Come as You Are (26 page)

• 
Common humanity
is viewing our suffering as something that connects us with others, rather than separates us. It’s assessed on the SCS with items like “When I feel inadequate in some way, I try to remind myself that feelings of inadequacy are shared by most people.” Its opposite,
isolation
, is assessed with “When I fail at something that’s important to me, I tend to feel alone in my failure.”

• 
Mindfulness
is being nonjudgmental about whatever is happening in the present moment. I talked about mindfulness in chapter 4, and I’ll be talking about it again in chapter 9. Mindfulness is important. On the SCS it’s assessed with items like “When something painful happens I try to take a balanced view of the situation.” Its opposite is
over-identification
, as in over-identifying with your own failures and suffering, holding fast to the pain and being unable to let it go. It’s assessed with items like “When I’m feeling down I tend to obsess and fixate on everything that’s wrong.”

Self-judgment, isolation, and over-identification turn you into your own lion, being your own threat—“I am at risk.” And they’re
normal—we all experience them. Self-compassion doesn’t mean never feeling them, it means being kind to yourself when you do.

I like to visualize the lion of body self-criticism as a sweet little kitten that’s been treated badly and needs me to give it affection and tenderness. That’s what helps me to forgive my culture for teaching me such bullshit. A woman I know prefers to imagine it as an enemy, and she visualizes herself beating the crap out of it. She finds her way to forgiveness of her culture (and of herself, for having believed her culture) through a sense of conquering the enemy. Whatever works!

Both of us complete the stress response cycle with physical activity, affection, a good cry, self-care, or any other strategy that deals with the stress itself, as I described in chapter 4. We let our bodies know we have successfully escaped the lion—“I am safe. I am whole. I am home.”

Self-compassion is emphatically
not
self-esteem. Self-esteem is about self-evaluation, your perceived value as a human being, which is often contingent upon your sense of personal success in comparison with others. Self-compassion, by contrast, is unconditional and nonevaluative. We can have self-compassion when we’re doing well and when we’re struggling—because life has treated us harshly or because we made a mistake.
²³

Nor is self-compassion the same as self-indulgence. Self-indulgence is what you do to numb emotional pain rather than allowing it to complete the cycle. Olivia’s moments of compulsive sexuality are an extreme example, but for most of us self-indulgence takes the form of binge-watching Netflix or eating a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in one sitting because “I deserve it,” instead of feeling our Feels. Self-indulgence is a form of freeze, sedating the lion instead of escaping or conquering it.

Emotional pain is exhausting, and sometimes it’s necessary to take a break from the pain, numb out for a while. Just remember what happens when the sedated lion comes out from under the anesthesia. The cycle has to complete, it
wants
to complete. Self-compassion is being patient with yourself through that process—and being patient with yourself when you need to take a break.

Here’s an exercise to help increase self-compassion:
²⁴

1. Write a description of a situation that you’re beating yourself up about—it can be anything from an aspect of your sexual functioning to your romantic relationship (or lack thereof) to your work to your body or anything else. Be sure to include the self-critical thoughts you’re battering yourself with.

2. Then write the name of a good friend at the top of the page and imagine that that person is describing this problem. Imagine that she’s asking for your help, and write down what you would tell her. Imagine that you’re in your best, most empathic, calmest, most supportive state of mind, and tell her all the things she needs to hear.

3. Now reread what you wrote. It’s for you.

The shorthand version of this exercise is: Never say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t want to say to your best friend or your daughter.

Olivia told me this story about how she figured out how to stop hitting the gas pedal when she got stressed out.

One night during finals week, Olivia tried initiating sex at bedtime.

Patrick, predictably, was too tired, and said so.

In the wake of his gentle refusal, self-doubt flooded through Olivia like a fast-rising river. What if her high sex drive wasn’t cool or sexy or fun or empowered? What if she was just trying desperately—pathetically—to get attention the only way she could? What if actually she was just trying to control people with her sexuality? What if— Her heart was racing and she felt like she couldn’t breathe.

Into the darkness, she reached out to her partner. “Patrick?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m having a meltdown.”

“It’s finals week. It happens. Deep breaths.”

“No, I’m having a meltdown about sex.”

“Babe, I’m so tired . . .”

“No, I know, I’m not saying that!” She explained in a breathless panic about the flood of self-doubt, adding her sudden recollection that her theory about testosterone and her genitals and her sexuality was wrong. “What if
all
the things I’ve told myself about my sexuality are just an invention to mask the truth that actually I’m totally just this bully using my sexuality to manipulate you? What if I’m out of control and, like, a danger to myself and others?”

Patrick turned on the light and looked at her. “Wow, I had no idea you had so much of this cultural brainwashing still buried in your brain. It’s like the anxious part of your brain seriously believes all the women-who-like-sex-are-evil stuff, and when you’re stressed out, all those beliefs come with the stress—even though the calm version of your brain totally knows how awesome you are. Keep breathing, babe, you’re holding your breath.”

And there it was.

When she was happy and relaxed, she had one set of opinions about herself: self-confident and self-compassionate. When she was overwhelmed, she had an entirely different set of opinions about herself: self-critical and even self-abusive.

