Coming Together
Embracing your Core Desires for Sexual Fulfillment and Long-Term Compatibility
By
Danielle Harel, PhD & Celeste Hirschman, MA
Published by Somatica Press, all rights reserved
Copyright © 2020 Danielle Harel and Celeste Hirschman
ISBN 978-0-578-59265-7
This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical advice of physicians. The reader should regularly consult a physician in matters relating to his/her health and particularly with respect to any symptoms that may require diagnosis or medical attention.
Discover your Core Desires
The Shaping of Your Core Desires
You have particular feelings that you want to have during sex. Everyone has them. Most people think that an orgasm during sex means that the sex was good. However, if you look at your sexual experiences deeply, you will notice that orgasms can often be the effect of great sex, (or simply hard work), but they are generally not the cause.
The intense desire and arousal that sometimes brings you to orgasm are caused by a sexual experience that makes you feel something that you really want to feel. Feeling what you really want to feel is what makes some of your sexual experiences far more fulfilling than others. When people talk about their most exciting, intense, and outstanding sexual experiences, they usually won’t mention whether they had an orgasm or not. Instead, their eyes glow as they describe the feeling they had when their partner met them in a very specific way that touched their most vulnerable longings.
The set of feelings you want to have, which we call your Core Desires, is the key that unlocks your arousal and your orgasm, yet it’s unlikely that you’ve ever deeply explored its essence or its importance to your pleasure. Just imagine how amazingly hot your sex life could be if you had the awareness and a language to let your partner know exactly how to bring you to your highest erotic heights and how to bring them to theirs.
Before you go on the journey of discovering your Core Desires, let’s take a look at where your Core Desires come from. Their development started long before you ever had or even considered having a partner. The deepest needs in your erotic life were shaped by your experiences with the people around you when you were a child. Sometimes they are complex.
One inspiration for our understanding of what makes sex exciting comes from a brilliant San Francisco psychotherapist by the name of Jack Morin. He presented his theory and findings in his book “The Erotic Mind.” Dr. Morin studied the fantasies and peak erotic experiences of numerous participants and found that their desires were shaped by childhood experiences that had a combination of arousal and an obstacle. He asserted that it was the frustration of certain desires that shaped our deepest turn-ons, and called these turn-ons Core Erotic Theme. He also found that these desires remained a person’s central sexual desires for the rest of their lives.
In working with hundreds of clients over decades, we have also seen that people’s sexual desires are shaped in childhood. While Morin focused on obstacles, what we have seen more commonly is that erotic desires are a direct attempt to soothe early childhood wounds including everything from our lack of getting a certain set of core needs met to experiences of trauma. For this reason, we call people’s deepest sexual needs their “Core Desires.”
Client after client has shared challenging childhood experiences that relate directly to their Core Desires. A good example was our client, Bill. When Bill was a child, he had an unusual skin disease: his skin would crack and blister, and would often get infected. His well-meaning parents were worried about exacerbating the problem and, as a result, almost never touched him except to put ointment on his body. When we met Bill, his adult fantasies were all about being licked and bitten and caressed all over. He said he wanted every inch of him to be embraced and adored. For someone who was barely touched as a child, it makes sense that his erotic fantasies would revolve around being wanted, desired, and engaged in a very visceral way.
While Bill’s history was a more rare experience, another client of ours, Mary, shared a much more common imprinting experience – a lack of parental attention. Mary was the child of a workaholic father and a codependent mother, who constantly focused on taking care of her husband. Neither parent focused on Mary’s needs or feelings, and she described her childhood experience as “feeling completely invisible.” Later, as an adult, her most common fantasy was dressing up in a gorgeous negligee and doing an exotic dance for a huge audience of adoring and aroused fans. They would stand with their erections at attention, looking her up and down, never tiring of her or her beauty.
It might seem surprising that your sexual desires were shaped so early on in your life before many people have had any direct erotic experiences. However, the research by Dr. Morin, the clinical experience we have with our clients, and the stories our clients have shared, clearly indicate this link. In some ways, this can be very relieving. If you have no choice about what turns you on, the best approach to your turn-ons is to fully accept and celebrate them and then to try to get them met in safe, consensual ways. This can be challenging for some turn-ons more than others.
If your Core Desires were shaped by particularly painful or traumatic experiences, you may also feel understandable sadness and anger about not having control of how your desires were shaped. While we truly understand how painful this can be, we want to offer you hope that differentiating your current adult desires from the shaping of those desires, and fully embracing and learning how to have them met in a celebratory way, can add a tremendous amount of healing and joy to your life.
