Podcast Ep. 202: Let's Talk About Sex

Tags: casual sex, emotional needs, emotional unavailability, relationship lost its spark, sexting, sexual values, should I wait to have sex?, signs he just wants you for sex

In this week’s episode of The Baggage Reclaim Sessions, I talk about why we need to evaluate our relationship with sex, especially when it’s a factor in how we perceive and value ourselves as well as others, or we use it to try and control our relationship experiences.

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Nuggets from the episode

Most humans have been socialised to have some level of shame and discomfort about sex. Thinking that we are entirely free of this or that it doesn’t have something to do with why we might keep falling into the same sexual traps is, well, a trap.
Something that so many people have found confusing is someone not being upfront about their intentions. They don’t understand why they won’t admit that they’re just looking for sex. Why put on the pretence of wanting a relationship or further dates? Why act like they’re really into them? Well, they put on a pretence because don’t want to be seen as the kind of person who ‘just wants sex’ even though, wait for it, they just want sex.
We are in a relationship with everything, including sex. If sex is a source of frustration, pain, shame, etc., it’s not a healthy relationship. It doesn’t need to be perfect, though; we just need to allow it to evolve with the level of awareness we have at that time.
Are your sexual attitudes and habits preference, so reflective of your values and awareness of your intentions and actions? Or, are they based on programming, so doing things based on pattern, automatically, by default?

When you keep finding yourself in repeats of the same situations and, yes, expecting different results, it’s because you’re driven by programming, not preference.

If someone avoids feeling their feelings and the likes of conflict, criticism, disappointment, rejection and intimacy, sex can be their way of feeling ‘alive’. It’s like temporarily allowing themselves to feel something. Like an escape from numbness.
Plenty of people choose to abstain and practice celibacy from a positive place. But there are also plenty of people who make the decision to do these from a place of fear and shame, or of wanting to control something.
You can have amazing sex with a not-so-great person. Just ask anyone whose slept with a narcissist, sociopath or someone abusive. Sex is not an indicator of overall compatibility.
As with anything, it’s crucial to figure out what’s true and good for you. Listening to your body, learning from experiences and evolving your relationship with sex means that you don’t have the unrealistic expectations of thinking, feeling and acting about sex the way you always have.
Sex is not something that’s reserved only for people who are in relationships. As a result, we don’t need to convince ourselves that we want to date or be in a relationship just because we want to have sex.
One of the things that humans do is give ourselves a hard time about not being and getting things that if we’re truly honest with ourselves, we don’t actually want. Society tells us that we’re supposed to have wanted a relationship and that sex should have led to it. What if, on those occasions when we had sex with someone we hardly knew, we just wanted to have sex? What if, deep down, we weren’t actually interested in a relationship at that time?

**We rely on rules about the likes of when to have sex because it allows us to control our fear about something.** Unfortunately, it also causes us to block our own judgement and intimacy.

Sometimes we say that we “love sex” as a cover-up for continuing to do something that we know isn’t working for us. It’s like when we have bad boundaries but call it being an empath.
Writing a list of our associations with sex reveals the source of our rules, shame and habits. Anything that sparks an emotional response points to emotional charge and helps us to understand the baggage driving our relationship with sex. From there, we can decide what’s true for us, as well as acknowledge anything that we’re still being hard on ourselves about.

Links mentioned

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