The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

The first thing you must do is a very practical one. You must give yourself, at least at the beginning, a certain amount of time alone, absolutely alone, each day. It might be for ten minutes or for a half hour or an hour, but you must be alone and you must seek this time regularly. It is most helpful if you can select a time when your mind is relatively free of worries and duties.

What do you do to achieve insight at these junctures? You start, on the simplest level possible, to let yourself really feel your negative emotions about your husband or sweetheart. Your only aim at this point is to let these negative feelings come to the surface, to seek them out, experience them to the full.

Pick out some small but recurrent irritation or annoyance he causes you; the more trifling, the better. Fix on it, then dare to allow your emotions and thoughts about it to hold sway.

Let me give you a single example from the case history of a frigid patient. Every day this woman’s husband, on rising, dressed in the bathroom. He invariably left his razor on the sink and his pajamas in an untidy heap in a corner. This had irritated her and she had spoken about it to him several times; he would reform for a few days but then would invariably fall back into his old habits.

This bit of information about their married life had been presented quite casually in the course of my first discussion with this patient. At that time she spoke of this peccadillo of her husband’s as a minor annoyance. A bit later, when she had returned to the subject for the third time, each time expressing annoyance, I encouraged her to dwell on it, to let herself feel the full measure of her emotions about it. I told her that I suspected there was a good deal more in her feelings about this apparently trifling matter than she suspected, and that I thought this because she had brought it up so many times.

At first she protested that the matter was too small to pay attention to; that there were more important things to consider. But with encouragement she gradually allowed herself to pursue her true feelings. Underneath her commonplace protest was, as I had thought, an emotional cave-of-the-four-winds.

Her husband’s “sloppy actions,” it turned out, did not merely “annoy” her; they “enraged” her. In her words, they signified his desire “to humiliate me”; “he thinks I have nothing to do but pick up after him, to wait on him hand and foot.” Her anger became more and more explosive as she reflected on the matter, and it led very quickly and directly to her underlying attitude toward men as a whole. Men wanted to do nothing more or less than to enslave women, to exploit them. They considered themselves a race apart, superior to women. All they wanted from a woman was sex, or anything else they could get out of them. And they were powerful, and thus dangerous; if a woman really showed her hostility they would use their physical strength against her. And so it went, on and on, the stored-up rage and the hostile and frightened attitudes that lay just beneath the surface and constituted the very bricks and mortar of her frigidity.

In pursuing this technique for getting at one’s feelings it is best always to select, as in the example quoted, one or 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?