The One Not-So-Obvious Reason
Women and pleasure is my new favourite topic. There seem to be obvious reasons why we have hang ups about pleasure, but there are also not so obvious ones. I polled Facebook the other day to see what others had to say about our hang ups about pleasure and I received some pretty insightful answers.
Someone talked about self acceptance and worth. Do we deserve pleasure? Can we admit that we want it, and can we even allow it in? Others talked about earning it . . . work before play and all of that training.
We are likewise programmed to believe that it is better to give than receive, and then that becomes, it’s easier to give than receive. To receive pleasure we’d need to let our guard down and be vulnerable.
Lot’s to think about in these musings about our hang ups.
The masculine joined the discussion and suggested that if we talked about it around the dinner table it might get easier. Instead of talking about what we did for the day, perhaps the question should be, “What pleased you today?”
Underlying all of the reasons for our hang ups about pleasure, for me, came from this simple response, shame. The dictionary defines shame as “The painful feeling arising from the consciousness of something dishonourable, improper, ridiculous etc. done by oneself or another.”
Brene Brown whose TEDx talk on vulnerability says this: “shame for women is this web of unobtainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we are supposed to be. And it’s a straight jacket.”
What is in your web of expectations?
Can you untangle the mess of expectations that make up your world? Does pleasure enter in?
A few weeks ago I visited a friend of mine who was training with her new service dog. The dog trainer said something fascinating. She said, “this dog is hedonistic, he works for the scratches and the pets”. In essence, the dog works for the pleasure of touch, the pleasure of being loved.
Unabashedly, this dog had no shame in scooting up to his owner/partner, or me for a pet or a hug. What if we let go our consciousness of shame? What if we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable, asking for more pleasure from our day, from our partner, for ourselves?
I believe that if we did uncover our hang ups about pleasure one by one, allowing some healing around them, we could enjoy more pleasure. As we did that, as pleasure filled us, we’d be more pleased. We’d enjoy pleasure, and maybe even our lives just a little bit more.
Michele Brookhaus, RSHom(NA), CCH emphatically supports women’s pleasure. She created Yoni’s Bliss as part of that belief, and she loves to support you finding yours.