And the negative opinions she had when she was stressed just added another level of stress and escalated the situation, which made her feel all the more self-critical, which eventually activated her least adaptive coping strategies. It was like trying to douse a fire by pouring gasoline on it.

Solution?

Stop adding fuel to the fire. Notice that you’re doing it, and do something else. Let the fire burn itself out.

She had already figured out that exercise helped her complete the cycle, coasting to the end of the biological stress cycle without hitting either the brakes or the gas. In the next chapter, she’s going to learn how to do the same thing with sex.

maximizing yum . . . with science! part 2: cognitive dissonance

In chapter 1, I recommended that you take a good look at your genitals and notice the things you like. Well, now I’m suggesting that you take off all your clothes—or as many as you can bring yourself to take off—and look at your entire body in a mirror. And make a list of everything you see . . . that you like.
²⁵

Of course the first thing that will happen is your brain will be filled with all the self-criticism and disgust you’ve been holding on to for all these years. Remind yourself that the day you were born, your body was a cause for celebration, for love without condition, and that’s just as true today as it was then. Let these self-critical thoughts go, let the judgments go, and notice only the things you like.

Do this over and over again—every day if you can. It will be hard at first, and there will be lots of complicated and conflicting emotions. It will be noisy in your head. Even now, as you consider doing it, you might be noticing a lot of, “But Emily!” noise in your head. It’s okay. As I’ll describe in chapter 9, there is an inevitable grieving process involved in letting go of old ideas about your body. It will hurt the way your hands ache when you come in from the cold—gradually they get warmer and then they feel great. Christopher Germer calls this “backdraft,” referencing the explosion that occurs when you add fresh air to an oxygen-deprived fire.
²⁶
You have to allow the hurt to go through the process, let it complete its cycle.

Practice ignoring the self-critical, judgmental thoughts and focusing on the self-appreciating thoughts. And gradually it will become easier to celebrate your body as it deserves to be celebrated, to treat it with the respect and affection it deserves, and to approach sex with confidence and joy. Which is the point!

maximizing yum . . . with science! part 3: media nutrition

Exposure to media that reinforces body self-criticism increases body dissatisfaction, negative mood, low self-esteem, and even disordered eating.
²⁷
This is perhaps most clearly illustrated by a multiyear study of the impact of Western media—especially television—on young women in Fiji.
²⁸
In a culture where there had been “a clear preference for a robust form,”
²⁹
after three years of exposure to late 1990s American television (think
Melrose Place
and
Beverly Hills 90210
), rates of disordered eating among teenage girls rose from 13 percent to 29 percent, with 74 percent reporting that they “feel too big or too fat,” in sharp contrast to pre-TV culture. And this wasn’t just a blip—ten years later, rates of disordered eating still hovered around 25–30 percent.
³⁰

If there were a food that consistently made you sick, you’d stop eating it. So if there’s media that makes you feel more self-critical, stop looking at it.

As you’re looking at movies or television or porn or magazines, ask yourself, “After I see this, am I going to feel better about my body
as it is today
, or worse?” If the answer is “better!” then do more of that! Increase your exposure to the media that helps you celebrate your body!

But if the answer is “worse,” stop it. You don’t have to get mad and write a letter to the editor or anything (though if you want to, feel free!), just pay attention to how magazines and TV shows and music videos make you feel, and stop buying anything that makes you feel worse. You don’t need to be trained in media literacy and all the ways that you’re being manipulated with digital alteration of images in order to know when something is making you feel better or worse about yourself.

And if it makes you feel worse, evidence suggests that it’s interfering with your sexual wellbeing—even if you’ve been taught to believe that feeling worse about your body “motivates” you to “improve” your body. That’s a psychological trap you never need to be caught in again. Stop watering the weeds.

By limiting your exposure to media that makes you feel worse about yourself, you’re not just improving your own sex life, you’re also voting with your eyeballs, your ears, and your cash. You’re joining an audience that will pay attention only to things that make women feel better about themselves. Wouldn’t it be amazing to live in a world where performers and artists and media outlets were competing to make the largest number of women feel fantastic about their bodies
right now
? On behalf of women everywhere, thank you for anything you do to make that real!

you do you

We started this chapter with three cultural messages that all of us have been exposed to in one way or another over the course of our lives: the moral message, the medical message, and the media message. All three messages are blended into our individual psyches; none of us lives with just one, and none of us wholly believes any of them. They’ve been layered over each other in our culture, each partially absorbing the others. The contradictions inherent in the three are a source of women’s confusion about how sex is supposed to work.
³¹
Your faith community tells you one thing, your media culture tells you another, and your doctor seems to have a different attitude entirely.

So whom should you believe? What messages can you trust to promote your own sexual wellbeing?

The answer is: yourself.

Listen to your own inner voice, which hears all these messages and, somewhere deep inside you, will sound an alarm when it notices bullshit. We’re all different, so what feels true and what feels like nonsense will vary from person to person. The only possible answer is: Choose what feels right for you and ignore what doesn’t feel right.

Informational cherry picking like this is a bad idea in science and in moralism. Scientific and moral systems, though different from each other in almost every single other way, share the quality of developing coherent structures of meaning where one idea hangs upon the others, the way
loops of metal hold chain mail armor together. When you’re working in a scientific or a moral framework, an idea must take its place in the context in which it was intended.