Body, Breath, and Consciousness by Ian Macnaughton

Author:Ian Macnaughton [Macnaughton, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-593-3
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2012-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

Intimate Boundaries

In this stage, the practice of boundary formation and containment is in service of both the emerging gender role and the balance of sexual and loving feelings for others. In her early delight with pleasurable genital feelings and sex-role discovery, the child wants to share this wonder with her parents, as well as with others. She needs to be met with her parents’ love, appreciation, and clear boundaries. The appropriate response from each parent is to assure the child that she will, in fact, never be able to take over the other parent’s place, and that her sexuality and gender are appreciated, but not open to exploration with the parent. This will initially make her feel angry and hurt. She will also soon feel cared about, and can then safely direct these feelings toward adult friends of the family. When she meets the same response there, she will finally turn to her own age group. There she will typically find an intimate same-sex friend and opposite-sex “love.”

An example comes to mind of the four-year-old girl who loudly announced that she was going to stand on her head on her father’s shoulders “with no pants on at all, all the way down the street!” Through the parents’ recognition and acceptance of the excitement she felt about this fantasy, and through their refusal to let her do it, she learns that sexual excitement and imagery are fine, but they are not necessarily to be acted upon. This is a step in learning to contain such feelings and to choose who to share them with. Likewise, through responses to her loving actions and desire for sensual and genital contact, the child learns which of her feelings are acceptable, and also which she should or should not identify with. It is worth noting that the child may be identified with the unacceptable to the exclusion of the acceptable, as well as the other way around. This was the case for the three-year-old whose mother refused to hold her hand when walking in the street “because people might think we are lesbians.” Although the term “lesbian” was incomprehensible to her, the underlying message was clear and impactful—wanting to be intimate with mother is bad and sexual. The choice of being intimate and not sexual (right now) was not available. As a grown woman, she was completely identified with being sexual, laboriously re-labeling it good instead of bad. Only then did she realize that vulnerable, non-sexual intimacy was not even in her repertoire of possibilities. This demonstrates how an unhealthy personal gender role may be formed. Some feelings and actions are labelled “me” along with “good” or “bad,” while others, equally valid, are labelled “not-me.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.