SEX & THE SUBCONSCIOUS:
Perversions and Diversions in the Realm of the Libido
by
Dr. Arthur Janov
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Kimberley Cameron & Associates
on Smashwords
Sex & the Subconscious:
Perversions and Diversions in the Realm of the Libido
Copyright 2011 Arthur Janov
Smashwords Edition License Notes
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Chapter 1 – The Subconscious Mind: Where Sexual Behavior Is Organized
Sex Problems Are Not Just “Sex Problems”: How Trauma Affects Our Entire Being
Repression and Reactivity: Flip Sides of the Same Coin
Case Study – Jack: Compulsive Sexual Behavior
Chapter 2 – The Three Levels of Consciousness: The Brain and Our Sexual Development
The Limbic System: The Feeling Center of the Brain
The Neocortex: The Thinking Brain
How The Three Levels of Consciousness Work Together
How Sexual, Physical, and Emotional Health Are One
Case Study – Phillip: Pornography & Exhibitionism
Two Hemispheres, One World: Our Left & Right Brain
Why Habit is Stronger Than Reason: The Grooving Process & Brain
The Sympathetic & Parasympathetic Nervous Systems in Sex
The Sympath And Parasympath Go To Bed
Case Study – Raphael: On Exhibitionism And Impotence
Chapter 3 – The Hormones Of Love
The Difference Between Romantic Love and Sex
Chapter 4 – Hijacking Sex: How Imprints Drive Behavior
Imprints and Repression/Depression
Prototypes And Sex: The Hijack
Chapter 5 – The Womb As A Black Box
Case Study – Fred: Obsessed by Sex
Rebirthing: How Not To Resolve A Sex Problem
Chapter 6 – Early Childhood Trauma And Sex
The Trauma Train: Building Steam Towards Sexual Dysfunction
Chapter 7 – Recovered Memory Syndrome: Is It A Myth?
Lessons To Be Learned From Katharina
Why Recovered Memories Can’t Be Faked
Chapter 8 – Homosexuality: Nature or Nurture?
Womb-life and Early Childhood: How the Dynamics of the Parent-Child Relationship
How Early Childhood Development Influences Sexual Orientation
Hormone Changes Made Visible: Finger
Primal Therapy & Homosexuality
Chapter 9 – Twists and Turns: The Deviations of Sex
How Deviations & Perversions Develop
Twists and Turns: The Many Ways in Which We Go Off Course
The Treatment of Deviations & Perversions in Primal Therapy
Deviations from Birth: The “Need For”
Chapter 10 – Conclusion: Sex, Sinners and Psychotherapy
Why Conventional Psychotherapy Won’t Solve Your Sex Problems
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My thanks to Mary Strobel and Augustin Gurza for the editing of this book, and to my patients who wrote their life stories and opened themselves up so that others could profit from their experience.
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Putting the fun and pleasure back into sex is not so easily done. We have to know what happened to take the fun away. And now we do. We can look back from sexual behavior and have a good idea what happened to us during gestation, birth and infancy. We can see how the man who is obsessed with cross-dressing, with wearing woman’s panties and clothes, may well have had a problem with a cold or absent mother early in his life. The cross-dressing is the fragment of a memory. We take that fragment and immerse the patient in the global feeling with the assurance that it will lead us to a specific time in history. We do not try to change the behavior. That implies taking a moral position. We are neither priests nor behavior therapists. We address the human condition. We trust that it has a logic all of its own. We let it lead the way.
There are all kinds of sexual difficulties I address in this book, from impotence and frigidity (don’t like that word) to compulsive sex rituals (exhibitionism and voyeurism). Never before have we understood how deep the causes lie of later sexual problems, usually events that long predate sexual maturity. Too often, there is just a problem in getting aroused and seeing sex to the finish. By and large, if sex is diminished so is much of life, as passion underlies sex and life. Or to put it differently, sex is life at its essence. We had better be sexual or our species will die out, not something to be desired. Usually a load of repression lies beneath sexual indifference. We have found a way to unload that repression in measured steps a bit at a time. It is my impression that once we take a symptom—a sex problem—as THE problem and attempt to treat it as apart from the rest of it, we have a prescription for failure. Sex is embedded into our bodies and our physiology; it has to been in context not as some alien event to be done to.
I have chosen a couple of case histories here in the Prologue to give the reader an example of the stories that are discussed throughout the book. These, along with the other case histories, are intended to give the reader a greater understanding of human sexual behavior. It is important to understand that if we experience some sexual dysfunction – and most of us will at one point or another – that it is not simply current stress that is responsible, but that it could be the result of stress imprinted on lower levels of consciousness that has given rise to a particular problem. These imprinted memories may affect our sex life without our ever understanding why.
We shall see how depression affects libido or sexual interest, why people fail to control their impulses, what is behind voyeurism and exhibitionism. We will learn about the impulses behind premature ejaculation and what can be done about it. Once we access the unconscious, we begin to understand the problems behind such behavior.
Sex can be contorted into an infinite number of permutations that have nothing to do with sex, because we are trying to fulfill other needs. In this way, we bring other issues into how we express ourselves sexually. It is little different from taking a drug to find relief from some pain – when pain is transmuted into over-eating, for example, we may be trying to find relief from an emotional emptiness we carry inside. Or, we may use drugs to do what mother should have conveyed: to experience an emotional warmth, to find a sense of confidence and comfort within ourselves. In the same way, we may use sex to give ourselves a sense of love, to experience touch and intimacy, and finally, to find relief from our pain.
