#35 Thoughts about crying after sex

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Gabby
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#35 Thoughts about crying after sex

Post by Gabby » Tue Jul 22, 2008 3:40 pm

#35 Thoughts about crying after sex / Am I destroying my new relationship?

Ask Dr. Drew:

Q: I’ve been seeing a man for several months, and it’s been going well. Recently though, I’ve been having a tremendous urge to cry after sex. I have felt rejected in the past after being intimate with someone, but this man is very sensitive to my feelings. He has never done anything to make me feel he was going to leave and not want me any more. Where might these feelings come from? MV. Illinois

A: In my experience, this is not uncommon. Some women actually cry tears of joy after sex, but that’s a small minority. Crying usually occurs because the sex exposes an incongruence of some kind. How you feel about the relationship or yourself doesn’t match with the intense intimacy you’re experiencing.

It might be that your feelings have changed and you’re not in the relationship the way you have been before. You’re expecting very strong emotions, and they’re just not there. The sex confronts you with that emptiness and lack of love and makes you feel bad.

Sometimes people cry after sex because they expect rejection and distance. The fact that he is showing you genuine feelings is exposing deficiencies in your intimate relationships in the past, perhaps when you were growing up. You may see yourself as unworthy of such openness. Ironically, many women who feel that way actually become rejecters themselves, unconsciously sabotaging their relationships so they won't have to experience abandonment.

Finally, if you are a survivor of trauma or abuse, sex can trigger a kind of flashback. You’re flooded with by feelings and just get overwhelmed and cry.

My advice is to hang in there and see what comes of it. Don’t allow yourself to bail out because you can’t deal. If you can’t sustain it, that’s when I would recommend therapy. Drew Pinsky MD.


Gabby's Reply:

Hi MV: Foremost and most importantly, there's nothing wrong with you or with him. This is simply part of the relationship-communication mastery curriculum.

There are three phases to mastery:
  • 1) not knowing
    2) knowing about
    3) knowing
Knowing a lot about sex is a barrier to knowing. One must begin each time from nothing, from not knowing. Use the Couple's Clearing "bewith" Process to create nothing.

It’s time for you to take sex to its next phase—from rudimentary beginner's sex to exquisite intercourse. I'm speaking of the kind where after-climax conversations are as satisfying as the physical communications.*

If you have had the urge to cry and suppressed it then you've revealed that you are not in communication with your boyfriend. You've become stuck in doing your imitation of communication. Stuffing (hiding/withholding) a thought, an experience, is the very first step when one is consciously or unconsciously masterminding a divorce. A withhold at the beginning transforms a relationship from a growing exciting, ever-expanding potential to one of mediocrity.

If you have cried then the fact that you've written also reveals that you are not in communication with your boyfriend. You may have discussed or talked about the crying with him but we know communication didn't take place else you would have had no need to write. When one has become stuck in talking problems persist. When communication takes place problems disappear, there are no exceptions to this phenomenon. i.e. It usually takes a communication skills coach the first 24 hours of a weekend-long communication skills workshop to communicate the ten workshop agreements so that all 100 participants get and own them. Conversely, when the West Point Code of Honor (an agreement) is told, explained, presented, discussed, said, emphased, to West Point Cadets by a senior staff officer, when the code is not communicated, it guarantees cheating and sex abuse scandals at West Point. Such scandles reveal that not one single officer at the Academy, from the Commandant on down, has mastered communication--such is the difference between talking and communicating.

For example:
  • You: "I feel like I’m going to cry.”

    Him: “H’mm. What’s it about?”

    You: “Nothing. I don’t know.”

    Him: “H'mm…” (men sometimes start with ‘H’mm’ when they are coming from nothing, not knowing, no intent to fix you, merely to be there for you). “…what thought is associated with the experience?” The ensuing conversation would transform the experience, resulting in an expanded experience of love.
It's not by accident that you wrote "...urge to cry after sex." This reveals that you are still in the process of discovering the difference between sex and intercourse. With intercourse crying is a part of the experience. It's every bit as much an emotional experience as is a climax. It's a communication and it must be acknowledged (gotten). Sharing such an experience guarantees a new closeness, an even greater climax the next time. It's a given that intercourse is everything, all verbal, non verbal, physical, and psychic communications that take place between climaxes, therefore there is no beginning or end.

The fact that it concerns you concerns me. I have these emotional peaks all the time (even when I’m driving) however, I can eliminate the possibility that it’s about pain, or fear, or an incomplete (some unacknowledged out-integrity) by looking at the thoughts that accompany the emotion. “No pain, no grief, no guilt. H'mm, let's see, it follows a previous pleasant experience, it must be joy."

Two of the foremost barriers to the experience of joy are thoughts withheld and unacknowledged perpetrations. However, you didn't suggest that it just might be joy, therefore I support you in listening to your intuition which in this case triggers concern and worry.

He may very well be the best man you’ve ever dated and still be merely one of many dates in the learning curve to discovering (creating) love through intercourse. You say he is “very sensitive to your feelings,” yet it appears he doesn’t pick up on this nonverbal (very obvious) communication that’s emanating from you and gently whisper, “What?" Or a conscious deep inhalation to support you in breathing through the experience.

Friends remind each other to breath when they see the other stuck with a breath-holding thought. Quite often when sadness comes up it triggers a thought; the mind doesn't share the thought and it becomes stuck in the drama of crying instead of having an intention to get to the truth. A reminder to breath supports one in choosing to live, in opening up and in letting go of the pain.

If it’s hurt or sadness breathing allows the sadness/incomplete to come to the surface. If it’s joy then breathing allows the joy and ecstasy to bloom. In other words, because he doesn’t get this subtle communication and complete it for you and himself (get certainty) suggests that his sensitivity is partly a “sensitivity act.”

Re: "I have felt rejected in the past after being intimate with someone," It's important that you identify and tell the truth about the childhood incident that set in this pattern. We know it's not what you have been saying it's about else you wouldn't be having this re occurring thought. Your mind will hide the truth from you so you'll need support.

Now here’s the kicker. If you have been withholding thoughts, such as the fact that sometimes you verge on crying after sex, so too has he been withholding thoughts and emotions from you. You can’t see the speck in his eye for the mote in yours. It’s a given that withholders always attract withholders, each withholding their thoughts of choice. It’s called control. There can be no sustained experience of love and joy in a relationship in which thoughts are withheld. Another way of putting it. Breathers hang around breathers. I recommend communication coaching—first you alone and him alone, then the both of you together.

Here's some support in completing the past.

Thanks, Gabby

PS. Do show this to your boyfriend.

* When I say "intercourse" the communication model I refer to is open, honest, and spontaneous communication, zero thoughts withheld. In such a relationship the agreement is, "The way to let me know you don’t want to continue the relationship is to withhold any thought." In such a relationship the experience you are having begs to be shared; otherwise, the withhold becomes as a mote in thine eye. Your “rejected” experience of the past suggests that you might have a pattern of attracting/rewarding rejecters or worse, of setting it up to be rejected. It reveals that have yet to tell the story from how you caused it, from how you set it up for him to reject you. If so, this would be your integrity at work, in support of you getting counseling/coaching to recall the first incident, the one that runs you about rejection, so as to complete it. If you continue dragging this incomplete interaction with your former into this relationship it will have undesirable effects.

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