Annelisa

At the end of the previous post, I suggested that sexual freedom has left us with a developmental task we may not have anticipated. Once sexuality is no longer governed primarily by reproduction, duty, prohibition, or marital obligation, something more sophisticated is required of us. We have to be capable of experiencing ourselves. This sounds almost embarrassingly obvious. Of course we experience ourselves. We wake up every morning inside ourselves and remain there all day.

In the previous essay, I suggested that our current concern about declining sexual frequency may begin too late in the story. We ask what has happened to desire without first asking what has happened to our capacity for sensation, receptivity and embodied experience. But there is another way in which the conversation begins too late. We tend to speak about sex as though the meaning we now assign to it were intrinsic to sex itself, when in fact sexuality has been asked to perf

Why Aren’t We Having Any? Something curious is happening to sex in the twenty-first century. We may be living in the most sexually articulate period in modern Western history, and yet there is mounting evidence that many people, and many couples in particular, are having less sex. We possess a vocabulary for sexuality that would have been unimaginable in our grandparents’ marriages. We speak openly about orgasm, desire discrepancy, responsive desire, menopause, erectile funct

All the Love in the World By MC Yogi https://open.spotify.com/track/1xZ3ZBazqI5T8pkPDZq2t2?si=edbeab9eca69427c https://youtu.be/jT3RLxn7Kbg?si=lYR0aEBmOhXb7dLB When your paths unclear and the night shadows drawing near When the mind is clouded by fear can't see the road don't know which way to steer / Please remember that you're not alone we're all on this journey home / All of us everyone that you know we're sending you All the love, all the love, all the love in the world

A woman sits across from me and says her husband is a narcissist. She has done the reading. She can list the criteria, and she can match each one to an incident. The way he speaks about colleagues who have disappointed him. The way a conversation about her day becomes a conversation about his. The birthday when the gift was so precisely wrong that it seemed almost deliberate. His absolute inability, in twenty-two years, to say the words I was wrong about that without appendin

The word "narcissist" and the topic of narcissism comes up a lot lately. The word is engaged in a variety of ways and contexts, to the point now where the true usefulness of the term seems greatly diluted. There is clearly great pain, trauma, neglect, and abuse that are the result of narcissistic injury. This is an incredibly important (and heartbreaking) topic, and those who have fallen prey to the devastating effects of narcissistic behavior in all its forms deserve attenti

More Vocabulary Before going further in the anger excavation, I wanted to clarify four more words, because they get used almost interchangeably, at least categorized similarly, and that imprecision will sink this exploration if not addressed first; assertiveness, aggression, rage and hostility. Assertiveness is direct, undisguised expression of a need or boundary. It isn't anger at all, necessarily. It's clarity. The word comes from Latin asserere, ad- (to) plus serere, to jo

The previous post raised the question: if anger is a kind of fusion or perhaps a complimentary pairing of grief, fear, confusion and unbearable madness. . . rather than discreet or sequential stages of emotion, does “anger” even belong as one emotional category? I’m exploring the possibility that, while it is convenient and even helpful to differentiate and delineate feelings for the sake of understanding ourselves and our reactions, it may also do anger a disservice to isola

We tend to talk about anger as though it were a single thing. A mood. A reaction. Something that shows up, does its damage, and eventually passes. But the word itself is telling a different story, one we've largely overlooked or misunderstood for a very long time. Anger comes from the Old Norse angr, meaning grief, distress, sorrow, affliction. Not rage. Not hostility. Grief. The English sense of “wrath” didn’t attach itself to the word until centuries later. Before that, to

By MC Yogi Spotify https://open.spotify.com/track/2guY382Y6t5I0NsUUnku7y?si=20ecdb20e5cf45e7 YouTube https://youtu.be/mLWFFaiDNkQ?si=X5MScclPLI54sPBm

The sapling believed the wind had come for it. The old tree did not disagree. "The wind will come," he said. "It will ask for more than seems fair. Bend, if you can." The old tree did not lean toward the sapling. It leaned with the wind. The sapling, certain that bending meant surrender, held itself as stiff as it could. Until one morning, after a great storm, the sapling noticed the great trunk had never tried to escape the weather. "Beloved," whispered the old tree, "God

Most people begin healing with a fantasy. It is rarely spoken out loud, and often not even conscious, but it is there, nonetheless. The fantasy is that somewhere in the future there exists a version of us who no longer hurts; a version who no longer gets triggered, feels abandoned, becomes anxious when a partner pulls away, or finds themselves overwhelmed by grief, fear, disappointment, or despair. We imagine healing as a kind of arrival. A destination where the difficult fee

The Child Knows A mother, sitting with me in session, describes, almost as an aside, something that happened the week before. Her son is six. They had been reading together, the way they do most nights, and partway through he stopped her and asked, out of nowhere, whether she was going to be okay. Not whether he was okay. Whether she was. She laughs a little when she tells me this, the laugh people use when something has unsettled them more than they want to admit. "He's six,

Couples rarely come to me because they've fallen out of love. The most common reason they come is to repair what has ruptured between them, the slow accumulation of misunderstanding and defense that builds in any long partnership. But close behind it, almost as often, is something else entirely: their children. A nine year old who has stopped listening to anything either parent says. A fourteen year old who is dissociating, lying, hiding in a room with the door locked, cuttin

By Kurt Cobain Performed by Moontricks, Frase & Fawna https://open.spotify.com/track/0PSmLCIIH7M5NHbS76NSWl?si=f5615c808a944d43 https://youtu.be/daROfl5it48?si=S2tDhm_y6K_whvyS Come as you are, as you were As I want you to be As a friend, as a friend As an old enemy Take your time, hurry up Choice is yours, don′t be late Take a rest as a friend As an old memoria Memoria Memoria Memoria Come doused in mud, soaked in bleach As I want you to be As a trend, as a friend As a k