Release Date: Friday, February 16, 2007

Free you, others of ill-founded feelings

Years of introspection or therapy to resolve relationship issues can lead us to the same basic questions.

What feelings did you experience in your relationship with your primary caregivers? What feelings did you experience in your first sexual encounters?

Our unconscious keeps files, but it doesn't date them or evaluate them for legitimacy first. The files don't get dumped unless we dump them. So 20 years later, we still lug around these feelings … and let's face it, some of them were ill-founded to begin with.

A client recently realized she had spent 12 years in a marriage that didn't work for her or for her husband. She married him because he asked — right after she lost her high-school sweetheart.

She had wanted to marry her very first love. When he refused, she felt humiliated and rejected.

As an adult, years later, she could face her feelings and give them a context. She could stop personalizing his rejection and, thereby, soothe the pain that nobody else had soothed for her. She could, then, face the hard truth that she had married somebody she was ill-suited for because surely HE wouldn't leave her.

We can “dump the files,” particularly the ones marked PERSONAL, that indicate we are somehow flawed. We don't have to feel like our time was wasted, though. We can realize that whatever our experience was helped us to get where we are. We can move on with the freedom and peace and joy that we had almost given up on.

In my client's case, her first love wasn't ready to commit. He was ready to go to school — not because he didn't love her, not because she wasn't good enough. In fact, he didn't want to lose her; he simply didn't want to marry her, yet.

His decision was not about her. It was about him.

This is good news, and we don't have to keep it to ourselves. We have friends — and children — who need it.

“Every day, as a sex therapist, I hear firsthand accounts from people about sexual truths, sexual tragedies and sexual histories that started when they were 12, 14 or 16, before they learned about safe and healthy sex,” says Darcy Luadzers, Ph.D., author of “Virgin Sex for Girls” and “Virgin Sex for Guys,” the no regrets guides to safe and healthy sex.

We experience more than sex before we learn what's safe and healthy. We experience love, or at least what we think is love. What if you could tell your children — and everybody else's children, however old — what you have learned or what you're still learning?

Dr. Darcy can. This is what she tells them:

Have an emotional connection before you risk getting emotionally involved and hurt as a result of sexual interaction. This means feeling comfortable and safe with talking and touching.

Talk about “sexpectations,” i.e., “If we are engaged sexually, I expect to have a monogamous relationship.” In the absence of discussion, you can easily feel betrayed simply because somebody else has different expectations.

Follow the three rules of sex: 1. Get permission. 2. No pain, ever. 3. When someone says stop, stop; when someone says no, stop.

Develop your sexual voice to avoid emotional and physical pain AND get what you want.

This is the same advice Dr. Darcy gives her teenage sons, but many of us missed it at that age and learned bad habits from others who also missed it. It's not too late to listen, or look at your experience and learn from it.

A good lesson is always worth whatever it costs us to really get it … and share it.