What's Going On?

If your eyes are open, information carried by light will enter your brain.  That information can elicit responses from your body.  The sight of a sexually-attractive person may stimulate your hormones.  Sexy relating has begun, without your permission.

Even if you tell yourself not to look, when your concentration lapses, you look.  Dopamine starts to flow.  Butterfly wings tickle your stomach.  Looking is not under control, and neither are body responses.  You can prevent your body from moving, but not from pumping hormones.  The change in body chemistry affects your thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and even health.

No matter how oppressive and negative childhood sexual programming was, bodies respond to sexual stimuli.  Bodies, at least, are made to respond.  Is this bad?  To put it another way, is nature wrong to titillate us?

My view is that nature is not wrong, and that cultural programming is in need of an update.  Tribes need social controls, however, control is very susceptible to manipulation and fabrication.  When it diverges too far from human nature, the result is a painful mismatch between public behavior, and internal truth.  Religions, countries, families, and other social organizations demand that you exorcise your internal truth.

Some people actually succeed.  By remaining virgins until marriage, for example.  The problem with suppression is that it generalizes.  It also shuts down necessary things, like sexual expressiveness.  Many good Christians can’t get over their chastity programming to have good sex.  Sex was always considered dirty.  The ritual of marriage did not make it clean. 
More typically, suppression is partially effective, so the true self lives in isolation, desiring to act, but frequently sustaining the injuries of insecurity, anxiety, fear, and shame, when the shy sexy self rises to the surface.

Either way, the path to sexual and emotional maturity is cut off.  This is why we see so many examples of men and women at the top of their careers suddenly do something sex-related, that tanks the career,  or blows up a marriage.
The norm is suppression, punctuated by moments of acting out.  A sudden acting out can be dramatic.  The more suppressed sexual energy is, the more wild the acting out.  I live in Arizona, and have Mormon friends.  I have seen this correlation with my own eyes.

Suppression can last for decades, but I have observed through my clients that it can’t last a lifetime.  The true self wants to live before it dies.  The sooner it gets a chance to live, the better, since suppression inevitably leads to sexual death.
A Sexy Relating solution starts with acknowledging what is really happening, mentally, emotionally, and sexually.  Are you happy?  Are you sexually aroused?  If not, you need to say or do something different.  Educate yourself, about yourself, so you can be truly connected to your lover.  That’s necessary if you want to take things beyond raw animal attraction, or return to it.

Shame is often what blocks communication.  That takes courage to overcome.  Sharing is vulnerable, and may feel like a set back, at first.  But after some tears comes intimacy, and the opportunity for things to be different.  The relief of moving from isolation to connection can make you giddy with gratitude.  That’s sexy.
 
The thought of doing something different may seem overwhelming.  But it is less painful than continuing what isn’t working.  What if you acknowledged just how painful it is to think your partner is no longer hot for you, or you can’t satisfy him, or her.  Even the mildest of fears or insecurities effect sexual performance.  That is an unnecessary agony.   
A lack of sexual fluency is not your fault.  You were not trained by family or country.  You were sent to war without a helmet, gun, or boot camp.  It is not surprising that you have stepped on land mines.
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Whatever your mix of sexual disabilities, your natural volcanic fire never goes extinct.  It can be awakened.  It’s just a matter of opening up to healing, confronting shame, and embracing the authentic sexiness of yourself and your lover.  That is the path to sustained pleasure, instead of dead ends, blow ups, and uncontrollable acting out.