Come as You Are (16 page)

Other

not-so-sexy contexts

Think of a not-so-great sexual experience from your past—not necessarily a terrible one, just a not-so-great one. Describe it here, with as many relevant details as you can recall:

Now consider what aspects of that experience made it not-so-great:

Other

sexual cues assessment

Read through all your sexy and not-so-sexy contexts. What do you notice as reliable contexts for great sex and reliable contexts for not-so-great sex?

Identify five things you and/or your partner could do if you decided to work toward creating more frequent and easier access to the contexts that improve your sexual functioning.

Now select the two or three that feel like the right combination of impact, ease, and immediacy, and list all the things that would have to happen in order for this change to occur. Be as CONCRETE AND SPECIFIC as you can. These should be ACTIONS rather than abstractions or ideas or attitudes. Ask yourself, “If we decide to create this change, what goes on our to-do list?”

Change 1

Change 2

Change 3

Finally, select just one change that you will actually implement. Choose a start date together that feels like good timing. Ideally this will be within the next month. Make your plan. AND DO IT!

part 2

sex in context

four

emotional context

SEX IN A MONKEY BRAIN

Women ask me questions, and then they tell me their stories. I have a whole mental library full of them—hilarious stories of sex adventures gone awry, sad stories of relationships that couldn’t be healed, awe-inspiring stories of survival and transcendence. Every single one is a story of discovery.

Merritt’s story is about survival.

“Why should I trust my body?” she said. “My whole adult life, my body has been unreliable and falling apart. When I get stressed, everything just shuts down—I get sick, I get injured, none of my systems work. And that includes sex.”

This made some sense, given her sensitive brakes, but it seemed to me there was more going on.

“It sounds like your body is opting for the ‘freeze’ stress response, where it just shuts down instead of trying to escape or fight,” I said. “It’s what happens when a person has either long-term, high-intensity stress, or is in the process of healing after trauma. Does either of those sound like you?”

“Both,” Carol and Merritt said together.

“You think stress explains why I have a hard time trusting my body?” Merritt asked me.

I definitely do.

This chapter is about stress and love and how they affect sexual pleasure.

Trust your body. Listen to it—not to the specific circumstances of the moment but to the deep, primal messages of your evolutionary heritage:

I am at risk/I am safe.

I am broken/I am whole.

I am lost/I am home.

If you’re already awesomely good at that, feel free to skip this chapter. But if, like most of us, you could use help translating the signals your body is sending, you’ll find this chapter informative. Because it’s not just the sexual aspects of a context that influence whether you get turned on. It’s all the other emotional aspects, including your preexisting emotional state.

And of all the emotional systems managed by your One Ring, the two that may have the most immediate impact on sexual pleasure are
stress
and
love.
Stress is the physiological and neurological process that helps you deal with threats. Love is the physiological and neurological process that pulls you toward your tribe.

Stress underlies worry, anxiety, fear, terror, all the variants of “Run away!” But it also underlies anger—irritation, annoyance, frustration, rage. And to a great extent it underlies the shutdown that characterizes depression. In the first section of this chapter, I’ll present a view of stress different from those you may have heard before: The key to managing stress (so that it doesn’t mess with your sex life) is not simply “relaxing” or “calming down.”
It’s allowing the stress response cycle to complete.
Allow it to discharge fully. Let your body move all the way from “I am at risk” to “I am safe.”

In the second part of this chapter, I’ll discuss love. Love, for our purposes, is attachment, the innate biological mechanism that bonds humans together. It underlies passion, romance, and the joy of finding a partner you can connect with. But it also underlies grief, jealousy, and heartbreak. Sometimes it’s joyful, like when you’re falling in love. Sometimes it’s agonizing, like when you’re breaking up. But always attachment pulls us from “I am broken” to “I am whole.”

And finally, in the third part of this chapter, I’ll talk about the place where stress and attachment and sex overlap—the place where we experience both the passionate, exuberant joy of intense love and also the agony of the worst interpersonal discord. When stress and attachment and sex all activate together in our emotional One Ring, they call, “I am lost,” to motivate us to search and search until we find ourselves in a new place: “I am home.” I’ll describe attachment distress–fueled sex as “sex that advances the plot,” and introduce ways that we can use this dynamic to our advantage.

