"But in the moments of emotional desperation or starvation, your sexual body will have its own requests and the voice of your emotions will know its own powerful remedy."
Follow up to: Sex, Grinder, and Breaking Your Own Trust: 2 Ways it Happens
Our desire is inherently innocent. I believe that full heartedly. My observations as a clinician point me to see all behavior as underscored by a deep beauty. Some call this the Immortal Diamond, the True Self, or the Original Blessing. To make the language workable, I’ll call it our innocent desire.
Our desire is an emotional beckoning calling us to be seen, safe, secure, and soothed. In other words, we all crave one thing: union.
Unfortunately, we start to use a voice of criticism that negatively appraises our innocent desire.
If we are taught that our desire to be held as men is inappropriate or weak, we’ll hide it. If women feel as though they shouldn’t ask for emotional connection, they’ll grow angry and feel alienated. And if we feel as though we shouldn’t want to be loved by the same gender, we will call our desire sin.
Easily stated, if we call our desire dirty the next step is to suppress it.
Whenever we sit holding our breath for too long, especially when we are withholding from something essential and innocent, we’ll swing from complete denial to over-indulgence. But when we do this, we’ll do it in secret or out of manipulation.
Remember, we will try to get our innocent emotional needs met in a way that protects us from being revealed or protects us from being shamed. The continuous criticizing of your desire has limited your behavior to damaging options.
In the emotional darkness that befalls our innocent desire (a learned seperateness), we scan on Grinder, hope on hookup apps, stare at porn, use a another’s body as the potion of secret satisfaction, or we fester in anger and resentment. And voilà!
We have compounded the process wherein our desire is labeled dirty. We do so by wrongfully interlacing our shameful behavior with our innocent desire. We think if a shaming behavior can satisfy my desire then my desire must be dirty.
Stop to contemplate: What part of your desire have you implicitly labeled dirty? Many of you will come up with nothing. Think again.
Your desire, at its fundamental core, is never dirty. But in the moments of emotional desperation or starvation, your sexual body will have its own requests and the voice of your emotions will know its own powerful remedy.
What if you could identify your beautifully innocent desire from the get-go? What if you understood your emotional craving as the desire for sustainable affirmation, continuous love, or undeniable security (in other words, union)? Would you reach for something different than Grinder or porn? Would you not go about satisfaction in a different way?
In the anxiety and heat of the moment, be paced. Practice trusting yourself by looking into the place that is full of honest innocent need. Reach for love, affirmation, and connectedness that will keep you sustained beyond a fleeting orgasm, praises for your body pic, or affirmation from a person who is neither committed nor mature.
Treat your innocent desire with respect, because underneath it all it will drive you closer to relational maturity.
*To read the originating post, click here.