CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SEX AND LOVING RELATIONSHIPS

      As you already know from reading the preceding chapters, your breath and your thought are conditioned by the circumstances of your conception and birth, all connected with your parents' attitudes about sexuality.  Since birth negatives and PDS are the major causes of any and all negative thought, creating any and all "wrongness" in your lifespace, they are the ultimate sources of anything you especially don't like about sex, about love, and about sexual loving relationships.

     One of the original Rebirthers, Sondra Ray, is a marvelously prolific writer who has written many concise books about sex and loving relationships.  In this chapter I won't even make an effort to summarize what she's had to say or to repeat it.  I simply recommend you read all her books, starting with I Deserve Love.  In this short chapter, I'll only stress a few ideas Sondra hasn't detailed very much.

     Remember, until we have let go our birth negatives, our sexual loving relationships will continue to manifest the negative aspects that were present at our conception, through our gestation, and during our birth, as well as the negatives that characterized our childhood interactions with our parents.

     To the extent that our conception differed from the Ideal, to the extent that the way things went when our mama was carrying us differed from the ideal, to the extent that our birth itself differed from the Ideal, and, of course, to the extent that the way our parents treated us differed from the Ideal, our breath and thought will differ from the Ideal and our sexual loving relationships will also differ from the Ideal.

Was your conception Ideal? 

     The Ideal starts with your father and mother feeling safe with each other, loving each other, agreed that they want a baby, and enjoying every aspect of sex.  They both love balling and joyfully embrace their orgasms.  He is tender, he is potent, and he is patient.  She is trusting and she surrenders to the sensations she's feeling.  When they find out that she has become pregnant, they love each other even more and they love the baby and eagerly look forward to the birth.  That is an Ideal conception.

Was yours?  Probably not.

     Terrible but true.

     Most women don't like sex.  Nine out of ten women never experience orgasm during intercourse.  Quite obviously, they have grievances about sex, and their babies certainly weren't conceived in joy and passion.  (While I have often heard that sex can be satisfying even without orgasm, it's a little hard for me to believe.  I know, looking back on the first years in my first marriage when I didn't come when I made love with my husband, I didn't feel satisfied.  I didn't feel good about sex at all, or even about myself.  I felt inadequate.  And I'm certainly glad that those years have long been gone!)

     An immense number of women engage in sexual intercourse, not out of freely felt desire, but out of all sorts of negatives: fear that they will enrage their lover, their husband, whoever, if they refuse; a sense of duty or obligation; a desire to get something in exchange, etc.  For them, balling has almost always been a negative experience.

     And a lot of men use sex as a tool of domination or as a tension release for tensions that have nothing to do with their partner but may come from their work, their money picture, their health, whatever.

     So most acts of intercourse are not the mutually rapturous act I describe as the Ideal.

     Similar surveys show that most women, again 80 to 90 percent of most samples, fear pregnancy and childbirth.  They believe all sorts of negatives about what childbirth will be like for them.  So your mother probably dreaded your approaching delivery.

     Furthermore, even in a world where condoms are widely advertised and available, nine out of ten pregnancies are "accidents," not desired events.  It's highly probable that your parents were unhappy to learn you were on your way into their lives.  Again, not the Ideal.

     Nor is the prospect of parenting.

     The vast majority of women, asked how they felt about becoming pregnant, giving birth, and raising children, have said that they dreaded all of them.  Ann Landers received hundreds of thousands of replies to a survey several years ago asking her readers how they felt about having had children.  Ninety-five percent of those replies said if they had to do it over again, the couple would never have had children!  Most of them said young children seriously damaged their marriages, and they didn't enjoy their grownup offspring either.  So the odds are that you and your parents didn't get along very well.  Maybe you still don't.

     You know enough about your parents to form a fairly reliable opinion about whether or not they were happy when you were conceived.  You have some idea of their age, their financial circumstances, their relative safety at the time, how long they had been married, for example.  From those few facts you can construct a reasonably accurate view of how they felt about sex, conception, and your birth.

