Do we need sex?
Last night I read another chapter of Facing Codependence by Pia Mellody. I picked up this book after finding out that she’s one of Brent Charleton’s primary influences.
I’m not going to try define codependence right now. I’m just going to jump into what I read about last night: how a codependent person deals with their Needs and Wants.
Needs: things that a person needs (duh, hence the name) in order to survive. I can’t remember the full list, but here are some examples of needs: food, shelter, money, sex, and emotional nurturing.
Wants: things not necessary for survival.
Pia divides Wants into two categories: little wants and big wants.
Little wants are preferences. She uses the example of a woman who wants a bathrobe made of a certain material. She doesn’t NEED this particular kind of bathrobe, in fact she has several already. But there is something about the material that brings this woman joy whenever she wears it.
Big wants are things that bring fulfillment. They are “life choices” that determine the direction of our lives. In this category she includes things like marrying a particular person, having a child, pursuing a certain career. These are not just small details of our lives (like the material of our bathrobe). Big wants determine the shape of our lives, and pursuing and getting them brings us fulfillment.
Side note: I’d like to know what qualifies something as “necessary for survival.” I don’t necessarily disagree that sex and emotional nurturing are needed, I just don’t know how to prove it definitively. Is it that you die if it’s taken away? Is your life stunted in some significant way without them? What’s the measure?
There are four orientations a codependent person can have towards their Needs and Wants.
1. Too dependent. When a person is aware of what their needs and wants are, but doesn’t know how to take care of these on their own. They rely on others to take care of these for them.
2. Anti-dependent. When a person is aware of their needs and wants, but is determined to take care of these purely by themselves. They would rather go without than to ask for help.
3. Needless and Wantless. Such a person does not even recognize what their needs and wants are, and therefore cannot take care of these on their own or by asking for help.
4. Confusing our Needs and Wants. When a person thinks that a Want will satisfy a Need, or vice versa. For example, children of wealthy parents. They may never have had their emotional needs met, yet had every material want fulfilled. Thus they attempt to fulfill their Needs with Wants, because wants are the only things that they have ever been consciously aware of. No one has taught them how to recognize and acknowledge their Needs.
I have questions about this stuff, of course. But let’s take it for granted for a second and see what it brings to mind.
How has this stuff showed up in my life? Where and with who do I see it playing out in the real world?
Sex and emotional nurturing are the big ones.
I think there’s a real danger in mistaking those for Wants rather than Needs. Or maybe, just as often, mistakenly using them to fulfill other needs, and thus having those go unmet.
I’ve had a tendency to act as if emotional nurturing was just a Want.
Actually, now that I write it out, I don’t think I ever really even recognized emotional nurturing as a want or a need. I could feel the need for it, but I mistook it for something else. I didn’t know what it was. My closest approximation was that I wanted and needed sex.
Actually, let me revise that again. I don’t think I ever recognized sex or emotional nurturing as NEEDS. I could feel my need for them, but I thought of them as Wants. I didn’t really recognize my need for emotional nurturing for what it was. I thought that was just me wanting sex. I thought sex — or the ability to get sex — would fulfill me.
Robert Augustus Masters talks about this a lot in his books. He says we need to “free our sexuality from the obligation to make us feel better.” In other words, we try to use sex to fulfill a wide range of emotional needs, something that it simply cannot do. And we need to stop.
A few days ago I was reading the blog of another (ex)psychotherapist. And I was surprised to find that he recommended celibacy for most people. He thought that, for most, sex is too emotionally confusing. As he put it (paraphrased), “sex is like tofu — it soaks up the flavor of whatever it’s cooked in.”
I understand that to mean, basically, that the quality of sex is determined by the emotions both people bring to it.
Each person can be trying, unconsciously, to meet such a wide range of emotional needs through sex. Each is trying to get something from the other person. But neither of them really recognizes what they’re trying to get. So they walk away unfulfilled, but they’re not quite sure why. And maybe they resent the other person for it. Or they blame themselves. Or they think that deep down there’s just something irreparably wrong with them. And shame and pain and anger ensue.
So let’s tie this back to Pia Mellody’s thoughts on Needs and Wants. And I’ll use myself as the example rather than generalize.
I often resort to sex as a way to make me feel better. I recognize some sort of emotional discomfort — a pain of some sort — and rather than reflect on what I’m really feeling and why, I seek out some kind of sexual experience. Because hey, I’m in pain, and sex feels good.
Isn’t that how it works? Don’t pain and pleasure cancel each other out? If I feel “bad,” can’t I remedy the situation by doing something — anything — that makes me feel “good”?
Ummm… no.
Here’s a bad analogy for that way of thinking. It’d be like if you broke your leg (pain) and as a “remedy” you decided to eat ice cream (pleasure). Maybe you do get some pleasure out of the ice cream. Maybe it does take your mind off the pain. But that’s all it does: distracts you. Your broken leg is still broken, and you haven’t done a thing to help it heal. In fact, eating ice cream (especially if you really go for it), is actively detrimental to the process of healing.
To take the analogy even further, using sex to distract from emotional pain is like eating ice cream to soothe a broken leg… except you don’t even realize your leg is broken. All you know is you’re in pain. You don’t really know what you need, so you reach for a “solution” that’s completely inappropriate to the situation.