Living An Orgasmic Life. Xanet Pailet

tongue on my pussy. I also knew from earlier experiences that I would be punished if my mother caught me. So the pleasure I experienced was colored with fear, anxiety, and shame.

      Fast-forward eighteen years. Is there any wonder that I was really uncomfortable with oral sex and could never relax enough to experience it as pleasurable? Not until I slowly brought this memory to consciousness in my forties and shared it with a group of people in a workshop was I finally able to heal my shame and begin enjoying oral sex. Interestingly, when I shared my shame story through tears and shaking during that workshop, another woman shared that she’d been sexually aroused as a child by rubbing against her cat! What a relief! For decades, I thought there was something wrong with me; that I was broken, sexually deranged, or maybe even into bestiality.

      The most important lesson I learned from the workshop is that the only way to normalize the conversation about sex is to normalize the conversation about shame. There are many ways to do that, but writing about it, talking about it, and sharing our experience with others are powerful first steps toward healing shame. Later on in this chapter you will get to explore your own sexual blueprint, but for now let’s look at some other real-life examples of how our sexual shame impacts our sexuality.

      Body Shame: Jessica’s Story

      Jessica came to see me because she was uncomfortable touching herself and was not able to have an orgasm. She grew up in a fairly open and sex-positive environment within her family. Jessica was a tomboy and loved playing with the neighborhood boys. For years, on warm summer days, she ran around topless, just like her friends did. She loved the freedom of being bare-chested and feeling the air on her skin. Her parents were totally fine with this, and Jessica continued to experience her freedom. But when Jessica turned ten, with budding breasts, things changed.

      It was a beautiful, warm summer day, and like always, Jessica ran outside the house without a shirt on to play basketball with the boys. Her mother, who had been running errands, pulled onto the street, took one look at Jessica and her budding breasts, stopped the car, and demanded that she go inside the house and “put a shirt on right this second.” Jessica’s body shame was exacerbated in middle school when a teacher told her that she needed to “sit like a lady” and keep her legs closed.

      In middle school Jessica gained a lot of weight, probably to hide herself from her own body. The disconnection from her body increased when she was later shamed for being “fat” by her aunts and uncles. It was carried over to her adult life as an inability to enjoy touching and appreciating her own body. Over time, Jessica was able to accept that the shame and negative image she had about her body were from her childhood, had no basis in fact, and no longer served her. As she began connecting with her own feminine self, she became more loving and compassionate to herself and her body. Eventually she was able to enjoy touching and pleasuring herself and experienced her first orgasm.

      Delayed Ejaculation Shame: Jeff’s Story

      Jeff came to see me after a nasty divorce. He was afraid of being intimate with women and was particularly concerned about delayed ejaculation, meaning he could get fully aroused but not come. When I asked Jeff about his first sexual experience, he told me this story.

      I was seventeen when I lost my virginity. I was one of the last of my group of friends and felt a lot of peer pressure to get laid. There was this girl, Jackie, who had a lot of experience and came on to me at a party. I wasn’t attracted to her, but she put her hand on my cock when we were dancing, and I felt excited. She took me into a back bedroom and we fucked. It went on for about a half an hour, and while it felt really good, I couldn’t come. Jackie made fun of me and even told her girlfriends about it. I felt like all her friends looked at me in a different way after that. Like I was not a real man.

      And thus, shame became a cornerstone of Jeff’s sexual blueprint. Jeff repeated this pattern when he started dating after the divorce. He’d agree to have sex with a woman when he really wasn’t that turned on and didn’t feel connected. Then, when he couldn’t ejaculate, he’d think himself inadequate and feel deeply ashamed. Once Jeff learned to relax during sex and developed stronger boundaries so he could say “no” to women he was not attracted to, he was able to enjoy making love, and his problem with delayed ejaculation went away.

      My own sexual shame runs fairly deep in my blueprint and was etched into my sense of myself at a fairly early age. As a young child, I was pretty sexual and often played doctor with my friends. One day I was over at my best friend Josephine’s house. We were two bubbly first-graders pretending we were doctors and exploring each other’s vaginas. This was one of our favorite games. When Josephine’s mother walked into the room, her face turned bright red. She scolded us, immediately called my mother to tell her what had happened, and demanded she come pick me up right away. My mother, who never showed any connection to her own sexuality, couldn’t even talk to me except to say it was a “bad thing” that I could never do again. After that incident, Josephine’s mother would not let us have play dates anymore. At the end of first grade, Josephine and her family moved away. I was heartbroken to lose my friend and believed it was my fault she had to move away. Thus began the association between my vagina and painful disappointment.

      My father’s death when I was three greatly impacted my sexual blueprint. Not only did my mother never remarry, she never dated and never invited a man, other than a relative, over to our house. Sex was never discussed. My mother so hated touch that she wouldn’t get a manicure and took no pleasure in keeping her own nails perfectly shaped. She could barely talk to me when I got my period at the age of eleven, other than to reinforce the overriding message: “sex is bad and dirty.” My only knowledge of romantic love was from what I saw in the movies and read in books, which caused me to idolize men.

      Shame from Inappropriate Attraction: Tim’s Story

      Growing up in a sexually open household also has its challenges. Tim, age forty-three, was unable to sustain healthy relationships with women because he was obsessed with his mother and constantly fantasized about her. He grew up in a household where nudity was acceptable. His mother had always walked around the house naked and this never presented a problem, until he entered puberty. Tim had his first erotic experience when he got a hard-on while looking at his mother with her breasts exposed. His mother noticed Tim’s erection and said, “I’m flattered by all your attention.” Tim also saw that his mother’s nipples had become erect and he realized that she was also turned on. This reinforced his sexual attraction to her.

      His mother squandered a perfect opportunity to remove the shame from the situation by simply telling Tim that it’s normal for a boy to get an erection when he sees a naked woman’s body. She also should have realized that her days of walking around naked in front of Tim were over. Instead his attention played into her own sexual desires, creating an inappropriate mother-son dynamic.

      Religious and cultural beliefs can also have a huge impact on our sexuality, particularly in Christianity and Islam. I work with a lot of men and women from India, Asia, and the Middle East. Many of them grew up in very sex-negative cultures where women are supposed to be virgins when they marry. Women are looked down upon if they dress in a feminine or sexy way. Girls receive a lot of negative messages and are often shamed for expressing their sexuality.

      Sexually Repressed Shame: Anya’s Story

      Anya’s family is from Iran. Sex was not talked about in her home and her mother put the kibosh on even the slightest hint of sexual expression. One day she and her mother were driving in a car and she saw a woman on the back of a motorcycle being driven by a man. The woman’s hair was flying and she was holding on to him very tightly. Feeling excited by this vision she said out loud, “Oh, I wish that was me.” Out of nowhere, she felt a slap across her face. “She’s a slut,” said her mother with disgust. “And you will be too if you do that!”

      Anya told me this story during a session. I’d been giving her some featherlight touch on her arms and she started to feel a little pleasure in her body, which I could sense from her breathing. But the minute she felt that pleasure, she froze up and started crying. When I asked her what was going on she told me that she heard