Pleasure, Integration, and Going to Therapy on the Good Days
Plus a practice for embodying pleasure
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Hello dear ones,
Thank you so much to the folks who upgraded to a paid subscription this past week. I’ve now hit 200 paid subscribers!!!! ICYMI: I wanted to share that I’m offering a special paid subscription discount available until June 30th. Get 33% of monthly and yearly paid subscriptions. It’s my hope that this discount can make a paid subscription more accessible for those who need it.
Your paid subscriptions truly enable me to survive in this capitalist hellscape with all of the social media woes I’m wading through atm. Increasing my paid subscriptions to a lofty goal — but hey, we’re manifesting here — of 500 would be life-changing.
With love,
Margeaux
We have become experts in denying ourselves pleasure. We believe that pleasure is frivolous, unnecessary, and something to feel guilty about. This is especially true if you are someone who’s marginalized. Systems of oppression work to strip those less privileged of any pleasure they might experience.
I remember, for example, the immense amount of guilt I felt when I bought myself an expensive two piece velour loungewear set. Having grown up poor – and, at the time, still living below the poverty line – I felt that it was wrong for me to spend my money on anything but the bare essentials. This belief has been enforced by the welfare system and the non-profit industrial complex, which surveil how poor folks use their meager amount of allotted money so that they can determine whether or not you “actually need” financial assistance.
Under this logic, we live our lives surviving, but never thriving. We treat pleasure as something we have to earn through financial success. In her book Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown pushes back against this flawed logic: “Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for; it is the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous.”
Pleasure is our birthright. We’re meant to experience pleasure, regardless of our skin color, gender, class status, ability, or size. Our bodies are wired for it. When we repress our desire for pleasure, we block our own liberation. “Pleasure,” writes brown, “is a measure of freedom.” Saying yes to pleasure is then a radical, liberatory act.
We need to seek out pleasure, bring it into our daily lives with the same level of necessity as food or water. Again, we remind ourselves that we all deserve to thrive. This might feel like some of the most challenging work you’ll ever do, because it requires so much unlearning and reprogramming. We must learn to let go of the story that we don’t deserve pleasure – a story that many of us developed as a way to make sense of the pain, hardship, and trauma that we’ve experienced in our lives. One way we do this is by building our pleasure threshold.
This past week, I came into therapy and told my therapist that everything was feeling really, really good lately. I was getting the support I’d been asking for on Instagram, LA Zine Fest was sooooooo nourishing, my partner and I were able to have sex without me dissociating. I was swimming in pleasure.
“That’s amazing. How about we use this session to integrate all of this pleasure you’ve been experiencing?” Amy asked me.
Integration is a key phase in our trauma healing. Trauma specialist and pioneer in the field, Judith Herman, popularized the three phase model of trauma recovery in her famous book Trauma and Recovery. The three phases are: safety and stabilization, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection and integration.
In the first phase, the therapist works with us to develop an embodied sense of safety – a sense that the past trauma has passed – as well as strategies for stabilizing our dysregulated nervous system. In other words, we don’t rehash the traumatic event until we can regulate our nervous system.
Once we’ve established safety and stabilization, we can begin to bring up past traumatic memories (often these memories are embodied, felt sensations, rather than visual memories), and we grieve the traumatic experiences and the impact they had on us.
In the final stage, we reach towards connection with others and the world around us – as trauma often results in isolation and disconnection – and we integrate traumatic memories, moving them from our emotional/somatic memory bank into our sequential, chronological memory. This is when we can recall what happened to us, while still staying present and anchored in our agency. We no longer feel defined by our trauma; rather, our trauma becomes just one aspect of who we are and how we move through the world.
Integration is also a practice of consciously and intentionally storing positive experiences in our brain, so that we can create new neural pathways. This is why going to therapy when things feel good is just as important as going when things are hard. Because we can integrate the positives: our growth, having a different response to something that used to trigger us, using a new tool instead of an old coping mechanism that no longer serves us.
Our brains have a negativity bias, which means that we will look for the negative to keep us safe, ignoring all of the positives. Every wondered why one bad comment amongst a million positive ones totally takes over your brain?? Negativity bias! Our brains have neuroplasticity. This means that we can rewrite old patterns and create new neural pathways. But it’s hard for these pathways to stick if we don’t integrate them.
I’m reminded of one of brown’s pleasure principles: “what you pay attention to grows.” And that’s exactly what we did in my therapy session. I closed my eyes and brought to mind all of the different things that had brought me pleasure recently. As Amy prompted me to pay attention to what I noticed, here’s what I described: A bright light. Warmth all around me. Expansion in my chest. Deep breaths. A smile on my face. The feeling that I deserve this.
What my therapist noted at the end of the session was that I’ve really grown in my capacity to stay with pleasure. It doesn’t bring up the same discomfort as it once used to — a discomfort that came from a lifetime of confusing danger with safety, of being taught that my pleasure didn’t matter, of believing that I didn’t deserve good things. Now, things are different. What a gift. If that isn’t something to celebrate, I don’t know what is.
Much of the writing in today’s newsletter comes from the guidebook for anchored: a deck for healing. Every week in the discord server, I pull a card for the collective and share the practice that’s paired with the card with them. I thought it would be nice to offer that here today.
Taking inspiration from Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, I’ve adapted brown’s words into a visualization and reflection for you:
I feel good when __________________. I’m increasing the amount of feeling-good time in my life by __________________________. I am decreasing any internal or projected shame or scarcity thinking around the pursuit of pleasure by ___________________________. I’m able to create more room for joy, wholeness, and aliveness in my life. Joy, wholeness, and aliveness look like _______________________________. I no longer need to deny myself pleasure, nor repress my desire for ________ _____________________________. I can see the liberatory possibilities that engaging in pleasure opens up for myself, others, and the world. A world centered around pleasure looks like ________________.
If you feel called to share, I’d love to read your pleasure vision!
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My partner and I just finished season 3 of Hacks. I feel like this is the sleeper show of our times: so many people haven’t heard of it. It’s been one of my favorite shows on television over the past few years. Equal parts funny and tender, the writing will make you quite literally LOL.
I will read anything Akwaeke Emezi writes, and so when I saw Little Rot at my fav bookstore in Pasadena, Octavia’s Bookshelf, I grabbed it immediately. It blows my mind how prolific a writer they are, and their first book Freshwater still haunts me in the best way. Also: this cover is just 😍😍😍.
Technically I haven’t consumed this media yet, but I just bought tickets for my partner and I to see Inside Out 2 tomorrow night. Inside Out is one of my favorite movies of all time and has informed how I talk about parts work. I can’t wait to see the new emotions that emerge as the film’s protagonist Riley enters her teenage years. Bonus points for how genderqueer Sadness is.
Okay, so another thing I haven’t watched but will be doing so immediately is season 3 of The Bear. While I initially had a hard time getting into the show because SO STRESSFUL, I gave it another shot and I’m so glad that I did. I’ve been missing Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri’s chemistry and am looking forward to biting my nails as I watch.
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I love this and relate so much of course. I’m traveling in august (partially paid for by work) and already feel guilty because how can I complain about medical debt and not being able to afford a mortgage if I’m going on vacation? Those questions pummel me even though I know it’s not a one to one. Thank you for all the reminders! Also, I love Hacks sooooo much!!!!
Thanks for the pleasure activity at the end. and Culture Diary on point! Yesssss Akwaeke!!!