LITMIR.BIZ

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knew saw her there. The list of rules and regulations she had created to shield her innermost sexual needs from the possibility that anyone in the “vanilla” world could use it against her was long.

      Some of it was reasonable: being non-consensually outed can be extremely traumatic for anyone. It was wise to keep her sex life and her business life completely separate too. But, as we worked together, it was obvious that all her social fears about BDSM had warped her self-esteem and caused her to make bad choices.

      Deep down, Louise really believed BDSM was dirty and shameful, and that people would reject and criticize her if they knew that in the bedroom she liked to be tied up and role play. Perhaps even more than that, she herself couldn’t stand the thought of being known as “a pervert,” because it was not how she saw herself. She saw herself as a normal, regular person not the kind of person who needed to be tied up and spanked to have an orgasm. Her perspective was that while she liked kinky sex, she herself was not kinky. It was just something she did, not who she was.

      Her anxiety made her compartmentalize her BDSM life from the rest of her life:

      Louise never introduced her BDSM partners to family or friends. That was unthinkable! She kept a non-kinky man in the picture to bring to family occasions, although she didn’t really enjoy sex with him. In private, she hooked up with kinky men she met on the Internet, using an anonymous handle.

      I was sympathetic to Louise’s fears. Some of them were justified: she had signed a morals clause at work, and a scandal would cost her the job. But some of them were self-sabotage. She was miserable: she was smart and attractive and financially independent, and felt completely alone in life. I knew that there were plenty of men out there who would welcome the chance to get to know her – if only she let them. But since quality kinky men were turned off by her secrets and games, she ended up with sleazy ones who were just there to get their jollies.

      Until you can accept that it’s really okay to need what you need in bed, that your personal sexual needs are, well, “just the way you are,” not some flaw or disease, nothing that says something is fundamentally freakish about you, but rather your own mind and body’s natural biology, it’s pretty tough to project the self-confidence that others find attractive. Not only did Louise and I work on her own inhibitions about BDSM, but we worked on her body language too. She walked around like a tight ball of fear, hands frequently clenched, a frozen smile on her face. People like that are predator magnets, radiating their insecurity and anxiety. As her mind relaxed, she learned to let her body relax as well. It was a first step forward towards projecting a sense of self-confidence and self-esteem, although the underlying work – of gradually learning to accept her sexual self without judgment – would take months.

      Long before your conscious mind identifies what you really need sexually, your mind is absorbing and processing information – physical, emotional, erotic, and intellectual – that shapes your sexual identity. This is why many of us remember behaviors in childhood that seemed completely innocent to us at the time yet which we view as embarrassingly sexual when we’re adults. Most common, of course, are the weird things little kids do with their genitals – showing them to friends, exposing them in public, sticking things into holes, riding toys obsessively, rubbing against walls or floors – which, we later realize, is crazy perversion! What?! Though kids generally don’t understand what they are doing or why they are doing it, what’s important for adults to understand is that even when we are tiny tots who don’t experience sexual feelings the way adults do, our primitive brain is collecting information in preparation for that great day in the still-distant future when our bodies are fully ready for actual, conscious sex.

      Needless to say, when children are exposed to sexual trauma – whether upon themselves or by witnessing it – their brains absorb and process that information too.

      JERRY, a frail man in his 60s, said he had spent his life struggling with his demons. He hit the sexual stress trifecta: Shame, Guilt and Anxiety! For 40 years, he had tried to be something he was not and it was killing him. Literally. He had high blood pressure, migraines, chronic heartburn, eczema, was subject to panic attacks and some days he had twitches and tics too. His doctors told him to take more vacations. I told him that if we could get him to stop torturing himself, it would be better than a vacation.

      After several failed marriages to women, Jerry was trying to deal with the possibility that he was gay. He wanted so much to be a good husband, but the same pattern repeated itself every time: he loved women, but after a while, they bored him in bed. He didn’t mind a vagina, he said, but he was not that fond of them either. They were okay. He preferred for his woman to perform oral, while he masturbated her with vibrators and toys. When it came to intercourse, he wasn’t always able to maintain an erection so he avoided it whenever possible. This had made some of his wives very angry.

      Every marriage had ended with him fading out of the sex life, and then fading out of the relationship, generally blaming his ex’s bad temper or demanding nature, and finding someone new to rekindle his passions, at least for the first year or two. It was the fifth wife who finally figured him out: she told him he was gay, and that she wanted a divorce.

      It wasn’t as if Jerry didn’t know. He just hadn’t wanted to accept that because he had gay fantasies in his mind that it meant he had to have gay sex in reality. He had chosen to lead a Christian life, he said. Then he told me a story about his youth.

      At the Baptist church in which he was raised as a boy, Pastor Kirk was a hero to the kids, especially Jerry, whose own father was distant and cold. The pastor, though, always had time for a smile or an encouraging word, and possessed a natural gift for ministering to his flock, especially the children, who were regularly invited to the pastor’s home to play with his own progeny. Handsome, caring, learned, and extremely charismatic, the pastor became Jerry’s role model of masculine perfection. He wanted to be just like him when he grew up.

      When Jerry was thirteen, his parents abruptly announced that they were quitting the church. Pastor Kirk was a bad man. No one was allowed to speak to him ever again. No one was allowed even to speak his name aloud at home. The law was laid down strictly and when Jerry started to cry and question, his father sent him to his room.

      At school the next day, Jerry heard an incredible rumor. All the kids were calling Pastor Kirk a fag, and claiming he left his wife for a man. Jerry didn’t believe it. The pastor had been passionately vituperative on subjects like infidelity and homosexuality. When he spat out the word “sodomites” from the pulpit, the whole church felt his revulsion. How was it possible that Pastor Kirk had left his wife to live in sin as a homosexual?

      Jerry was shattered. On some level, he was awed by the pastor’s audacity – as Jerry saw it, the pastor had risked it all for love. It seemed so romantic. Jerry was so conflicted he could barely eat for three days. He was finally able to break the spell of misery when he prayed to God and promised that he would never disappoint his family, his church, and God the way the pastor did. Secretly, Jerry was a little jealous of the mystery man who had captivated the pastor. He began obsessing over what kind of a sex life two gay men might have together, trying to imagine how Pastor Kirk looked without clothes. By his mid-teens, he was regularly jerking off to fantasies about Pastor Kirk and hating himself every time.

      He convinced himself that jerking off to gay fantasies didn’t make him gay. As long as he lived as a straight man, he could be one. And so he resolved to marry a woman and to be faithful to her too. He felt in his heart that he could do it through sheer will-power. That’s what his faith told him. But now, sitting in my office, Jerry was finally realizing that despite the promise he made to God at age thirteen, despite all his striving to be someone he was not and to cover up his authentic sexual identity, he was a gay man who had lived a life of self-hatred.

      The timing of this traumatic event could not have come at a worse period in Jerry’s biological life. Male puberty is a very vulnerable phase for most boys. Boys don’t produce testosterone until they hit puberty (usually 10 to 13). But once testosterone production begins, it can soar to the high end of adult normal. Suddenly, you have a little kid whose

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