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 their very intensity. They were, in the beginning, felt to be overwhelming; it was as if they proceeded from a bottomless well of feeling. And so, through the years, one has learned to hide them, even from oneself, to fix them on trifles in order to minimize them—to deny that, indeed, they exist at all.
Only by letting them up into the awareness can one experience the fact that their intensity is not overwhelming and that the emotion one experiences has very definite limits; it does not proceed from a bottomless well.
I recall one woman who, in approaching this problem, would not let herself weep over a strong underlying feeling of rejection by men that she had partially uncovered in herself. “If I start crying I feel I’ll never stop,” she told me. She was not being histrionic either; that’s the way she really felt. When she did let herself cry, however, the storm lasted for a mere thirty minutes or so—and then it was done with for good. She was terribly relieved to find that the emotion which, when unexpressed, seemed so boundless had very concrete limits. From that point on she was much more at home with all of her emotions, not nearly so frightened of them.
The second reason a woman fears to let her feelings about her husband (and men in general) come to the surface is that she believes that the things she feels are literally true. They exist in her unconscious or partly conscious mind as profound convictions. She holds them at bay because she does not wish to face just how completely a part of her mind believes that her highly irrational feelings are based on reality.
It will help, however, to know that, no matter how convinced a part of you is that your negative feelings represent reality, such is not the case. Your investigation is not going to prove that your hidden fears are valid; it is going to prove that they are invalid. These deep and hidden convictions are shaped early in a woman’s life, primarily by her relationships with her parents and secondarily through her relationships with her brothers and sisters. They are basically irrational feelings, erected as defenses against childhood and girlhood fears and misunderstandings. They have no real basis in fact; they do not pertain to the male as he is.
It is of very great importance to know this when you begin to uncover your most secret convictions. No matter how real these negative attitudes appear to be, remember that they are only feelings, not reality. As long as you keep that fact in the forefront of your mind you will increasingly dare to let these feelings up into your awareness, into your conscious mind.
I counsel women to be remorseless with themselves in this search for any negative feelings they might possess toward their husband and toward all men. Do not stop when you have seen one or two details that indicate an amount of feeling you had not clearly known you possessed. Press onward and inward fearlessly until you have exposed every last hostile and irrational emotion and attitude you have.
One woman who came to me had worked very hard for five sessions on her negative feelings toward men. We had started our mutual investigation when she confessed that any slight irritability on her husband’s part caused her to feel extremely anxious, often resulted in actual nausea.