For a normal, healthy person, sex involves sensations, feeling, attachments, and emotional closeness. It involves experiencing passion and pleasure and sharing love. Unfortunately, many of us are not "normal" – meaning, we do not have full access to our feelings. We are plagued by a whole subterranean world of pain created by past trauma and lack of love, which is always a trauma, a world that has made us blunt our sensations, thereby diminishing our pleasure, and most importantly, our sexual pleasure.
Most of us do not know that this is happening because repression has interceded in all its tender mercy to make us unaware. We have dulled our experience of sex but often do not know it. When we feel what we couldn’t previously feel before, we become healthy beings once again. When we feel the pain that our system has held down, our consciousness expands. When we touch someone, we touch with feeling, and they sense it. It is sensual and stimulating.
The case study of Phillip is discussed in Chapter 2.
Phillip – Pornography & Exhibitionism
At age ten I found some pornographic pictures in an empty lot. It was the first time I realized that women had nipples. What a shock! I thought breasts were just beautiful white mounds on a woman's body, just deliciously enchanting, yet always out of reach. Nipples got in the way, but soon I couldn't conceive of women without them. I don't know how many times I masturbated to the pictures where the women were looking back at me. That excited me. The larger-breasted women who also looked back at me were the most exciting.
My mom happened to be big breasted, but she never looked at me in an understanding way. So here I was getting what I needed from pictures: a mother who exposed herself (like mine never did) and paid attention to me (which she also never did).
Shortly afterwards I began exhibiting myself and also became a peeping Tom. I also tried on my mother's undergarments. All this was part of my daily routine and was repeated thousands of times for three and a half decades. Many hours each day would be spent on my rituals. So much energy expended in this destructive manner. It was the same energy that could have been used in creating a life for myself.
I performed so that I was rarely seen by the women who passed by my window, or door, or car. If they did, I would quickly hide from view. The excitement was too intense to conceive of being seen for more than one or two seconds. After all, my mother never saw me, and that was what I needed so deeply. Since all women became "Mommy" to me, I wanted desperately to be seen by them and couldn't stand it at the same time.
It was beyond my emotional comprehension that any woman could ever see me. That is why I have never been arrested. I was a shy exhibitionist. Even in the convulsive act of exposing myself, I could never conceive of being accepted by a woman.
The main scene as a child that led to exhibitionism is being forced by my brother to pick up a crayon with my right rather than my natural left hand. It happened over and over again for weeks. Mom thought it correct to allow my brother to sit on me with his knees pinning my arms down, forcing the crayon into my right hand while I, at four years of age, was screaming for my existence. She never saw me. I have been reliving this scene over and over, and it is beginning to rid myself of the urge to expose myself. Feeling the pain of my childhood traumas leads me to be more conscious and less compulsive. I know I am being healed from within, and it can only affect the way I behave from without.
The case study of Raphael is discussed in Chapter 2.
Raphael – On Exhibitionism and Impotence
Recently, I experienced impotence for the first time. Talk about a deflating experience. It freaked me out. I'd been sexually compulsive for many years: masturbation, exhibition (particularly at nude beaches) and some peeping. I never had a problem with having erections; in fact I had the opposite problem. I had problems not getting erections through my early twenties (I'm now 40).
Besides masturbating three to five times a day, as a fifteen-year-old I began to exhibit myself. This consisted of climbing out of my bedroom window, buck naked with a huge hard-on, at 1 in the morning and streaking around my neighborhood. I was so turned on that "somebody" might see me. (In therapy, I realized that "somebody" was my father.) Unconsciously, I was timing it so that my father would almost catch me because he came home from work at 1:15 a.m. Several times, I literally dived in through the window as his car turned the corner of the driveway. At school, I had to wear a mid-thigh length corduroy coat to conceal uncontrollable, continuous erections. Teachers often asked me why I wore this brown coat in mid-summer, but I couldn't take it off. I simultaneously feared and wanted my erection to be seen.
What was being replayed here was sexual abuse I’d experienced with my father in my pre-teens. The dilemma about simultaneously fearing and wanting my penis to be touched was how I felt in the bathtub when my father and I shared baths. As an eight year old, I remember telling my father that I wanted to clean my own penis, that I could do it myself, but he said I couldn't and threatened me for talking back to him. For the next four years, the penis-cleaning ritual continued weekly. He would have me stand up facing him in the tub, and he would clean my genitals with soap and a washcloth. Then he would pull my foreskin back as much as possible and this was exceedingly painful. I often recreated this later in life by combining pain with masturbation: by being rough or masturbating beyond the point of being bruised and bleeding.
I felt utterly helpless, unable to defend myself, humiliated and violated. I started leaving my body at this point. I placed myself outside of my body watching the scene from elsewhere in the bathroom. I couldn't stop him, I couldn't say "no." Later in therapy I went back to this scene and in the feelings said "no" to him – bringing up overwhelming horror and helplessness. Not only could I not stop him from beating me, but I couldn't stop him from touching me sexually. This was part of a lifetime pattern of finding it difficult for me to defend myself. It was horrible how he set up my isolation and need for touch and then invited sexual-ness with him. As an adult, I think he was trying to get me to want him sexually. This way he was blameless. It also felt really yucky to touch him, to sit between his legs in the tub and feel his penis against my back. It still makes my skin crawl to think about touching him. I really hated all this touching, but he forced this to continue. He threatened to beat me big-time if I ever protested again. I was trapped in helplessness.
