Why We Resist Sexual Pleasure
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Much as we'd like to think otherwise, we're not that far removed from the nineteenth-century Victorian era — a time particularly characterized by its austere view of sex. Victorians believed in a strict code of behavior that actually aimed at limiting sexual pleasure. Virtuous women were expected to derive little pleasure from sex, while men were regarded as having an inordinate appetite that had to be tamed. Men were advised by their doctors to satisfy their needs with their wives in as short a time as possible to avoid draining their nervous system and to spare the good woman any drawn out unpleasantness.
Our grandparents and great grandparents were likely to have been raised in a Victorian atmosphere, and they in turn had a strong impact on the sexual attitudes of the mothers and fathers who raised us. A single man in his late thirties once told me that when his father was a little boy his mother locked him in a closet for several hours after catching him masturbating. Tom felt that he could trace his own sexual hang-ups to that particular sexual trauma endured by his father. Every time a situation with a woman started to get sexual, Tom would get anxious and awkward, especially when he very much desired the woman. That's how powerfully these multi- generational patterns are locked into our bodies. Tom's father was punished and shamed as a child for sex and he, in turn, punished and shamed his son, making him sexually insecure.
Among the many concerns that people typically have about their sexuality — whether it's about a lack of sexual interest, performance fears, inability to have orgasms, or sexual addiction — almost all of it can be traced to pleasure-anxiety. It can be found in their inability to just be at any level, not just in sex. It shows up in their patterns of thought, which keep them stuck in their head or defended in their heart. But most specifically, pleasure-anxiety translates into a fundamental, largely unconscious, fear of being overwhelmed by sexual excitement.
Unfortunately, we all have some sexual inhibition by virtue of having been raised in a society where sex is considered "dirty". However, most of the time we may not be in touch with our pleasure barriers because, generally, we don't go anywhere near the intensity of pleasure that would test our limits. Instead, whenever there is any possibility of intense sexual arousal, we may automatically hold sexual feelings down with a physical reflex that grips the muscles of the torso and pelvis, holding in the ribs and shortening the breath. In effect, we allow ourselves only the degree of excitement we know we can tolerate.
When a situation does become very sexually exciting, however, pleasure-anxiety too can become more intense. As Tom started to observe in himself, it was when he was most turned on to a woman that he was also most mentally obsessed, physically stressed, and unable to act on his desire. He didn't trust himself to relax and give up control.
If you meet up with pleasure-anxiety at your own upper limits of excitement, it can feel like a panic attack — your heart beats wildly, you feel faint, and you think you're dying. When your entire body hits that level of excitement, letting go of control and being swept away is, short of real death, the ultimate surrender. In fact, in French, orgasm is sometimes referred to as " the little death". For many of us raised to hold sexual feelings back, the more you feel yourself melt into someone's arms, the more it can bring up feelings of mortality and the fear of death.
