Anxieties about body feelings

EASING the teenager's ANXIETIES ABOUT BODY FEELINGS is a most important part of the sex education he craves.

Many times instead of helping reduce a youngster's anxiety, we unwittingly augment it by dire warnings against disease.

Seventeen-year-old Laura shied away from contacts with boys. Her ardent nature, her parents feared, was leading her into a too close and intimate friendship with another girl. As Laura unloaded her worries to the psychologist to whom they took her, it became clear that the immediate thing contributing to her avoidance of men was her fear of disease.

"You can't tell whether or not a man has got it! And you can get it even by kissing! I'm scared."

Other boys and girls express similar anxiety in their questions: "Can you get the sex disease when you come too close and get the breathing in your face like with colds?" . . . "Can you ever get cured once you've had it? Some say there are drugs. Some say it keeps coming back so your children turn into idiots." . . . "They showed us pictures. Sores and things. I've got a bad skin. Do you think I could have caught it without knowing?"

Some show their fear openly. Some pass it off with bravado. "I'm not scared. I can get by all right. I've managed with a lot of girls and have never caught anything," Rog declared. But night after night he woke from sleep groaning, startled out of dreams in which his body had been woefully maimed.

As Laura went on exploring her feelings more deeply, she discovered that her anxiety had not started with the recent fear of disease. It had started much further back with the sex thoughts and feelings she had had as a child. The more recent warnings against disease had tuned in with a familiar chord of earlier warnings and set off old fears in new settings.

In most instances, what the teen-ager hears today forms bridges across time to many things in his past. Common among these is what happened to him when he found that by touching himself he could produce pleasurable sensations.

Ordinarily when a child does this, if it is discovered, his parents show dismay, or worse.

One intelligent girl relates, "When I was about six my mother came in and discovered me touching myself. She hissed through her teeth 'Pig' and went out with the most scathing coldness. Her rejection, I think, was worse than any more violent threat."

Even when parents have heard through lectures and reading that masturbation is not harmful, they may, because of their own backgrounds, still feel revulsion. Valiantly though they may have tried to hide it, their child has undoubtedly sensed this. For children have uncannily acute feelers which they seem to keep alerted to the inner thoughts and emotions of the adults on whom they depend.

In instances where actual threats have been nonexistent, the child often fills in the gaps with his imagination. "When you are bad," he has learned, "you must expect to be punished." He has applied this, unwittingly, to the matter at hand. "If your body is bad," his fantasy has said in effect, "then your body will suffer. Punishment is sure to come. And what punishment could be worse than being crippled or hurt?"

Some boys and quite a few girls neither recognize nor remember this. They have forgotten the frightening threat or the tightened voice or the raising of brows. They have forgotten the act itself, and their fantasies about it. But in their unconscious minds, traces remain of fear and of the sense of being "bad." Other boys and girls remember. In either case, both actual and imagined threats still exert their influence. The questions these youths ask betray their apprehension.

"Does it make you shrink and get smaller?"

"Does it get you so weak that you have to wear a brace?"

"Does it hurt you so that you can never have babies?" with a plea for relief behind the worried look.

Nineteen-year-old Caroline has been married six months and is struggling between her frigidity and her wish to enjoy herself vividly. She had been told as a child that she was bad to touch herself and that it might injure her so that she would never enjoy intercourse.

"They kept impressing on me to keep down the sex feelings. But now, all of a sudden, I'm told those very same feelings won't hurt me and I'm expected to turn on the switch."

She had been worried that she might injure herself. She had been told she was nasty. So now, underneath her wholesome wish to react to her husband with vigor and warmth, Caroline still felt fear and self-condemnation. It was only after she finally got it straight that these feelings had never had the power to hurt her and that she had never been "bad" to have sex feelings that she began having the sexual satisfaction she needed to cement her relationship with her husband and make her marriage strong and sound.

One of the imperative jobs confronting the adolescent in order for him to mature wholesomely is to feel acceptable to members of the opposite sex. And yet, as we know, a person cannot feel acceptable to others unless he feels acceptable to himself.

Maturing is a complicated process. It involves many difficult, hesitant and apprehensive moments. Warnings that use fear to keep sex urges in check reinforce the fears which always accompany growing up and which are hard enough to endure. Condemnation of the sex urges to hold them under robs the individual of self-confidence. It adds obstacles to the task of integrating body and soul as the adolescent develops. Anything that makes him fear or berate or dislike his maturing body undermines the sense of his own worth which he needs so greatly to possess.

Sex education which leaves the adolescent with too heavy a fear of hurt or with the dregs of self-loathing destroys security
in facing the world as a man or a woman. It lessens confidence in his capacity to find a vigorously satisfying life.

Implicit in the teen-ager's questions and wonderings lie complaints that the sex education he's had has attempted to stop him from believing that pleasure is permissible. It has failed to give him release from the fear that punishment must come as a result of enjoyment; that hurt or injury will result. It has failed to relieve him from self-condemnation. It has failed to answer his desperate need to like himself should he enjoy his body feelings and to know deeply and well that he is still a good person--with human dignity--and that enjoyment does not turn him from man into beast.