Fear and Aversion

It's probably fair to say that everyone fears sex, whether we like to admit it or not.  Why?  There are perfectly good reasons:

• No other area of our lives makes us so vulnerable...  nowhere else do we feel such acute pain. 
• No other area of our lives so insistently, irresistably intrudes upon and subverts the civilized control we're taught to maintain over our emotions.
   

Love Can Hurt

Sex draws us irresistably into love — first the passionate crushes and obsessions of courtship, then the binding love that develops between mates, then sometimes the consuming love that children can inspire — and each of those loves lays you open to the most intense, agonizing emotional wounds anyone ever experiences. 

Also, as psychologists constantly observe, fears around love go back long before the wounds of adolescence and adulthood, back to pain you inevitably felt in the first loving relationships of your life, with your parents and family.  Those early familial relationships established in you core assumptions and expectations about love, most of which you're probably not even aware of, and many of which aren't relevant to the more recent relationships where you unconsciously apply them.  Even after you learn to recognize such assumptions and expectations, they can be hard to change because of how deeply ingrained they become. 

Pain Produces Aversion

Long after the memory of a love wound has faded, its effects linger on in the form of aversion to what you perceive as the source of your pain.  If you find yourself in a situation that reminds you of the one where you were hurt before, the aversion rises up and can dampen even intense sexual hunger, making you back away from the danger of being hurt again in the same way. 

Useful as such aversions are in protecting us, they can tend to become restrictive over time.  If we let them build up as we get older, they can form a crust of armor over us that limits our movement, robs us of grace, narrows our field of vision, and exhausts us with its weight. 

Aversions are no more directly amenable to reason than sexual hunger or the desire to cough when your throat tickles.  You can tell yourself that you know better, that the pain of love is inevitable, that there's no reason to flinch away every time something reminds you of a past hurt, but you'll flinch anyway. 

The only way to chip away at the crust of aversion that love's bruises can create is by regular, persistent application of counter-experience.  You have to identify the things you're unnecessarily averse to, and then have the nerve to experience them safely, not once but over and over again until gradually your aversion wears off. 

In spite of the effort that this process requires, it's worth it not only to prevent fear from gradually boxing you in, but also to keep your rational mind and your your animal one in communication, and to maintain understanding and trust between them (see also our page on integrity).  

And You're So Out of Control!

Sex is scary not only because of the pain it can cause, but also because its urgency and passion is often stronger than the reasoned decisions that our socialization, caution and ambitions may lead us to make.  We know that love can hurt, but we still can't stop ourselves from pursuing it. 

For millenia, men in particular have written in a variety of ways about how disturbing they find the insistence of their own sexuality.  Generally, this is one of the first sides of sex a boy becomes aware of early in adolescence, when he discovers masturbation.  The unaccustomed intensity of the experience is almost always disconcerting as well as ecstatic, and many boys vow to themselves not to repeat the experience, or to keep under strict control.  Almost invariably they then find themselves continuing to masturbate on a regular basis, in spite of great resolve and effort not to.  Their bodies simply won't obey!  Particularly for someone raised in an anti-sex family, it's easy to view this compulsion as a horrible form of self-betrayal (see our masturbation page for more about this). 

Of course, we're designed not to be able to resist sex.  Those people who, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, have been "wise" enough to avoid the risks of sex and who have escaped the trials of parenthood because of their restraint, have also escaped passing such "virtues" on.  Your ancestors do not include a single one of them — you're descended from an unbroken line of people who, prudently or foolishly, reluctantly or enthusiastically, had sex that resulted in children. 

If you believe, as many of the ascetic traditions teach, that sex is sinful or orgasm is harmful, the weakness of your resolve in the face of sexual hunger can continue to be deeply disturbing.  People often respond to control problems by trying to dissociate themselves from their own "body" or "lust" as if these have nothing to do with their true identity.  They then proceed to foment a civil war within themselves, usually incurring huge losses in the process (see our pages about dualism and erotic phobias). 

There are probably better ways of coming to terms with the power of your own sexual feelings. 

Coping With Fear

Coping with sexual fears and aversions means resolving ambivalence.  Part of you feels one way (say, wants to have deep, intimate, mutually satisfying sex with someone you love) and part of you feels another way (say, fears that if you open up to that person, they'll betray you the way one of your parents did and leave you feeling deeply hurt and disappointed). 

Ambivalence is a mental condition by no means limited to sex.  How do we persuade ourselves to eat well when we take such pleasure in sugar and fat?  How do we persuade ourselves to exercise when we feel like sitting around watching TV?  How do we restrain ourselves in general from doing wrong when our conscience speaks so quietly?  How do we persuade ourselves to devote less time to the loud urgencies of our work and social lives so as to spend more on the barely audible whispers of our spiritual desires? 

The most effective long-term approaches to problems of this kind require that the different parts of yourself be able to trust each other.  The part of you that wants to run away has to trust the part that says, "Wait, hold on, I'll make sure it's safe."  Being trustworthy means in many cases that you have to learn to respect and honor things in yourself that you've grown up being ashamed of, or even fearing. 

We talk more on our integrity page, about what it means to bring all the different parts of yourself into alliance and harmony so that you can more easily face fears and escape patterns you feel are trapping you. 

No matter how you approach them, though, do accept and honor your fears, hopes and dreams.  Don't make the mistake of discounting or dismissing feelings you think might be stupid, perverse, uncool or silly.  Be protective of all the parts of yourself, especially the fears, and you'll find them much easier gradually to work through... and then the ones that replace them, and then the ones that replace those as you move through your life.