Chapter 14STEPS TO FREEDOM
The resolution of an emotional problem is a process, a process with a beginning, a middle, and an end. To put this process in motion and to maintain it in motion, two distinct approaches are necessary.
The first step is to grasp the problemobjectively, to understand its nature, its implications, to learn all theoutsidefacts about it one can grasp with one’s intellect.
We have now taken this first step, an all-important one for most people. If you have read thus far, you have learned a great many objective facts about frigidity.
You have learned what it is and the toll it exacts; you have seen why women are subject to it and how it originates in the individual and the different forms it may take. You have seen, too, how woman has attempted to masculinize her personality, how she has tried to eschew sex entirely; and you have seen why these unhappy attemptscanbe successful, why they are inherent biological and psychological possibilities.
This kind of objective understanding is of great importance. It frees one from prejudice and prevents one fromseeking false solutions (which abound); it brings one face to face with the real nature of the dilemma of frigidity, its essentially psychological structure, and it uncovers the hidden area where personal responsibility lies.
Without this kind of objective intellectual understanding the individual woman could not come to direct grips with frigidity, for she would not know its nature. This type of knowledge, then, has carried us to the very edge of the bridge to true womanhood.
In order to cross it, however, the individual woman must do more than merely understand in an objective manner.
The second and all-important step in the resolution of the problem of frigidity requires asubjectiveapproach, an inquiry by the individual woman into the attitudes and emotions that are preventing her from achieving maturity. The kind of knowledge one gains in this way we call insight. If one can get true insight into the attitudes and feelings upon which one’s own frigidity is based, the problem can be completely resolved.
At the moment this may seem like a big order and insight a frightening word. Every woman knows how complex her emotions are, how difficult to understand, how multi-faceted every human being is.
But I wish to tell you now, at the outset, that the whole approach can be kept very simple. Frigidity is like a log jam on a narrow stream. If two or three logs jam together, forming a barrier, all the other logs will jam up behind them, forming a complicated maze that stretches backward sometimes for miles. To release the jam, however, all one has to do is to free the first two or three logs, and then the others will resume their unimpeded journey.
The emotional log jam we call frigidity is held in place by two basically neurotic attitudes. The first is an attitude toward men; the second is an attitude toward real womanhood. We have seen these attitudes in every form of frigidity and have seen how they function. If the individual woman can come to grips with these two attitudes in herself, if she can dislodge them, the free flow of her personality toward health and maturity will resume once again. Insight can dislodge these hindering attitudes and keep them dislodged.
Let us start, then, and see how insight into these attitudes can be achieved by the frigid woman.
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 yourselfreally feelyour 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 themto 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 discussionwith 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 herfeelingsabout 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 ormore 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?
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 istheir 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 isnotoverwhelming 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 goingto 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 maleas 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 areonlyfeelings, 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.
We pursued the matter and soon found a great store of antagonism toward men hidden just beneath the surface of an apparently gentle person. She had, we discovered, the common, classical conviction that men wish to exploit women, to bend them to their wills. She soon realized she had been interpreting many everyday happenings in the light of this belief. Her husband, an editor, sometimes had to work at home in the evening and had asked her to keep thetelevision set low until he was finished. Though she knew his homework was exacting, she took this to be a characteristic infringement of her “rights” and had a great deal of stored-up rage about it. She also had hidden rage at such commonplace duties as bringing his clothes to the cleaner, entertaining his business friends, cleaning his “filthy” study, etc.
We explored them all, one by one. Neither of us, however, felt that we had come to the end of the matter. There was something that eluded us. She as well as I felt certain of that. We persisted, therefore, and the hidden feeling at last showed itself. Returning to her first complaint, I asked her if she had ever been physically struck by her husband.
“No,” she replied, “but I oftenfeelthat he is going to strike me.”
Knowing her husband to be a kind person, I pursued the matter, and it soon developed that she had a very strong unconscious conviction that men in general had no compunction whatever about using their superior physical strength against women to obtain what they wanted. In other words, she not only felt that men were basically hostile to women but that they were potentially extremely violent.
This was a bizarre conviction, and my patient soon realized its irrational nature. Her picture of men was based on early memories of a truly sadistic father; he had frequently struck her mother. When she realized the pervasive importance of this only slightly repressed physical fear of men she was able to resume a psychological growth that had been severely impeded from the earliest age.
