Good Sex or Sick, Needy and Repressed?
HETEROsexuals Need to Come Out of the Closet — Part V
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In my first article and subsequent parts, I outline how the human race went from a well balanced view of sex to a warped view.
So what — right? Who says our view of sex is warped? So what if we have rules that we all recognize, and conform to. Doesn’t this make us a more civilized society? Aren’t we better for it?
The answer is — No.
I am going to discuss some of the very real consequences of sexual repression. These consequences include, but are not restricted to:
- Sexual dysfunctions.
- Domestic violence.
- Failed relationships.
- Child neglect and abuse.
To name a few of the more obvious ones, but include,
- Substance abuse.
- Rampant STDs.
- Antisocial behavior.
- Depression, alienation and anxiety.
- Wasteful materialism.
And even,
- Damage to the planet.
If a person does not grow up in an environment with healthy sexual attitudes they will never mature emotionally.
The Wolves of Yellowstone
Everything is linked. Sex, violence, substance abuse, misogyny, sexism, alcoholism, pollution, the environment, the distribution of wealth, and power all link back to sex.
Does that sound extreme? Sex has something to do with pollution and the environment? Yup. Just like the wolves have something to do with the paths the rivers take.
Doing it Right
Life is full of urges. People are born demanding nourishment. They don’t have to be taught to eat or drink. They also feel compelled to move, to vocalize. As they develop they feel compelled to satisfy their curiosity by engaging their senses. At first all their consuming, vocalizing and moving is pretty random, but soon they learn to get it organized, put limits and boundaries on their behaviors and make them more convenient and useful. Soon they don’t grunt, shriek and kick when they are hungry, hoping someone will guess what they need. They say, “Hey, what’s there to eat?” or they use that mobility that they learned to control to raid the fridge.
As they build more and more useful structures around their urges they mature and become more capable of coping with various situations. They reference how they feel and look after all their urges and desires, with healthy limits and boundaries. Given the opportunity to explore everything they feel and every urge they will probably become a healthy, mature person with a well organized and productive life.
They will become skilled at getting their needs met. They will probably be happy. They will not be in the least bit needy. They know how to get all their needs met.
Getting it wrong
But what happens if they are consistently denied the opportunity to explore how they feel and cultivate limits and boundaries?
The baby that is not given enough nourishment just might repress the need for nourishment and not ever feel hunger ever again. They will go through life with food issues. It is easy to draw the line between need, repression, and consequence in this instance.
Here is a more complex situation.
Young people need to have fun with their peers. Play allows them to grow socially and meet many related needs. They develop a sense of belonging and that lays the foundation to meet further needs, such as bonding, cultivating both sexual and non-sexual intimacy.
What happens when a child decides they can’t afford to play? Imagine a seven-year-old who’s Mom is a drunk and whose Dad has anger issues. When Dad gets home he finds Mom drunk all the time. The best course of action Dad can think of is to rant, rave, and slap everybody around.
With drunk and useless Mom and threatening Dad, home is a frightening place. Life is fraught with stress and anxiety. For a little kid even survival seems at risk.
Kids are narcissistic by nature. They often feel they are responsible for everything and it is up to them to fix it. One option is to take control of their home situation, which on the surface might seem like a good idea.
They come up with a strategy. Each day the kid gets home from school and encourages Mom to sober up. They clean her up a bit, get her dressed and brush her hair. They throw out the empty bottle. They tidy the house and put dinner on. They make sure Dad has nothing to rant about. They make sure everything is relatively normal.
The sad thing about this is, everyone tells them what a wonderful, helpful person they are. Everybody admires who they have become. They might even take pride in their new status and commit to it further.
Too bad their strategy has left them no possibility for emotional growth. They will not discover how to meet their personal needs or learn healthy ways to navigate through life. They are locked into their strategy. It will always be their only means of coping with every situation. They have decided the only thing that guarantees them survival is their strategy. They become rigidly committed to it. How they feel and what they want for themselves or what they need doesn’t matter ever again.
As John Bradshaw would say, they have become a human doing rather than a human being.
Their personal limits and boundaries become obscured. They will have little sense of self. They feel responsible for their parent’s behavior. Without a healthy sense of self they will eventually feel responsible for the behavior of many others around them. They will be the one that inevitably makes sure their party-animal friend that they have a superficial connection with gets home safely all the time. They will feel shame and self-loathing because of their inability to make everything right all the time.
