Our culture has no model of healthy sexuality. Even sex therapists play into our society's diseased beliefs, and no wonder, given their abundance! Their therapy focuses on helping people to obtain sexual activity, and includes recommendations that inhibit intimacy and encourage re-abuse.

     Rather, we need to scrap old views of sex and replace them with a new understanding, so we can smile and nod when our clients are discovering what sexuality is really all about.

     I work with people who are having difficulties in their sex lives. Men and women come to me because they don't want to have sex, or are afraid to stay present when being sexual, or prefer masturbation to sex with a partner, or depend on pornography, or want sex all the time, or feel a need for affairs, or are addicted to sex, or search for prostitutes, or want to engage in sexual acts that have nothing to do with loving their partner. Others focus on sexual bonding, searching for the perfect partner, attaching themselves to abusers. These people all experienced emotional and/or sexual abuse during childhood, and this abuse has radically influenced their sex lives. Because they enter therapy to change their use of sexuality, I get to see the results of serious sexual housecleaning, and what emerges to replace the old.

     Long before I specialized in sexual issues, I began the process of examining my own use of sexual energy. During my childhood I lived in almost constant sexual fantasy, creating an arousal drug to avoid the emptiness of my life. When I was old enough to invite a person into my addiction, I became addicted to relationships. In recent years, I began uncovering memories of childhood sexual abuse, and have been cleaning away their influences. Through this process, and the good fortune of entering into marriage with a recovering sex addict who had been similarly engaged in sexual clearing, I am discovering healthy sexual energy. But I had no mirrors for my discoveries and that the media continually told me that they weren't true. Yet now, after years of watching people enter therapy for this specific purpose, and seeing them rediscover what I've learned, I have many mirrors.

     During my early practice as a psychologist, I had no useful training in sexuality. I could be of little help when a woman told me she lay in bed and masturbated for hours at a time, or when a man described going to "adult" book stores and putting his penis through a hole to have it brought to orgasm, or when a woman told me her husband was frightened at her refusal to have sex with him every day. When women complained that their partners looked at other women lustfully, or compared their bodies with the Playboy centerfolds, I didn't know what to do with that information. I didn't nderstand the correlations between adult use of sexual energy and what had occurred in childhood. I didn't see that our culture abuses our sexuality from the time we are born, preventing us from discovering our healthy sexual energy.

The Sexual Shame Compartment

     Our culture defines sex as shameful. Sexual jokes are "dirty" and sex is not spoken of openly. We cope with the shaming of sex by creating "shame compartments" for sexual activities. By moving into a different conciousness, a shame-based one, we become able to engage in sexual activities and conversation, but once we leave the shame compartment, we must isolate our sexuality from our "selves". Members of my sexual therapy groups have discovered that they feel shame when discussing sexual activities openly - the same activities that bring no shame when one is in the shame compartment.

     For example, the Men's Sexuality group initially discussed masturbation without feelings of shame. Men are allowed to talk about "beating off" and even to move their hands as if stroking their penises. But when I brought in a large drawing of penises ejaculating - a delightful, celebratory picture of male genitals - the reactions were very different. The men were shocked, some angry, and most shamed. Over the course of about an hour, the discussion resulted in the discharge of the shame, and the drawing became merely a picture on the wall.

     The Women's Sexuality group, however, experienced shame with all sexual conversation. Women haven't been allowed to tuck shame away, to create a shame compartment that allows us to sidestep the deeply embedded shame of sexuality. As a consequence, the women were able to remove shame more quickly because they had no trouble accessing it. My task as a therapist was designing conversation to elicit men's shame, to allow them to feel and discharge it. As long as they weren't able to feel shame, they were unable to do the emotional work that allowed the shame to be removed from sexuality. The task with women was to hold the shame down to manageable amounts so they didn't become overwhelmed and immobilized by it.

     I encourage you to prepare yourself to work with your clients' sexuality by working on your own.

Talk About Sex

     So how can we climb out of the shame compartment, feel our own acculturated shame, and remove it from sexuality? The answer is to talk and talk and talk about sexual things. Gather together a group of friends, or colleagues, and set aside time, perhaps twice a month, to go over your sexual histories and society's rules. Focus on the shame that emerges as you talk, and doing what it takes to allow the shame to wash through your body and out. By not using maneuvers to avoid the shame, you can let it go. Discovering how you enter your shame compartment, and choosing not to, will bring your sexual shame where you can have access to it.

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     Ways by which you go into your shame compartment might be: lust, pornography, affairs, falling in love repeatedly, "talking dirty" during sex, or focusing on the need to be loved, perform well, feel like a person, or feel valued, or in any other way that makes sexual shame permissible. You might also avoid sex in shame-free situations, such as with your mate or self loving masturbation. If you can identify how you manage to escape shame-free sex, then you have a starting place to encourage feeling shame.