The goal is to help you recognize how the stress response cycle and the attachment mechanism are integrated in your sexual responsiveness, and to offer strategies for allowing them to enhance sexual pleasure, as well as to provide options when they’re impairing pleasure.

We can understand women’s sexual wellbeing only if we take
context
into account—and most of that context has nothing to do with sex itself. Which means we can improve our sexual wellbeing and expand our sexual pleasure without directly changing anything about our sex lives! What I’ve included in this chapter and the next are the contextual factors that research has shown are consistently associated with changes in women’s sexual wellbeing. Improve your context, and your sexual pleasure will expand all on its own.

the stress response cycle: fight, flight, and freeze

Let’s first separate your stressors from your stress. Your
stressors
are the things that activate the stress response—bills, family, work, fretting about your sex life, all of that.

Your
stress
is the system of changes activated in your brain and body in response to those stressors. It’s an evolutionarily adaptive mechanism that allows you to respond to perceived threats. Or it
was
evolutionarily adaptive, back when our stressors had claws and teeth and could run thirty miles per hour. These days we are almost never chased by lions, and yet our body’s response to, say, an incompetent boss, is largely the same as it would be to a lion. Your physiology doesn’t differentiate much. This fact will have important implications for your sex life, as we’ll soon see.

Stress is usually taught as the fight-or-flight response, but it’s vastly more helpful—and accurate—to call it by its full description: fight/flight/freeze. Here’s how it works:

When your brain perceives a threat in the environment, you experience a massive biochemical change, characterized by floods of adrenaline and cortisol to your bloodstream and a cascade of physiological events, such as increased heart rate, respiration rate, and blood pressure; suppressed immune and digestive functioning; dilation of the pupils and shifting of attention to a vigilant state, focused on the here and now. All these changes are like revving your engine before a race, or taking a deep breath before you duck underwater—preparation for the action to come.

What action that will be depends on the nature of the perceived threat—that is, it’s context dependent.

Suppose the threat is a lion—the kind of threat we were dealing with in the environment where the mechanism evolved in our early ancestors. The stress response cycle notices the lion and shouts, “I’m at risk! What do I do?” A lion, your brain informs you in much less than a second, is the kind of threat that you are most likely to survive by trying to
escape.

So what do you do when you see a lion coming after you?

You feel fear, and you run.

And then what happens?

There are only two possible outcomes, right? Either you get killed by the lion, in which case none of the rest of this matters, or you escape and live. So imagine that you successfully run back to your village and scream for help, and everyone helps you slaughter the lion, and then you all eat it for dinner, and in the morning you have a respectful burial service for the parts of the carcass you won’t be using, giving reverent thanks for the lion’s sacrifice.

And how do you feel now?

Relieved! Grateful to be alive! You love your friends and family!

And that is the complete stress response cycle, with beginning (“I’m at risk!”), middle (action), and end (“I’m safe!”).

•  •  •

Or suppose the threat is a person with an angry expression on his face, who’s sneaking up behind your best friend, with a little knife in his hand? Your brain may decide this is a threat you can best survive by
conquering.

You feel anger (“I’m at risk!”—as we’ll see in the attachment section, the people we love get counted as “ourselves”), and you fight.

And again, you can fight and die or you can fight and live; either way, you complete the stress response cycle by engaging in a behavior that eliminates the stressor and the stress.

These two responses, fight and flight, are both accelerator stress—the sympathetic nervous system, the “GO!” of the stress response. Fight emerges when your emotional One Ring determines that a stressor should be conquered. Flight emerges when your One Ring determines a stressor should be escaped.

But suppose the stressor is one that your brain determines you can’t survive by escaping and you can’t survive by conquering—you feel the teeth of the lion bite into you from behind. This is when you get the brakes stress response—the parasympathetic nervous system, the
“STOP!” activated by the most extreme distress. Your body shuts down; you may even experience “tonic immobility,” where you can’t move, or can move only sluggishly. Animals in the wild freeze and fall to the ground as a last-ditch effort to convince a predator they’re already dead; Stephen Porges has hypothesized that freeze is a stress response that facilitates a painless death.
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