How Survival Mode Slowly Pulled Me Away From Pleasure
Laura Vanhapelto
5/28/20263 min read
I'VE ALWAYS BEEN deeply sensual and sexually alive in relationship. But when I’m alone, desire becomes much quieter for me.
In sexuality research, people often talk about spontaneous desire and responsive desire. Very generally speaking, men tend to experience desire more spontaneously, meaning it appears more automatically and independently of context. Many women, on the other hand, experience desire more responsively, meaning it emerges through connection, touch, emotional intimacy, inspiration, safety, feeling desired, and often through being turned on by our partners desire for us.
Of course people are individual and these are not rigid categories, but recognizing myself in responsive desire has helped me understand my own sexuality with much more compassion.
I’ve also had to acknowledge how much stress, loneliness, nervous system overload and life circumstances can affect our relationship to pleasure and aliveness.
Over the past few years – with the end of an intense relationship, menopause, financial insecurity, survival mode and building a completely new career alone – self-pleasure hasn’t always been at the top of my list.
Aliveness still comes very naturally to me in connection, movement, touch, community and shared energy. I feel it in dance, in conversation, in embodied spaces. But sustaining that connection alone, in isolation, has been harder.
And I do spend most of my time alone – working from home, building my work independently, without a partner or everyday shared intimacy around me.
The Shame of Feeling Disconnected
Somewhere along this year, I started feeling ashamed of not being “good” at pleasure anymore. As if I should be having beautiful, deeply embodied, intentional experiences of self-intimacy no matter what my actual life situation looked like.
I also realized that self pleasure had started to feel strangely goal-oriented for me. Which is painful to admit, because I know how fulfilling and nourishing deep self-intimacy, softness, embodiment and loving connection with ourselves can be. I teach these things. I’ve experienced them profoundly.
And yet stress, survival mode, loneliness and nervous system overload had slowly pulled me away from that experience without me fully realizing it.
So I reached out.
Reaching Out for Support
One thing I feel deeply grateful for is that this work has connected me with an incredible community of intimacy coaches around the world over the years. Wise, skilled and deeply caring and gifted professionals doing this work in very human ways.
When I shared honestly about where I was at, I was met with an outpouring of support. So many colleagues reached out to me with warmth, encouragement and their own similar experiences. I haven’t even had time to properly respond to everyone yet.
And yesterday, I had my first coaching session with one of them.
What surprised me was how immediate the feeling of relief was. It's not like I suddenly discovered some magical new technique or insight. But I felt so much more alive after the session. I was more connected to myself, less ashamed, and less alone.
Simple and Profound
A good coach does something very simple and very profound. They reflect patterns without getting emotionally entangled in them. They create nervous system safety. They ask the right questions. They interrupt shame loops and performance loops that we cannot always see ourselves when we are inside them.
The session also reminded me how different it is to experience coaching as a client instead of always being the coach.
We've already agreed to continue this process with two more coaching sessions, and I'll also bee having some sessions with a Jade Egg coach.
What’s interesting is that none of this work is new to me. I’ve studied these methods and these practices for years, and I teach them myself.
But there are seasons when it’s difficult to move through certain things alone, no matter how much knowledge or experience we have. We are deeply relational beings.
❤️ Laura
I reached out last week to be coached because I realized I had been stuck in a kind of sexual winter for a little too long. Something that felt strangely hard to admit as a sexuality coach.