In addition to the ways that our Core Desires were shaped in our childhood, research has also shown that the way we want to enact them, can be shaped by our culture – everything from gender expectations to our political belief systems. In his book Tell Me What You Want, Justin Lehmiller shares findings from the largest study done to date on the sexual fantasies of adults in the United States. The study showed, for example, that conservatives were much more likely to fantasize about breaking taboos while liberal fantasies incorporated more power play. It also showed that women had more emotion-based fantasies than men, and men had more taboo-breaking fantasies than women.
The bottom line is that your Core Desires are not changeable, the things that turn you on the most will always turn you on the most. Some people feel like their Core Desires have changed over their lifetime. This may be because there are two pathways to get to the same feeling – resolution, or repetition with agency. We will go deeper into these two pathways later. Regardless, all paths lead to the same root desires, but the kinds of sex you need to have in order to get these desires met may look completely different.
Coming Together is full of practical tools to help you have a better sex life. After working with thousands of clients, we are ready to help you discover and get your Core Desires met. As a final note, your freedom of choice is very important. Once you find out what you really, really want, the choice of what you want to do with this information is yours. For example, there may be ways to have your Core Desires met that feel better or more comfortable for you, and there may be some turn-ons you never want to explore any further than acknowledging that they are there.
Just knowing and accepting yourself can be deeply satisfying whether you decide to pursue your Core Desires or not. It is also possible to have arousal and excitement even if your Core Desires are not being touched. You are the expert on how to live your life; we are just here to support you in finding the right path for you with as much love, gentleness, and self-acceptance as possible.
Get Your Head in the Game
Before you start exploring your Core Desires and how to share them with your partner(s), it is important to embrace the right attitude and approach. You can begin by developing self-awareness so that you can study your own desires and motivations. Get curious and open-minded about your desires. Before involving your partner, take some time to look at your internal sexual self on your own. It will be important to understand and accept yourself before trying to share with a partner.
Become a Self-Detective
We can spend endless hours of our lives studying, guessing, and gossiping about everyone else’s motives and desires, but we rarely take time to explore our own, especially when it comes to our sex lives. You can start this process by gathering some data from your own life. What turns you on might be sparked by romantic encounters, experiences full of passion and intrigue, spiritual connections, or playing with dominance and submission or kink. As you explore, we recommend doing some journaling to really pinpoint your Core Desires.
Take a Curious and Non-Judgmental Attitude
Before you start to explore all of this, the most important part of self-detecting is taking a curious and non-judgmental attitude. You may find that some of what turns you on is more accepted by society and other parts of what turns you on are less accepted. If any of your thoughts make you feel ashamed or guilty, remember, they are just part of your erotic imagination and you may or may not ever decide to act on them.
What if your Core Desires aren’t socially acceptable? For example, as a woman, if you want to feel desired, loved, taken, connected, adored, feminine, or cherished, those are highly socially acceptable feelings to want to have. As a man, if you want to feel desired, powerful, masculine, or competent, no one will bat an eyelash.
However, if you are either gender and you want to feel degraded, punished, scared, cruel, shaming, like the opposite gender – or any other feelings that you might think of as negative – you might fear that others will not accept your fantasies. And, sadly, you might be right. Historically, some sexual desires have been thought of as so deviant that they were considered to be diagnosable psychological illnesses, while others have simply received the moniker “perverted.”
In our work with clients, in our training classes, and in the world in general, we hold a non-judgemental space where any feelings that you want to have are celebrated. Once we help people figure out what they want to feel sexually, we help them find ways to enact those feelings that are safe and consensual. This could mean anything from simply fantasizing about them during sex to sharing those fantasies with partners, or enacting them sexually in a way that doesn’t harm themselves or others. We also help people decide if and when they want to share these fantasies with partners, depending on whether they feel safe enough to do so.
Since we can’t have every single one of you in our office, we want you to create this non-judgmental space for yourself. Learning how to get to your highest states of arousal is a wonderful thing, as is accepting yourself as you are. The best way to cultivate self-acceptance and to begin the process of self-discovery is to embrace the idea that thoughts and fantasies are different than actions.
If Your Fantasies Clash with Your Personal Belief System
Some people have Core Desires that are antithetical to their politics or beliefs about how people should behave in the world. This can make it difficult to fully embrace your desires. Perhaps what turns you on is something you’d never actually want to happen to anyone out in the world, and the guilt prevents you from experiencing your arousal. This is actually quite common. Many people are aroused by things that are taboo or that involve power differences.