But the point I wish to emphasize is that she had to persist in her search for hidden attitudes. If she had assumed that she had gotten to the heart of her difficulty by uncovering the first few negative feelings, her self-investigation could nothave succeeded. Please mark the fact that she did notfeelshe had come to the end of her emotional inventory until she had actually done so. If one is honest with oneself one can sense, feel, when important attitudes still lie hidden within.
If you persist in your daily sessions with yourself, however, the time will come when you will feel that you have exposed to your own view all of your angry feelings and your negative attitudes toward men, come to the very lees of the feelings left over from childhood. You have now made a major step toward recovery. The biggest log in the jam has been removed.
Why does this necessarily follow?
One of the major contributions of modern psychiatry has been the establishment of the fact that attitudes and feelings have the power to do lasting harm only when they are hidden from one’s awareness, or half hidden from it. The frigid woman’s troubling vestiges of youthful error, once they have been made conscious, automatically lose the greater part of their power to do harm. When they become known to the conscious mind they are then exposed to judgment, reason, and further information. They are seen, by one’s intelligence, to be fragile balloons of easily exploded ignorance. When this happens, the natural movement of the personality toward health, blocked for years by hidden fears, rages, defenses, false attitudes, is resumed.
A woman who can achieve this is nowpreparedto understand her husbandas he is—and all other menas man is. If you will recall, that particular ability, to comprehend and care about the uniqueness of one’s mate, is a chief prerequisite for love.
If the frigid woman did not explore her irrational feelings in the manner I have described, any objective information about men, learned from whatever source, would be useless.Herhiddenfeelings about men would still dominate. Now, however, with the hidden feelings up and out, she is ready to hear more about men as they really are, to contrast the reality to her projection upon it. We shall take that latter step in the next chapter, but before we do there is another, further insight into one’s feeling, which it will be very helpful to achieve.
Women who suffer from frigidity often have, in addition to negative feelings toward the male sex, another very marked characteristic. They are subject to powerfulfantasieswhich militate against the recovery of their lost sexuality and their psychological maturation. It is extremely important that these fantasies be ruthlessly explored and exploded. If they are not, they serve the unhappy function of preserving the unhealthy conviction that one deserves a far better fate than that of being a beloved wife and mother.
Such fantasies are often half hidden from view, just as are one’s negative feelings about men. They are daydreams left over from adolescence or earlier. Their destructive power derives from the fact that the daydreamer either still believes that the dreams are realizable or that she could have achieved them if her husband and family had not prevented her from doing so.
It is amazing how powerful and persistent these fantasies can be. They generally spring from an early desire to become an actress, a dancer, or a concert artist. However, they may also express wishes to become a doctor, lawyer, athlete, diplomat, or whatever. Their impossible, Walter-Mittyish character is blithely ignored by the daydreamer. I have had frigid women of forty and even fifty who still, just beneath the logical, sound surface of their minds, still believed that someday (tomorrow perhaps, next year certainly) they would go to acting school and soon obtain leading roles ina Broadway drama, or resume their piano lessons and become famous concert artists.
Such fantasies derive their power from the fact that the daydreamer feels unable to deal with reality. Since a woman who is frigidisdealing with her real-life situation in an inadequate manner, it is not strange that she should hold onto such fantasies with passion. They protect her from her feelings of inferiority. What matter, says her unconscious mind, if you are unable to love, what matter if your husband exploits you, attempts to enslave you. Tomorrow—someday, at any rate—you will show them all that you are beautiful, glamorous, a great performer, or doctor, or lawyer, or Indian chief.
The frigid woman should approach such fantasies in the same manner as she approaches her negative feelings toward the male sex. First she should let the fantasy have full play. She should allow herself to imagine herself as impresario, doctor, whatever fantastic dream her unconscious has fixed on. Let the daydream roll on and on. Note its magnitude, its grandiose quality, its glitter and its glamor.
When all the details of the fantasy have been experienced, allow yourself to imagine what life would be like for you if you wereneverable to realize any single aspect of this daydream. If you feel depressed by such a prospect, if the contemplation of life without the possibility of realizing such a dream of glory seems empty, you have had an important experience. You have taken your fantasy’s full measure. You now can get some idea of what an important part it plays in your emotional life.
Do not be afraid of the depression, the feeling of emptiness that will come with your first conscious attempts to free yourself of your fantasy. It can be the beginning of a far richer emotional life than any which depends on an unrealizable daydream. Therefore, persist for a few days inimagining what life will be like if you do not ever realize your daydream. Please notice that your depression does not go beyond a certain depth and that it is not incapacitating; also note that your feeling of deprivation is not unendurable.
