Dear afeels:

Good to read from you!

Sexuality is not a part of us that is separate from our  overall emotional development through our childhoods and on.

You must have  observed how young children play in the playground, running and screaming, full of joy. You don’t see adults acting that way because we all disassociate to one  degree or another, we all feel less excited much of the time and so, we act… mature, not like children.

Many children who grow up with an aggressive parent or otherwise  unloving parents, feeling alone and lonely, disassociate more than others. The child, overwhelmed by hurt, fear and  even anger toward a parent, feels too much, more than she can endure, so she  automatically and naturally disassociates, gets numb, feel the minimum  possible. Not  only hurt, fear and anger  get minimized but also joy, hope, curiosity, the desire to explore, and so on. All forms of excitation get minimized and the child becomes  depressed.

You are one  of those  children who significantly disassociated. Fast forward, you wonder why as a young woman, “with men I am dating I will feel attraction and then the attraction goes away in an instant and it confuses me. For example, I will  kiss a guy in a bar surrounded  by people and feel desire and attraction but once  we are  alone the desire is gone”-

what  happens is that the excitation of sexual desire is normally numb, but not  entirely gone. It gets awakened at times but it  doesn’t stay because the disassociation has  been established long ago, in childhood. Disassociated, the brain/body rejects all excitations. If we feel  it, it doesn’t last, the numbing is automatic.

It is not that you are heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual-  it is  that you are  disassociated. See the difference?

anita