     If your own sexuality seems too uncomfortable to safely discuss with those in your life, you can go to Sex Addicts Anonymous, Sexaholics Anonymous or Sex and Love Addicts meetings, or join a therapy group for this purpose. The people in these groups talk about sex out of the shame compartment in order to recover. They can hear you, and you can hear them constructively dealing with their shame.

     You (and your clients) can question the damaging rules our culture imposes on sexuality, and thereby make way for a new understanding of healthy sexual energy. (Examples of such rules are: married people have to have sex, men have to score, men must be good lovers, women must have "sexy" bodies, sex is dirty, sex is love). As the old dies off, you make room for the new. And what is the new? My clients and I are learning about that.

Therapists Grew Up In The Same Culture As Clients

     We therapists grew up in the same culture as that of the group members, and we also use the shame compartment when engaging our sexual energy. Until we can remove the shame from our own sexuality, we will have difficulty hearing our clients talk about their sex lives.

     Do you remember how you felt the first time you heard a client talk about an incest memory? I remember a multitude of feelings, including believing the memory, shock that I was having such a conversation, and voices playing in my head that said we mustn't talk about such things. My shame changed my voice: I sounded strained and false. Years later, I feel open and welcoming of such information. My clients are safer with me now than they were back then. Even after years of such work, however, I find that I remain blind to clients' experiences that parallel those of mine that I haven't yet worked through. Each time I make a breakthrough in my own healing, I find that I can better hear clients with similar issues. This is true for both the influences of my particular incestuous family background, and for the influence of our culture.

New Sexuality

     The other day I saw an article describing some "hunks" on television. As I looked at pictures of these men, their bodies didn't look at all like bodies I might want to be sexual with. Then I realized that they didn't look like my husband's body! Rex looks so perfect to me, so deliciously attractive with his plump roundness, that the "classic" male body doesn't compare. I was delighted to see that my cross-wired belief that some bodies are more sexually attractive than others has been eliminated. Our culture dictates what is "sexy" and, if we go along with it, we either have to search for the perfect body and face, or feel that we have settled for something inferior. Instead, each of us can have the perfect body and face on our partner. I now experience what I have long believed is possible: What is perfect changes, depending on our choice of partner.

     Jack (not his real name), a member of the Men's Sexuality group, is finding the same thing. Long focused on dating only perfect bodies and faces, he is now delighted to find that his lover's body is the perfect one. Her bodily proportions that differ significantly from the Playboy's centerfold now seem beautiful to him. As he told this to the group, I remembered his anger with me only a year before when I told him that his limited choice of women was cross-wired sexuality, and was preventing him from finding the partner he wanted.

     My husband and I have learned that interest in having sex emerges out of both of us, rather than one wanting sex and the other agreeing to it. The shame compartment requires that one goes into it first, and then invites the other to follow, setting up the dynamic of one person "initiating" sex and the other responding. But if there is no shame compartment operating, then we are shamelessly sexual almost all the time. The decision to "have sex" is casual, becoming only one way to be in a sexual relationship. It isn't "making love," but one of the things we can do with our sexual energy. We are always making love. We stay in touch with our sexual bond, seeing how it wants to express itself. The need to compartmentalize sex prevents intuitive "seeing".

     All people - men and women alike - in reclaiming their healthy sexuality, find they must have complete control over their decision to have sex. Women who say yes because they have to have sex when married, and men who say yes because "real men" cannot say no, will not be able to discover healthy sexuality. When people can truly say "no" to rules about choices of partner, frequency, and activities, they invite a different use of sexual energy.

We Can Make New Mirrors For "Good Sex"

     It is joyful to know that we will automatically move in the direction of healthy sexual energy by examining the effects of our childhoods and our culture. During this process we will have the feelings we couldn't before, and use those who are finding healthy sexual energy as mirrors for what is possible. We can be good mirrors ourselves, by achieving our own sexual recovery, by understanding the process, and discovering what is possible. As we create mirrors and new language, we will change the world.

Anne Stirling Hastings, Ph. D. is a psychologist in private practice in Bellvue, WA, and the author of Reclaiming Healthy Sexual Energy, 1991. America's Sexual Crisis and Why Would Someone Do This to Me? Answers for Adult Survivors of Childhood Incest will be published in 1993. She specializes in sexual issues including the addictive use of sexual energy, sexual shame, discomfort with sexual choices, and lack of interest in sex. She offers classes, workshops and therapy groups.