When my father touched me, he was also arousing me. I got no soft touch from either of my parents, and my father was physically abusing me daily. I still needed warm touch, and he was stimulating this need in me as well as stimulating me sexually. The awful conflict was that if I allowed myself to react genitally it might have led to further abuse. I remembered this awful feeling in therapy. I couldn't let myself get aroused as an eight year old because I figured he'd go for me sexually then and all I knew was that was very scary: this fear was partly conscious as an 8 year old. What remained unconscious was a life-long conflict about wanting to get aroused and feeling like I couldn't. For me to name this nameless danger meant going back to the scenes in therapy.
One day when I was twelve, my father ripped my foreskin so badly I needed surgery. For the previous four years, my mother had retreated to bed. She turned a blind eye when he beat me. Daily my face was red and swollen. I had finger marks and bruises all over my body, and she did nothing, as did the teachers at school. She also stayed out of the bathroom whenever my father and I shared baths, but having my foreskin ripped marked a turning point. My mother recently told me (although she steadfastly denies any sexual abuse in our family) that she remembers seeing my father coming out of the bathroom looking extremely upset and red in the face. She knew something dreadful had happened. She said she asked him “What happened” but didn't get an answer. She came into the bathroom.
She called the family doctor and when the swelling was causing the head of my penis to turn purple; and I was taken in for surgery. A story was concocted that I had been hit in the crotch with a soccer ball. My father had threatened me years before that if I ever told anyone what was going on at home, the family would be destroyed and I'd be responsible, what it would do to my mother etc. So I kept quiet-as I always did. A summer trip to Germany to visit relatives soon happened and when I returned my father never touched me again.
As I masturbated, as I exhibited, as I fantasized, I was always splitting off from my body. I was constantly preoccupied with sex when I felt lonely, or unwanted which was all the time. My need for touch, for warmth, for company was entirely penis-focused. In terms of dating and friendships, I had no one. I felt women didn't like me, no one would, and it was no use; these were all old feelings I had about my mother.
In my late teens, for a while I would drive around the city masturbating in my car while looking at women on the street, or in bus stops. I was in my need. I had my penis out in my hands, masturbating fully. I didn't care anymore if anybody saw me. A couple of times, as I came, I lifted myself up from the driver’s seat so my penis and come would be visible through the car windows. I was completely into the obsession. One day I realized I could be charged for this, so I stopped being so blatant.
Unconsciously, I felt that I'd never get a real girlfriend or real affection and I was also re-enacting the fusion between touch and sex my father had created. There was a thrill and danger about being caught that excited me sexually – the same danger I had in the bathtub that I might get caught by my father having sexual feelings-the same danger that my father might catch me coming home from work at night.
As a child, my father never could stand me needing or wanting anything. He beat me for asking to hold my mum’s hand, or for wanting bedtime stories with her. So he pushed my needs deep down and then tried to revive them when I could respond sexually. About this time, he kept asking me things like "Are you looking at that girl's breasts/legs/bum?" I was then punished if I said yes – another block in the way of me enjoying my own sexuality later in life.
In my late twenties I got married. After about a year of having sex, I began to be comfortable with sex but I still cut myself off from my body in order to 'enjoy' sex. I'd dissociate, think about errands, fantasize about threesomes or other women, and most importantly, I'd physically repress the sensations coming up my body. This was exactly what I did when my father touched my penis. My wife was an incest survivor and I was most sensitive during sex, being very careful and stopping whenever I sensed she was close to memories. For a few years this worked well. Our relationship improved as we became closer together but the rule was that she could have her old feelings, but I couldn't. My role was to be there for her all the time. I was doing with her what I had done with my mother as a very small child already. Virtually every time I had an orgasm, I began crying, and not once did I allow myself to feel this, or go deeper into the feelings. Eventually the marriage ended, and I had to feel every one of those feelings I had put off. The crying after sex was simply my infant need for touch resurfacing. A few years passed by and I began my current relationship.
I struggled with this girlfriend, as I had done all my life, to bypass all the feelings of shame, terror and disgust I felt in my body; but my old trick of ignoring my body and focusing on sex just didn't work anymore. I was left to face the fact that I was impotent. I felt enormous shame that I couldn't have intercourse with her. She was OK with it, and accepting of me, which was nice.
Me? I was completely flummoxed. What was it? Why was this happening? I'd have an erection until just before the point of entry. Then it was like letting air out of a balloon. I remember the stray thought, "If I go in there I'll die," but I didn't make much of it at the time. At a retreat round-table discussion I told Dr. Janov I couldn't get it up, and he said that meant I was close (to birth). He was right. Shortly afterwards, I began experiencing a segment of my birth where I began running out of air. I've been walking around 99% of my life feeling air-deprived. It's the birth trauma of anoxia speaking. Strong feelings of pushing and "it's no use" came up.
When my girlfriend touched my groin area, I felt this huge feeling of revulsion come up and I had difficulty telling her to stop. I had some feelings about how my father used to touch my groin while cleaning me in the bathtub. Beneath the disgust I felt about my father touching me was a birth primal of something numbing coming down the umbilical cord, through my belly button, into my lower abdomen, and spreading through my genital area. Suddenly I couldn't move my legs at all! I desperately needed to move them in order to get born. I felt so completely powerless and helpless.
