Afraid of Attraction or Arousal? We’re Not In 7th Grade Anymore!

by Reid on May 30, 2015

loving middle aged wife and disabled husband outdoorsAre you afraid of other people’s attraction? Or your own arousal? Most of us can actually control ourselves. You can upgrade your beliefs and feel more confident with yourself and others.

Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com and Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com share tips and approaches to help you appreciate your pre-frontal cortex!

Cathy: Are you still afraid of attraction? A lot of us are. We’re taught when we’re young that we can easily be out of control and we shouldn’t be left alone. Hi, I’m Cathy Vartuli from TheIntimacyDojo.com. And this…

Reid: I like you, Cathy.

Cathy: This is Reid Mihalko from ReidAboutSex.com.

Reid: She said we weren’t silly enough in the last video, so…

Cathy: Yeah, he’s making it up for the last two in this one. Would you like to explain a little bit?

Reid: Yeah. So this idea that we’re told when we’re kids especially when we’re going through middle school, and then into high school when we start kind of… we’re sexual beings our whole lives but when culture starts seeing us as raging little bags of hormones running around and just dry humping the sofa, culture tells us control yourself or behave because you can’t control yourself. What we… no one tells us around our sexuality is that as we grow up and medically speaking, after you’re 24 or 25 years old, your prefrontal cortex is fully-formed and you actually have developed impulse control. Things you did not have when you were two. Did not have when you were seven.

Cathy: Or fourteen.

Reid: Or fourteen or even like nineteen. The arc of our sexual awakening so to speak where we’re now kind of getting into people of the same sex or the opposite sex or just like people, hormones, rawr. What culture doesn’t tell us is when you grow up, you will be able to control yourself. We’re all walking around thinking I can’t control myself and neither can you and that basically creates the world as being very unsafe.

Cathy: A lot of us are scared. If someone’s attracted to us, whether we’re attracted back or not, there’s a fear. If we’re attracted to someone, it’s like, “Oh my God”, there’s a lot of shame and embarrassment about it. People don’t feel really safe setting boundaries because we’re kind of still conditioned to think that even if I say no, that person’s going to try to dry hump me like the sofa.

Reid: For what it’s worth, just kind of look at the world around you now. If you’re in your early, mid, and past that 20’s that you’re actually starting to have a sense of control. You have impulse control and other people do too. So you get to call them on them being jackasses and if anyone who’s always like, but I can’t control myself, that’s a really good sign that you probably just shouldn’t be dating them. If they can’t take the criticism of like, hey, actually you can, be a grown up.

It’s really just about looking at the world as being a much safer place, if it’s really no guarantee on safety. Bad things happen or accidents happen but at the same time, most of the planet actually can control itself after a certain age. It’s just that we remember all the negative stuff. We remember the negative news stories about people losing control. And we think that that’s everybody and it’s not.

Cathy: It’s really beautiful when you can set aside some of the fear and shame around attraction. If you feel attracted to someone, and you’re ashamed and you’re repressing it, it kind of squirts out sideways. It’s very awkward. Once you start realizing that you can control it and it’s safe and it can actually feel kind of nice even if the other person isn’t interested, you get to experience that in your body, you have a lot more ease about it, it doesn’t come out as kind of creepy or strange. It’s just something you feel that can be flattering.

Reid: You’re allowed to like people. Just be respectful and you can be respectful because guess what? You can control yourself now.

Cathy: Thanks very much.

Reid: Leave some comments. What do you think about that whole idea? How’s your prefrontal cortex?

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