{"id":77058,"date":"2014-06-03T07:00:58","date_gmt":"2014-06-03T11:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=77058"},"modified":"2014-06-03T07:14:13","modified_gmt":"2014-06-03T11:14:13","slug":"from-how-to-be-your-own-lover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/sexuality\/from-how-to-be-your-own-lover\/","title":{"rendered":"from ‘How to Be Your Own Lover’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Link to Original<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Let’s make a note that here in the first seasons of the 21st century, we have a little problem with relationships. Most of them are boring. The divorce rate is the tip of the iceberg, and is artificially inflated by many who attempt marriage three to nine times. Meanwhile, what’s the real domestic violence situation? What about the insidious problems of jealousy and control, and the repeated incidents of lying to our partners about sex, or concealing our sexual realities from them? What about the countless women who have told me they were used for sex under the age of 10, or were raped and could not say anything about it for decades, blaming themselves?<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a>
Photo by Eric Francis from the Daily Mirror series, April 2008, Book of Blue.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Could these all be expressions of one thing, namely, the painful, guilt-laden relationships we are conditioned into having with ourselves? This doesn’t always show up as sexual guilt, nor does sexual guilt always show up as what shrinks call “generalized guilt.” But guilt is guilt, and it has a lot to do with sex. For many people, the two words are practically synonymous.<\/p>\n

Fritz and Laura Perls, early pioneers of Gestalt Therapy, taught that guilt is resentment turned against itself<\/em>. Generally speaking, children, being the powerful yet powerless little critters they are, take upon themselves the notion of “fault and blame.” They cannot imagine adults (who are personifications of the gods and goddesses) making an error. If they do, it’s still the “fault” of the child. “If only I would’ve done this or that, daddy wouldn’t hit me.” “If I was more quiet, mommy wouldn’t drink.” And so on. Since they are at “fault,” they are “guilty,” and since they cannot rage against the adults very successfully or have a real impact on the direction of events, they turn the resentment at being pruned, modified, corrected, disciplined, strongly directed, or dictated to, back at themselves.*<\/p>\n

That is guilt. It’s fair to say that our lives, so often filled with the idea that we cannot influence the direction of events, so often caught in the web of control, of bosses, of taxes, of children, and yes, of our sexual relationships, are often holographic copies of these original crushing relationships with parents and teachers. Yet as adults, the programming, the patterns, are contained within us. They are internalized. Check it out: do we have especially creative jobs? Dare we say what we feel, go where we want, be who we are, or have sex with who we desire? Or are we pruned, modified, dictated to, and denied out of existence by our own self-control? <\/p>\n

* This paragraph co-written with Joseph Trusso, student of Fritz and Laura<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Link to Original Let’s make a note that here in the first seasons of the 21st century, we have a little problem with relationships. Most of them are boring. The divorce rate is the tip of the iceberg, and is artificially inflated by many who attempt marriage three to nine times. Meanwhile, what’s the real … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1738,16],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77058"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77058\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}