After the Primal, I thought that what it must have been was that my mother had been given a spinal. Later I found out that she was etherized into unconsciousness just before I was born because she was in pain. The anesthetic rendered me, in the canal, totally unable to move (a lifelong pattern). Being anesthetized was the prototypic event that stamped helplessness and hopelessness into me so damned thoroughly. Other events were my mother's tension, smoking, and lack of adequate contractions, and the degree of terrorizing physical and sexual abuse I experienced later in life at the hands of my father. I know that it isn't a particularly sexy for me to begin choking, writhing, grunting, spitting up mucus, coughing and gasping for air-but that's what I have to do when the sensations come up. Since having the series of birth Primals, I'm naturally more erect, but it's still tenuous.
There is more there yet. I let my erections come and go as my body dictates. The difference is now the door to my birth is open to me, and I know how to feel it as it comes up. It's not magic. It's hard work. It's still an effort to push myself over the edge, and let myself feel my birth when it arises.
Chapter 1 – The Subconscious Mind:
Where Sexual Behavior Is Organized
What is our reason for being? Are we here on this earth to suffer, to build character, or to do well for our fellow man? No. Our first and primary task is to procreate, because procreation means survival of the species. We're here to make love, "to be fruitful and multiply." We are a gene machine whose main purpose is to make other gene machines. If virtue means the greatest good for mankind, then sex is indeed virtuous. After sex, all else is secondary.
The universe is indifferent: it doesn't care whether we live or how we live, or whether we suffer or not, or if we build character. Though we go on looking for justice and altruism, hope and magic, the universe offers no final justice, no settling of scores, no dictum that goodness wins out. It doesn't give us any real reason to exist, any purpose to go on except what we invent. The universe only "cares” about one thing: the continuation of life. In a cosmic sense, only sex is meaningful. We can imbue sex with very high principles, such as morality and love, but in its essence it is still procreation. It helps if two people care for each other, but what it mandates is sex and offspring. The caring part comes in to make sure the partners stick around long enough to rear the children properly.
Nature made sex fun to ensure that we'd keep on doing it. And we do, except that some of us don't have fun with it, and suffer problems with it. Some of us want to have sex, but can't. Some of us don't want to have sex, and don't care about it. Some of us can hardly think about anything else. Others are addicted to doing it, and can't stop themselves. If sex were painful, we would have died out. Why does something so pleasurable become so problematic and painful for so many of us? Frigidity, impotence, obsessiveness, compulsive masturbation, weird fantasies, arcane rituals, exhibitionism, sado-masochism, voyeurism – there’s no end to the problems we can have.
What, then, is “normal” sex? How often should we do it, and how? Why is one person's sex drive and fantasies so different from another's? Fundamentally, we are sexual beings; normal, feeling beings are sexual. They exude a sexuality that is recognizable. When someone is healthy, it shows in their attitude, allure and very being. It makes them attractive, and their physical appearance then becomes secondary. This has nothing to do with acting sexy, being provocative or seductive. Rather, it is an internal state.
The idea that what determines our sexual behavior occurs during our silent struggle to be born, which may last but a few minutes, may seem outlandish. Perhaps saying that most common "sex problems" are an outgrowth of the birth trauma understates the complexity of the issue. Yet birth trauma is often a significant factor in many difficulties in sex, and later childhood trauma may then complicate things further.
Why is the birth process itself so critical in determining our sexual health? Because it is a life-and-death struggle that happens when we are at our most vulnerable and possess only primitive brain structures, the very same brain structures that are involved in our sexual development. This is a primal event, and sets the stage for how we will react later on to any perceived threat. It is called one-trial learning, and lasts a lifetime. It establishes an imprint that gives shape to adult sexual behavior.
The body speaks a language that is not expressed in words. We all speak that language, but few of us understand it. We can capture that language through machines that measure blood pressure, heart rate, and body temperature, for example, as well as register the biochemicals that process our feelings. This language of the body speaks eloquently, and it is far more credible than anything we might ever say. Machines don’t lie: they measure physiologically our earliest imprinted memories, memories that are a product of early traumas we experienced while in the womb, or at birth. These primal memories get buried deep into our subconscious mind, and are characterized by an absence of words and images. The most advanced part of our brain, the cerebral cortex, will push down the memory of anything that is too painful to bear. The body needs something to avoid the feeling of pain, and the brain’s neocortex is well suited to that job.
The body also speaks in its own astute fashion through behavioral patterns, such as premature ejaculation or low libido. It tells of our history and our buried feelings. No matter how much we may deny our history, the body expresses the truth. Our biology is never arbitrary. It doesn’t create a symptom out of the blue. There are always reasons behind our problems; we need only to know how to find them. Migraines inform us, perhaps, of a lack of oxygen at birth. Colitis may tell us of memories imprinted before birth, pointing to events that happened while in the womb. Depression and the inability to be aroused sexually might indicate an overload of anesthetics at birth.
We must learn this language and communicate with the body in ways it understands. It is possible to do this. But if we remain on the level of words, explanations, instructions and insights, we shall never comprehend sex problems or how to solve them.
