In my previous post I shared the challenge that I received from Sharon Hersh, the brilliant teacher of my Sexuality and Sex Therapy class when I was in counseling school. I want to repeat these words now as something for you to consider:

“If you’re uncomfortable, be curious about your discomfort. What does it tell you about yourself? If you’re not uncomfortable, be curious about that, too. What does that say about you? About what you believe about sex?”

When I think about what it would be like to face my discomfort, I expect a very rough and unpleasant process: I expect it to mean that I’m supposed to power through my discomfort. But powering through discomfort is actually ignoring discomfort, not facing it. Facing your discomfort means slowing down enough to actually sit with it and get to know it.

I hope that you, dear reader, will take those words to heart. When you encounter something about sexuality—either in the world or in yourself— that makes you feel sensitive or uncomfortable, honor those feelings. Pay attention.

Going deeper in your relationship with sexuality, then, requires a delicate balance: It’s not helpful to charge ahead and “get it over with” while hoping that your sensitivity and discomfort will soon callous over. The goal isn’t to be able to talk and think about sex like it’s no different from the morning weather report. But it’s also not helpful to altogether avoid things that make you uncomfortable. If you do that, you miss out on what your sensitivity is trying to teach you about sexuality and about yourself, and you lose the possibility of experiencing new forms of goodness.

So, there must be a willingness to say both “no” and yes” when the moment calls for one or the other. There must be enough self-attunement to know when to say “a little more” and when to say “a little less.”   There must be room for both boldness and tenderness.

Honoring your discomfort means an awareness that nothing good will be gained either from a self-violating determination to bear everything all at once, or from prudishly burying your head in the sand. With sexuality, it is essential that there be permission for intimacy —even self-intimacy—to grow as slowly as the opening of a flower.