Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/192

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

more of the petty annoyances in everyday life. Does your husband's behavior in company embarrass you? Has he an annoying habit? (Bathroom habits of a mate are very fruitful sources for this kind of self-investigation.) Is he untidy? Does his taste in clothes irritate you? Does he ignore the children or pay too much attention to them, ignoring you? You will know what has become the provocative agent in your life; select it and explore the feelings underneath it to their limit.

As you let your feeling come to the surface, please note how quickly you move from contemplation of your husband's annoying characteristic to very broad generalities about men. In the case above the woman moved almost at once from annoyance, to rage, to ascribing a hidden motive to all men—a desire to enslave women, to exploit them.

It was the generalities she made which (in the end) revealed to her with great clarity that her underlying attitude created a spiritual climate in which real love and therefore a productive marriage were virtually impossible. How can one love, in any real sense, a person one regards, basically, as a tyrant?

Taking this highly emotional inventory cannot be a swift affair. In the beginning, for the first several sessions with herself, a frigid woman may find that no very strong feelings or passionate generalizations will come up. But if she perseveres she will inevitably get to an area where the feelings are intense and negative indeed. We have found that such feelings always exist in frigidity. If they did not, there would be no frigidity.

The frigid woman has hidden the intensity of such feelings from her conscious mind for two reasons. To know these reasons can help you, make you somewhat braver in your attempt to surface the feelings.

The first reason these emotions have remained hidden is