We can recapture primal memories and bring them to the surface. . We have filmed and measured patients in the throes of such experiences, and have incorporated the findings as part of long-term brainwave and neurochemical studies (as reported in Biology of Love and Primal Healing, by the author). These are not experiences that can be fabricated; there are certain foot and arm positions that are pathognomonic, or sure signs of a true experience, as well as unique facial expressions and other physical positions.
In addition to vital sign controls taken during each and every session, we at the Primal Center in Santa Monica, California, have undertaken double-blind research studies with various institutions, such as UCLA, Open University, England and St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. Our research has included four separate brainwave studies, biochemical and neurochemical studies, and vital function research, including the close monitoring of blood pressure, core body temperature, and heart rate. We add to these observations of sex life reports of hundreds of patients over several decades, including how sex life is influenced by feelings.
A study on the sexual problems of Americans reported in the Los Angeles Times (Feb. 8, 1999) revealed that 80 million adult men and women have some kind of sexual dysfunction. Many women between the ages of 18 and 25 have low libido, as do older men.
Sex is a matter of passion and passion involves reactivity. If we want to recapture our passion we need to return to where our reactivity was stopped or blunted – to rediscover the events that were so traumatic that they caused us to shut down. We need to travel back in time and react to those events as we should have – then and only then will we regain our passion, our ability to react emotionally. Vitamins, hormones, exercise, or lotions and potions all may feel nice, and may help a bit, but they cannot reconstruct our physical passion. Anxiety does "eat up" some of our vitamins, as does depression. Adding vitamins to our regime may indeed help us regain energy, but it is not a cure. It is far from the whole story.
Hormone distortions are another factor that play a part in sex problems. They must be addressed, but it is important to examine the generating sources that caused a hormone imbalance originally. Once we understand that there are origins to our problems, both physical and psychological, we won’t reflexively believe that sex problems, or even drug addiction, bulimia, and anorexia are all a matter of a "chemical imbalance.” Because we do not understand origins there is a tendency to ascribe many of our problems, not the least of which is sex, to something genetic, while neglecting our nine months in the womb, the most important time of our lives, the time when key hormones are being organized and when the brain is rapidly developing.
We have done key research at the UCLA Pulmonary Laboratory, emphasizing the role of very early trauma on later behavior. This research has been filmed. In it patients go back to relive their very earliest imprinted memories. This is an experience that is unmistakable, and cannot be faked in any way. We will learn more about the importance of this experiment later on. Such research verifies that memories endure and influence behavior. Since sex lies at our very core, early imprints have a strong influence on how we function later on.
Recovered Memory Syndrome, the recapture of shattering early trauma, relates most often to incest Recovered Memory Syndrome is real. There is a very good way to verify these memories and determine if they are faked or not. First, we need to cast our approach within the realm of science, and above all, within the realm of neurology so that we don’t concoct theories that contradict brain development. We need to change the art of psychotherapy into a science.
In Primal Therapy, the patient makes all the discoveries and interprets them. Because history is engraved into the individual’s neurophysiology, we employ a systematic process to unearth that history. That systematic approach follows evolution’s path – in reverse. Often times, it is the least noxious memories that are the most recent and closest to the surface, while more traumatic memories are found in the remote past. That is the voyage we undertake with our patients. They travel back, taking us with them, to memories that lie on the level of primitive brain organization that also deals with sex.
Uprooting painful memories means liberating sexual problems. Feeling the deep imprints underlying depression automatically elevates sexual interest. The reason: depression is heavy repression; there is an exhaustion of inhibitory neurochemicals in depression, the pressure of feelings moves upward toward cortical awareness but cannot make a connection. What the depressive feels is the sensation of the pressure; labored breathing, difficult, slow movements, inability to speak, etc. Dissolving the load of repression reawakens interest in life and sex.
Feeling is the central organizing principle of human behavior. You can measure feeling in the brain, in the body’s biochemistry, in mother's milk, in saliva and in spinal taps. We can measure it in brain chemicals such as serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin, and dopamine. Feelings are all encompassing, and love is the key feeling in human intercourse. It can be found everywhere in the system because feeling is everywhere.
Love is important because it ensures survival of the species; it is a kind of assurance that the offspring will be healthy and sexual, again to carry on a species that will be strong against adversity. Love also translates into mental and physical health, and provides the best chance for survival of offspring. It is not an ephemeral, mystical notion that floats above us in some never-never land. It can be measured; the processes of love can be quantified. Love makes us feel good. It also is the most effective pain killer.
Love means a correct hormone balance and proper development of the brain. It means all the sexual hormones and equipment are in good working order. A mother’s love for a child regulates his brain development, learning and emotional evolution. It is reflected in the neurophysiology of the offspring. A loved child will have the best chance at a normal sex life later on, and that means the species will have the best chance of continuation.
We can measure love if we define it carefully. We shall learn more about this in the chapter on the “Hormones of Love.” It is important to measure love because so many sexual problems derive from its lack. We need to know how deep someone’s emotional deprivation goes, how long it lasted and what affect it had on the neuro-physiology.
In Primal Therapy, the fact of getting a little love in the present, even when we hold the hand of a patient who is in terrible pain, is enough motivation for patients to travel back to a time when they were unloved. They open up to that pain, which means they open up overall. To feel love, we must first feel how we were unloved. And to feel pain is to liberate our sexual health, and ourselves, because sex is all about sensations and feelings, and repression gets in the way.
