I'm in a big comfortable bed with a beautiful man — the man I would eventually marry. We're in love and just beginning to live together. Sunshine is streaming through the slatted blinds, the French doors in front of us open on a small Spanish-style balcony with a view down the canyon of chaparral and trees. This sunny Sunday morning has a special quality of sweetness. We've made breakfast together — French toast, fruit, and coffee — and brought it back into bed with us. We've eaten side by side propped up on pillows and under the comforter, reading the Sunday papers, and hearing great music.
Later, with our breakfast dishes cleared from the bed, we lay in each other's arms listening to Beethoven's Choral Symphony. At a particularly lyrical coda, my lover turns toward me with a soft smile, looks deeply into my eyes, and kisses me with a gentleness that rocks me to my core. I swoon. My entire body spasms in waves of pleasure that ripple through every part of me.
Yet, instead of surrendering and letting myself be swept away, I feel a jolt of fear. I sit up and gasp for breath. He watches with concern as I recover myself. Then, when I have myself in tow, I swiftly cover it over and pull him back down to me with a veiling giggle and a kiss. He apparently thinks nothing more of it, and we resume lovemaking. But for me that jolt led to a startling revelation. It showed me that — to that intensity of feeling — I was afraid to let go. And as much as I liked to think of myself as a sexually liberated woman, I was not as free as I thought.
It doesn't have to be as obvious as a clutch back from the brink of nirvana to show you that you're afraid to surrender to sex. Perhaps just as you're getting really turned on, you suddenly flash on something you don't like about him or her, and you can't quite let go of that negative thought. Or maybe it isn't your mind that snaps you out of it but your body — a leg cramp, a stomach ache, or a heart flutter that worries you. Or out of the blue, you suddenly feel ticklish, and wherever your lover touches you, you act skittish and silly.
It can be as seemingly insignificant as that and still be significant. Anything that distracts you from your sexual focus and pulls your attention elsewhere is a sign of the number one limitation in enjoying sexual pleasure: pleasure-anxiety in sex. Sexual pleasure-anxiety is very likely nearly universal in our culture because, to some extent, we've all been trained in childhood to fear our sexual urges.
Why We Resist Sexual Pleasure
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.
We all have personal stories of how we learned to inhibit ourselves sexually. We may have been shamed as young children for any display of sexual interest, or were punished when caught experimenting. Women and men molested as children are likely to feel some fear during sex and often have learned to cut themselves off from the sensations in their bodies and put their minds elsewhere. But early traumas or not, even for those of us who do enjoy sex, there are still plenty of ways we may inhibit ourselves sexually.
One major way people hold themselves back is to be performance-driven rather than experience-drawn. Both women and men can be more focused on how they appear to their partner than how good it feels to be with him or her. For example, you may feel tense because you don't like your body and feel embarrassed rather than excited at being seen nude, even by your own husband or wife. You may have set images about how sex is supposed to be and concerned that aspects of your sexual desires or fantasies may not be considered normal. You may tell yourself you won't be able to please your partner. In each case, you're focusing on the other person's experience rather than your own. Being more concerned about your sexual performance than your sexual experience is often an unconscious way to keep a lid on uncomfortably expansive sexual feelings.