They will grow physically and intellectually, but emotionally they will always be a kid with a survival strategy. Their emotional development has been thwarted.
Anger and Fear
However, their needs never go away. The needs boil and roil below the surface of the psyche causing all kinds of disturbances.
They are angry because they abandoned their needs under duress.
The kid would love to be a kid and have fun. Everyone would love to have the support and opportunity to have their needs met and discover their full potential. The fact that they were forced to make the choice between having a life and taking control of their dysfunctional world leaves them angry.
They are also angry because their limits and boundaries are obscured.
They resent feeling responsible for everyone else. They resent everyone else’s relaxed attitude. This leads to trust issues. It is impossible to trust, open up and be vulnerable if you feel others might burden you with their personal needs.
They are also terrified.
They always want to feel they have everything under control. Who can feel confident about that? They are hyper-vigilant and rarely let go and enjoy life. They try to plan and foresee everything. They can be controlling and manipulative.
On a conscious level, they have no idea that they are angry and terrified.
They see their reactions to the world as perfectly natural. It is their normal. They assume it is everyone's normal. Their fear and anger dictates how they engage the world. They might even do it with a smile.
Their anger is free floating. They have no conscious idea of where it comes from.
It might show as frequent mood swings or a constant foul mood. They probably suffer from depression. They might withdrawal. They might be prone to lash out. They are reactive. They get defensive.
Warmth and affection do not flow from them. Anger kills affection. Their family is probably victimized by their anger because that is a relatively safe place to vent without the whole world knowing.
They probably self-medicate with drugs or alcohol.
In spite of accepting their state of being as normal they will frequently have a sense that normal is not a comfortable state. They might experience an emptiness in their life.
They might turn to God or religion to fill that void.
They might lose themselves in their work and become a workaholic or a relentless busy-body.
They might seek approval, in an effort to feel complete. That is how some get to the top of the corporate ladder.
They make good minions and go-go-go on behalf of corporate overlords, seeking status. They can be compliant and eager.
They become other people’s enablers feeling that they are doing something noble.
But their ambition for mediocrity leaves them feeling just as hollow as ever, and often disillusioned. None of their striving addresses the real issue.
Being needy has a toxic effect on relationships.
It leaves people incapable of deep, rich and meaningful bonds. When a person constantly plays a role everything is calculated using their survival strategy as the template.
It doesn’t matter who they are interacting with, the role is the same. The involvement is limited to the dynamics of their strategy and lack of trust. It is never an organic blending of souls.
They will never merge with you spiritually.
That feels dangerous to them. They fear losing themselves if they become somebody other than the drone they committed themselves to be.
They don’t allow their life to evolve. They don’t want to be influenced by you. They don’t want to discuss things. They are reactive and defensive. They are easily triggered. If you try to nudge them out of their ridged role you have a fight on your hands.
After all, they have life all figured out. They figured it all out when they were a little kid.
They will never bond with you over your passions.
Living passionately in concert with a repressed person is not an option. In other words, it is difficult for a repressed person to engage in the things that make life magical and worth living.
A repressed person may look like they are living passionately.
You may be tempted to share and support their passions. However, they are likely being obsessive or compulsive. The kid from the horrible family might become a perfectionist. Everything has to be just right. Anything less causes them stress and anxiety.
When it is not passion that is driving a person their high maintenance will be draining if you have a relationship with them.
Constantly on the alert, mistrustful, and terrified of what might transpire if they emotionally embrace others, life is never combined energies, insights, inspiration, blended emotions and shared experience on an intimate level as new horizons are explored, new ways of being and potentials are discovered.
I’m not saying you need to write these people off. Be there for them. Being needy and repressed is a mental health issue. They can respond to therapy. They need to be loved. Just be aware of what you are dealing with, and how such a person will impact your life.
Needy people often end up in relationships with other needy people so they can play their respective roles.
Inevitably this leads to very toxic situations. One enables the other so they both can continue their dysfunctional behavior. The chronically underemployed or alcoholic lost soul will find an enabler that allows them to be just that. Without the enabler, they would be forced to change their life. That is why people who grew up where alcohol was a problem often get involved with alcoholics.
Children of repressed people do not get the support they need so they become needy people. It is a vicious cycle. These are literally lost lives.
They are always in a chronic state of need.
However, without the ability to identify what they really need, their need becomes free floating.
One minute they want attention, but that isn’t really the thing they actually need, and they want to be left alone. The next minute they want new shoes, but as soon as they have them they forget about them and want something else. You might throw them a party, and they say it would have been nice if it had been a BBQ instead, or you could have spent the money on something else.
