Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life

by Emily Nagoski

Such intrusive thoughts are generally viewed as a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder, with anxiety manifesting not as repetitive behaviors but as repetitive thoughts. Some people have violent intrusions, some sexual, some disgusting, some religious or immoral. They don’t want to do the things they think about; on the contrary, their distress comes from the very fact that they absolutely do not want to do these things, and they’re worried that they might or that the thoughts mean that some hidden, awful part of them does want to.

research has found that nearly everyone experiences some form of intrusive or unwanted thoughts sometimes, and about a third of people with OCD specifically have sexual intrusions.

From child sexual abuse to sexual assault to all forms of interpersonal violence, women are disproportionately and systematically targeted, and thus they disproportionately bring to their sexual functioning the emotional, physical, and cognitive features of a trauma survivor.

Rape has been described by victim advocate and former police officer Tom Tremblay as “the most violent crime a person can survive.”

Sexual violence often doesn’t look like “violence” as we usually imagine it—only rarely is there a gun or knife; often there isn’t even “aggression” as we typically think of it. There is coercion and the removal of the targeted person’s choice about what will happen next.

Trauma isn’t always caused by one specific incident. It can also emerge in response to persistent distress or ongoing abuse, like a relationship where sex is unwanted though it may be technically “consensual” because the targeted person says yes in order to avoid being injured, or they feel trapped in the relationship or are otherwise coerced.

Each person’s experience of survival is unique, but it often includes a kind of disengaged unreality. And afterward, that illusion of unreality gradually degrades, disintegrating under the weight of physical existence and burdened memory. The tentative recognition that this thing has actually happened incrementally unlocks the panic and rage that couldn’t find their way to the surface before, buried as they were under the overmastering mandate to survive.

But survival is not recovery; survival happens automatically, sometimes even against the survivor’s will. Recovery requires an environment of relative security and the ability to separate the physiology of freeze from the experience of fear, so that the panic and the rage can discharge, completing their cycles at last.

Sexual trauma survivorship impacts information processing for both the accelerator and the brakes. Sensations, contexts, and ideas that used to be interpreted as sex-related may instead now be interpreted by your brain as threats, so that sexy contexts actually hit the brakes. And the chronically high levels of stress activity in a recovering survivor’s brain can block out sexual stimuli, categorizing them as low priority.

Healing Sex: A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma by Staci Haines and The Sexual Healing Journey: A Guide for Survivors of Sexual Abuse by Wendy Maltz.

If the trauma is not recent and is more or less resolved, it’s normal for you to experience residual effects on your sexual functioning, even when you are largely recovered. Sexual trauma tends to wrap tendrils around so many parts of your emotional experience that you find it unexpectedly, like a persistent invasive weed that has to be pulled and pulled again.

recognizing the meaning that you’ve created around the trauma and then challenging belief patterns within that meaning, or recognizing behavioral habits that you’ve trained yourself into since the trauma and challenging those patterns.

And imagine yourself as you are now, safe and whole, sitting quietly—or imagine yourself embracing yourself as you were then, offering yourself the comfort and security you needed then, with reassurance that you survived, that your life got better. This is your new pattern: Allow the feelings to move through you.

By practicing this skill of noticing what you’re paying attention to, you are teaching yourself to be in control of your brain, so that your brain is not in control of you.

What you pay attention to matters less than how you pay attention.

The practice grants the opportunity to “cultivate deep respect for emotions,” differentiating their causes from their effects and granting you choice over how you manage them.15

Proximity Seeking. You feel connected to the other person, so that it feels good to be around them (liking) and you desire (wanting) to be as close to them as possible.

Safe Haven. When things go wrong in your life, you want to tell your attachment object all about it; you seek them out for support.

Separation Distress. When the person goes away, you feel pain—you miss them.

Secure Base. Wherever that person is, that’s your emotional home.

Attachment is about survival; relationships are about survival. When they are threatened, we do whatever it takes to hold on to them, because there are no higher stakes than our connection with our attachment objects.

The [rhesus monkey] babies came back and they did everything they could to make those mothers love them again. And they cooed, and they stroked, and they’d groom, and they’d flirt, and exactly what human babies do with their moms. And they would abandon their friends. They had to fix this relationship. It was so important to them.19

Of course they did. When we feel distressed, our attachment object is our safe haven. Even—or perhaps especially—if our attachment object is the source of our distress.

toward the attachment object who would never commit to her and who therefore chronically activated her attachment system’s need for safe haven.20

“solace sex,” sex that’s motivated by your desire to prove that you are loved.21

Secure attachers have more positive emotions during sex, more frequent sex, higher levels of arousal and orgasm, and better communication about sex.26 They are better at giving and receiving consent and are more likely to engage in safer sex practices such as contraception use; they enjoy sex more, are more attentive to their partners’ needs, feel a link between sex and love, are more likely to have sex in the context of a committed relationship, and are more sexually self-confident. Secure attachers have the healthiest, most pleasurable sex lives.

Anxious attachers worry more about sex, and yet they also equate the quality of sex with the quality of a relationship. They’re more likely to experience pain with sex, particularly in low-intimacy relationships.

Anxious attachers experience more pain, anxiety, and health risks.

end, insecure attachment hits the brakes. We can’t understand sexual wellbeing without understanding attachment, and we can’t maximize our own sexual wellbeing without learning how to manage attachment in our relationships.