I am not using auto-suggestion in these last remarks. A persistent daydream has certain characteristics in common with a drug or alcohol habituation. The daydreamer has, over a long period of time, learned to handle reality in terms of her drug—her deep-seated daydream. Without realizing it she has come to feel that, without this psychological narcotic, life would be impossible. She must, in a very real sense, wean herself from it, gradually realize that life without it is not nearly so dreary, so difficult, as she had imagined it would be.
The next step in this process is to explode the daydream entirely. This can be done with a few pinpricks of cold logic. Most people, realizing that such daydreams, formed in the heat of youth, have no function in reality, have long ago given them up in favor of living as passionately as possible in the present. The frigid woman, however, having a reason for keeping them alive, has never scrutinized them in the cold light of rationality.
I know of one woman who, at the age of thirty-eight, with three children under fifteen years of age, still felt she could become a dancer. As she looked more closely at this conviction she became increasingly surprised at how seriously she really took this fantasy. At length, when she felt really ready to face sacrificing her lifelong fantasy, she wrote a list of facts and questions. I present them here.
1. To become a dancer I would have to study the dance for a minimum of five years; during that time I would have to practice dancing for about eight hours a day. Could I take this discipline?2. If my mind were able to take such discipline would my body be able to stand up under such arduous work?3. If I were able to arrange it would I be willing to give up my daily contact and relationship with my three children?4. If I overcame every obstacle and became a well-known dancer, achieving my wildest dream of success, I would have to go on tour for at least eight months of the year; this would mean separation from my husband and children during that time. Do I want this? Even if I do, could I take it emotionally?
1. To become a dancer I would have to study the dance for a minimum of five years; during that time I would have to practice dancing for about eight hours a day. Could I take this discipline?
2. If my mind were able to take such discipline would my body be able to stand up under such arduous work?
3. If I were able to arrange it would I be willing to give up my daily contact and relationship with my three children?
4. If I overcame every obstacle and became a well-known dancer, achieving my wildest dream of success, I would have to go on tour for at least eight months of the year; this would mean separation from my husband and children during that time. Do I want this? Even if I do, could I take it emotionally?
The answers to these questions were obviously passionate noes. And the result of such a common-sensical examination of her long-standing fantasy was, at long length, freedom from it.
It will not take much logical thought to dispose of your daydreams, thus clearing the way to a life in the passionate present rather than in a mythical future. Ask yourself the kinds of questions indicated above and give yourself honest answers.
In giving the case histories of women suffering from the various forms and degrees of frigidity, I have described to some extent the early origins of their problems. I should now like to raise the question of just how much knowledge of one’s early, often buried, experiences one must uncover to achieve feminine maturity.
In my opinion, the majority of women suffering from frigidity donothave to go into the matter of their childhood experiences to any extent at all. The evidence that their childhood experiences were traumatic to some degree is contained in the fact that they do have problems in the present. It is always the immediate problem about which people developtheir deepest and strongest emotions. The technique of “feeling” one’s way through one’s problem is, as I have said, the method that really works with frigidity; it is one’s present emotions, therefore, that constitute the major material of one’s self-examination.
Actually understanding present feelings and attitudes reveals the past, for it was in the past that these attitudes were established; they have changed very little since their inception.
Why, then, did I go into the detailed childhood development of frigidity in my case histories? For the same reason that I gave all the other objective facts about frigidity before we approached this section. The more conscious knowledge one has of the entire problem of frigidity, the more one dares to face up to the responsibility for one’s own problem—and the more one isableto face up to it also. For knowledge can free one of the ignorance and superstition upon which resistance to achieving psychic maturity is based.
I am not, on the other hand, holding that there is any fundamental objection to a scrutiny of early experiences or to helpful speculation about them. Sometimes, as in the case of an early seduction, or a rape that is remembered, early experiences can throw a therapeutic sidelight on one’s present feelings. However, the myriad details that go into the formation of everyone’s personality while growing up can be confusing if one tries to understand them all without the help of an expert guide; and it is not requisite for recovery to understand them all. So if self-examination of one’s early experiences does not seem to be immediately helpful, I would abandon it entirely; I would confine myself to a “feeling through” of my problem in the present, undoing the harm the childhood attitudes are still causing in the here and now.
The steps for achieving insight into one’s negative emotions which I recommend here are the most difficult steps one has to take on the road to maturity. If you can take them, the hardest part will be over. The remaining part of the process of recovery occurs rather naturally, is a matter of acquiring more information, allowing new feelings to grow and expand inside oneself, accepting guidance past a few possible pitfalls. You will see what I mean as we continue in the following chapters.