The Power of Pleasure to Heal
I always considered myself to be a pretty typical midwesterner. Polite and passive aggressive with an utter inability to be direct without feeling rude. I was raised catholic, attended parochial school for many years and went to mass every Wednesday and Sunday. And though the small town where I grew up has since developed into strip malls, chain restaurants and culdesac neighborhoods, when I was growing up it was basically all farm land. I was a wild, agressive, dirty country kid, and hadn’t yet been corrupted by those pesky Midwestern values.
I was also a very curious and sexual kid, with little to do out in the country and very little supervision. I found myself on more than one occasion either playing doctor with various neighbor kids who also didn’t have much to do, or spending an exorbitant amount of time exploring our detachable shower head. I couldn’t have known it then, but this was an unusual and formative time in my life. I was exploring something I was deeply drawn to but didn’t understand, and had all the weight of catholic guilt fully embedded in my psyche by the time I was 8 or 9 years old. I was taught that desires of the flesh was sinful and wrong, that uterus owners were either saints or whores, and I was pretty sure I was not a saint. As I got older, engagement with pleasure was immediately followed by shame and fear of damnation. Though I found my way out of the Catholic Church by time I was 17, the lessons followed me far into adulthood.
As a grown person, I was often intimidated by people who seemed to have a healthy relationship to sex. Their ability to own their desires and express them irked me, and I resented my own confusion and lack of education. I judged those who were “promiscuous” and thought kinky people were truly violent deviants, imagining scenes from the horror movie Hostel. I wrestled with being scared of it all, and also pulled to understand why I was also so attracted to the ideas.
I never felt in control of the pleasure I sought, and was afraid of what I might find if I went looking too closely. Catholicism and my midwestern upbringing gave me a skewed sense of my responsibilities to men’s sexual urges and it crafted what I understood about pleasure. It was all very vanilla, hetero and misogynistic. If I wanted intimacy with a man, the cost was penetration of my body. There was no education in true consent when I was young and that put my body in a constant state of survival. During a recent webinar with the incredible sex educator and author, Kai Cheng Tom, she shared the idea of a spectrum of consent that goes from enduring: this is hurting me but I don’t know how to say no, tolerating: this is something I am putting up with, willing: this is something I am okay or neutral about and wanting: this makes me feel good. I was blasted with the cold truth that the majority of my sexual life has been lived in the space of enduring and tolerating sex. I was too polite to say I didn't want it, like it, or wanted it but not in that way. It was a brutal awakening.
Turning to secure attachment to myself has been part of my pleasure healing process. Being in the present moment with myself, being curious without an agenda, being aware of my personal resources and leaning into the discomfort of growth have been the keys to my success. I explored my own sexual fulfillment through sensual touch, pelvic exploration, masturbation, ecstatic dance and quality time alone. With an awareness of my unique nervous system and its needs, I began to naturally release the fear, and explore my carnal urges without shame. I found a “wanting” space with myself where my body said this makes me feel good. Even writing this now, I know I am healing myself by falling in love with that little child, curious and wild, who loved pleasure before they were taught it was “wrong”. I am reparenting my sexual self and healing my trauma with deliberate pleasure.
With myself as a stabilizing primary partner, I have begun to joyfully explore deeper eroticism with my other partners again, feeling empowered and sexier than I have felt in my whole life. I have embraced Tantra, kink, and BDSM as new pleasure explorations, and I love the liberation I feel in deciding that for myself, without fear. The best part is that the sweet midwesterner in me is still there, I just let that wildness in me return. I am not a deviant and I am not a sinner. I’m a seeker of my most authentic self, and that’s my new religion.
If you would like to take the journey to secure attachment with yourself, opening up to purpose and pleasure you’ve only dreamed of, consider working with me and my Whole Person Coaching Method! Let me help guide you to your most authentic and unapologetic self! Contact me for a FREE 30 MIN CONSULTATION!
