Hijacking Sex

Whenever the system is under intense stimulation, it scans its history and then passes immediately into the prototypic survival mode stamped in long ago. For example, it is a parasympathetic prototype (emanating from the animal “freeze response,” that keeps us from reacting promptly in the face of an impending catastrophe such as an auto accident. Becoming paralyzed and immobilized under high levels of excitation is the way the parasympathetic nervous system deals with stress. This helpless/defeated type of response becomes a template guiding us into what worked before in a life and death situation.

A key structure in the feeling area of the brain is known as the hypothalamus. It contains two divisions of two very different nervous systems—the sympathetic (alerting/vigilance) and parasympathetic (rest and repose). Getting turned on sexually is parasympathetic; ejaculation, however, is sympathetic. It seems that all ejaculation, including a mother’s milk, can be inhibited by an over-producing parasympathetic nervous system and under-producing sympathetic system. When the parasympathetic system is predominant in our systems it prevents quick arousal. In sex, we see it when it takes a great amount of stimulation to get a partner going sexually. It's typical for the parasympath to have less interest in sex than the sympath. In essence, the parasympath has numbed feelings, is difficult to stimulate, and is very slow to become aroused. The numbness from anesthesia at birth may very well have established the prototype response of going numb during the sex act. The system veers away from quick over-excitation as a survival mechanism – as a means to avoid the original imprint. Avoidance of sex, or passivity in sex, is like the phobic avoidance of elevators: it becomes an external means of manipulating internal pain, and happens unconsciously.



As I use the term, imprints are a special category of memory; experiences that because they are too painful to integrate, are repressed, in a sense "put on hold," below the level of conscious awareness. They are put on hold in terms of our whole physiology and not just as a brain event. An imprint is a memory that unlike cerebral recall, which is a cortical event, can be "remembered" by every system of the organism because it is fixed in these systems exactly how the event was laid down originally – the same blood pressure, body temperature and heart rate. If there were a rapidly beating heart of 160 beats per minute during the experience when the memory or imprint was created, then when the memory of that event is provoked, there will again be the same heart rate. The imprint means that part of the traumatic event was experienced while another large part was not; it is yet to be felt. It is not an inert force but something continually active. Aspects of the imprint are, by definition, unconscious. They will become conscious when they are felt fully and connected to higher brain centers.

Once the imprint is blocked away from conscious-awareness, it is always a danger, a "foreign element" to be reckoned with. The danger is that it will intrude upon awareness and send the vital signs skyrocketing. The alien intrusion, such as being abused or abandoned by one's father, for example, makes the child feel unwanted, unloved, and unsafe. Under the experience created during the child's early years, the child becomes terrorized and repressed. Trauma then creates a splitting of the self – it drives a wedge between the real pained self and the unreal, or unfeeling, repressed self; the self presented to the public. Because of the split or disconnection we can no longer will our bodies to do our bidding. In sex, that means the body is out of our control. Our "will" remains on the top cortical level and cannot reach down to tell the penis what it should do, so it cannot stop it from ejaculating too quickly, for example. Very early trauma has compromised the development of the controlling orbitofrontal cortex, which could slow ejaculation.
Being disconnected means losing a bond with many of the processes that are mediated by lower levels. Thus, we have no way to control heart palpitations or lower our blood pressure, or will an orgasm. No willpower on our part can make a difference. We are trying to harness forces with which we have lost contact years ago. They are sending out orders in their peculiar silent language, shifting resources from one place to another and trying to warn us of danger. To illustrate, the level of the stress hormone, cortisol, may be raised to a high level, but all we will feel is the vague sense of impending doom, and we do not know from what. "Doom" was in the offing during perhaps a birth experience with too little oxygen. Or worse, we do not feel anything at all. This is a problem, and the essence of which I call the “Janovian Gap.” The wider the distance or disconnection between a deep imprint and the conscious/awareness of it, the more susceptible we will become to illness. The space between feeling/sensation and the cortical, "thinking" acknowledgment of it, is a precise measure, and in my opinion, a gauge of our longevity. One can say, "Yes, but the man developed lung cancer because he smoked 2 packs a day." I would say that the man smoked because of the gap between what he was experiencing physiologically and his conscious awareness of it; that gap that compromised his system, and his health.