Editor’s Note: This week’s sex-and-relationships guest-post comes from Christina Louise Dietrich, whom we’ve featured a couple of times now. You can read more of her writing at her own blog. — Amanda
By Christina Louise Dietrich
It’s a terrifying thing to consider: acquainting myself with an energy I don’t even remember possessing (before it was twisted by my father) and then reclaiming it as Me and mine. An energy that was my divine birthright, now manifested in a persona I call the Cronechild who, in her wisdom, wants so desperately to come out and play. It’s terrifying because it’s leading me to integrate my shame around things like sex and motherhood and status and identity. And power.
Christina Louise Dietrich
After a lifetime of giving her away from a position of powerlessness, convincing her other people’s desires were paramount, telling her she didn’t matter, and compressing her into a space so small and dark that she’d never see the light — I’m now beckoning her to come forward. I’m beseeching her to emerge and tell me, at long last, what she literally almost died to keep secret: what my bodily temple desires most in the world.
How I want to be touched and where. How I prefer a long slow building of energy based on what’s actually happening in my body, as opposed to imagining a fantasy about someone else’s experience and attempting to make it mine Right Fucking Now. How I require safety and an actual connection to really feel safe.
Now that I’m beginning to receive these messages attentively and compassionately, listening to her with an open heart, I realize that to some extent I’ve been able to hear her my whole life. I’d just never trusted what she had to say. I’d never before believed that I could ask for what I wanted and have anyone give it to me because what I wanted required trust and safety and a long, slow build. In a world where sex is often meted out rashly and aggressively on a whim, projected against a pornographic background of desensitized disconnection.
Trust, safety, slow…these are not sexy words according to my programming. And so, I have never believed myself to be sexy.
But the tides are turning and there’s a new Director of Messaging. Lucky for me, the person occupying that role is my husband: a man so beautiful, sensitive, courageous, and insightful that I sometimes think he’s imaginary. Because here is someone who wants to hear what Cronechild has to say and is willing to let her speak in her own time, which he ensures by guaranteeing my safety and building trust. By listening to me and going slowly.
Because he respects and honors me as a person, as a woman, as a sexual creature. Something that he has been able to do only because I did it first. Seven years ago I started the journey that has led me to this place where I actually believe I am worthy of respect, pleasure, and attention. That I don’t have to earn it by offering you my body like a piece of meat or staying small.
Seven years to really start unraveling 38 years of programming based on 5,000 years of women being sexual property.
I’m so grateful to be here with him, listening to her. Because reclamation is no small thing.
Resources
- I Thought it Was Just Me (But It Isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think” to “I am Enough” by Brené Brown
- Slow Sex: The Art and Craft of the Female Orgasm by Nicole Daedone
- Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body – New Paths to Power by Riane Eisler
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Christina Louise Dietrich, a technical writer by trade, says of herself: “I write because I am claiming the voice my family and my society tried to silence, the voice that was my divine birthright. I am a woman, a mother, a feminist, a wife. I am compassionate, judgmental, loving, a bully, empathetic, obstinate, caring, rigid, and creative. I’m passionate about systems, beauty, process, experience, trees, interconnections, transitions, logistics, balance, and clarity. I manifest the Amazon, the Androgyne, and the Mother-to-be-Crone.”
Christina, I have, as a male, the same story line about finding freedom through sexually freeing my inner flower which needs the safety and security of a deep connection with the other – for that condition to be created. But I have a most vivid story of my wife’s inner discovery that I would like to share.
We were married 14 years and had just had our second child six months earlier, when one night, my wife woke me in a sexually aggressive state and wouldn’t take no for an answer. She took complete control and I felt the strength of her psychic power over me in a way that almost frightened me but mostly fascinated. I lay back and experienced an out of body type of sexual encounter complete with her expressing multiple organisms with hedonistic abandon! She displayed a carnal knowledge that heretofore, she was oblivious to. I would say at the time that she was possessed – yet I liked this magical demon goddess and was not afraid, though later I often teased her that way. Afterward we talked about what was happening that night and she seemed to be somewhat confused like as if she couldn’t remember – but I encouraged her that something long repressed was suddenly unwilling to remain in the background.
My wife always enjoyed sex but was also subconsciously ashamed of her own desire and very afraid of anything taboo. She had never had an uninhibited orgasm (usually saying “I think I did”) until the night that “whore” as I came to call her, showed up (that night there was no doubt). Over the next couple of years “Whore” sporadically made her appearances and we came to look for her intensity and desire, missing it when she stayed away for long months at times. My wife still seemed disconnected from who she was as “Whore” but she was aware of how much I liked Who She Was as Whore, and over time she felt freer to summon Whore. It was a wonderful transition that took place in our forty’s. At some point about 2012 we confronted together each of our deepest memories surrounding sexuality; hers reveled a young girl who found the pleasure of self-sensuality – shared it with her most beloved cousin – and was shamed into the closet. Soon she put this beautiful aspect away – as this most hideous part of her nature deserved! – and so – into some dark store place of her mind it went never to be heard from again. But the inner female with all her passion could not be contained so easily and the many, many, symptoms of that separation would manifest, negatively, over the years to come.
When she came to recognize exactly where these old emotional feelings came from and looked with wiser eyes at all that she wanted, and why, she forgave her craven nature and realized it is the most basic fundamental creative self she had tried to reject. She had a complete inner healing and those rejected parts were again part of her complete consciousness – she reestablished the line of communication between her rational and emotional/sensual self. Her inner child is no longer trying to be the innocence it was told to be, but is now, the creative honest truth it is. Now whore is fully a part of the festive sexual life and our daily rational life we share – and nothing we do together is inhibited. The “Old Lady” who used to be so influential as to what sweet little “Patty” could do in the bedroom – is dead, that aspect no longer necessary as my Wife is no longer afraid of her own desires.
And her new found freedom has allowed me to express what before I could not, thus, we are together free and evolving beyond all previous levels of emotional connection. Total freedom of expression – but as if doing a dance where the steps are choreographed by some unseen force relieving us of any conscious effort in direction. I think this is what is available to minds connected at source level – where no mask is possible – and the human spirit is freed of it bindings. I think the world as a whole is capable of this evolutional leap.
Thank you for your amazing, inspiring, and life-affirming account, Cowboyiam. It has touched something very deep in me.
Thank you both for sharing. As a woman looking for a lover to share herself with, I am wanting trust and safety to part of the equation so that my sexual sensual expression is free in mutual share. Thank you both for sharing your experiences. It give me faith in knowing that this is possible.
Wow, thank you for sharing your stories, they have touched me deeply. I’ve been married 20 years and only now, when we’re both reaching 40 and are mature enough to create an environment of complete TRUST, that we are together discovering the marvel of unbridled sexuality. It is a force to be reckoned with, and done with Love, sex is hot, creative, joyful, healing, and DIVINE.