They might crave food. That can make them feel okay for a brief time, but it is only a stopgap that goes away so they reach for more food and become unhealthy and overweight.
They might crave drugs or alcohol, again a stopgap solution that inevitably lets them down and leads to craving more. They might crave constant approval. And so it goes.
Ironically, they never reach out for the thing they actually need, because that is the forbidden fruit that was denied them, or they vowed to deny themselves.
The subconscious need for one thing in place of another is called displacement.
I can’t let myself embrace others the way people normally do, so I will use food, drugs, shoes, power, money, control, sex, booze, approval, or a combination of them all. Obviously, none of these things are bad in and of themselves, but if someone compulsively seeks them out in place of what they really need. this becomes a problem.
To Summarize, Needy, Repressed People Are Very Messed Up People.
You expect them to look like total basket-cases. Some do. Others look like perfection.
The scary thing is, most wear their mask — their social mask that allows them to dwell among us.
Anger, fear, addiction, violence, misogyny, self-loathing, depression, mental health issues, broken homes, toxic relationships, wasteful consumption, abused and neglected children — you would think that society would be hyper-vigilant to make sure people’s needs are met.
You would think that societal convention and cultural taboos would guard against any repression so that everyone can grow up well balanced, happy, healthy and actually have a life.
What kind of crazy society would deliberately and systemically psychologically damage its citizens by making them repress their needs?
Sex Is a Real Need
Were you supported when it came to your sexual development?
Were you taught about consent?
Did you learn very early in life to respect other people’s limits? Were you taught to be aware of your own limits? Were you taught how to guard your boundaries?
Did exploring your body feel safe?
Did you know when it was appropriate to explore? When you wanted to explore other people’s bodies did you feel supported? Were you accommodated and encouraged?
Your sexual development starts at a very early age. Very little kids explore their genitals with no inhibitions. How did that go for you? Did you have your hands slapped away? Were you told nice little girls and boys don’t do that? Were you shamed? Were you threatened?
I once saw a little two-year-old dancing and flouncing her dress around in a little girl reverie in a shopping mall. Dad freaked at her. It triggered something in him. Dad went into a state. He slapped her hands away from the hem of her dress and shrieked, “Don’t do that!” The little girl looked so confused and terrified. What was she doing that made Daddy become so vicious? Laugh? Dance? Sing? Be happy? I was confused too. I suspect it was because her panties were showing. She had no idea. I suspect that moment changed her.
At one time you had no inhibitions.
You were at peace with nudity — yours and other people’s, and that is the way it should have stayed. But for many people, nudity is a huge issue. Typically nudity becomes an irrational taboo. Parents freak and cover their children’s eyes if nudity shows up on TV. Just ask Janet Jackson! Ironically it is fine for the kiddies to see endless blood and gore on TV and in video games!
Playing Doctor
There is a stage in a child’s development when getting undressed with peers is inevitable. It is euphemistically referred to as “playing doctor”. Their curiosity about human anatomy is natural and healthy. They are full of questions.
Were your questions answered, or were you ignored?
Were you told that nice little boys and girls don’t ask those questions. Did the adults you asked seem embarrassed? Were you shamed, or punished or threatened for playing doctor? Were you made to feel you did something wrong. “If I catch you doing that again…!”
This was very likely the beginning of a long indoctrination. You were taught guilt and shame. They have been part of you ever since.
I knew a woman who lived alone and showered with her bra and panties on, in the privacy of her own bathroom behind locked doors.
Were you ever shamed for masturbating?
In many families kids are taught masturbation is dirty and something they need to feel ashamed and guilty about. Masturbating is an integral part of sexual development. It starts at a very early age. Yes, limits and boundaries need to be placed around masturbation, just like many other things in life.
I know a woman who was forced to sleep with her hands above the covers.
You were full of curiosity about where babies come from at one time. Were you told the truth?
For many women, this is where it can get particularly rough.
There was an age when you wanted to distinctly declare and claim your gender and sexuality. You wanted to fly your flag.
Hetero guys generally don’t have any obstacles at this point. In fact, they tend to get lots of support and encouragement to “be a man”.
How did Mom, Dad, or your Guardian take it when you wanted to be sexy?