Let’s take the example of being a feminist. If you are a feminist, that’s wonderful. Who wouldn’t want men and women to be treated equally and women to be given the full amount of dignity and respect afforded to men? Our Core Desires, however, do not necessarily conform to our politics. You might be a feminist and be turned on by feeling submissive or coerced; you may even have rape fantasies, which are quite common among women.
As a teenager, one of our clients had seen a film with a very explicit rape scene in it. While watching the scene, she felt extremely aroused and went up to her room to masturbate. After she orgasmed, she felt a huge rush of shame. She didn’t understand how she could be turned on by a woman being harmed, she felt ashamed for having these fantasies, and she started to shut down around her sexuality. Ultimately, with our help, she discovered that her upbringing shamed her so strongly around her desire for sex, that the idea of rape (not actually being raped) allowed her to imagine a sexual experience in which she had no choice. This allowed her to feel sexual without feeling responsible for wanting sex so she could surrender to her arousal.
As we talked with her, we explained why it is ok that her politics and her turn-ons clashed and how she could reconcile this discrepancy in her life. The bottom line is that you do not have any control over what turns you on. You may imagine these fantasies while masturbating or role-play rape as a way to bring you to orgasm; after all, it is completely harmless to run a fantasy in your head or play it out consensually with a partner in bed. This does not mean that you want women to actually be raped, and you can continue to fight for women’s equality.
We also had a male client who was a feminist. He felt ashamed that his fantasy was about dominating powerful women. At the same time, he found a woman to marry who was his intellectual, social, and professional equal. He supported her in her career and took an equal part in child-rearing. They learned to enjoy this fantasy together once they realized that what they did in the bedroom did not have any bearing on how they treated each other in day-to-day life.
If the Feelings You Want to Have are Rooted in Trauma
One of the most challenging situations we face in working with clients is when their Core Desires developed from some kind of trauma – especially childhood sexual trauma. While it is not always the case that sexual abuse will shape your Core Desires, we have seen it enough times in our office to conclude that it is probably quite common.
If you experienced childhood sexual abuse, incest, or some other sexual, emotional, or physical trauma as a child, your Core Desires may be related to those experiences. Sometimes, your Core Desires are to have the opposite experience of your trauma – taking power or feeling cared-for, and other times, they develop as a desire for something that feels more like a repetition of the traumatic experiences.
This can be particularly painful because it may feel like your abuser has left some indelible mark on you and that they somehow still have control over you. We have helped clients look at it in a different way. As an adult, you can reclaim your turn-ons from these early traumas. Through this reclamation, you can become an empowered adult with the agency to choose how you want to play these Core Desires out and with whom. This is the opposite of being controlled by your abuser. You can find partners who respect your body and your boundaries and who will stop and check-in if you use your safeword.
We will talk more about negotiating around boundaries and safewords later in our discussion of your Hottest Sexual Movie. Suffice it to say, many of the ways people play in different BDSM communities rest on the idea that you can turn old pain into present-day pleasure. You can embrace your deepest longings and have the most fulfilling, healing, and hottest sex you’ve ever had. Embracing it and removing shame and stigma around your Core Desires, and particularly those that are associated with early trauma, also helps you feel like a whole human being.
Our client Cathy’s story is one of abuse and reclamation. When Cathy was six years old, she was caught masturbating by using her hand over her clothes while in her bedroom. Her mother slapped her face, took her to the bathroom, placed her in the shower fully clothed, and ran cold water over her while aggressively washing her hands with soap. While she was washing her, her mother yelled at her, “You are dirty and disgusting, I don’t want to ever see you do that again. Where did you learn to touch yourself there?” and many other things that Cathy could not remember.
As Cathy grew up, her sex life evolved to incorporate elements from this childhood event. Cathy’s most arousing sex involves feeling both guided, dirty, and caught. She liked to role-play with partners that she was a little girl, and they were teaching her how to masturbate. Sometimes she wanted her partner to “catch” her touching herself and tell her how dirty and naughty she was and that she was only allowed to do it in front of them, but never by herself. When they “caught” her, she also wanted them to slap her face and spank her.
When she first came to us, she felt a lot of shame, anger, and frustration for having these desires. She felt like her mother was still controlling her life in some way. We helped her see that she had taken a traumatic event and was now playing it out on her own terms consensually with partners who excited her and were excited by her fantasies.
You may have disturbing thoughts that arouse you, but you can still always choose to have sex that is safe and consensual. We want you to explore and embrace your erotic imagination separate from any actions you might take. Later in the book, we will talk about how to get the feelings you want to have, whatever they are, in ways that are safe and consensual. We will also teach you how to share your Core Desires with partners in a way that they will most likely be able to hear them.