     You also know what you observed as you grew up, whether they treated each other lovingly and whether they really still cared for each other or not once you were born.

     Add that all up and you can fairly accurately contrast your probable conception circumstances with the ideal.

     You can also contemplate what you know about your birth and compare your birth to the Ideal described by Dr. LeBoyer and Leonard Orr, among many.  I recommend you read Birth Without Violence by LeBoyer, as well as Leonard's books.

     I won't repeat what they say, but I want to add a few details they don't cover.  First, as mentioned in the preceding chapter, there's the importance of length of labor.  Less than a couple of hours isn't long enough for the baby's adrenals to wake up and make the substances that coat the lung spaces and allow him to breathe easily.  So a baby born in less than two hours may have trouble breathing.  And more than eight or ten hours generally results in some exhaustion of the mother's adrenals as well as of the infant's.  So a baby born after a very long labor may also have more difficulty breathing than otherwise.

     In addition to thinking about how long your mother was in labor when she had you, contemplate other things like where did she give birth?  Was your father there?  Who helped her?  Was she wide awake?  What happened to you right after you were born?  Were you treated like a commodity that was weighed and measured and cleaned up and wrapped and placed with other little bundles in a nursery?  Or were you joyfully grabbed by your mother and put to her heart and breast to feel her warm love again?

     If you know that there were special circumstances surrounding your birth, think about what they probably made you feel like.  Don't take them for granted.  If any or all of this were happening to you today, how would you feel?  Extrapolate back to what it probably made you feel like as a child.  For example, if you were put in an incubator, think about what it must have felt like to be in a hot, brightly lit box, completely surrounded by plastic and other miracles of modern science, having at least three different nurses care for you every day, as opposed to having been in a womb where everything's soft and warm and organic.

     If your first days or weeks or months or even years had a lot of physical pain involved in them, if you had surgery, if you were very ill, think about what that made you feel like.  Don't just chalk it up and say, "Yeah, well, you know, I had pneumonia three times before I was one year old," or "Yeah, they had to do an emergency operation on me -cause there was something wrong with the way my intestines were built."

     Think, too, about the Ideal first few months, especially with regard to feeding satisfaction.  Think about an Ideal mother who is competent and loving, and who cherishes her baby and is there for him, nursing him when he shows he's hungry, and ready to help him learn to stretch out his digestive rhythm so that he learns to take more and more milk with each nursing, and so that there's enough time between each nursing for him to fully digest his last little tummyful.

     Think about how it was for you during your first months after birth.  Did you have a mama who was so convinced that you no right to bother her more often than once every four hours that, unless it was "time," she refused to offer you any comfort either from her arms and her voice or from offering you a bottle or even a pacifier?  Some mothers, afraid their babies look silly or will harm themselves sucking on pacifiers, refuse to give them to their babies.  Babies don't harm their dental arch or develop bad habits from sucking a pacifier.  It just satisfies their lust to suck.

     Breastfeeding mothers have a hard time withholding the breast from a crying baby because the high-pitched sound of the baby's cry automatically makes the mother produce a hormone called milk let-down factor which brings the milk from the breast tissue where it's made down to the nipple.  So, since her nipples will be leaking milk when she's around her crying baby anyhow, she is usually tempted to nurse as often as her baby cries.  That's one of the reasons why breast-feeding mothers tend to go to extremes in the opposite direction and offer the breast whenever the baby cries.  This may have "bad" consequences because the baby doesn't easily learn to tolerate any kind of delay or discomfort and may grow up impatient and demanding.

     In any case, what do you think?  What was your mother like?  Was she the kind of woman who comforted you and picked you up and fed you and loved you and reassured you?  Or was she afraid to "spoil" you, not even giving you any comfort by rocking you and crooning to you?  Was she emotionally cold?  Was she dominated easily by authority, especially authority in the form of a male doctor?  He may have told her, "Don't you feed that baby any more often than every four hours," so she didn't go with her intuition and her desire, but instead sat by helplessly watching you suffer.  Was she harassed?  Did she have so many other duties or such low energy that she couldn't be there for you?

