Come as You Are (44 page)

So dig this: Research participants who were less affected by their symptoms did not experience lower frequency or severity of symptoms, nor were they more aware of their internal state—the “observe” factor. Nope. The people who were less impacted by their symptoms were those who were more nonjudging! In other words, it isn’t the symptoms that predict how much anxiety disrupts a person’s life, it’s how a person feels about those symptoms. It’s not how you feel—it’s not even being aware of how you feel. It’s how you feel about how you feel. And people who feel nonjudging about their feelings do better.

The body of research specifically measuring nonjudging in relation to sexual functioning is small but growing. In a tiny study of sensorimotor sex therapy, women in the treatment group reported that the therapy helped them to feel less like they “should” be experiencing something in particular and more able to be gentle and forgiving with themselves.
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(Sound like anything from, oh, say, chapter 5? Remember self-compassion?) Though the study was too small to find statistically significant results, the qualitative findings are encouraging, and they reinforce the idea that it’s not awareness of your sexuality that matters, it’s how you feel about what you are aware of.

nonjudging = “emotion coaching”

I’ve said it more than once: Emotions are tunnels. You have to go all the way through the darkness to get to the light at the end. And if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other, you’ll get where you want to go. Some of us know how to go through the tunnel because we grew up in families that taught us how. Some of us know how to go through the tunnel because we learned that skill later in life. And some of us haven’t had a chance to learn that skill yet. But we can always learn, by becoming our own emotion coaches.

In
Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child
, psychologist John Gottman describes four different approaches a parent can take in responding to a child’s feelings: emotion coaching, dismissing, disapproving, and
laissez-faire. I’ll refer to the last three (less supportive) approaches together as emotion dismissing.
⁸

Emotion coaching teaches you that

• You can recognize lower-intensity emotions so that you can manage them before they escalate.

• Negative emotions are a natural response to negative life events. Because negative life events are sometimes inevitable, so are negative emotions.

• Because negative emotions are a normal part of life, they are discussed, given names, and empathized with.

• “It’s normal that sometimes it feels hard,” “When you feel bad, we love you just as much as when you feel good,” and “You cry all you need to, honey.”

• Your sadness, anger, and fear are signs of being human.

Emotion dismissing, on the other hand, teaches you that

• You should ignore subtle or lower-intensity emotions—they’re irrelevant.

• Negative emotions are toxic, dangerous to yourself and the people around you.

• Negative feelings are a choice, something you could select in the morning like part of your outfit. Because they’re a choice, negative emotions may be punished—even if there is no overt misbehavior.

• “Get over it,” “Be grateful for all the good things,” or “C’mon, give me a smile, honey!”

• Your sadness, anger, and fear are signs of failure—either your own or your family’s.

In other words, emotion coaching teaches you that feelings are tunnels, and you can allow yourself to go through the darkness to get to the light. Emotion dismissing, on the other hand, teaches you that feelings
aren’t a tunnel, they’re a cave . . . with a river of cyanide . . . and a thousand rats . . . in the dark. Where you’ll be trapped forever. So whatever you do, KEEP OUT.

Lots of families use both styles, depending on the context or the specific emotion. And bear in mind that emotion dismissing is often lovingly intended. “Don’t cry, honey,” seems like a thoroughly benevolent sentiment, motivated by a desire to help someone who is suffering to feel better. But underneath “Don’t cry, honey,” is a subtle hint that the feelings are unwelcome. That you’re making other people uncomfortable. That it would be easier for everyone if you just didn’t feel that, so please stop.

But uncomfortable feelings happen. They are the normal, healthy response to negative life events. When you experience an injustice, anger happens. When you experience a loss, sadness happens. When you experience obstacles in your progress toward a goal, frustration happens. When you experience a threat, fear happens. And even if you only anticipate any of these things, you may very well experience the emotion, and it will be just as uncomfortable as if the thing were actually happening.

Things that happen also end. Every single time, as long as you don’t slam on the brakes to stop yourself from going through the tunnel.

nonjudging: tips for beginners

If you got lucky and had a family that taught you how to go through the tunnel, that’s great! You can apply the same skill to your sexual well-being. If your family was more like mine, then you might need some tips for learning to walk through the tunnel, when, as far as your brain is concerned, you’re just going deeper and deeper into the cave. Here are three ways to think about nonjudging that I’ve seen women use effectively:

• Remember that feelings are biological cycles with a beginning, a middle, and an end, built in. You believed me when I said it earlier, right? When we got chased by a lion? And the kid came out from under anesthesia? Feeling an emotion won’t get you trapped forever in that emotion; on the contrary, it will allow you to move through it, like a tunnel. It might not be fun, but it’s not dangerous. Your body knows how to do it. All you have to do is allow it.

• Some people find it helpful to think about allowing feelings in the same way they allow themselves to pee and poop. It’s built into the system. You don’t tell yourself you shouldn’t have to pee, you just wait for an appropriate time and place. And if your need to pee is urgent, you seek out an appropriate context. Same goes for feelings. They’re a natural part of being human, built into our biology. Cultural rules mean we can’t just feel our feeling anywhere we want, but we can find an appropriate time and place.