The goal of repression is to restrict access to those sensations – if we have suffered some trauma while in the womb, or during the birth process, repression will set in early. We then cannot sense pain and we also cannot fully sense anything else – we become removed from experience. That means that during childhood when love is offered by our parents, and still later by lovers, we cannot feel it. Repression has blocked our ability to receive input, even if that input is love. That is repression’s purpose: to keep external stimulation from rocking the internal boat. Repression doesn't just blunt the effect of not being touched in infancy or being ignored; it is global and affects every aspect of our being. Repression isn’t selective, and doesn’t confine itself to one trauma. It works in a global fashion, and affects us system-wide, including our sexual health.
Looking at other primates, we can begin to understand ourselves. Caged primates in a zoo are less sexual and less inclined to procreate than in their natural habitat. Their physiology and their hormones know better than to bring offspring into such an environment, so their endocrine system changes. It speaks in the language of survival. The system says, “We don’t want to raise our babies in cages.” The more their instincts are suppressed in the interests of "taming" them, the less sexual they become. By contrast, the more freedom they have the more sexual they are. Suppression of their freedom has twisted the species' survival mechanism.
Sex Problems Are Not Just “Sex Problems” – How Trauma Affects Our Entire Being
Our sexual behaviors follow a prescribed course given a certain set of circumstances at birth and in childhood. Our sex lives are not isolated fragments of our being but rather, a direct reflection of whom and what we are as a whole. As simplistic as that might sound, the most common error in treating sexual dysfunction is to believe the opposite: that sex function can be extracted from overall personality and treated as a separate entity.
So-called sex problems are rarely solely sex problems – in hundreds of cases I have seen over the decades in which the person experiences frigidity or premature ejaculation or some other "dysfunction," it is highly unusual for something anatomical or physiological to be the real cause. This is not to deny that inadequate blood supply to the penis, for example, can cause the inability to have an erection, or that certain illnesses or medications may interfere with sexual functioning.
Readers of my previous books will be familiar with the idea that much of our adult behavior is circumscribed by pre-birth and birth trauma compounded by other traumatic events which occurred to us when we were very young. Childhood events, lack of love and shattering experiences elaborate basic sensations into organized feelings. The fact that there is a whole life inside us that we experienced before there were words to describe it may be difficult for most people to understand; and when I say most people, I include most medical professionals who despite extensive scientific evidence still do not accept this fact. That's why so-called "Recovered Memory Syndrome" (the sudden discovery in adulthood of traumatic memories long repressed) is so controversial, even though science informs us it should not be. There are proven ways to evoke old memories in therapy and verify their accuracy, which I discuss in detail in a later chapter.
When a professional says that a sex problem will just take some brief counseling to resolve, he or she is stating implicitly that sex is something apart from one’s being, and unattached to one’s history. Thus, the second typical error in treating sex or drug problems is to take a counter-historical approach, so that the current presenting symptom becomes the problem. No antecedents are considered, and an attempt is made to make the symptom normal instead of the person. So there is a mechanical tinkering with the symptom to the exclusion of the person as a whole. Then when the symptom is either normalized or under control, the rest of the organism begins to manufacture other symptoms to deal with the part of the pain that was not addressed.
It is the same in many of the current therapies for alcoholism and drug addiction, with treatment focused on the isolated problem of addiction, unconnected to the rest of the individual and that individual’s history. Thus, 6 months off drugs is considered an effective therapy for the addict, when all along the whole individual is being neglected, along with the deep-lying traumatic memory that originally gave rise to the addiction. The result: A drug-free person with annihilating terror deep in the brain that ultimately will find other outlets. This terror can be measured in many ways, such as monitoring brainwaves and neuro-chemistry. These measurements tell us how much tension is left in the system to dictate the need for drugs.
Certainly, when undergoing treatment for any serious problem, few of us would expect to make a total personality change within a few weeks; yet this is implicit in the promise of a quick cure for a variety of sex problems. This kind of promise implies that our past has no significance and no effect on our adult behavior, though we know from treating thousands of patients that past trauma is indelibly imprinted in our nervous system.
Many of our systems are busy repressing events in our brains and bodies, such as the cardiovascular, immune, brain and muscular systems. We repress as a total organism, in response to directions from the brain. That repression has a powerful affect on our adult sex lives even though they may have occurred before we drew our first breath. When there is deep repression of non-sexual and pre-sexual events, this repression still has a powerful effect on sexual behavior when we become sexual.
Experiences to the fetus are registered as system-wide neuro-chemical changes that lack ideas to make sense of them. They are raw impulses that drive later behavior. They pre-date verbal, cognitive control; ideas are never as strong as impulses which deal with life-and-death matters and survival strategies. A high level of stress to the pregnant woman will force production of stress hormones within her system (such as, the father leaves during her pregnancy), which in turn affects the fetus in fundamental ways, including its sex hormones. Ideas, which are a product of the neocortex (the “thinking” mind), come much later in our development, both individually, and as a species. It would defy evolution to think that ideas can alter sexual dysfunction, which has the primitive impulse of survival behind it.
The purpose of repression is to suppress reactivity; liberating repression gives us back our reactivity. In reliving a very early trauma such as birth, the vital signs leap into dangerous territory. When a patient fully relives an early memory, the exact early vital signs during the trauma reappear. However, if the strength of the trauma is too great there will be a shut-off mechanism to suppress reactivity. Otherwise what would happen to the person is something that happens to many of our patients every day when they approach early pain – blood pressure soars to over 200/120. When prolonged, such a physiological response could be life threatening.