     What about your dad?  Was he a loving dad who cradled you and took care of you and played with you?  Or did he usually ignore you completely or even resent you?  Did he treat you like a toy?  When he played with you was he gentle or was he perhaps a little too rough with you?

     Inside yourself, you know what these people were like when you were growing up.

     You know.  Think about it!  What was it like for you to be their baby?

     The Ideal is that they gave you whatever you needed when you needed it, and they brought you up with good examples and gentle guidance, not with punishment.

     Compare how it was for you with the Ideal.  All you've got to do is concentrate on it a little in order to flesh out the form, and all of a sudden you'll have an authentic picture of how it was when you were a child:  You'll probably remember how you resented them and hated them and feared them.  You may recognize what you still disapprove of them for and haven't forgiven them for. 

     All of this is important because, as Freud observed, our bodies are one large sensual entity with special areas that are most intensely erotic: our mouth, our hands, our bladder, our bowels, and our genitals.  So we experienced intense pleasure or pain as our parents took care of us, feeding us, cleaning us, touching us.

     Was your body usually bathed in pleasure or was it frequently subject to pain inflicted on it by authorities who disapproved of what you were doing, who were so feared, you couldn't even complain to them?

     Did they spank you?  Did they punish you physically?  When did they wean you?  How did they clean you?  How did they teach you to use the toilet?  Did they frighten you with stories about hell and sin and God punishing you?  Did they lay a guilt trip on you?  Did they tell you silly stories instead of the truth and not give you a straight answer when you asked questions, especially about sex?  Did they ridicule and embarrass you?

     What were your parents like?  How did they treat you?  How did you react?  Were they people you had a hard time feeling any affection and respect for?  What do you still hate them for?  What have you never forgiven them for?

     Sometimes it's difficult to put ourselves in our parents' place, to understand their thoughts and feelings at our conception.  Many a mother wishes to shield her child from realizations of how bad her life was like when she found out she was pregnant, and what it was like when that child was born.  She paints a pretty picture of it and hesitates to "mark" her child by telling him the likely truth: "No, I didn't like your father, I didn't want to make love with him, I hated it when I found out I was pregnant and I wished to God that you'd die.  But once you were here, I couldn't help but love you!  You were so totally adorable!  The minute I first touched you, I realized that whatever had happened up to then didn't matter.  I want you to know that I loved you completely the instant you were born, and I've always loved you since then."

     For most mothers, that's all true.  Despite the negatives that happened before the birth, hormones that get made during the birth make the mother love the child.  We bond instantly, as soon as we hold that little piece of life in our hands.  The hormones flow and they make us want to be protective and good to that infant.

     Thank God for our posterior pituitaries and the hormones they secrete at birth!

     But no wonder so many of us believe romance and sadness are necessarily connected, that something about really loving involves sadness and resignation and loss.  I think this is because we imprinted our mother's sadness and her bewilderment, her lack of joy in knowing that she was pregnant, her fear of the approaching delivery.  All of this is part of our earliest experience of love.  And then, it's confirmed by the events of birth themselves because, after all, what is birth but a total separation of the self from all that surrounded it which it loved and was a part of?  We all of us experience and mourn that loss.

     Anything involved with your conception, with your birth, and with your childhood treatment by your parents has an especially immense effect upon you as a loving person once you're reached sexual adulthood and start having the different kinds of interpersonal relationships that come about with adulthood-especially loving, sensual ones.

     Once sexuality becomes a genuine phenomenon within us as we arrive at puberty and become sexual adults, everything that was connected with all our erotic zones and with our parents becomes manifested.

