Pleasure’s Dirty Little Secret
We all want pleasure, right? Or do we?
This is an excerpt from my book Want: 8 Steps to Recovering Desire, Passion, and Pleasure After Sexual Assault
One late summer afternoon, I found myself high up on the bleachers at a Superdogs show at Vancouver’s Pacific National Exhibition. The PNE is basically a large scale county fair, complete with rides, a petting zoo, and as much bright pink cotton candy as you could hope to want (which is, inevitably, a lot). As I watched the dachshund Tater Tot and the fluffy white mixed breed Kleenex run through an obstacle course with pure joy in their little dog feet, I felt so happy I could die. Literally: I almost had a panic attack. I stopped breathing and tears started streaming down my face. I felt my heart racing and I thought the pink cotton candy might be about to make a repeat appearance (which, to be fair, might have been because I ate a lot of cotton candy). By the time the dogs finished their antics and got up onto short podiums so groups of adorable little kids could pet them reverently, I felt so exhausted I had to go home.
On that sunny day at the county fair in the terrifying joy of watching hilarious dogs jump around, I realized something must really be wrong with me. I called my doctor as soon as I got home. I can’t remember if I tried to explain about the Superdogs, but I did end up with a diagnosis of Generalized Anxiety Disorder and a prescription for some benzodiazepines so I’d stop freaking the F out anytime I came across a cute animal.
The Superdogs, in all their glory, completely destabilized me. They gave me a moment of brightness in the wash of grey that was my life at the time. It had been a year or so since the assault, and I was with a boyfriend who was constantly pressuring me to have sex and subtly manipulating me on the daily. I hadn’t faced my grief, my fear, or the loss of the color in my life, so the sudden blast of joy from these delighted dogs sent a shiver through the straining floodgates. If I could feel pleasure, the subconscious terror cried out, maybe I’d have to feel everything else, too. I did not want to feel everything else. I clutched my little blue pills like a lifeline.
Everyone wants pleasure—it feels good, gives us energy, helps us manage stress, and keeps us hopeful. Pleasure is the food of desire. But pleasure has a dirty little secret: sometimes it is unavoidably linked with pain. Opening to pleasure means opening to the truth of our bodies, and suddenly all the crap we’ve been repressing rises up to the surface. I wonder if that’s part of the reason why anhedonia—literally meaning “no pleasure”—is such a common feature of depression. Depression is a complex experience, but for some of us, it involves subconsciously suppressing anger or grief. Depression isn’t always about sadness; it’s often about numbness, about not really feeling anything at all. Every emotion is flattened and the color goes out of the world. If we could feel pleasure in this state, all the anger and grief we’d swallowed might make a repeat appearance (along with the cotton candy).
Feeling pleasure requires being present. It is a physical experience that happens in the body. It’s a rush of warmth up the center of the chest, a tingling in the feet, a flush to the cheeks. It’s the full-body shake of laughter, the total release of orgasm. If we let ourselves feel it, we have to be in our bodies. If we’re busy surviving after a sexual assault or other trauma, that might be last place we want to be.
The body is the location of our pain and trauma, which is stored in our nervous systems. When pleasure pokes us to feel, it threatens our ability to keep everything safely contained under the surface. Pleasure, then, is a practice, and it’s not always easy. Eventually, I started trying to find ways to safely engage with it without panicking and barfing cotton candy. I’d go to movies by myself and eat double-buttered popcorn. I’d go to a cafe and curl up in an old armchair with a good book and a shot of Bailey’s in my Earl Grey tea. I’d literally smell the flowers—full on, with my eyes closed, nose nestled into the petals. These pleasurable moments were mixed—they felt good, but sometimes the grief they triggered would make my legs want to give out. I tried to keep breathing, to let the moment be bittersweet. I knew that if I was going to find my way back to pleasure, it would be on the back of my pain. I had to trust that everything I’d swallowed did not, after all, have power over me. I had to work to get my color back.
This is me, sticking my nose in a flower
Our culture is weird about pleasure. North Americans have a bit of a collective Protestant hangover (even with variations in individual religious upbringing) that tells us that pleasure is sinful and that we’re not really good people unless we feel bad most of the time. When something good happens to us, we worry about whether or not we deserve our success. We wait for the other shoe to drop. We fear failure so much we don’t even try. Vulnerability researcher Brené Brown calls this “foreboding joy,” pointing out that feeling happiness is a very real sort of vulnerability because when we have something we want, that means we have something to lose. Feeling happiness and satisfaction is kind of the worst because when we inevitably go back down the garbage chute that is life, the pain of that loss will be much worse than when we were hanging out in our boring but familiar crappy lives with nothing to lose but time.
I remember having drinks with a couple of girlfriends recently, talking with them about being in a new relationship. I was struggling with some guilt about moving on from my last relationship and obsessing about how to manage my ex’s feelings. One of my friends pointed out that maybe the familiar thing was the stressful thing, and was I possibly maybe avoiding giving myself a chance to enjoy being in a new relationship? She asked me, “What would you say to either of us if we were in your situation?” I paused, then piped up with the sudden brightness of the lightbulb going off in my head, “Honey, enjoy a nice relationship for once in your GODDAMN LIFE!” Everyone at the bar briefly turned to look in my direction as my girlfriends solemnly nodded. It was true: I was a little addicted to what I know best—stressful, high drama romantic relationships—and was missing out on an opportunity to feel safe and connected to someone who treats me with kindness. I had to give myself permission to focus on the source of pleasure instead of the source of stress.
The familiar thing is often the stressful thing. We’re more comfortable with stress and pain than with joy because it’s what we’ve always known; it’s a pattern we keep laying down, over and over. We tend to focus on stress rather than ease because, at an instinctual level, we are more concerned with survival than comfort. Our brains are already primed to over-focus on negative information. The stress pattern is even stronger if we grew up in a family where tension was the order of the day. If we learned as little kids that love meant fighting, yelling, or stony silence, we’ll tend to seek those things in our adult relationships. Tenderness and affection can feel overwhelming and alien so we unconsciously resist that form of love. Feeling good can feel uncomfortable because it goes against some very old conditioning about what we think relationships are supposed to feel like.
Pleasure, then, can threaten the negative feelings that we don’t even realize we’re attached to. Letting ourselves feel pleasure can seem like a betrayal to grief and pain that feels necessary. Maybe, for example, we’re not ready to let go of the story of our victimhood. Perhaps we feel we deserve the pain—another gift from our old friend shame. Trauma and sexual violation always come with grief. We may not acknowledge the loss right away or be able to identify exactly what it is, but there’s always loss. The self that existed before the trauma is gone, and it can be hard to conceptualize who we’re supposed to be now. The story we held about what we thought the world was has been irrevocably broken. The old story and the old self must be mourned.
A moment of joy is not a betrayal to that old self. As human beings, we contain multitudes: when we let there be pain and pleasure, joy and grief, deep connection and heart-rending loneliness all at the same time, we are expressing the fullness of our humanity. Having a moment of happiness inside a period of deep grief won’t interrupt the mourning process, which is always uneven anyway. We don’t need to be loyal to any of our emotions; they’re not going to run out on us until they are ready, even (and especially) if we try to force them out. You can trust me on that one.
This photo is by Andi McLeish