If a person is shut down sexually with the inability to achieve orgasm, he or she is also shut down systemically, and cannot allow for the spontaneous eruption of any emotion. It is the whole system that generates symptoms, and it is the whole system that must be changed.
“Whole” doesn’t mean holistic in the New Age sense; it means including history in the mix. It means imprint, memory, pain and repression. It means the whole of one’s experience, not just in the here-and-now. There is no here-and-now so long as the person is in the there-and-then. The new ego psychology makes this error; thinking that if the therapy stays in the present it can be more effective. The therapy stays in the present while the patient is wallowing in the past. Sometimes the patient reports feeling better; this happens whenever defenses are effective. But the more a therapy concentrates in the present the more the patient is locked into the past; the stronger the defenses, the greater the force of pain impelling us. Sex therapy, cognitive therapy and ego psychology are all the same in this regard. We can never isolate a behavior, drug addiction or loss of erection, separate it from the rest of us and properly treat the affliction.
To be frigid or non-orgasmic means the body and the brain are not working right. That, in turn, may be an indicator of later illness, because it indicates that the whole system is dysfunctional. Traumatic memories are recoverable - in our history lies not only the cause of many of our current problems but their cure; the seeds of the cure lie in the problem, in this case, sex.
A deep look at sexual behavior reveals our history, while a deep look at history may reveal future sex problems. For example, some women develop a migraine headache after sex, which tells possibly of a problem of anoxia (lack of oxygen) at birth. The level of excitation during sex triggers the old trauma with its high valence of excitation, and the original vascular response to this lack of oxygen … a severe vasoconstriction to conserve oxygen followed by massive vasodilatation, which is an expansion of the vessel, and the pounding sensation – the migraine. When patients relive this oxygen shortage over time their migraine often disappears or diminishes. The patient, through the vehicle of feeling, makes the connection of the symptom to its point of origin. If we want to know if we ever suffered a birth trauma of anoxia, we have to look no further than a post-sex migraine.
What often happens to patients in the middle phase of their therapy is that orgasm immediately leads to a birth sequence; the current stimulation engages nerve pathways back to remote origins. This illustrates the connection for us between sex function and early imprinted memory. When sexual excitement is great enough, the person is led automatically to early traumas residing on deep layers of the brain. This is assuming that they have enough access to go there. Access means having the ability to experience one’s feelings unabated. Symptoms such as uncontrolled coughing or migraines frequently intrude upon access; the less access the more severe the symptom, and more likely we are to have problems in sex. Conversely, when there is greater access, symptoms will be less severe, or absent altogether, which means a less dysfunctional sex life. The experience of pure emotional pain is one way to prevent symptoms, or later, to eradicate them. In this sense, symptoms take the place of feeling; and feelings take the place of symptoms.
There is a whole universe of activity going on in the subconscious mind, which is governed by deeper levels of brain function. We are able to discern what kinds of imprints are involved and when they were laid down by the nature of the symptom. It is a rule of thumb that the deeper the memory, the deeper the symptom, and the more catastrophic a sensation or feeling, the more catastrophic the disease. It is why I think that imprints are involved in some cancers and heart conditions. Lest we think that memory is only verbal, I call the reader’s attention to an article in New Scientist (“Sperm Remember the Way They Swam.” Aug. 31, 2002. Page 15). The report states that sperm can remember the twists and turns they have made – this is certainly not cognitive memory, but it is memory, nevertheless. If human sperm turn in one direction, they’ll turn in the opposite direction at the next opportunity.
We cannot deny that what we learn about sex at home and at church can have an impact on our sex life. But sex is of the body, and learning is of the "mind." For the most part, sex problems have a lot to do with how much love – or lack of it – we had when we were young, such as in infancy and before, not excluding life in the womb. We will see later on how a lack of touch in the first months of life is reflected in the reduction of certain hormones, such as oxytocin and vasopressin, and an increase in stress hormones such as cortisol, which then influences sexual functioning.
In the chapter on the brain and how it influences sexual behavior (The Three Levels of Consciousness: Where Sexual Behavior Is Organized), we will learn that sexual behavior is based more in the right hemisphere of the brain, while learning is organized in the left. Learning involves the left frontal cerebral cortex, which is a world away from the deep levels of the brain where sexual behavior is organized. If there is not a strong connection between the two hemispheres of the brain, then willing an erection with the left-brain will not translate to the right for action. Access is weak or inhibited.
A strict sexual upbringing does play a role in later sex problems, but not as much as we might think. What happens to our bodies before that conditioning took place is primordial. The base for either frigidity or impotence can exist long before we're exposed to any kind of learning about sex. Impotence can be a general character trait, which is not only manifested in sex but in the entire being – a man may be passive, or unable to fight back, with low energy and lack of aggression. It can emanate from the feeling that one cannot succeed in any task. Colloquially, it's called the “limp dick” syndrome, the body stating what is registered in the man’s emotional archive: “Nothing I can do will matter; I feel like a failure; I cannot assert myself.” These feelings have an origin rooted in one’s earliest memories, and they govern more than just sexual behavior. It is possible to find these beginnings, changing not only one’s sex life, but also one’s whole personality. Our task is to find that history. The problem today with sex therapy is that one takes a problem and attacks it immediately with a variety of methods, looking at it as an isolated symptom, without once asking, “Why? Why is the problem there?”
