman: if the father withdraws his love and attention, the adolescent girl may feel deeply hurt, which leads to a sense of shame about her developing body and sexuality. Similarly, how mothers respond to their adolescent sons’ nocturnal emissions, masturbation, and increasing interest in girls can also cause deep shame in young boys. There are many possible and damaging scenarios, but overall, when the expression of their sexual selves is handled in a shaming way, adolescents’ sense of identity is wounded and their budding sexuality is negatively affected.
Love-Sexuality types often grow up in families with a rigid atmosphere where sexual awakening is judged or condemned: expressions of love, tenderness, and emotions are not openly communicated and are even frowned upon. In certain families, love is conditional, predicated on looks and performance. As a result, adolescents’ experience of what they are told is love and their relationship to their own bodies become distorted. Experiencing love as conditional and sexuality as shameful creates a lack of integration between loving and sexual feelings that has lifelong repercussions for how they relate to their own bodies and to an intimate partner. They relate either from the heart or from their sexuality but find integrating both difficult and anxiety-producing.
Individuals who have navigated the first four developmental stages with relative success and whose life force has not been distorted by earlier trauma tend to be high-functioning adults. They have energy to meet their life goals and tend to be well integrated physically, which makes them attractive to other people.
When individuals experience misattunement to their love and sexuality needs at this stage, one of two subtypes develop—the romantic subtype or the sexual subtype—each favoring one aspect of the love-sexuality split.
These individuals romanticize love and marriage. They are openhearted but often disconnected from their sexuality and may even be terrified of it; they have difficulty integrating a vital sexuality into their love relationships. In the early stages of a relationship, they can feel more sexual, but as the relationship deepens, their sexual feelings diminish. Less integrated romantic subtypes, having disconnected from their sexual impulses, can become the moral crusaders, the self-appointed guardians of public morality who attempt to enforce their moral code on others. In the repressed romantic subtype who professes a strong and often judgmental position about the sexuality of others, the sexual impulses have been driven underground and are sometimes expressed in covert and secret acting out.
Individuals with the sexual subtype have a tendency toward seductive behavior as a way to make themselves desirable. They seek out and use attractive partners to bolster their own self-esteem and measure sexual satisfaction by the frequency, rather than by the depth, of their experience.
Their seductiveness is not used for control, as with the Trust type, but as a way to prevent real intimacy. Because of their fear and avoidance of intimacy, they often have the feeling that they are incapable of loving. Sexual subtypes consider themselves sexually sophisticated, and sexual potency and performance are important to them. Frequently, however, their sexuality is mechanical and disconnected, centered more on conquest and performance than on heart connection.
For this subtype, the love-sexuality split results in both alienation from deep sexual pleasure and obsession with genitally focused sexuality. Individuals in this sexual subtype may be obsessed with sex and pornography; they may be highly promiscuous, constantly seeking the sexual satisfaction that their rigid, defended bodies will not allow them to fully experience.
In relationship, they experience an initial period of intense sexuality, but as the possibility of a heart connection develops, they often lose sexual interest or break off the relationship. They are able to be sexual with relative strangers but not with the person they love. This split is reflected in their inability to maintain a strong sexual connection beyond the early courting period. As a relationship progresses and the partner becomes less of a stranger and more like family, sexual subtype individuals cannot maintain a sexual charge. They cope by changing relationships relatively frequently to maintain their sexual interest or by staying in one relationship and feeling sexually frustrated. Sometimes, they will stay in one relationship to fulfill their need for love but have affairs to fulfill their sexual needs.
The identity of Love-Sexuality types is based on looks and performance; their highest priority is to look good and perform well. Individuals with this survival style spend their lives compensating for their early heartbreak and rejection by trying to perfect themselves. Having experienced rejection, their mantra becomes, “I will be so perfect, so attractive, that everyone will be drawn to me, and I will never have to face rejection again.” They are often driven and demanding and hold high standards of perfection for themselves and others. Their pride-based identifications involve the relentless pursuit of perfection, whereas their shame-based identifications, often unconscious, reflect a sense of hurt, rejection, and feeling flawed.