• The flock metaphor from chapter 8: Nonjudging is allowing the birds in the flock to fly away from a predator. Sometimes people are afraid that if they let those birds fly away, they’ll fly away from the predator forever. But that’s not how the system works. Once the birds have escaped from the predator (or noticed spontaneously that there is no predator after all), they’ll transition back to flying toward the magnetic pole along with their neighbors. But if you don’t allow them to fly away—if you say to yourself, “I shouldn’t have that feeling,” and slam on the brake—that’s like trying to cage the birds who are trying to escape. And how will those birds react? They’ll freak out, batter themselves against the bars, desperate to escape both the predator
and
the cage. Allow them to escape and trust that they’ll rejoin the flock.

Finally, a suggestion: Start small. Most mindfulness or other meditation training starts with paying attention to something simple, like your breath or eating a raisin. The smell and taste of a raisin are straightforward and nonthreatening, compared to the sensation of anger or shame or grief. Learning to notice how a raisin smells, tastes, and feels in your mouth builds a platform on which you can begin to experience more complicated and difficult sensations with the same attentive neutrality—nonjudging.

What says, “You are awesome in bed!” more clearly than your partner’s orgasm?

Your partner not being able to stop themselves from having an orgasm—especially if that partner has a slightly stubborn accelerator.

Camilla thought through the “If I make you a pizza and you only eat one slice, how does that make me feel?” problem logically and came to a smart conclusion:

They made a rule against her having orgasm.

They could do anything else they wanted, but Camilla wasn’t allowed to have any orgasms. It’s a reverse psychology trick that you’d never expect to work in real life—“You don’t want to have an orgasm? Fine. You’re not
allowed
to have an orgasm!”—but it actually does.

The rule did two things. First, it genuinely took away performance pressure from Camilla and frustrated expectations from Henry. They could both relax and forget about it, which made them both feel better.

It had another impact, too. Henry had already shifted the way he thought about foreplay and was thinking of their entire relationship as an opportunity to tease Camilla’s ticking pilot light. The new rule took that to another level.

See, taking orgasm off the table put Camilla’s little monitor in a puzzling situation. If Henry was, say, going down on her, and she felt so aroused that she thought she might have an orgasm, she’d remember that she wasn’t supposed to have an orgasm, and then the little monitor would keep checking her arousal level and comparing it with her goal state of not having an orgasm, which means her monitor would keep thinking about orgasm and how close she was to it.

Embedded in the thought “Don’t have an orgasm” is “. . . have an orgasm.” And if I say to you, “Don’t think about a bear,” what’s the first thing that happens?

Orgasms aren’t as automatic as thoughts, but in the right, sex-positive context, if you make orgasm against the rules and then give the person a lot of time to try not to have an orgasm . . . I’ll just say it’s a fun game and you might want to try it sometime.

Which brings me to the orgasm your partner can’t stop themselves from having.

Henry is just about as smart as Camilla. I know this because one day she called me and said that he had stuck to their agreement better than she had—he was using a vibrator on her and she had been close and actually
wanted
to have an orgasm, but he stopped before she got there.

She was frustrated. And even a little pissed. But hey, the rule was her idea. He was being a gentleman.

He did this two more times—got her close, then backed off.

Because he is such a gentleman.

And eventually he got her so close that she genuinely couldn’t stop herself from having an orgasm. Which is a neat trick—women don’t have a “point of no return” for orgasm the way men do for ejaculation. To get a woman to be unable to stop herself from coming takes a high level of persistent arousal.

And yes, again, being a sex educator is the best job in the world when people tell you stories like this.

“no good reason”

Here’s an emotion-dismissing meta-emotion I hear a lot: “If there is no solution to an uncomfortable feeling, there’s no point feeling it.”

Yes, there is.

The point of feeling a feeling you can’t do anything about is to let it discharge, complete the cycle, so that it can end.

I was talking about the nonjudgment research with my colleague Jan, and she told me she’d had a relevant experience over the weekend. She had noticed herself getting disproportionately enraged about a small thing—losing a stamp when she was trying to mail a letter—and she later made the connection that her anger wasn’t really about the stamp. The anger had been activated the night before, when she watched a movie about a misogynist jerk, which triggered her own history with a misogynist jerk from two decades ago.

“So what did you do with the anger?” I asked.

“I told myself I didn’t need to feel angry, because the jerk is gone from my life now.”

“You judged? You hit the brakes?”

“What else was I supposed to do? Be mad at a guy I haven’t seen in twenty years?”

The threat—the misogynist jerk—wasn’t around anymore to fight against or run away from . . . and yet she still had these feelings. So what could she do with them?

She could complete the cycle. The Feels exist in her body, without reference to the jerk whom she successfully left behind.

But this is not the habit most of us learn early in our lives, and it takes practice. When we have feelings we can’t really do anything about and we don’t know how to let ourselves simply feel without doing anything, our brains will look for some situation it
can
do something about, and it will try to impose the feelings on that situation.

So don’t be mad at the guy who’s long gone. Just allow the anger to move through you. It doesn’t matter what it’s about, it’s just random Feels, left over from the past, that have to work themselves out. Don’t hit the gas pedal, but don’t hit the brake either. Notice the anger and allow it. Be still, and it will blow through you like a hot desert wind or a typhoon.

healing trauma with nonjudging

When a person experiences trauma, it’s like someone snuck into their garden and ripped out all the plants they had been cultivating with such care and attention. This is particularly awful when the person who tears up the garden is not a stranger but someone the person trusted. There is rage and betrayal, there is grief for the garden as it was, and there is fear that it will never grow back.