You were probably around 12 or 14. You wanted to wear makeup. Maybe you wanted to dress sexy. Did you roll up the waistband of your skirt after you left the house to show lots of leg? Did you have to sneak sexy clothes that you borrowed or shoplifted out of the house so that you could dress like “everyone else”?
What happened when a parent or guardian found out? Was it a good healthy talk?
Were you called a slut, easy, a skank, a cock sucker or a whore by your guardian, parents, indoctrinated sibling, or peers? Were you preached at about the evils of sex and taught about being a “good girl”, a “nice girl” and saving “it” for marriage? Were you told that girls in particular who didn’t save “it” for marriage were going to burn in hell?
Did you have to hide the fact that you had a special friend? Were you ever punished and shamed for being caught necking or fondling or letting yourself be fondled? Was sexual intimacy clearly a crime in your family?
Worse still were you treated like it was your fault when you were violated— when you were the obvious victim of assault or sexual interference? Were you punished for letting it happen?
Were you threatened by your family? By your religious leaders. Were some kids told not to play or associate with you because of your “reputation”?
Are you ashamed of your fantasies?
Do you feel guilty about some of the things you are curious about? Do some of your desires make you feel awful? Are you embarrassed by the things you would like to do? Do you feel they make you a sub-class or inferior?
Or worst of all, you have checked out. You don’t have any sexual desires. At least, none you are aware of, and sexy is something you are just not interested in.
Was there ever a time in your life that you could talk openly to friends or family about serious sexual issues?
Sexually transmitted diseases run rampant because it is awkward or taboo to talk freely about all things sexual. How can something be effectively dealt with if it has to be shrouded in mystery? The same goes for family planning.
I know a woman from a very repressed culture that had sex with strangers as an act of rebellion. She seriously thought her birth control pills protected her from STDs.
On the other hand, I knew a stripper who loved her work. One thing she loved was that among her peers no topic was ever taboo. What a healthy attitude. Think about how far that would go to save millions of lives or unintended pregnancies.
Social Bargaining. Here is where it really gets crazy.
Just as the person who is socially repressed needs a social facade to function, the sexually repressed person needs to function sexually.
Those that are so far repressed that they cannot function sexually in any capacity usually live a lonely life. They can find partners, but the possibilities are pretty limited.
In the cultivation of relationships, a lot of bargaining goes on.
People bargain their assets in exchange for other people’s assets. The guy with a great sense of humor has something of value to other people. He uses his assets to bargain a relationship with a pretty girl with big boobs. That is what he values. The guy who has no sense of humor, but has a fancy car is worth something to someone, he hopes. The woman who is a high flying, corporate-executive is not going to negotiate a relationship with the filthy, drooling homeless guy that lives under the bridge unless he has something going on that we don’t know about. Yes, I know — it is not that simple, but a lot of personal asset bargaining goes on.
A person’s sexual appeal is one of their greatest assets, particularly at a certain juncture in life.
If you want to be in the running when it comes to social bargaining you need to be sexy. If you are repressed you put on a mask. You play a role, just like the socially repressed kid puts on a mask and plays a social role now and again.
You don’t have any problem knowing what that role is. It is being sold to you constantly. In media, sexy people are the staple.
The superficial trimmings and trappings of being sexy are being marketed everywhere. It is the driving force behind the multi-billion dollar fashion industry.
Everywhere you look you see people with a media driven, faux sexual facade. Makeup, hairstyles, clothes, glamorous selfies, poise and poses, and glitz. It has all been prepackaged for you, so that being sexy is a no-brainer. You just need the cash to purchase your manufactured, commercially available version of sexy. Sexual needs or libido to motivate you are not required. In all likelihood none of it expresses who you really are sexually or how you feel.
You can look “sexy” and be deeply sexually repressed.
You argue that you can’t be sexually repressed, because you like sex.
Well, maybe. You like getting it on with your partner. But again, is that just to add to your value in the social bargaining market? Or is it primarily to maintain your relationship, so your partner is not tempted to look somewhere else?
You probably have a sexual role that you are comfortable with. You know what the cues are. You know how to behave at certain times and in certain places. You know the routine.
You might argue that you can’t be sexually repressed because you have orgasms.
Again, maybe. However, to their horror, sometimes women who are being raped have an orgasm. No. They are not enjoying the experience.
Orgasms can be like getting tickled. Even when you are in no mood to laugh, and you are angry that you are being tickled you can be consumed with laughter. It is your bodies response. There is no joy or mirth in it, although, like the rape victim, you might feel confused.
Your healthy libido is like body heat.