A general characteristic of individuals with this survival style is a tendency to do rather than to feel; they distrust emotions. The constant focus on doing helps them stay out of touch with their feelings. They distrust emotions because emotions put them in touch with a level of vulnerability they prefer to avoid. They often consider emotions to be a sign of weakness and can be insensitive to both their own and others’ tender feelings.
Love-Sexuality types, focusing more on surface image than on the core of the relationship, choose partners who reflect well on them. They like to bathe in the narcissistic glow of their partner’s good looks and accomplishments.
Individuals with the Love-Sexuality Survival Style have a tremendous fear of vulnerability. They may be aware of strong feelings of affection for their partner but will show marked restraint in revealing them. When feeling wounded, their rigid pride reveals itself; they wait for their partner to initiate reconciliation. Having invested energy in creating an image of perfection, they fear that nobody could possibly love them if their flaws were revealed. They also fear that they are not capable of loving anyone, and they constantly question whether love is even possible.
• “There is something fundamentally flawed in me.”
Compromised Core Expression
• “I love you.”
Shame-Based Identifications
• Hurt
• Rejected
• Flawed
• Feeling unloved and unlovable
Pride-Based Counter-Identifications
• “I’ll never let anyone hurt me again.”
• Reject first
• Self-esteem based on appearance and image
• Perfect, seamless, flawless
Reality
• Love that is conditional upon looks and performance is not love at all
Behavioral Characteristics
• Perfectionistic and critical; impossibly high standards for self and others
• Hard on themselves when they fail to live up to their high standards
• Continually oriented toward self-improvement
• Drawn to working out, plastic surgery, wanting to make their hard bodies even harder
• Mistake admiration for love
• Difficulty feeling heart and sexual connection together; tendency to shut down sexually when heart opens
• Difficulty maintaining relationships
• Sexually acting out—or moralistic, prim, and prudish
• Self-righteous, judgmental, stiff with pride
• Driven, compulsive, rigid, black-and-white thinking
• Orientation toward doing rather than feeling and being
• Sex as their primary way of being in touch with the body
• Seductive, then rejecting; will always reject first
• Base sense of sexual desirability on sexual conquests
• Afraid to open heart: “I’m not sure I even know what love is.”
• Competitive
• Fear of surrender; difficulty allowing vulnerability in love relations
Energy
• High energy focused on discharge through motor activity: doers
• Sympathetically dominant
Breathing Pattern
• Armored around the heart
TABLE 6.1: Key Features of the Love-Sexuality Survival Style
It is important to remember that individuals with the Love-Sexuality Survival Style have experienced intense hurt and rejection. To avoid rejection, they hold back on their impulses to open up and reach out. The unconscious decision they made as children—“I’ll never let anyone hurt me like this again”—leads them to reject others before they can be rejected.
Individuals with the Love-Sexuality Survival Style come to therapy with concerns about relationships. Either they are unhappy in a current relationship, or they have had a series of less-than-satisfying relationships and feel anxious about whether or not they are capable of having a good relationship.
The following vignette illustrates a classic relationship pattern for individuals with the Love-Sexuality Survival Style.
Robert and Jessica met in their late teens and immediately felt a strong physical attraction and intense sexuality. After dating for nine months, they married, and shortly afterward Robert noticed that he started feeling less sexually attracted to Jessica. Sexual intensity diminished for both of them. The original sexual attraction between Robert and Jessica had been intense and initially involved little heart connection from either of them. As their relationship progressed and heart feelings emerged, the love-sexuality split became more evident.
Jessica became pregnant. After she gave birth, the sexual interest on both their parts diminished even more. Robert related that he continued to love his wife but that she started to feel more like a sister than a lover, and for the first time in his life, he experienced difficulties with potency. Complicating the situation was the fact that as Jessica bonded with her baby, she lost interest in being sexual with her husband. The baby required a lot of her attention, and Robert began feeling left out and resentful. Rather than sharing his feelings with his wife, he had a brief affair. He experienced potency in the affair, which convinced him that his lack of interest in sex was really his wife’s “fault.” When Jessica found out about the affair, she divorced him.