     When sex becomes that reality for you, everything that was connected with sexuality for your parents is manifested in your attitudes and behavior.  No wonder you may not be enjoying a healthy, mutual sex life with your loved partner if your mother was repelled and disgusted by sex or if your father used sex as a terrorist tactic!

     Just as your conception was a sexual act, and birth is a sexual act, everything connected with your parents is, in a sense, a sexual act. 

     Basically, until you truly separate yourself from your parents and honor them with not even a tiny hint of negativity and disapproval, you can't have the kind of sexual loving relationship that we all want, that is Ideal.  What you will have will, instead, manifest some of those old negatives.  They'll be right there, in bed with you, influencing your every sexual experience.

     For most people in the United States and in most of the U.K. and Western Europe at least, the most persistent sexual loving relationship is that of marriage.  In some societies, premarital and extramarital sexual adventures are admitted and accepted.  In others, they happen but they're not talked about, people deny their existence.  But in very few cultures is the relationship of marriage devoid of its sexual and loving overtones.  Even in eastern societies where marriages are arranged, so that love and sexual attraction are not the main impetus for marriage, it certainly is expected that once the marriage has occurred, sexual intercourse between the partners will take place.  And it is also assumed that sooner or later, as a result of how they deal with each other and with the added "cement" of sex, the two people in the couple will develop a loving tie to one another.

     Here in the USA, what's the psychological purpose of marriage?  It provides the opportunity for sex (sexual security), the presence of someone else in your life on a relatively regular basis (social security), and whatever benefits are available to having two people working and providing for each other (material security).

     But is there anything else, perhaps of even greater value?

     My answer to that question is Yes.  The commitment involved in being married to somebody brings up your old PDS issues, especially the Oedipal ones.  How did you disapprove of your parents for not loving you as much as they loved each other?  How did you disapprove of them for how they dealt with sexuality and how they dealt with you and your sexuality?  All of that comes up in marriage, in a committed relationship.

     In an uncommitted relationship, you're together only so long as you please each other.  When it gets to be too uncomfortable, you're easily free to chuck it and say Goodbye to each other.  In that kind of a relationship, it's not easy to resolve your parental issues, because you can avoid having to resolve them.  You don't have to deal with them at all.  You can simply leave the field.

     If you're ever going to grow up, however, you need to stop being lost in your childhood and your grievances towards your parents.  So I would answer to people that the major psychological purpose of marriage is to provide an arena in which the results of these old battles can finally be let go of.

     I'm always puzzled and amused when people say they don't know how to find someone who likes them and wants to marry them.  I think the solution to such a problem is obvious. "Give them what they want."  Don't try to change them so they'll want what you want to give them.  Simply give them what they say they want, within the framework of whatever standards you set for yourself, what you're willing to do and not do.

     If you find that what a person says he wants goes against the grain of all of your principles and thoughts about what you believe is appropriate in life, say No.

     I'm not suggesting you act on your negative and end the relationship.  Instead, I urge you to use it as a teaching and make an affirmation that will let you let go that negative.

•             Old negatives only come up so that I know that I'm still holding onto them, not so that I can act on them as if they were ever true.

Once your negative is gone, the offending person usually, and without your interfering, either changes or leaves.  You only need to clear your consciousness.  Breathe-don't act out.

Please understand that anyone who comes in your life so wholeheartedly negatively that you find it impossible to say anything good about him is a powerful teacher.  Such people are showing you how much of an old negative you're still carrying around.  Take the opportunity to breathe and let go that old load of negative thought.

From what I can see, the keys to finding and making a love that is joyful and satisfying are to practice breathing fully and freely in the connected pattern and to practice using affirmations that keep your thought pure and loving and forgiving.  That's what Rebirthing is all about, and that's what being alive is all about.

• I am not my mother.

• I am not my father.

• I don't have my parents' thoughts and feelings, especially about sex.

• I don't need to have their thoughts and feelings in order to win their love or to show them that I love them, or to have a satisfying sexual loving relationship.

• I am here to enjoy life.