Attachment style is an inescapable factor in sexual response and relationship satisfaction—and it varies not just from person to person but also from relationship to relationship.

Healing always involves pain—if you break your finger, it hurts, gradually less and less until it heals. Same goes for healing emotional injury. You can’t choose for your broken heart not to hurt, any more than you can choose for a broken bone not to hurt. But you can recognize the pain as part of the healing, and you can trust your heart to heal, just as you trust your bones to heal, knowing that it will gradually hurt less and less as you recover.

tend and befriend stress response. Both feeling taken care of and taking care of others register in your stress response as “completing the cycle.”

if there is stress in a relationship, cultural rules make it likely to impact the woman more than the man, and it’s likely to impact her sexual interest and response. And because she has to hold on to her stress, so that her partner can let his go, she is more likely to become stuck in her stress, while he moves through his.

Being with the tribe doesn’t replace the Feels built into completing the cycle. We need to discharge the stress response, complete the cycle, before our bodies can move on. “Home” is the place—physical and emotional—where we can discharge stress without being judged or shamed or told we just need to relax or forget about it. “Home” is where we receive our partner’s “loving presence.” People who listen with a loving presence are calm, attentive, and warmly attuned to the other person. In the very best relationships, we’re allowed to experience all forms of stress—anger, fear, shutdown—and receive the loving presence of our partner as they sit still and quietly through the storm.

Sex is an adult attachment behavior. When your attachment is threatened or when you and your partner share a stressor together, sex can be a powerful, pleasurable way to connect in the face of the “I’m lost” signals, so that you can find your way home. Together. But this feels pleasurable only if you can give each other time and space for Feels.

Stress hits the brakes for most people, but it activates the accelerator for others—people vary. But for everyone, stress changes the context in which you experience sexual response, which changes how your perception of sexual sensations.

Sex is an attachment behavior, reinforcing the social bond between adults. Sometimes it takes the form of passionate, joyful sex between people who are falling in love with each other. Sometimes it takes the form of desperate, grasping sex between people whose attachment is threatened. Counterintuitively, when attachment is at its most secure and stable—when your relationship is all satisfaction and no worry or “plot”—it can take a backseat in your sexual arousability.

Stress and love (in the form of attachment) can be companions to sex. Sex strengthens bonds between partners, helps each partner feel safe, cherished, and supported in a world where we are not always safe, where sometimes our only shield from chaos and terror is our chosen family.

When a person experiences trauma, it’s like someone snuck into the garden and ripped out all the plants she had been cultivating with such care and attention. There is rage. There is grief for the garden as it was. And there is fear that it will never grow back.

Stress reduces sexual interest in 80–90 percent of people and reduces sexual pleasure in everyone—even the 10–20 percent of people for whom it increases interest. The way to deal with stress is to allow your body to complete the stress response cycle.

Trauma survivors’ brains sometimes learn to treat “sex-related” stimuli as threats, so that whenever the accelerator is activated, the brakes are hit, too. Practicing mindfulness is an evidence-based strategy for decoupling the brakes and accelerator.

In the right context, sex can attach us emotionally to new partners or reinforce emotional bonds in unstable relationships. In other words, sex and love are closely link...

Sex that brings you closer to your partner “advances the plot,” as opposed to gratuitous sex, for no reason other than that you can. To have more and better sex, give yourself a compelling rea...

They cuddled and snuggled a few minutes at bedtime each night, without the awkward are-we-going-to-have-sex-tonight anxiety. Into that silence one night, Laurie asked Johnny why he liked having sex with her. He gave such a good answer. He said, “Because you’re beautiful.”

“You really don’t see it. You really believe this stuff makes you less beautiful. Honey, your body gets sexier every day, just by being the body of the woman I share my life with.

It is not fair that you have to do all that extra work. After all, you didn’t choose what got planted by your family and your culture. No one asked for your permission before they started planting the toxic crap. They didn’t wait until you could give consent and then say, “Would it be okay with you if we planted the seeds of body self-criticism and sexual shame?” Chances are, they just planted the same things that were planted in their gardens, and it never even occurred to them to plant something different.

“We’re raising women to be sexually dysfunctional, with all the ‘no’ messages we’re giving them about diseases and shame and fear. And then as soon as they’re eighteen they’re supposed to be sexual rock stars, multiorgasmic and totally uninhibited. It doesn’t make any sense. None of the things we do in our society prepares women for that.”

These patterns are emphatically not innate, but they were learned early. You began these lessons long before you were capable of thinking critically about whether you wanted them. And just as you learned them, you can unlearn them, if you want to, and replace them with new, healthier patterns that promote confidence, joy, satisfaction, and even ecstasy.

body self-criticism. This issue is so entrenched in Western culture that most women hardly notice how ubiquitous and how toxic it is. It’s so entrenched, in fact, that many women believe it’s actually important and beneficial. I’ll talk about the research that says otherwise. If the only change you make after reading this book is to reduce your body self-criticism, that alone will revolutionize your sexual wellbeing.

The goal is to help you recognize what you’ve been taught, deliberately or otherwise, in order to help you choose whether to continue believing those things. You may well choose to keep a lot of what you learned—what matters is that you choose it, instead of letting your beliefs about your body and sex be chosen for you by the accident of the culture and family you were born into. When you take the time to notice your unchosen beliefs, and to say yes or no to those beliefs, you empower yourself to have the sexual wellbeing that fits you, custom made.