After the divorce, Robert decided to continue in individual therapy. Over time he came to realize how difficult it was for him to feel both sexual and loving toward the same woman. Robert began to understand his experience of impotency with Jessica from a different perspective. Previously, he had been looking for a mechanical fix. Now he could see that he was not the victim of a random symptom but that his impotence was a message; as soon as he felt emotionally close to a woman, anxiety would emerge and his sexual feelings would diminish. At first he could relate only to his lack of sexual feeling as boredom. He then came to see that his inability to maintain a sexual and loving relationship had to do with a lifelong love-sexuality split that had remained unresolved.
The therapeutic task involves helping individuals with the Love-Sexuality Survival Style become aware of their relationship patterns. Projecting their early childhood experience, Love-Sexuality types feel in jeopardy of getting their heart broken if they love deeply. The rejection they fear is both a memory of their early rejection and a reflection of how rejecting they are of themselves. On an emotional level, working through love-sexuality issues involves learning to allow more vulnerability, to open the heart, and ultimately, to surrender.
• Struggling with a love relationship that has failed provides an opportunity for therapy and growth.
• Support these clients to move from blaming their partner for the relationship difficulties to seeing their own contribution in the dynamic.
• The emotional work of learning to recognize and allow tender and vulnerable feelings is a central theme.
• Work slowly to support and allow tenderness and vulnerability toward self and others to emerge in these clients.
• Help them deepen their bodily awareness, not just beautify or objectify their body.
• Support mindful awareness of how doing helps them avoid their vulnerability and underlying hurt.
• Help them understand that their constant striving for the idealized self-image actually reinforces the shame-based image of feeling flawed and unlovable.
• Help them understand that love based on looks and performance is not love at all.
• Work with their tendency toward a rigid, black-and-white belief system.
• Work on their ability to feel and open themselves to their heart responses.
• Work on the hidden shame related to sexuality.
• Work toward resolving the split between love and sexuality.
TABLE 6.2: Therapeutic Strategies for the Love-Sexuality Survival Style
Growth for Love-Sexuality types involves learning that surrendering to love is not about surrendering to another person but about surrendering to their own feelings. When asked to get in touch with a time in their life when they gave in to their heart feelings, they often remember their newborn child or a pet they deeply loved. When asked to remember the feeling in their body, they describe a melting feeling and a fullness of the heart—which helps them begin to understand “opening the heart” from a different perspective. This can be the first step in a process whereby they come to experience love as its own reward.
Shame about sexuality is present even in the apparently most sexually sophisticated individuals with the Love-Sexuality Survival Style. These clients have to work through the shame about their sexuality to be able to make the final integration. For Love-Sexuality types, integrating love and sexuality in a committed relationship brings the most profound level of vulnerability. The final healing of the love-sexuality split comes as individuals work through the many conscious and unconscious layers of shame that are associated with their sexual feelings and as they learn to integrate their vital sexuality with an open heart.
The goal of the NARM approach is to help clients experience and live their original core expression and recover their right to life and pleasure. Growth and change happen as connection to the core resources are reestablished and strengthened. In the process of therapy, clients learn how they have incorporated and perpetuated their original environmental failures into their sense of self, body, and behavior in order to survive. Overall:
• Connection types learn to see how isolating and life-denying they have become. They learn to acknowledge their own needs and their own aggressive feelings and begin to live more fully in their body.
• Attunement types learn how they deny and reject their own needs, giving to others what they want for themselves and, in the process, abandoning themselves. They learn to attune to, express, and allow the fulfillment of their needs.
• Trust types experience how they betray not only others but also themselves. They give up their need for control, learn to ask for help and support, and allow healthy interdependency with others.
• Autonomy types learn to see how they pressure and judge themselves. Through an increasing capacity to self-reference, they learn to develop their own personal sense of authority and set appropriate limits.
• Love-Sexuality types experience how conditional on looks and performance their self-acceptance has been. They learn to open their hearts and integrate love with a vital sexuality.
Figure 6.1 presents an outline of the diminishment and distortion of aliveness through each of the five adaptive survival styles. This outline should be read from the bottom up.
FIGURE 6.1: Distortions of the Life Force in Each of the Five Adaptive Survival Styles