People hate to be cold. For practical reasons, they will endure cold, but they are always drawn back to warmth. They don’t think about it. It is just natural to want to be warm.
Cold is miserable and you are always very aware of when you are cold. We always seek warmth, but paradoxically when we are comfortably warm we take it for granted.
That is how your sex drive should be. If you are a healthy sexual person, you can take your sexual nature for granted. It is just part of you, like your body heat. Your sexuality will just flow from you without you thinking about it or any effort on your part.
It will be one of the primary dynamics of your personality, like your intellect or your sense of humor. It will always be there, to be engaged by others or offered by you, subtly or overtly.
Sexually repressed people can be, metaphorically speaking, out in the cold, not know it, and have no desire to seek out any warmth.
I once read in an online forum how a woman was so relieved that she didn’t have to be sexual or worry about her weight anymore, because she had recently gotten married. I wonder how that is working out for her?
To borrow a riff from John Bradshaw, are you a sexual human being or a sexual human doing?
Do you naturally gravitate to the warmth and comfort of your sexual nature? Is it a distinct, irrepressible aspect of your nature or do you have to force it? Can you let go? What is sex like for you?
Good sex is the most profound altered state of consciousness you can experience.
It is a gateway to your soul. It can touch the core of your being. It can connect you to deep and unique feelings that you never experience in everyday life — those amazing feelings that you need to experience and can only experience both emotionally and physically through sex. It is the closest you can get to being in a perfect state of being. As you orgasm you don’t think. You just be.
Good sex changes you. You feel strangely reconnected to yourself and the universe. Sex heals all the little wounds that you have sustained with everyday living. It rejuvenates and makes life meaningful. It makes you feel alive. You can take something away from each experience. That thing can resonate for hours or even days.
In many of the old religions worship included sex.
The sexual experiences of those people who had never had to deal with false inhibitions, were deeply spiritual. We know this because there are lots of records available to us. Their techniques and experience can be reproduced. The bliss experienced was considered a taste of heaven. Orgasms lasted for hours. That experience is called ridding the wave. Out of body experiences were common. That is how sex can be. That is sex in its natural, un-repressed state and it can be truly profound.
I’m not saying that all sexual experiences should be profound, but that the potential could be there in a healthy, sex-positive world.
We live in a world of sexual repression.
Sexual repression by far outweighs all other forms of repression. It lays heavily and painfully on the world. The horrific thing is that the repression is deliberate. It is a massive injustice.
With most of the population in a systemically repressed state, just by growing up in just about any culture on this planet, it is no wonder that there is so much suffering.
The consequences are not just sexual issues and dysfunctions.
Like other forms of emotional repression, the suffering shows up in drug and alcohol addiction; anger and violence, particularly domestic violence; misogyny and rape; toxic, abusive, energy-draining, painful, failed relationships; child abuse; co-dependence; anti-social behavior including horrific crimes; people with wounded self-esteem, and; people with distorted, imbalanced lives that are obsessed with gambling, money, computer games, religion, or work.
They suffer clinical depression, guilt, self-loathing, anxiety and have other mental health issues. Their neediness leads to wasteful over-consumption that leads to obesity and heart disease, as well as a rampant obsession with owning far more than they need, which is changing the climate and killing the planet.
When the damage does not stem from repression, there is damage done when people are treated cruelly and unjustly marginalized because of their consensual sexual behavior.
One of the real crimes is the proliferation of STDs because the issue of sex is obscured with social taboos.
Sadly, repression begets repression.
It is a domino effect. Remember our kid with the alcoholic mom and the angry dad? Chances are that mom and dad are the way they are, because of the way sex was dealt with in their family. In their ancestry, there was sexual repression and it has been inbred into their family system. No doubt the kid will grow up and have kids that will have issues also, unless the kid gets therapy.
Tell me that we don’t need to be passionate about changing the way we think about sex! I dare you!
Perhaps now you understand how sex-positive people can heal the world, just like the wolves of Yellowstone healed the park.
In a sex-positive world people will not suffer from all the ills that are the result of the deliberate repression of their sexual needs.
Considering, at this point in history, most psychological repression is the result of the systemic and deliberate attack on sexual development, a lot of healing will take place as we transition to become a sex-positive world.
So many of the world’s ills can be addressed by taking a new look at sex and the role it plays in the world and life. A sex-positive world will be a much happier, healthier place.
Don’t hold back!
Please have a look at the last chapter of this series.
