Posts
Monday, February 28, 2011
When the energy of an imprint is blocked, we have little access to ourselves. This also suggests why depression often involves being sexless, as the system is in the energy conservation mode – parasympathetic. All energy is suppressed. The underlying pain has demanded that so much energy be expended in repression that there is little left over for other things. And the memory endures, keeping the system off balance where the parasympathetic system is dominant.
Tranquilizers that repress pain often suppress sex drive, as well. We produce those same inhibitory substances internally, and can shut ourselves down just as readily as with drugs. If anything that should tell us that we react holistically which is the example of tranquilizers. They suppress pain in a global way and along with it the sex drive. It is not that they target sex specifically, but that when targeting a whole system it must necessarily include sex. That is why the imprint is set down systemically. It is why non-sexual and pre-sexual traumas directly affect sex.
We see it so clearly when patients on Prozac, which is a serotonin enhancer, have diminished sex drive but find it difficult to believe that the very same chemical we produce internally can also shut off sex drive. Now we can begin to see the origin of some sex problems; problems that will not respond to any conventional treatments. A reliving of a brainstem imprint necessarily involves a brainstem reaction. Without the reliving there is a still a brainstem reaction going on which affects sex, yet the memory is out of awareness.
Fortunately, resolving sex problems such as diminished libido by lifting depression can occur without one word addressed about them, per se. The more we feel what caused the closure of our system, the more it becomes safe for the system to be open. This occurs not all at once, but over time. (I discount age here. Clearly, an eighty-year-old is going to have diminished sex drive, as is someone who is very sick. They have less energy available, hence less energy for sex.)
We are captives of our biology and our imprints, not its masters. Once there is an imprint, once memory has become neuro-physiological, we react to our history first and external reality second. Inner life is pre-potent because it has to do with survival. We then see the world through the filter of history. It is why under completely calm conditions we have palpitations. The imprint sculpts new circuits in the nervous system so that certain networks get grooved and are more likely to be used again and again. Later on, that groove may be sexual and compulsive so that each time pain comes up the excitation by pain is transformed into sexual compulsion. It is in the limbic system that the compulsion takes on a sexual focus.
Comments to Reflections on Imprints and Repression and Reduced Access to Ourselves. March 1, 2011.
A deranged mind and body, for example, due to mental or physical pain, is consuming more energy than its fair counterpart. My energy consumption has changed considerably after three months of Rolfing. I can feel and evaluate it in different ways. With a well balanced body, which does not have to make continuous efforts to keep itself upright, I need/consume less food and calories, to keep my body weight, and I walk faster with more comfort and pleasure . Doing more realistic exercises, more stretching, I need less energy and muscles and feel stronger.
Even during my most abundant Tegretol intake during more than 20 years, my strong sex drive and my ”hormon storms” could/did take me in unexpected directions proven by my large number of relationships in spite of my situation as an epileptic. When my need for sex carried me away, I put, with increasing frequency, a lid on my sexual release , because, over the years, I became more aware of the relationship between seizures and sexual releases. By fear of going into feelings and/or having a fit , I choose to avoid sex when I had enjoyed the arousal and so to speak prepared the ground. I did not see this as a problem, but most of my women did.
We often hear that women prefer caresses and tenderness, while men are just looking for a quick release. I’m not quite convinced of the truth of that statement. There was often a greater need of my women (in the "long term" relationships over two-three decades) to experience the satisfaction that I ejaculated than that they got a sexual release themselves. They were more annoyed if I denied them sexually to release me than if i failed to satisfy them. There may of course be a whole lot of interpretations of the value for a woman to satisfy her partner but, in my case, I can only guess.
Leonard Cohen just turned 70, when I listened to an interview with him. When the journalist asked him, which of all the developments, he had been through in his life, had the biggest influence on his present life, he answered: ”It is no doubt that my hormone storms have subsided, and I can now look at a pretty woman without to be driven mad with desire”. I could not agree more.
Jan Johnsson
No comments:
Post a Comment