oh
🥺
Conversation
“As we develop, we will seek - and need - a special acknowledgment for our masculinity and femininity, a sense that our ‘girlness’ and ‘boyness’ are recognized and appreciated by our parents.”
HMMMMMM
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“We begin to believe that any wish for special caretaking and love is forbidden, off-limits, as if it meant asking for too much, for something we aren’t supposed to have.”
on one hand, straightforward synthesis of Running on Empty + Unlocking the Emotional Brain, and otoh owie
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def a part of me that read that sentence and felt vindicated, like “yes! special caretaking and love *is* forbidden and off-limits! it *is* asking for too much! we’re *not* supposed to have it!”
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to be clear “we” means me specifically the rest of you are innocent babies who deserve all the love in the world and i alone am wretched before god
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the difference between loving you and loving myself is that loving you does not threaten my connection to my parents in the slightest
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that “and their later proxies” is going to rattle around in my head
wondering if part of what made leaving grad school so hard was learning to use my ability to do math as a proxy for connecting with my parents in high school 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔
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“The function of sexual fantasy is to undo the beliefs and feelings interfering with sexual excitement, to ensure both our safety and our pleasure. Our fantasies convince us that we’re not going to harm or betray anyone, and that if we get fully aroused, no one will suffer.”
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“...the unconscious belief that one isn’t supposed to have more pleasure of any kind than one’s parents had”
HmMmMmMmM
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“Sexual excitement also requires that we momentarily become selfish and turn away from concerns about the other’s pleasure in order to surrender to our own, that we momentarily stop worrying about hurting or rejecting the other person.”
sounds impossible but ok 🧐
Replying to
“Because shame and rejection are common experiences, many common sexual fantasies function to negate them. Characters must be drawn, details chosen, scenarios plotted, and roles defined to this aim.”
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i’m just going to pretend he never mentioned the DSM 🤢
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“The threatening identification with a sad parent is replaced by the exciting fantasy of a happy one. Sexual fantasies are constructed in order to counteract the potentially debilitating effects of identification.”
(“identification” = sth like merging, here)
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“Getting turned on involves transcending the past, counteracting dangers, disconfirming beliefs, undoing traumas, soothing pain, and finally, finally laying claim to pleasure.”
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Replying to
And undesirable. What pleasure can sex offer if not the one of being intimately in the know with the arousal and pleasure the other person is having because of you? Just have to do it eyes closed for 30 seconds and then another 30 looking them in the eyes to know this is bollocks
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Sure you can close yourself off in your own mind and create for yourself an understanding that ignores the person next to you and still enjoy it, but you alone can't create the knowledge you and your partner can together through good communication. Bollocks I say
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Show replies
Replying to
Reich breaks the sexual act into stages and my sense is your quoted text is referencing what he would call the "involuntary stage". He notes that any lingering thoughts have potential to disrupt it... not so much "selfish" as "unselved", pure enjoyment without subject.
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