The feeling of impotence is systemic; it is not a cortical decision by the thought mechanism of the brain. It is not a decision that one can make or unmake. A man who cross-dresses cannot simply decide to stop dressing up any more in women’s clothes – his decision won’t induce change, because the impulse to do it will not go away. The impulse is driven by his real need, which carries a sense of urgency. For example, he may be trying to feel close to his mother, which developed as a real childhood need that will not disappear with age. This need, in turn, gets channeled into behavior such as cross-dressing, and is no longer solely a sexual impulse. Any therapy that asks him to simply stop, or expects that he can, will do no good, because it will produce more tension psychologically. Forcing him to stop only eliminates his outlet for expression. That is why it is generally not enough to change a sexual symptom or dysfunction; we need to change the whole human being, of which sex is one aspect. There are exceptions, however. The problem may be something ephemeral, a momentary impotence due to a current emotional shock. Here is when a counselor may be useful. Specific brain circuits imbedded in the limbic system (which is the emotional system of the brain), process feelings of impotence. Those circuits must eventually be addressed if we are to attack the source of the impotence. Also, the emotional system cannot be addressed by ideas, but can only be approached by going subcortical, to lower levels of brain function.
Pain and repression are interactive. Pain induces repression, which in turn keeps pain locked down tight. A man can “will” a sex interest, but he will often be defeated by his history that says: “I am impotent against the forces subduing me. I am busy repressing massive pain and dare not feel or have any passion.” Here passion becomes dangerous. Thus a tyrannical father beating down his son with constant criticism and humiliation, leaving him feeling defeated, contributes in part to his son’s adult impotence. The son can be encouraged by a therapist who says, “You can be strong. You are attractive,” etc., but that is a temporary measure, at best. Once he faces the real agony of his early life he will be on the road to recovery.
To apply the same principle to a different problem, a man who cannot control his sexual impulses may also be a person who has little control in other domains. We know this because by treating general impulsivity –something that may go back to the time when we were only a mass of uncontrolled impulses, when there was no neocortex to translate sensations into ideas. In one case, such as impotence, there is too much repression, and in the other, impulsiveness, not enough.
We know that one key focal point for the integration and control of sensations/feelings is the brain’s frontal cortex, most particularly, the left frontal area, which is behind the eye socket and forehead. This area of the brain gives us our ability to plan for the future, see the consequences of our actions, reject and repress feelings, think abstractly, as well as integrate deep lying sensations and feelings. Early trauma, such as stress to a fetus, compromises the development of the frontal cortex, which may damage the development of connecting points and receptor cells, so that there may be a neurological deficiency throughout life, resulting in a weakened control apparatus.
Even if a woman convinces herself that it should be enjoyable to be touched and fondled, her body may still be rebelling and producing tension, due to a traumatic history of never being caressed by her parents. So even with therapeutic encouragement and permission, running counter to the parent’s previous attitudes of inhibition, touch is automatically repelled. It now brings up the pain of not being touched early on. If the mother never touched her daughter, was cold and icy with her, then touch will hurt. Yes, with enough permission and encouragement by a sex therapist, one can temporarily override one’s history, but it will not last. History is always the victor because it dictates our behavior. There are tricks that can help us override history, but it is often a pyrrhic victory.
When in conventional sex therapy a man is encouraged to put his hand on the wife’s breast, he is also putting his hand on a memory. She may either tighten up due to early incest or molestation, for example, or she may let it happen and enjoy it. The man in this case is caressing her history, not just her breast. As an illustration, during a session a patient will state that he really needed his mother to hold him. He may cry out to his mother to do just that. But when he actually raises his arms to her and begs her, the feeling deepens dramatically and the sobs are uncontrollable, going on for perhaps half an hour. The need was registered in those arms in their pleading gesture, as well as in his brain. The patient remarked that in his affectionate relationships he had been unable to reach out to his mate – he need her to make the first move. Otherwise, the gesture evoked too much pain of his early need.
Repression and Reactivity: Flip Sides of the Same Coin
The meaning of “conscious-awareness” involves integrating feelings that have been blocked and repressed, cutting away the general pain of early traumas so that deep repression is no longer necessary. That is the meaning of liberation.
Too many current approaches to treating sex problems include exhortations, special exercises, medication, splints, creams, aphrodisiacs, or sex therapy. These all consider sexual dysfunction as something to be adjusted and regulated or tinkered with, but the brain and its physiology nearly always return to trump any conventional therapeutic intervention. Feelings/needs are not something to be managed – they are to be felt.
If the apparent problem is treated as THE problem, rather than as an isolated symptom, then the best one can hope for is "help”, not cure. That is what we get in Alcoholics Anonymous, or Sex Addicts Anonymous: The root of the problem (i.e., the trauma that gave rise to the alcoholism) is not addressed, but only its symptom (drinking too much).
We cannot feel a lifetime of pain in one session. It is too much to bear. Our systems have a control system that allows us only to feel and integrate a bit of a feeling at a time. It is important that patients experience their pain slowly, over a period of time. We examine a problem and find its origin, then resolve it slowly. No weekend seminar is ever going to accomplish that. Once the experience is relived fully, healing will begin. It happens without effort. Then there comes a day when the patient says “That is why I…” a sequence with an, "Aha!" at the end. There is nothing sweeter than that Aha!